Back when I was newly married and my wife and I were both in graduate school, I bought a desk for the improvised study area of our apartment. It cost almost twice as much to have the store assemble it, so I decided to assemble it myself. How hard could that be? I pulled out the instructions, which were all in symbols so that they would be intelligible to people speaking any language, although I imagine it actually made the instructions equally unintelligible in any language. The desk had a hutch with little doors, and try as I might, I couldn’t get the door to fit into the hinge doohickeys at the top and bottom at the same time. In frustration, I slammed my shoulder against the door and tried to force it in, only to hear a sickening crack as part of the corner of the door broke off. How should I know that the little circular arrow meant that the hinge holders had to be adjusted first? I thought of saying, “Ruthie? Don’t you think it would be easier to get to our supplies if we leave the shelves open?” but I knew that wouldn’t work any better than my assembly method. Of course, we made do with open shelves anyway.

Whatever possessed me to try to force that door in, it wasn’t the first or likely the last time that one of us has broken something by trying to force it. And these incidents are only tiny examples of a much larger problem: how often people try to get what they want or to solve a problem by force, and how often that doesn’t work.

Way back in the 1960s my father tried to force my brother to cut his long hair, but it only resulted in bitter battles between the two of them. Trying to force our dog to take a pill was a disaster–it took hiding it in a treat to get it down. In high school dating I saw how anyone who clings too much usually drives the other person away. Nearly any time we try to force someone to do or be what we want, it either backfires or harms the relationship, even or especially if we get what we demand. At the extreme is domestic violence, which has ended many relationships or made them relationships of misery.

So why do we try to use force or even violence to get our way if it so often doesn’t work?

One reason is that sometimes it does work. A little more force may open a stuck jar, and there have been real-life cases where would-be robbers have been driven off by a gun. Violence has remade the map of the world many times, and Hitler was only stopped by military defeat. Children can often be forced into compliance, even if the long-term effects are not so great.

And that’s part of the problem. For force to be effective, it has to fit the situation, we have to know what we are doing, it has to be applied correctly, and even then, there may be consequences we don’t intend down the road. Especially for physically violent forms of force, their only real effectiveness is to destroy. That may be OK if we are demolishing an old building, but very few of the things that are important or valuable in life can be achieved by destruction or violence.

We often overestimate what can be accomplished by force and also forget how often it backfires. Yes, guns occasionally help protect against criminals, but in reality, if someone is killed by a gun kept in the home for self-protection, it is 22 times more likely to be someone you know than an intruder or criminal. The risk of suicide is five times greater in households with guns. My point is not mainly an argument about gun control, even though it could be. My point is simply to ask why so many people feel safer with an instrument of deadly force in the home even if it actually makes us less safe? Why do we overestimate the usefulness of force?

One reason may be that we are often driven by fear, not our most genuine needs. Another is that we imagine what we intend, not what we don’t intend. The thought of being robbed or attacked stimulates our anger and fear, especially if it has actually happened to us before, and our imagination of a scenario where a gun gives us power over the attacker can be very compelling. The father in Texas last year who got in a gun fight with a robber didn’t intend to shoot his six-year-old daughter when she walked into the hall, but he did. No one who buys a gun for safety intends for it to be used for suicide, but it happens.

We don’t always think through the details outside what we imagine or intend. In many situations, a gun would not help unless loaded and immediately available, and unless we are ready to shoot without hesitation, yet these are the conditions that most lead to accidents. I do recognize that some people are much more responsible with guns than others, and I’m not telling you what you should do in your home. I was an 8-bar sharpshooter in my Boy Scout days, and I don’t hate guns or want to take everyone’s guns away. But I believe we vastly overestimate the usefulness of guns for safety, along with many other unrealistic fantasies about guns in our society. How many movies have you seen where bullets flying everywhere always miss the hero–it wouldn’t happen that way in real life. Holding a gun can make a person an immediate target for someone else with a gun, and a gun isn’t a shield. Violence is only effective for destruction, and even when people want to destroy the effects may be unintended. The killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose life we celebrate this weekend, was an utter tragedy, but it did not silence his voice. It is almost certain that he is better known and more revered today than if that did not happen, and his words are better remembered, even if we don’t always remember the full message that he taught.

At a broader level, we similarly overestimate the effectiveness of war. WWII got rid of Hitler, but much of our moral strength came from the fact that it was clearly a response to an aggressor who believed he could succeed through force, and who ultimately didn’t. We recently had a World War II veteran named Ed Wood speak at Explorations! on the myths of World War II. He reminded us that along with the heroism and sacrifice in that war, there were also atrocities, cowardice, cruelty and other evils. Not that we shouldn’t have fought that war–he believes it was necessary–but he thinks we drew some wrong lessons from World War II, glorifying war itself and exalting without question the development of a huge American military machine. When President Eisenhower left office, he warned us about the military-industrial complex; can you imagine what he would think today?

We are spending over half of our discretionary budget on the military, about the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. Every month in Iraq we spend the equivalent of the lifetime earnings of five thousand American workers—the blood, sweat and tears of their entire lives. And still we can’t just get our way at will. We can pretty much destroy at will, but not much else. The results of war can be very unpredictable except that there will be suffering. We don’t imagine the consequences we don’t intend, and it’s rare for there not to be unintended consequences from trying to solve problems with destructive force. Afghan “freedom fighters” that we armed against the Soviet Union yesterday became the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighting us there today in a situation getting steadily worse. The invasion and occupation of Iraq did not go as planned, and an attack on Iran would bring far worse unintended consequences. Yet even with reductions in violence and CIA reports undermining the justifications that have been built up for an attack on Iran, our leaders still are ratcheting up the rhetoric, and then barely a week ago there was an overblown and partly fabricated incident, complete with threatening voices spliced into the audio by the Pentagon, in order to provoke public tension and fear toward Iran. In the meantime, we have purchased some reduction in the bloody violence in Iraq by arming a Sunni movement that is in tension with Shiite leaders, perhaps laying the groundwork for a worse power struggle and civil war later on. We are playing with fire in the Middle East, trying to get our way by military force, and we shouldn’t be surprised if we get burned. War is an extremely blunt instrument, and very often it ends up being another example of the futility of force.

