NON-VIOLENCE IN PHILOSOPHICAL AND CLIFFORD G RELIGIOUS ETHICS christians
Abstract
Along with human dignity and truth telling, non-violence is an ethical principle entailed by the sacredness of life. My purpose in this paper is to examine non-violence from the perspective of religion. Hans Kung argues that all religions agree on the common ethical principle that war and violence are immoral. The ethical system of all major world religions is centered on the non-violence of the golden rule - "do to others as you would have them do to you." Martin Luther King's philosophical perspective on non-violence was deeply religious in character. Religious perspectives appear to support and enrich non-violence as a universal principle of ethics. But the issue is inclusiveness. Are religious perspectives only relevant for adherents? The Dali Lama presents a moral system based on universal human ethics rather than on religious principles. That convergence Michael Traber represented also. An approach that sees religious perspectives in positive terms, as enabling a commitment to non-violence, must confront the dilemma that religious beliefs generate conflict more than they promote tolerance. This conundrum is confronted through the principle-practice distinction. An ethics of non-violence that is credible philosophically and religiously gives us leverage for action in the spirit of Michael Traber.
Clifford G. Christians is Professor of Communications at University of Illinois-Urbana; e-mail: cchrstns@uiuc.edu.
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Non-violence as Ethical Norm
Non-violence is one of three ethical principles grounded in the primordial reverence for life, or in negative terms, no harm to the innocent. Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King developed this principle beyond a political strategy into a philosophy of life. For the pre-eminent theorist of dialogic communication, Emmanuel Levinas, the self-Other relation makes peace normative. When the Other's face appears, the infinite is revealed and I am commanded not to kill (Levinas 1981). Along with dharma, ahimsa (non-violence) forms the basis of the Hindu worldview. In communalistic and indigenous cultures, care for the weak and vulnerable (children, sick and elderly), and sharing material resources are a matter of course. Death and violence at the World Trade Center, suicide bombings in the Middle East, and killing of the innocent in Afghanistan and Iraq cuts to our deepest being. Along with the public's revulsion against physical abuse at home, our consternation over brutal crimes and savage wars are a glimmer of hope reflecting the validity of this principle.
Out of non-violence, we articulate ethical theories about not harming the innocent as an obligation that is cosmic and irrespective of our roles or ethnic origin. When peace is an ethical imperative, it is not reduced to the politics of war, but, along with human dignity and truth, is a fundamental way to understand the sa-credness of life intrinsic to our humanness. The principle of non-violence promotes a discourse of peaceful coexistence in community life, rather than a focus on peacemaking between inter-governmental bodies. In terms of this principle understood through the protonorm, "only by invoking the sacredness and inviolability of life, by advocating non-violence and creative resolution, can communicators act morally" (Lee 2007).
When ethical models are built in universal terms, we have a framework by which to judge the media professions and practices locally. Of the three ethical principles that have arisen from various sections of the world, in communications we have worked the hardest with the first and the second - truth and human dignity. Truth is central to communication practice and appears everywhere in our codes of ethics, mission statements, classes and textbooks on media ethics. We often disagree £ on the details, not always sure what the truth means and how it applies. There is still in news a heavy emphasis on facts and unbiased information that is no longer defensible epistemologically. But the general concept of truth is an unwavering imperative. In entertainment media, we insist on realism, on artistic imagery and aesthetic authenticity, as synonyms for truth. In the persuasive arts, advertising and public relations, we consider its antonym, that is, deception, to be absolutely forbidden.
And increasingly, human dignity has taken a central position in media ethics. yj For two decades now, media ethicists have worked on ethnic diversity, racist language in news, and sexism in advertising. Gender equality in hiring and eliminating racism in organizational culture are no longer dismissed as political correctness but seen as moral imperatives. Human dignity that arrives on our agenda from the universal, takes seriously lives that are loaded with cultural complexity. Our
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selves are articulated within these decisive contexts of gender, race, class, and religion. A community's polychromatic voices are understood as essential for a healthy democracy.

