How to be a Completely Useless Idiot

I am, as the years go by, less and less convinced that violence is ever the answer.  

This is something of a challenge, as my Scots Irish blood tends more towards the "fight" side of the fight or flight equation.  I feel the urge, fiercely and viscerally.  But I can also say this: in fifty six years of life, I have never struck another person.  War, which never changes, is a horror, an endless swirl of blood pointlessly circling the drain of history.

For my lifetime, the United States of America has stood as the militarily dominant world superpower.  Even though the Constitution of the United States does not assume the presence of a standing army, what Eisenhower described as the military industrial complex has become a defining feature of our national identity.  We have been in a forever war for much of the last century, projecting our power in ways that often haven't seemed particularly small-R republican.

In the face of this, there have always been idealistic Americans who have called for disarmament.  We must make peace.  We must stand down, set down the sword, demilitarize, so that we can buy the world a [oatmilk vegan smoothie] and sing in perfect harmony.

Which is all well and good, with a single rather notable flaw.  Calling for American disarmament doesn't solve the problem of war, because...well...there are actually other countries out there.  Americans often forget this.

The authoritarian regimes we've stood in both hot and cold running war with haven't been pure as the driven snow.  The Soviet Union wasn't a place where art and literature thrived, or where peaceful dissent was tolerated.  Today, post-Soviet Russia is more Tzarist than it is communist, the sort of place where those who oppose the regime are imprisoned.  Or disappear, or are poisoned, or fall out of fifth-floor windows.

Those militaristic regimes have always strongly encouraged and covertly supported peace movements in the republics that opposed them.  They've fomented deep and radical cynicism about the integrity of democratic states, which are all "imperialist" and "decadent."   The goal of those malicious actors is to create a cadre of полезные дураки, the "useful fools" who...driven by a desire for "peace and justice"....ultimately only serve the ends of tyrants.

That was always a reality in the 20th century, and now that social media allows troll farms to cosplay as activists, useful idiocy runs rampant.  Driven by the reactive immediacy of the medium, those who earnestly seek peace and justice leap from one dangled shiny object to another, endlessly outraged and overwhelmed.  Is the thing you're enraged by right now a real thing, or a bit of cynical agitprop dropped into your feed by the cynically masked agent of an oppressive regime?  Does that meme come from Iran or China?  Does that

The goal, I think, is not to serve any tyrant or despot.  Instead, be totally and completely useless.

So sure, call for disarmament.  Call for an end to war.  Live out that ethic.  But make that demand universal.  Call out the military industrial complex, while at the same time explicitly naming Russian aggression and Chinese repression.  You can simultaneously observe Israel's relentless regional truculence and the violence fomented by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

If you watch the Black Block brawling with Proud Boys and pick a side, you're not committed to nonviolence.  

Refuse to tolerate or excuse violence and hatred by anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

Be a fool and a stumbling block to every despot, everywhere.

Following Jesus in a Boko Haram World

Boko Haram makes me struggle with my faith.

The conversations have been everywhere, about those girls, about their fate.  It's been a wild mess of a discussion.  

For the right-wingers, woken from obsessively muttering "Benghazi" to themselves in their twitching, disturbed sleep, the answer is simple:

Kill Boko Haram.  Just kill 'em good.  With drones, preferably, although if Vlad the Impaler can be somehow roused from his sarcophagus, his strategic inputs would also be welcome.  He was always such an excellent negotiator.

Done and done.  Now can we talk about Benghazi again?  There are Documents That Were NOT Released in a Timely Manner, Dagflabbit! 

Leftists?  Well, they're doing what leftists do.  On the one hand, outrage!  Racist America is silent and ignorant, and does not care about these young women of color!  We must raise awareness!  But also, Outrage! Because we are daring to speak about these Africans through social media, a clear sign that we are #slacktivist #privileged cultural imperialists!  But wait, Outrage! Because we allow these girls to be nameless faces, unaware of their identity as persons.  But hey, OUTRAGE!  Because we're naming these victims of sexual violence, thus exposing them to cultural shame.

The American left needs to get out more.  Or not.  Maybe not.  Maybe the aimless nattering chaos of #twitter is the best place for it.

Stepping outside of the din, and into encounter with this horror, part of the butchery of a madman whose methods even give Al Queda pause, I wonder at how to respond from the discipline of my faith.

Having spent time in Nigeria, I feel this one.  My mom used to personally teach young girls from our neighborhood in Ibadan-- a city 130 klicks northwest of Lagos--to read, inviting them into our home and providing them with materials.  This is a real thing for me.  I see the faces of those girls, as people I know.  

But I also know there is nothing that I personally can do.  Not here, not from this distance.  I can be aware, as I  try to be.  I can speak, as I am here.  I can pray, as we do when there is nothing material we can do.

When faced with such hateful, monstrous violence, though, I am torn.  The heart of Christian faith is self-sacrificing nonviolence.  It is the way of the cross.  This is radically, intensely, inescapably true, no matter how much we wish it not to be so.

Nonviolence transforms and restores.  Nonviolence heals cultures, just as Jesus healed.  I know this as a truth, because when we have had the courage to try it, it has had power.

Yet I hear the empty, feverish hatred in the voice of Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram "prophet," and I see no purchase for nonviolence.  I see only a maw into which peaceful and nonviolent lives would be poured.  I see only madness and the incoherence of a broken soul.

Perhaps this is just a failure of my faith.  It is easier to see such a person as little more than an animal, a being who has lost hold of the sentience that is our created nature, and now is no more responsive to grace than a rabid dog.  You put them down, as you would kill an animal that was threatening your children.

