KEY POINTS:
Most writers would have considered writing a history of non-violence a dangerous idea in itself, given the high probability of spreading boredom rather than enlightenment.
And if any book promises what Frank Sinatra called "the old ennui", it is one with a foreword by "His Holiness the Dalai Lama", who believes in a seriously silly version of reincarnation and stands not so much for any philosophy I can discern but rather for a vague sort of Niceness.
However, Kurlansky, an American, has a publishing history that suggests he is game for anything. He has written, among others, Salt: A World History, Cod: The Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, and The Basque History of the World, titles unlikely to grab a reader by the eyeballs. But the salt and cod books were well reviewed and big sellers, considered well written, sound histories of their type.
So he seemed well equipped to handle non-violence, from which he has removed the hyphen, explaining in his opening: "The first clue, lesson number one from human history on the subject of nonviolence, is that there is no word for it. The concept has been praised by every major religion. Throughout history there have been practitioners of nonviolence. Yet while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence except that it is not another idea, it is not violence."
He is also surprised, as I have always been, that while Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy and tactics have been adopted by many resistance movements, no one has taken up the word he coined for them, satyagraha (literally "truth force"), which would certainly have met Kurlansky's need had it been better known.
The author explains how Christians, for centuries singularly against violence, were given the rationale for war by Pope Urban II, who launched the Crusades during a "peace council" in 1095 by defining the "good war" - the one, of course, fought by Christians against heretics. Quite soon, clergy began to insist that Christians could obtain divine salvation by going to war against the Saracens.
Kurlansky writes: "The concept of holy war is one of many ideas that Christians and Muslims borrowed from the Old Testament, which describes numerous wars sanctified by God to deliver God's wrath."
From that point it is not a long stretch to the utterly absurd situation where two Christian armies would take the field, each invoking the support of God, convinced he was on their side.
At the end of the book he spells out "The 25 Lessons", a list of truisms which are, however, worth a look.
He touches on the contemporary situation in the West where, with the "God, King and Country" rhetoric sounding empty nowadays, it is difficult to get young men to risk their lives in warfare. Some political leaders have tried invoking "freedom" and "democracy" and other concepts so abstract they don't carry much resonance among today's socially aware young people.
But Kurlansky triggers worries about his accuracy and depth when he cites Parihaka as an example of non-violent activism. Te Whiti's campaign of protest would have fitted neatly into his case for the power of unarmed resistance but, well, he gets it all wrong.
Any educated New Zealander could have fixed the facts for him with a quick edit, but even more disconcerting to me as I read on was that the context is askew. It wasn't at all like he says it was.
This sort of experience makes a reader cautious with the facts and their context for the rest of the narrative.
The book is, nevertheless, a gallant try to talk up the essential importance of non-violence. Kurlansky says American intellectuals Will and Ariel Durant have calculated that only 268 of the past 3421 years have been without war.
That is bad enough, but when the technological advances and ready availability of weaponry are considered, the business of somehow stopping violence is likely to be more critical to the survival of the human race than climate change - and much harder to fix when you consider that the economies of all major Western industrial countries continue to depend to an unhealthy degree on international arms sales.
* Published by Jonathan Cape, $45