Even apart from guns or war, we often make similar mistakes in our personal lives that overestimate the usefulness of coercive force. Many parents believe spanking or hitting their children is effective, when studies show it generally is not, especially over time and especially when done in anger. Sometimes we yell and scream or become stubborn, demanding or uncompromising, even though it rarely helps us get our way and we may pay for it in other ways even if we do get what we want. Do you become more responsive or cooperative if someone tries to shame, pressure, punish or threaten you? Why should we think other people will respond differently if we do the same thing?

In his book “Why We Know What Isn’t So,” Thomas Gilovich suggests that our own rationality sometimes betrays us, including in ways that lead us to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment and underestimate the effectiveness of reward. The regression effect is the tendency of extremes, whether good or bad, to be followed by something closer to average. Rewards are often given after unusually good behavior, but if followed by something not as good, which normally happens, we may conclude it didn’t work. Punishments are often given after unusually bad behavior, and when followed by something better we conclude it helped. Yet especially in the long run, punishments are generally less effective than rewards or incentives in promoting the behavior we want. The way my southern relatives would put it, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Rewards and incentives may be more effective than punishments and threats, but even so, they can still be manipulative if the goal is simply to change someone else’s behavior. Far deeper are concepts of nonviolent communication such as those developed by Marshall Rosenberg. Our Explorations! session this morning led by David Shindoll is an introduction to this method. In nonviolent communication, we learn to reach deeper than our wants, fears, anger and position statements to identify and communicate our most genuine needs, and to similarly identify the needs of others, needs such as love, autonomy, safety, basic bodily needs, and a sense of meaning and purpose. We learn to make requests rather than demands. We become more aware of our feelings and how they come about, and less prone to blame or demonize others. In the process we become more compassionate and more likely to meet our genuine needs. If you want to learn more, there will be a course on nonviolent communication beginning later this month.

I think there are ways that these concepts can be applied at a broader level as well. Even as a nation, what is it that we genuinely need in the world? Among other things, we have needs for energy, for basic security, for financial stability and the resources to meet basic human need. But seeking oil energy by war only feeds that addiction and does not prepare us for a future without oil. (Even Alan Greenspan knows we would not be on the ground in Iraq if there were not oil under the ground.) The countries that will thrive in the future are those that change their oil-based infrastructure the soonest and lead the way in conservation, efficiency and alternative energy. Why not us? Spending trillions of dollars on war undermines our financial stability and deprives us of resources to meet basic human need, not to mention our genuine energy needs. As Martin Luther King said years ago, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Such a nation may be approaching physical doom as well, since our bloated military spending also does not meet our need for basic security. In terms of our military, what we need for essential security, deterrence or national defense is far below what we are spending now. We only need such a big military (and it only seems overstretched) if we are trying to control other countries by war and occupation and to manipulate countries around the world by force, often for the desires of a wealthy elite described as national interest. In the process, we ensure that we will be the targets of hatred around the world, and we become vulnerable to simple box cutters that no bomb or Star Wars program can stop. If we stay on the path of empire, we are doomed to follow the path of previous empires that overextended themselves militarily and financially. If we continue to invest enormous resources in ever more devastating ways to kill, we will reap what we sow. And if we ignore the needs of other nations, even labeling some of them as evil, we will only make worse the problems that inflame the fears of so many people in our nation, such as terrorism and immigration, as well as the more genuine dangers of environmental destruction, nuclear proliferation and financial collapse.

So much of this was foreseen decades ago when Martin Luther King spoke out for nonviolence and against the obscenity of war, as well as the obscenities of racism, poverty and oppression, which are really other forms of violence. King wrote whole speeches about the Vietnam War that could be delivered today if the word ‘Iraq’ were substituted for ‘Vietnam’. He spoke of American arrogance, the waste of money and lives, the loss of allies, the growth of the military-industrial complex and the harm to our genuine needs from that war. King taught us that nonviolence is not naive; it is powerful and just; a “sword that heals.” That is still true today. In fact, as Walter Wink was quoted in 2001, “1,695,000,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions [in 1989] that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations ... If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa ... the independence movement in India ...) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering [majority] of [all] humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world.”

Whether at a personal or collective level, true nonviolence is powerful. It is motivated by love rather than hate and it identifies genuine needs and creative solutions rather than fearful desires and angry demands. It is willing to take risks and able to inspire. What is naive is faith in violence. It is naive to believe that if we just push on the door a little harder, shout a little louder, destroy another opponent, harden our demands, buy another gun or drop another bomb, we will get what we want, much less what we truly need. Violence is effective for destruction, but very little else.

Attempts to solve problems through force and violence are usually attempts to take the easy way out. Much more difficult but also more effective are the methods of nonviolence and compassion, integrity and honesty, and restraint in use of force. Both personally and globally, our Unitarian Universalist principles call us to strive in this manner for justice and peace. Peace is possible in our lives and in the world, if we will see the futility of force and the power of nonviolence and love. Let us lay down the sword of violence, and pick up only the sword that heals.

May it be so.

Note: The phrase “sword that heals” comes from King’s 1964 Why We Can’t Wait: “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon…which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.” While a sword may seem an inappropriate metaphor for nonviolence, a sword might cut bonds of injustice, and it illustrates his point that true and principled nonviolence is not passive or weak—it is active and powerful.