The Third Harmony

Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature

Michael N Nagler, Ph.D., Michael N. Nagler

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781523088171
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking

In the latest fruit of a brilliant career, Michael Nagler argues that nonviolence'Äînot just as a tactic but as a way of being'Äîis the only way to unite deeply divided people and enable progressive movements and leaders of all stripes to fulfil their promise and potential.
So many of the problems that beset us'Äîwar, poverty, isolation, and the climate crisis'Äîhave their roots in an old story about the universe: we are purposeless matter in a random void, and scarcity, competition, and violence are inevitable. Citing the convergence of modern science and the essence of the world's wisdom traditions, Michael Nagler argues for a new story: the universe is conscious and purposeful, humans are spiritual beings, and cooperation and collaboration are our natural way of interacting. This 'Äúnew story'Äù has had other champions, but Nagler is the first to realize that a piece is missing. For the new story to take hold, we have to embrace nonviolence, not only as a social change tactic but as a way of life.
Nonviolence is the only power strong enough to 'Äúmove the heart'Äù toward this deep and revolutionary change in worldview. Nagler refers to this as the 'Äúthird harmony,'Äù which is the harmony within and among us to resolve the crisis of the human image. Calling on us to realize the urgency of nonviolence for resolving our personal and collective problems, Nagler focuses on how to shift to our story on a personal, everyday level and then integrate it into the very foundations of our understanding of humanity and community, for our sake, for the sake of future generations, and the sake of nonviolence itself.

PART I

Lifting the Curtain

Chapter One

The Power of Story

On television, the internet, in schools, and everywhere in the cultural apparatus people are encouraged to consume, enjoy, think primarily of themselves, and remain obedient to the ongoing order.

—Henry Targ

Tell me who writes the stories of a society and I don’t need to know who makes the laws.

—George Gerbner

On the day she will never forget, Antoinette Tuff was sitting in for the receptionist, who was out sick, at the front desk of Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Georgia. She hadn’t been on the job very long when a young man, obviously distraught, slipped past the security gate brandishing an assault rifle and a backpack stuffed with five hundred rounds of ammunition.

“This is real,” he announced to the terrified staff. “Call 911; we are all going to die today.”

It was just fourteen months since Adam Lanza had gotten into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed twenty children.

Tuff was terrified. But not just for herself; she was thinking about her “babies”—McNair’s 870 young students. The young man, Michael Brandon Hill, age twenty, soon barricaded himself in the front office, with Tuff and a coworker—essentially hostages. He fired off one shot into the floor and several more at the police officers who had turned up outside. They returned fire. No one was hurt—so far. Mastering her terror, Tuff started talking to Hill, reassuring him, sharing his pain. Slowly, she began to reach him, coaxing him to give up: “It’s going to be all right, sweetie,” she tells Hill at one point in the 911 recording. “I just want you to know I love you, though, OK? And I’m proud of you. That’s a good thing that you’re just giving up, and don’t worry about it. We all go through something in life.”

She kept reassuring him, sharing that she, too, was going through a hard time, and—an important move in dealing with distraught people—giving him agency: “Tell me when you’re ready for me to call in the police.”

After an extremely tense hour (which must have seemed much longer), she got Hill to put his assault rifle down on her desk, lie face down on the floor, and give her permission to call in the police. And in they stormed, screaming orders at the young man who was already lying face down on the floor with his hands behind his back, waiting to be taken.

“Let me tell you something, babe,” she tells the 911 dispatcher when it’s all over. “I’ve never been so scared all the days of my life. Oh, Jesus.” But she saved 870 children—and Hill, and herself, and others, doubtless including some police officers.

There was a fair amount of coverage of her heroic action, including her own book, Prepared for a Purpose: The Inspiring True Story of How One Woman Saved an Atlanta School Under Siege, and a Lifetime movie, Faith Under Fire, though at the time one channel pulled the story because “no one was killed”! But to my knowledge no one, journalist or other, got the critical lesson from this incident. I’m not referring to the fact that our country is flooded with horrific weapons and that they’re readily available to anyone bent on using them, of whom we have more than our share. It’s an even more important, more fundamental lesson: there were, in effect, two different systems in place to protect McNair, based on two different concepts of humanity. One system consisted of the emergency phone line, a metal-detecting security door, and SWAT teams. That system completely failed. Hill slipped in behind a teacher who was cleared to enter; the police were actually, in this case, worse than useless. When they showed up, Hill panicked and started shooting at them, almost wrecking everything Tuff was trying to do. Happily, she did regain control of the situation.

