SPEAKER 2: Talking about Aden Ballou who is our, one of our great Unitarian universals, contributors to the theory or philosophy of non-violent action, non-violent resistance showed to people. So a little bit of background on how he came to that place and how he related to, how he was similar to, how he will solve the problem, how he interacted with some of the other people and ideas that were available at that time. So this particular part of Aden Ballou’s story actually starts in the early 1830s which was the time when the abolitionist movement was just getting organized the American anti slavery society organized the 1833 with Lloyd Garrison had begun publishing this newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831. It was still quite an unpopular position even people who believed that the slavery was wrong tended to believe that efforts to focus on this problem and call attention to it and put pressure on it would only make things worse so that people could and many people were opposed both to slavery and to abolitionism. So this is the place abolitionism was in that time. So in 1833, the American Anti- Slavery Society pledged to reject the use of what they called carnal weapons. They would use only weapons that were spiritual and many of the leaders of the anti-slavery society William Lloyd Garrison, the Unitarian Minister, Samuel J. May, and many of the people I believe was about half the membership were Quakers. So many of the leaders of the entire slavery society were in fact pacifists but even non-pacifists considered non-violence to be a promising strategy for opposing slavery since political and economic, and power, and the power of the state was all ranged on side of protecting slavery because it was illegal, in the states which it was legal. They considered that their best approach would be not to go up against those powers, with those, you know, direct assault on those powers using their own weapons. They were they were weaker and instead they would use moral power in which they thought that they were stronger. So at that time, it appeared to do many in the abolitionist movement that the lines between anti-slavery and passivism or what they call non-resistance were not very clear. There was a kind of a blurring of the boundary between them. In 1838, the New England non-resistance society was formed and with a great deal of overlapping leadership and overlapping membership with the anti slavery society. Aden Ballou was introduced to non-resistance and to the anti slavery movement by his friend Samuel Jagmay but when Aden Ballou adopted non-resistance to him it was freedom for the slaves but it became the corner stone of his philosophy of life which was a perfectionist philosophy. He believed that human beings could and ought to live what he considered a Godly or a holy life. One of his favorite biblical passages was, ”Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” and within a year or so after joining a non-resistance society he in formulated this thing called the standard or practical Christianity which was a very demanding catalog of the way in which a person ought to live which rejected not only violence in all its forms but all kinds of what we will consider coercion or abuse of power. All kinds of dominance of one person over another basically, and this became the basis for the Hopedale community which he and some associates founded in 1841 as a kind of a experimental laboratory in which to work out the system of how humans ought to live and the idea was that it will be a prototype community and that always we would follow although live that never bound.

Speaker 1: What was the name of that workplace, that traditional area ......?
Speaker 2: Well it is that part of the standard or practical Christianity it is just a short document a couple of pages long that became the basis of a pledge that people would sign when they joined the community, and I am sure it is in one of the books we have with us so I can show it to you later on. Well in the 1840s the anti slavery movements and the non-resistance movement which had seemed in the 1830s to be so interrelated began to move in different directions. Lewis Lloyd Garrison and many of the other people who had been leaders involved made a kind of decisive move towards. They are really going to concentrate on the anti slavery movement. The non-resistance society kind of dwindled away and really would have passed out of existence if it had not been for Aden Ballou who kind of took it over, ran it added to the newspaper eventually combined the newspaper of the non-resistances society with the newspaper of his own community; whereas Lewis Lloyd Garrison came to believed that all government was essentially simple. Aden Ballou opposed only non what he called non-Christian government. He believed that there could be such a thing as a government that would live in accordance with right principles and that could be a right government and that was one of the proposes of hope they are was to develop right government. He spent a lot of time trying to think about how society could be organized without recourse to violence and in doing so he became one of the great theorist of non-violence. In 1846, he wrote his book Christian Non-resistance in which he set forth his philosophy which basically is an absolute rejection of injurious force of doing an injury to any person for any reason whatsoever but he did believe in resistance to evil by non-injurious force. He did not he didn’t reject all use of force but only force that would damage the person to whom it will apply. In the book he developed his scriptural justification for his views but also talked about it from a more secular source of scientific point of view in showing how it accorded with psychology with human nature and that arguing that it is effective as well as morally right and he imagined a non-resistant government. In 1860, he supplemented this work with short word of pamphlet of non-resistance in extreme cases which was a response to the many abolitionists who had fallen away from non-violence when other options opened up and he argued that if the principle of the non-resistance is right than in extreme cases, it is when its new the most and that it does not form an exception but is the time in which we ought to be most committed to the principles, if they are true principles. He understands the temptation that leads people to say, “oh this is a special case. This is extreme circumstance while he has argued that if we really believed that violence makes things worse rather than better then we must reject it no matter how extreme the case is. Let me go. Stop there.

Speaker 1: So do you want to question?

Speaker 2: Yeah! I want to hold questions and then…

Speaker 3: It is our questions as viewed moderate (11:07).

Speaker 2: (11:09) so I guess it is a good clarification between injurious and non-injurious because I went through violence, you know like he was mentioning a very violent (11:23) and I think that sort of like uncontrollable violence or emotion can be very inspiring so that is when you give another passion, you need to do a good work. If Aden Ballou has another short work called learn to discriminate in which he explains what the difference between passivism and passivity from this point of view and makes the point that when he says non-resistant, he means do not resist evil with evil but that does not mean just bid to it and that you have a moral obligation to resist people all the non-injurious means at your disposal.