But the third ethical principle, nonviolence, is still underdeveloped. Flickers of peace are emerging on our media ethics agenda, but only glimmers compared to rv truth, and of late, human dignity. As well-known in this conference, Johan Galtung has developed and applied the principle most systematically with his peace journalism, concerned not simply with the standards of war reporting, but positive peace - creative, nonviolent resolution of all cultural, social and political conflicts (e.g. 2004). Peace journalism recognizes that military coverage as a media event feeds the very violence it reports, and therefore is developing the theory and practice of peace initiatives and conflict resolution (Lynch and McGoldrick 2005). But the broad task remains of bringing this third principle to maturity. This paper seeks to advance that project by giving the non-violence principle theoretical justification.
My perspective on peace and communication is philosophical anthropology.2 For my framework, I identify the characteristics common and unique to human being. The status of philosophical anthropology is controversial within the classical philosophical disciplines at present, that is, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Its agenda has been taken over by the philosophy of mind or eclipsed by analytical philosophy in the North Atlantic. Therefore, while working out the necessary and sufficient conditions of the human species, my overall argument is more broadly ontological.
Social Contract Theory
For properly justifying non-violence philosophically, the elephant in the room is social contract theory. In coming to grips with the nature of the human in our analysis of peace, we must establish the alternatives to social contract as the dominant paradigm.
In social contract theory, a person's moral and political obligations are dependent on a contract or agreement among a society's members. In its modern terms, social contractualism is given its first full exposition and defence in the moral and political theory of Thomas Hobbes. After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best known proponents of this enormously influential theory, in fact, one of the most dominant theories within moral and political philosophy throughout the history of the modern West. In the twentieth century, the social contract tradition gained further momentum as a result of John Rawls' Kantian version (for history and critique of contract theory, see Nussbaum 2006, ch. 1). In fact, Virginia Held has argued that "contemporary Western society is in the grip of contractual thinking" (1993). Contractual models have come to inform a vast variety of relations and interactions among persons, and much of our discourse about peace assumes it.
However, despite its longevity, prominence, and sophisticated defenders, a number of philosophers have called into question the very nature of the person at the heart of contract theory (Carole Pateman most notably, 1988). The one who engages in contracts is a Robinson Crusoe, represented by the Hobbesian man, Locke's autonomous self, Rousseau's noble savage, and Rawls' abstract person in the original position. The liberal individual is purported to be universal - raceless, classless, and gender neutral - and is taken to represent a generalized model of humanity above cultural differences. But many political thinkers have argued that when we investigate carefully the characteristics of the liberal self, we find not a
universal human being, but a historically located, specific type of individual (cf. http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/soc-cont.htm). C. B. Macpherson (1973), for example, has concluded that the Hobbesian person is actually a bourgeois man typical of early modern Europe. Feminists have also made it obvious that persons at the heart of the liberal social contract are gendered masculine (e.g., Di Stefano1991). Hobbes' conception of the liberal self, which established the dominant modern conception of the person in contract theory, is explicitly masculine. It is radically atomistic and solitary, not owing any of its qualities to anyone else. This model of masculinity therefore, cannot legitimately claim to be a general representation of all persons. Moreover, such liberal individuals enter into the social contract as a means by which to maximize their own individually considered interests.
Dialogic Theory
In terms of a credible ethics of non-violence, philosophical anthropology with its focus on the human, insists that the liberal self be exorcized and replaced by the relational self instead. A shorthand version for peace and communication argues that a dialogic model ought to be substituted for monologic transmission between discrete individuals. In fact, the argument here is stronger - for non-violence to be legitimate intellectually and possible practically, dialogic social philosophy is the only defensible normative communal theory at present. In this case, rather than rejection by feminist social ethics as with contractualism, dialogic theory embodies the breadth and range of its insights. Daryl Koehn (1998), as one example, supports the emphasis in feminist ethics on a relational rather than individualistic self and insists on an empathic rather than legalistic approach to community life. In the process she argues for a dialogic ethics that makes feminist ethics more credible. A normative dialogic paradigm is a decisive alternative to social contract and a fruitful framework for an ethics of non-violence in an age of globalization and multiculturalism.