So the other system, if you will, was Antoinette Tuff. A good name; but who was she? Not a saint, not a seasoned or in any way a trained nonviolence activist. An ordinary person; though it almost seems, as she explains in her book, that life had been preparing her for that moment. She had recently been through her own adversities, which gave her something she could share with Hill to break through his terrible isolation. Most importantly, her minister had taught her something called grounding that she was relying on intensely, along with praying silently the whole time of the incident (including praying for Hill!). She had the practice of taking fifteen minutes a day to try to still her mind—a simple, unstructured form of meditation. And of course, she was passionately concerned about the children.

All this enabled her to stay calm enough not only to try to understand the gunman, but also to get him to relate to her. “I just started telling him stories,” she said—especially a story about a tragedy in her own life. “I let him know what was going on with me and that it would be OK.”

A very similar incident had taken place fifteen years earlier, when an ER nurse named Joan Black was suddenly confronted by a distraught woman with a gun who burst into her emergency room gunning for another nurse she thought was having an affair with her husband.¹³ That situation also ended without bloodshed, and once again, the remarkable thing is that without either of the persuaders having any particular training for such emergencies—acting instinctively, it would seem—they seem to be following the same script:

You see the distraught person as a suffering person, not a threat or a monster: Tuff: “He was really a hurtin’ young man; I started praying for him. I just told him that I love him.” This is almost exactly what Joan Black said: “I saw a sick person and had to take care of her.”

You show him he is not alone in his grief: Black: “Everybody has pain in their life”; Tuff: “I almost committed suicide when my husband left me last year.” What you’re doing here is the crucial part: overcoming the distraught person’s alienation.

You offer “this too shall pass”: “You don’t have to die today,” Tuff said. “Life will still bring about turns, but we can learn from it.”

You buck him up. In both cases, the person is desperate for self-esteem and dignity. Tuff (probably crucially): “You’re a good person, I love you. I’m proud of you.” Giving the person agency, not threatening or trying to control him or her, is also critical.

And then:

You deliver the exhortation: Black: “We can work it out”; Tuff: “You’ll be OK; put the guns down and tell me when I can buzz in the police.”

As I pointed out in Search, this repeated pattern is not a coincidence. It was recognized long ago as an innate pattern of human behavior, something that you could reinforce through training and institutionalize by encoding it in your culture. It was in fact codified thousands of years ago, by the Greeks and after them the Romans, who called it a consolatio and taught it to budding orators. But alas, the two cases of Antoinette Tuff and Joan Black have another feature in common: there was no recognition, no institutionalization; nothing changed. And the killings go on. In Tuff’s case, as we’ve seen, one network actually spiked the story because no one was killed—which you might have thought was the whole point! In Black’s case, journalists quoted her as saying (as I suspect they got her to say) “That was the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life.” In neither case did we hear anyone say, “Wow, what just happened? Is there something here we could use in other similar situations?”

Countless people have found themselves using a technique more or less like this one, again more or less spontaneously. Maybe you are among them. Neither Antoinette Tuff nor Joan Black was all that extraordinary. They represent a human potential, a potential that could be developed, institutionalized, educated for—and put to work saving us from the plague of violence. And hardly anyone got it.

STORY AND CULTURE

My struggle to start a peace studies program at Berkeley was long and often frustrating, but in the course of it I got to know a number of interesting colleagues from departments other than my own fields of comparative literature and classics. One of them, whom I still think of with fondness and admiration, was Ernie Haas. Ernie, a holocaust refugee, had become one of the most distinguished figures we had in political science and international relations (IR). He was one of the few doing IR at Berkeley, and I was told he was the go-to person for a peace project like what I had in mind. I assumed it was because of what he had been through, and because he had a strong enough reputation that he could risk being associated with such a quaint issue as peace. He had a gruff exterior and was a bit startled—not to say brusque—when I called him up and broached the idea of a program in peace studies, but he came around soon enough, and we became friends. So it was with no small excitement that I invited him out for lunch one day to share with him what I thought then, and still think today, was the hottest idea in peace development: Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI, recently renamed Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping, or UCP). We had had a lot of good talks before, and I must admit I felt no small pride that I’d be the one to tell the famous Ernie Haas about this new development, which I thought he’d find nothing short of amazing. And he did.

There are several groups doing it, I explained. Peace Brigades International, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and now the big push for a worldwide service, Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). They give people some basic training in nonviolence and in local skills and send them into some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts (think Sri Lanka, South Sudan, even Syria!). When on the ground, working with local organizations, one of the things they commonly do is simple but effective: round-the-clock accompaniment of threatened people, often human rights workers. They also do rumor abatement, serve as go-betweens, and provide other good offices. NP has helped broker a peace agreement in Mindanao and rescued child soldiers in Sri Lanka.

