Reflections of a Conscientious Objector

Dear Editor,

The March 2010 Clio’s Psyche is another wonderful array of incisive thought, but when I read my own item in the letters section, I noticed that the words “This disgusted me” at the bottom of page 447 did not reflect my feelings during the incident I was describing. Actually, at the time of that incident, I already knew that U.S. troops had sometimes used torture while interrogating Filipino prisoners during the Philippine War of 1898-1902. So I appreciated the candor of the old gentleman on my draft board when he tacitly acknowledged witnessing or participating in such torture—especially since our exchange was at a formal draft-board hearing.

I guess my viewpoint probably differed from that of most 21-year old conscientious objectors; I didn’t think of myself as “in a pickle.” Mentally, I was not worried about jeopardizing my future career since I didn’t want to have any future career, which I viewed as a life of regimentation. Emotionally, I wasn’t insecure about “coming of age” since I’d spent the previous six summers out West on my own. I wasn’t worried about what might happen to me in prison since I had just been on a long peace walk with people who’d been in prison and seemed unfazed. Thus, in my own case, the military draft was not an intrusion into some different trajectory that I desired for my life. Instead, it was a challenge to try to help find a nonviolent way to deal with conflicts.

But despite success after success for nonviolent “people power” since the 1960s, mainstream Western political science has

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remained indifferent. Indifference is almost equally pervasive in mainstream Western psychology. Erik Erikson did choose Gandhi as the subject of his second psychobiography, prompting considerable anticipation in the peace movement, but what followed was of considerable disappointment—at least about the book’s long mid-section “letter” to Gandhi that was prominently pre-published despite the title Gandhi’s Truth, Erik Erikson didn’t seem aware what Gandhi’s truth was.

If the editor grants me leave for another page, I’ll make my own stab at that. First, from his youth onward, Gandhi suffered a lot for various reasons. Self-chosen suffering became, plausibly, a way he could escape his non-chosen suffering. By devising several real-life experiments, he discovered that self-chosen (voluntary) suffering could affect more people than merely the person who was suffering. However, he also encountered a big hitch—that only if voluntary sufferers kept their thoughts on truth (or God) while any attacker beat up or denigrated them did the attacker’s attitude seem to change. So he repeatedly urged nonviolent actionists to keep their thoughts on Truth or God if they were attacked.

When we try to find a place for Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” in Western political theory, we face an obstacle—namely our culture’s separation of “objective” from “subjective.” Only what is “objective” is considered trans-personal and thus potentially political, but Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” were subjective. He found that subjectively “holding actively to truth” (satyagraha) could put other people subjectively under conviction of their conscience and he learned that when people (others as well as himself) acceded to their conscience, they often felt blessed and became very loathe to switch back to their previous attitude.

All this brings to mind a phenomenon well-known in India called darshan, the blessing that people share in the presence of a guru. Gandhi insisted he dispersed no darshan, but his theory of satyagraha implies that anyone anywhere can temporarily fill the role of a guru by keeping their thoughts on Truth or God. What makes someone a guru is being egoless and anyone can temporarily be egoless while they’re contemplating God, the Absolute, Love, Truth, Beauty, or anything beyond human manipulation.

What most Indians want from a guru is just a blessing. Indians seek out gurus and in effect tell them, “just sit here and do what you do while we sit over there and look at you.” They thereby experi-

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ence their separation replaced by unity—as though their separate attention has passed right through the guru and returned to the group unified. They experience oneness.

Similarly, anger that attackers direct toward a nonviolent actionist might simply pass right through an actionist who is thinking about Truth or God, and return back to the attacker as a blessing charged by his own energy. As Richard Gregg said in his book The Power of Nonviolence [1935], satyagraha is like love because they both make use of “the threat of an opposing force or person [by] utilizing its energy in a higher synthesis.”

Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth sometimes portrayed Gandhi as a suitable candidate for psychotherapy. Erikson did not seem to notice that Gandhian satyagraha is not just an innovative social psychotherapy but that it obviates, at least temporarily, any need for personal psychotherapy. Indeed, satyagraha is a form of personal psychotherapy.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Salstrom

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