According to the dialogic perspective, homo sapiens is the one living species constituted by language; therefore, humans are fundamentally cultural beings. As creators, distributors and users of culture, humans live in a world of their own making. Rather than one-dimensional definitions of the human species as homo faber, homo economicus, or animale rationale, the cultural character of our humanness illustrates both our dialogic composition as a species and the relationship of human beings and the media. In traditional epistemology, all acts are monologic, though actions may be coordinated with others. However, when the lingual interpretation
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of ourselves and our experience constitutes who we are, human action is dialogic. Our experience is then understood largely in terms of rhythm with other non-in-"Y dividuated actors. Humans are dialogic agents within a language community.
Therefore, all moral matters involve the community. A self exists only within ^ "webs of interlocution" and all self-interpretation implicitly or explicitly "acknowledges the necessarily social origin of any and all of their conceptions of the good and so of themselves" (Mulhall and Swift 1996, 112). Like feminist ethics, dialogic ethics does not think of morality as an impersonal action-guiding code for an individual, but rather as a shared process of discovery and interpretation in which members of a community continually refine their positions in light of what others have said and done. The most defensible ethical stance is one of continuing thoughtfulness (Koehn 1998, 156-161).
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Rather than patch up liberal individualism, the dialogic paradigm enables us to start over intellectually and thereby establish a more credible humanness for C^ understanding non-violence. As a substitute for individual autonomy, Taylor (1994, 32, 34, 36) summarizes the social bondedness of dialogic theory as follows:
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves and hence of defining our identity, through ... rich modes of expression we learn through exchange with others. My discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others. My own identity crucially depends on my dia-logical relations with others . . In the culture of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of self discovery and self affirmation.
The dialogic lineage of Martin Buber, Paulo Freire and Emmanuel Levinas insists on emancipatory struggles and transformative action. Together they make a normative commitment to the dialogic unequivocal. In Freire's (1970) perspective, only through dialogue do we fulfil our ontological and historical vocation of becoming fully human. Under conditions of oppression, through dialogic communication we can gain a critical consciousness as an instrument of liberation (Freire 1973). For Buber, restoring the dialogic ought to be our primary aim as humankind (1965, 209-24). Buber's philosophy of communication is not content with empirical claims regarding socially produced selves or lingual assertions about symbolic constructions. He speaks prophetically that only as I-Thouness prospers will the I-It modality recede (Buber 1958). Levinas' interaction between the self and the Other makes peace normative; non-violence in his theory is not only a political strategy, but a public philosophy (1981). Together they enable us to endorse dialogue as the apex of normative communication theories and the most appropriate framework for the ethics of non-violence.
Spiritual Dimension of the Human
In focusing relentlessly on the nature of the human, philosophical anthropology rejects the mainstream's liberal self and validates dialogic communication as an appropriate framework for the ethics of non-violence. And in concentrating on the relational human in dialogicism, its spiritual dimension become inescapable. Buber and Levinas are typically connected to Judaism and Freire's Catholicism is well known. But philosophical anthropology works more deeply and persistently to see spirituality as intrinsic and inescapable. In enhancing rather than suppressing the spiritual dimension, a thicker understanding of humans-as-relational emerges, and a normative strategy is made transparent for acting on the ethics of non-violence. Not only is the liberal self reductionistic, but its secular context prevents it from seeing humans in holistic terms. Therefore, a spacious framework is unveiled by including spirituality within philosophical anthropology rather than adhering to the conceptual boundaries of epistemology and metaphysics.
Spirituality refers to an inherent aspect of everyday life, that perennial propensity of human beings for ultimate meaning. We refer with this term to those sacred times and spaces so engrained in human community that history becomes an empty shell if viewed without it, and our categories blurred if we fail to appreciate spirituality's irrepressible character.