“They’re saving lives,” I explained, “and so far—knock wood—no one’s been hurt doing it.” (Incidentally, there are still only one or two casualties, twenty years on.)

In no time Ernie began to grasp the possibility I was hinting at: that if taken to scale, this practice could plausibly be a substitute for war. “That’s fascinating, Mike, just fascinating.”

Pleased to no end, I proposed the next logical step: “Ernie, let’s get some of your colleagues together for a symposium and I can fill them in, too.”

“No,” he said.

“Excuse me?” I was so nonplussed that it took a few days for me to call and ask him why not. He paused for a moment, and then gave me a very straight and telling answer that I remember to this day: “It’s not their culture.”

I knew he was absolutely right, and that it was not good news. How on earth do you get people to change their culture?

It turns out I was not the only one asking that question. Here and there, in academia and elsewhere, people were saying, as I was, this has to change. If our culture is killing us, we can’t simply shrug it off and hope for the best. But again, how do you change a culture? Fortunately, there’s a way to focus the question that makes it more doable, albeit still with some interesting challenges. While a culture is made up of many habits and practices, every culture has at its core a defining narrative. A story, as we’ve been saying, about the universe and human nature. Nowadays we are beginning to recognize that our story may be the biggest problem of our time.

“We live by story—and the story we live by today is driving our species to extinction.”¹⁴

The British philosopher Mary Midgley—one of the best thinkers of our generation, for my money—explains perfectly why my colleagues, or journalists, or anyone for that matter, are asleep at the switch: “Most people who follow current events at all do now grasp … that there is a danger and they want to do something about it. But we don’t have the concepts ready to express this need”¹⁵ (my emphasis). Midgley is referring here to the danger of environmental collapse, but the same observation would apply to any dimension of the crisis. A given culture’s defining narrative, or story, is built on a particular set of concepts. Together they make up a coherent narrative—and exclude others. The controlling narrative still in place today has it that we are separate material beings in a random material universe. How are we to grasp the enormous tragedy of throwing off the natural balance of the earth we’re living on? If power grows out of the barrel of a gun, how can we understand people overcoming violence precisely because they don’t have guns? As Midgley says, we simply don’t have the concepts—the conceptual grammar, if you will—to grasp these things.

The problem, in other words, is by no means confined to Ernie’s colleagues. Being political science professionals did not exempt them from being constrained by a finite set of assumptions about reality that has now become dangerously inadequate. For the human project to regain its forward momentum—and without that, its very survival is in doubt—those assumptions need to be challenged, maybe discarded, and replaced with new ones.

In America and other industrial countries we have seen the emergence of groups—some large, some small; some benign, but some quite dangerous—with strange, often pathetic belief systems that play on the human need for meaning that is not met by the old story. Followers of extremist religious sects present threatening examples. Bill Moyers referred to one during his acceptance speech for the Global Environment Citizen Award: “These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the nineteenth century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.”¹⁶

Now, these true believers are of course outliers, a lunatic fringe, like people who go into a school with an automatic rifle or randomly shoot into a crowd at a concert; but sometimes extremists can tell us something we all need to think about. Do they not tell us something about the far larger number who believe—despite growing evidence, scientific and observable by anyone—that global warming is either not happening or not caused by the burning up of fossil fuels that had lain untouched in the earth for millions of years? Or who believe, in the face of growing scientific evidence, ancient tradition, and personal experience, that we are mere objects in a world without spirit or meaning?

FLIPPING EVERYTHING

Nonviolent advocates today have a colorful term for the kind of transformation Antoinette Tuff pulled off at McNair on that fateful day: flipping the script. Michael Hill walked in harboring the scenario “I am a deranged killer and I’m going to massacre children.” Tuff held up a completely different one: “No, you are a valued human being who needs help, and you’re going to turn yourself in.” Hill’s opening gambit said, “You are terrified.” Tuff countered, “No, I see the human being in you underneath that mask.” We’ll meet more examples as we go on, and many more can be made to happen far earlier in the conflict process, long before the resisters have to face such a life-or-death emergency.

Arno Michaelis was an extremely violent leader of white supremacist organizations that terrorized people of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I. Lifting the Curtain
• Part II. Telling the New Story
• Part III. What Changemakers Know
• Part IV. A Call to Action
• Appendix A: Alternative News
• Appendix B: General Sources
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Discussion Guide