This is not an appeal to a theology of communication or to theological
ethics. From St. Augustine in the fifth century to Stanley Hauerwas today, work in theological ethics is imperative reading. But the argument here is not for a series of formal, scholastic theologies. Even where theologians appear in the argument or elaboration, they serve as springboards to more wide-ranging explanations. Philosophical anthropology with a spiritual inflection does not mean we just write about God or use official theological categories.
Nor is spirituality and non-violence identical to communication and religion. Obviously spirituality comes into its own through institutional religion, and several of the world's major religious traditions enter the analysis here - Jewish, Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Animistic, Muslim, Russian Orthodox, and so forth. Yet the appeal in spirituality is not basically to organized religions. Religions are filled with distortions; they typically lust after certitude and present dogmatisms in the name of truth. Such accusations the world's religions can meet themselves. Spirituality emphasizes another dimension - the religious. The concern of philosophical anthropology, in coming to grips with the relational human, is not formalized dogma, but the quality of experience called "spiritual." In that sense, participation in this analysis is welcomed out of concern for peace studies, regardless of whether an explicit theological tradition is held or not.
Spirituality rejects the naiveté that the religious realm can be isolated and established independently. It refers by analogy to heatness in red-hot iron. One of the human species' most intriguing problems is why something exists and not nothing, why we find ourselves living on a tiny fragment of the vast universe in a minute fragment of time. Our intrinsic spirituality motivates religious life and thought to answer that. Thus the contention here that the religious dimension is still the best form for exploring the human predicament. What are typically dismissed as archaic spiritual values are not limited to a primitive state, but are preoccupations which emerge in those unending struggles across history for freedom and purpose.3
In the same way that spirituality brings history into presence, a thematic idea within it might be labelled openness or creativity. While organized religions are normally castigated for being narrow, stifling, and bigoted, the spiritual domain actually means releasing creativity, opening our perception of reality. Spirituality cries out for a polyphonic, multi-dimensional world that prevents both sterility and cacophony.
The most dramatic kind of openness in spirituality, of course, is openness toward the transcendent. Spirituality by definition entails the higher and deeper and more ultimate realities beyond the immanent. In Buber's language it is God, in Paul Tillich a non-symbolic ground of being, in the Russian Orthodox tradition the Primordial principle, and in the New Testament grace. While social contract democracy tends to support a bland demythologized form of scientifically acceptable religion, the spirituality of everyday life finds the non-empirical not only ^ meaningful but necessary.
In important ways, therefore, spirituality can be defined as humans thrusting out beyond their embodiments and the limited social order under which they live. In other words, spirituality is the human attempt to reach unconstrained reality and the ultimate sphere, or in Rudolf Otto's terms, "the numinous." Again, this press
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toward transcendence is neither new or passé. The assumption is that human beings have a transcendent dimension which if not encouraged to develop properly will steal through the back door in bizarre and destructive ways. Secular culture thus
lives dangerously by shutting out transcendent meaning. In so arguing, spirituality not only enhances philosophical anthropology, but adds an important dimension to contemporary discussions of communication and culture. It insists on the need for a centre, an ultimate focus to curb arbitrariness in human relations. At the least, it encourages communication scholars to take religious language and rituals seriously as arenas where ultimate matters are given existential significance.
Thus spirituality makes the world of meaning absolutely essential for our well-being as humans - and encourages our working that out in highly practical ways as Freire does. Spirituality opens an imaginative journey into the secrets and mysteries of human meaning. Rabbi Abraham Heschel writes correctly that meaning is as indigenous to our being human as the dimension of space is to stars and stones. Culture is thus considered a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, and meaning is the fundamental ingredient in human cultures. For spirituality, communication describes the process of creating meanings. Communication is seen as the human attempt to uncover significance in life. It recognizes that our important threat is not physical survival but the uncanny. The ultimate menace occurs when lingual systems start disintegrating. We are connected to the history of the human race and to human communities through the realization that ritual and symbolism are not extraneous to social processes, but intrinsic to humankind as a species.
Social contract has reduced human experience and handles openness awkwardly. The contemporary mind as a whole finds it difficult to grasp the subtlety of our multi-roled, multi-formed existence. Secularization continues to shape us decisively, yet a revolutionary transformation of consciousness is always held out as a hope by the tradition of spirituality represented here. Its various iterations anticipate the release of the creative, an upsurge of liberating energy, a freeing of people from suffering and dulling restraints. Making spirituality prominent brings all symbolic creations - including song, poetry, drama, metaphor, and worship - into our study of communications phenomena.
Above all, the spiritual/religious/numinous is committed to the sacred character of human speech. Spirituality has a sacramental concern for the communication process rooted in its oral-aural form. Already in the ancient world humans understood the powerful force of words in shaping reality. In the tradition Paulo Freire represents, for example, people are assigned the responsibility of naming as a sign of their partnership with God in forming the creation. Those for whom the spiritual is phosphorescent, stand in awe of oral language. Language is spirit, being, reality - a powerful force of creative energy. Words are understood to produce events, not just describe private thoughts. The spirit of Hebrew poetry in Buber's mysticism sees life as essentially personal throughout - the human and divine, and natural reality too. Spokenness across history warrants our hearing yet today.
Spirituality adds to dialogic theory by challenging us to maintain the mystical quality of language. Where do we find the Bubers now among communication theorists, those who revere dialogue as the primary vehicle for relational living and a personalist world? Where are we committed to protecting the sacramental quality of natural language which the Creator bestowed upon it? Spirituality forces us to consider whether we have any longer a profound appreciation for frail human speech as sacred for all human beings everywhere in that it can divide or reconcile, destroy or build up, enslave or free. Out of the violence and turmoil in the Middle
East are the inspiring stories of Jews and Muslims working together on water projects in Palestine, and teaching their children each other's religion - proving once again that language can empower the moral imagination toward peace.
Holistic Humans
Insisting on the spiritual dimension of humanness enables us to define relational beings holistically. Humans are spiritual embryos, endowed with mystical power that needs to be cultivated by non-violence. In a holistic view of the human species, there is an unseen power that leads the world's creatures in a harmonious way. In Taoism its name is Tian. With humans as whole beings created by nature, the focus is on nurturing and awakening our basic humanity, that is our whole inner being.
Humans are understood to be an indivisible whole, a vital organic unity with multi-sided moral, mental and physical capacities. The body, mind, and heart are indivisibly linked and developed in concert with one another. Deeper than political strategies toward peace is the profound educational need to touch our inner being in order to awaken the higher elements. This is a way of knowing that is non-conceptual or pre-conceptual, one in which the inner powers that reside within us are released. Educators committed to holistic humans cultivate a harmonious spirituality that exists and need not be imposed. Human beings in these terms are elevated to their highest and noblest by the very spirit being nurtured (Huang 2007, 1-5).
Life is understood as a journey of releasing the sacred power residing within life itself. Human beings are not simply biological or psychological entities, but spiritual entities seeking expression within the physical and cultural world. In these terms, an ethics of non-violence is primarily activated through a special kind of education. Pedagogy provides an atmosphere in which our inner energy is liberated through a natural internal unfolding. It means further that human beings must become inwardly certain that they belong to a supersensible world of soul and spirit that always surrounds them while animating them. Thus education is not an instructional system but an art, the art of awakening what is actually there within ^ the human being. Rather than ignore our soul life, an ideal education enriches the soul and awakens the unity of our whole being - body, mind, and spirit. In other words, education has to awaken a sense of the sacred and the interconnectedness of life, and ultimately exposes us to the larger vision of what it means to be a human being inhabiting the cosmos (cf. Huang 2007).
Rather than a Taliban-style indoctrination imposed from without, authentic Q awakening centres on our inner life, and only through such awakening can nonviolence flourish. Critical thinking is essential to education, but being mindful is to bring soul into our lives. Being compassionate is to see our connectedness to others. Educational goals cannot be centered too narrowly on intellectual development or behaviour control that ignores human growth in holistic terms. Harmony within a self means a state of being able to see a whole picture of one's being in relation with others, and our connection to the universe. Harmony within spreads S to compassion for others and oneness with the eternal.
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Taoism
The spiritual dimension of the holistic human is stated in different ways and from different cultural perspectives, but with the same meaning. The Protestant
theologian H. Richard Niebuhr turned Christian love ethics into a definition of the person as The Responsible Self.4 The Dali Lama's best-selling book, Ethics for a ro New Millennium (1999) is written for all though it is intensely spiritual in charac- ^ ter. Karol Wojtyla (better known as Pope John Paul II) explicates horizontal love (human-to-human) and vertical love (divine-to-human and human-to-divine) as a trained philosopher speaking to the human race, not as official teaching for the Roman Catholic Church (1981).
As an extended illustration, one way to describe the spiritual dimension of the human is through Taoism.5 The spirit of Taoism is to recognize a mysterious power in nature, and to pursue the harmonious state of being united with nature (cf. Gunaratne, 2005, esp. chs. 1, 5). It is particularly applicable to the ethics of non-violence because of its origins in the fourth century B.C. It was created as a philosophical system when China was occupied by countries that constantly fought against each other to become the dominant authority. Taoists in that era explored what was driving the conflicts, violence, and chaos in society and how human beings were to live in such a society. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are two major figures in developing and advocating it. Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the origin of Taoism and Chuang Tzu's biography, Chuang Tzu, presents it poetically.
In terms of Lao Tzu, "Tao cannot be heard, cannot be seen, cannot be told, and should not be named." For him, Tao is a formless mysticism that gives life to all creation and is itself inexhaustible. The Chinese character pronounced as Tao contains two parts - a head (actually an "eye in a head") and a walking foot meaning "to go." Together they mean "the way" (both physically and philosophically/metaphorically) or "the path or road" (Lao Tzu 2005, viv). Lin Yutang interprets it as truth (Lao Tzu et al. 1948, 5). "Tao; hence Tao is an energy that guides human action." Tao is within a Self and gradually evolves in the Self when humans embody it. When humans are merged with the Tao, they are at one with nature, both one's innermost nature and the force of nature we experience everywhere" (Lao Tzu 2005, xv). In this sense "all human actions become as spontaneous and mindless as those of the natural world" (Chuang Tzu 1964, 6).
Chang Tzu's philosophy is about freedom - in his words freeing ourselves from the world (Chuang Tzu 1964). Thus from Taoism's perspective, the essential point in holistic education is nurturing our inner nature while respecting the mystical power of natural reality. The basic question is how can we live harmoniously in the midst of social orders and values that tend to make human beings soulless objects? Chuang Tzu contends that humans suffer because they have no freedom. We lack freedom because we are attached to material goods, to feelings, knowledge and religions. Our fears and suffering come from our attachments which themselves result from our own web of values. However, anything we believe we own, such as reputation, wealth, and power, can be changed when our value system is altered. What we believe we own is merely attachment which has no eternity, and brings no peace, that is, harmony of heart.
Chuang Tzu emphasizes that we tune in to the harmony and balance within our own Self and the larger world, rather than live according to a value system that at its best recognizes merely part of a human being's significance to the whole universe. When freed from attachment to the external, we are at peace with others, society, the world, and the universe. We neither struggle for good things nor are bothered by what others consider bad things. We refuse to recognize death as any less desi-
rable than life. Living in an era of constant war over power, wealth and territory, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu advocate forsaking the value system that twists people's behaviour and intentions, and disturbs the harmony within our humanness.
Taoism pursues a society that operates without hurting the harmony within its people and the harmony within nature. Holistic educators promote a form of teaching and learning that retains our inner nature and recognizes everyone's uniqueness. Taoism advocates our pursuit of the spiritual life in the midst of the dominant voices touting efficiency, structure, and management. It turns people's eyes to the state of life, being at oneness with the world, in a hope of making the world a better place physically and spiritually.
Golden Rule
Philosophical anthropology that takes spirituality seriously provides us a vocabulary for and definition of the holistic human. The seeds of such holism are already in dialogical humans-in-relation. But spirituality makes holistic humans explicit and transparent. In addition to articulating a human being that thinks and acts non-violently, the spiritual domain gives us a normative strategy for living peacefully - the golden rule (cf. Kang 2006).
From a religious perspective, almost all discussion of a common morality and the ethics of non-violence refer to the golden rule as a guide for morally appropriate action. Hans Kung is one prominent scholar who emphasizes the golden rule as the core of religious ethics. He believes, as do many others, that all the great religions require observance of something like, "Do to others as you would have them do to you." This is a norm that is not just hypothetical and conditional, but is categorical, apodictic, and unconditional. Kung is correct that it is fully practicable in the face of the extremely complex situation in which individuals or groups most often act (Kung, Global Responsibility, 58-59; A Global Ethic, 23-24; A Global Ethic for a Global Politics and Economics, 96-97, 225, 229, 232). Its secret is avoiding a list of prohibited acts and providing a way to think about behaving toward others.
Kung assumes that the golden rule is so clear and intuitive that we feel no need to ask what it really means. In that sense, acting toward others as we wish others to act toward us is a pretheoretical given. The rule of reciprocity between others and myself seems unarguable, intuitive, the natural way to live harmoniously in the human world. At least a commitment to the golden rule does not require shared ethical theory; we can generally agree about its importance for non-violence but disagree in our theorizing over capital punishment, warfare, and euthanasia (cf. Kang 2006). But, as Lindberg (2007) observes, its brevity and simplicity obscure its radical implications. In his words, it proceeds from the assumption of human "Y dignity - we regard others as basically like ourselves. Thus when followed it produces a "community of goodwill." |R	Note for illustration, the Confucian understanding of the golden rule. Confucius
Q states it, on one hand, in negative form: "Do not do unto others what you would not desire others to do unto yourself" (The Analects 5.12, 12.2, 15.24). But it is also
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erected and let others get there the way you would desire yourself to get there." The Analects teaches throughout that we should not concern ourselves with acknowledgement from others but worry about failing to acknowledge them (1.1, 1.16, 14.30, 15.19).
For Confucius, I should not study in order to show others, but study for the cultivation of myself (14.24). I should cultivate myself, first of all, in order to serve LO the other's peace (14.42). "Collecting" my scattered mind and heart, "keeping" and ^ "nourishing" it by means of reading and concentration are the way of Confucian self-cultivation, developed by the Song philosophers in the twelfth century. In the Confucian tradition, the effectiveness of the golden rule depends on the degree of my self-cultivation (cf. Kang 2006). The emphasis does not focus exclusively on the reciprocal relation between myself and the other, but includes my moral cultivation. This whole program of Confucianism is concentrated on moral cultivation on the individual, family, social, national, and transnational levels by different stages (from childhood to adult) and by different means (book learning, method of concentration, keeping rituals, and so on). In its best forms, Confucianism contributes to the moral education of persons in a concrete community, while being global in scope.
As Young Ahn Kang (2006) concludes, from the perspective of religious morality, the golden rule when understood generally as a rule of reciprocity can function effectively, if not as a moral principle, then at least as a moral procedure and as an expression of common moral wisdom of almost all humanity.6 The agencies of civil society can participate in teaching and promoting the golden rule as a path of non-violence both in local communities and global organizations with regard to the problems facing the contemporary world - poverty, malnutrition, war, the loss of cultural identity, and so on. For an ethics of non-violence, there is no reason not to make use of this common rule among peoples, nations, and for multinational cooperation in order to build a world in which cultural diversities are respected and shared.7
Conclusion
Rooted in the sacredness of life as a universal value, non-violence is an obvious ethical principle. In order to establish its legitimacy as a moral norm, I have chosen philosophical anthropology as the most suitable framework, rather than episte-mology, metaphysics, or metaethics. This intellectual strategy validates dialogic relations as the appropriate communications theory in contrast to those appeals to peace and peace-making rooted in social contract theory and its liberal self.
Philosophical anthropology while orienting us in the right direction toward the nature of the human, is likewise relentless in refusing to allow us to turn elsewhere to secondary questions. While totalizing our concentration on human-ness, it leads us into this intellectual space toward the religious dimension. While the spiritual dimension of our humanity is signalled by humans-in-relation, that presumption needs to be made visible and articulate for an ethics of non-violence to be adequately rich and comprehensive. Spirituality, rather than theological ethics or religion, opens this arena most effectively and leads to a richer definition of the human as wholistic beings and to the golden rule as a normative guide for implementing non-violent action. Rather than dismiss religion as contradictory to peace, emphasizing spirituality allows us to think and act beneath institutional structures and thus lay the groundwork for revolutionizing them.
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1.	In recognition ofTraber's extensive work in Africa, note is taken here of Albert Schweitzer (18751965), for whom the sacredness of life is his overarching belief about the world. This multi-gifted man was a musician, physician, philosopher and theologian, but perhaps most famously he founded the Lambar'ene' Hospital in Gabon, Africa. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben which he described in his autobiography (Out of My Life and Thought) as his greatest single contribution to human civilization. For him, respect for every kind of life had to be restored or ethical principles would continue to decay.
2.	Philosophical anthropology is broadly understood as the philosophical examination of human nature, or more precisely, the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a human being. But it does not presuppose an essentialist human essence of some sort. It has been part of the European philosophical landscape for the past century and a half, emerging as a main interest of post-Hegelian philosophers from Feuerbach and Marx to Nietzsche and Dilthey. For overviews see Arnold Gehlen's Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1988) and Richard Schacht, Existentialism, Existenz-philosophy, and Philosophical Anthropology (1975).
3.	Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) illustrates sociologically the lasting character of religious phenomena. He wrote Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912 toward the end of his life. Religious issues do not disappear, even for a functional sociologist. August Comte (A General View of Positivism, 1848) had predicted they are left behind in stages toward metaphysics and science, but contrariwise, religious phenomena require the best effort of a mature because its problems are the perennial ones of human flourishing.
4.	For Niebuhr, the responsible self is a root metaphor, that is, an expression that opens up our way of being in the world. The self is dynamic, in his view; our personhood is manifest in the act of answering. "Our relation to other selves is primary: we respond to responders; ...the self [is] in dialogue with community (1963, 52, 60). The ethical person does not live according to formal laws that must be obeyed, but as dialogical selves we live in responsive relations. He found no theory of the human in Western history that was equally comprehensive. As he concludes: "The approach to our moral existence as responsible selves.. .makes some aspects of our life as agents intelligible in a way that the teleology and deontology of traditional thought cannot do" (Niebuhr 1963, 67). He intended in this formulation to make the love commandment a moral demand necessarily incumbent on all humans, believers or atheists.
5.	This section on Taoism and holistic education is dependent on Huang 2007.
6.	For informed discussion of the golden rule, see Battles 1996.
7.	Christianity promotes the golden rule following the explicit teaching of Jesus, and in terms of the overall Biblical injunctions it is clear that it cannot be separated from the command to love my neighbour as myself. "Love your neighbour as yourself" is normative and uniquely so in the Judeo-Christian traditions because love characterizes the very heart of the universe. Divine love is the supreme good. Therefore, human love has its inspiration, motive and ground in the highest reaches of eternity. The norm does have a superabundant quality not entailed by the golden rule, that is, giving and forgiving with uncalculating spontaneity and spending oneself to fulfil a neighbour's well-being.
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