That's the easy way.  But it is a profoundly dangerous way of thinking, if you claim Jesus as your master.  You can never approach another human being as an object.  Ever.  No matter how hateful and monstrous they have become, your stance towards them must be grounded in the awareness that they have within them the same potential for relationship with God that you bear in your own self.

You must love them, as God loves them.  This is very, very hard.

Faced with predatory violence, I am still not sure that I could see the path of nonviolence.  Or rather, I can, but I do not know if I could take it.  I could see, perhaps, how after hundreds of nonviolent resisters poured themselves out in love...gunned down, assaulted, hacked to death with words of forgiveness on their lips...that such relentlessly gentle madness might make an impression on Boko Haram.  Might.

But I wrestle with how many kind, gentle, and justice-loving souls that would cost.

I also know, from faith, that we are fundamentally interconnected by God's love, which is the inescapable foundation of God's justice.  We participate in one another, in ways that we do not see in this life from behind our walls of existential isolation.  Allowing a blighted soul to spread horror sets them towards that horror as the defining feature of their relationship with God.  

The full reality of every rape, every mother's tear, every death that Boko Haram inflicts is their inheritance in eternity.  That will be Shekau's hell.  I know this as surely as I live and breathe.

Believing this, I wonder if using force to stop the madness of unthinking violence might be a mercy to the one who is inflicting harm.  With Augustine, this is where I find myself when it comes to protecting the innocent.  It is not an easy place.  Ending the life of a broken soul is like killing your own broken child, your own lost and prodigal son.  If it is not that hard, then you do not understand God's love.

And so I still struggle.  It is a struggle worth having.

I Am A Violent Man

I'm forty-five years old, and I've never punched another human being in anger.  Not once.  Oh, I've come close.  There was that time in middle school where I snapped of a series of lightning jabs, "landing" them a fraction of an inch from the face of the kid who was unsuccessfully attempting to bully me.  I didn't intend to land them, and because he did not choose to walk into them, I didn't.  They had the desired effect, and he took off.

There have been other times, but they have been few and far between.

That was before my commitment to following Jesus had become my vocation.  I honor nonviolence as the noblest path.  It is the response of God to evil.  Violence is not necessary to destroy evil, because evil bears the seeds of its own annihilation within itself.

But as I read through Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, as he lays out a relentless assault on the legitimacy of violence, I find myself both drawn to it and struggling with it.

I am drawn to it because his view is uncompromising and absolutely real.  This is what Jesus and Paul and the early church lived out.  It is the reality of the Reign of God, with the obfuscation and the rationalizations stripped away.

But as I examine myself in the light of that clarity, I do not know with certainty whether I am completely nonviolent.  In the abstract, yes.  In the pursuit of a goal, yes.  And even in organizational life, I have found that if given the opportunity to destroy or attack a vulnerable opponent, I will not take it.  I will and have shown grace, even at personal and vocational cost.

I do not know, however, if crisis would change that.

If presented with a real existential threat, to myself or--more pointedly--to my loved ones, I do not know if I would respond nonviolently.  Or if I could.

I have felt that primal surge of hormones, focusing me, shutting down both fear and inhibition.  Closing me off to the reality of another.  So far, it has proven manageable.

I cannot say, though, that if loved ones or neighbors were threatened, that I would be able to stand nonviolently and allow both their harm and my own.  I do not know.

Honestly, I don't wish to find out.

A Letter to Sam Harris about Nonviolence

Dear Sam:

A couple of years ago, I read my way through your Letter to A Christian Nation, that bit of provocative neoatheist polemic that sold so very well.

Although you're a bright guy, it was an impressively shallow bit of writing, one that tried to articulate Christianity through the peculiarly clouded and simplistic lenses of anti-theism.  Provocative and simplistic sells, I suppose.

Nothing good has ever come of Christianity, or so you argued.  Ever. It is terrible and hateful and violent.

In your writing, you anticipated a response: "Well, er, what about Martin Luther King and the whole nonviolent civil rights movement?  That was grounded in the churches, and in Christian faith."

But you had an answer, which you expressed in your book.  That wasn't Christianity.  That was MLK  stealing an idea from Gandhi, who got that idea from the Jains.  You had a bit of a forbidden crush on the radically nonviolent Jains back then, one that eventually got you into trouble with the "all-faith-is-icky-poo-poo" crowd you run with.  

But you confidently presented this thesis: Nonviolence had nothing at all to do with the teachings of Jesus, or with the faith that rose from his teachings.  Having actually bothered to read the Gospels and the Epistles, that felt wrong to the point of being a little bit insane, but gawrsh, you were just so confident.  Let's take a look at what you said, why don't we:

While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to nonviolence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.  In 1959, he even traveled to India to learn the principles of nonviolent social protest directly from Gandhi's disciples.  Where did Gandhi, a Hindu, get his doctrine of nonviolence?  He got it from the Jains. (Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 12)

Now, Jains are awesome. I love 'em too. And I loves me some Gandhi. I find common cause with everyone for whom truth and love for others matters.

But I recently came across something that makes your statement seem even more off.  I was reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  Being a pastor and all, Tolstoy's passionate, heartfelt Christian faith led me to read more Tolstoy.  He wasn't just a novelist.  He was also the founder and leader of Christian anarchosyndicalist communities in Russia, and wrote extensively about abandoning force and power in our relationships with one another.

And in that reading, I came across something interesting.  It's a sequence of letters, part of the very real history of humankind.  Follow this link, and you can read them for yourself.  Gandhi, you see, did learn nonviolence from the Jains.  But he also paid attention to the world around him, and to other faith traditions.  One faith tradition he found remarkably inspiring was Christianity, and so he sought out Tolstoy, one of the most eloquent Christians of his day.

Early in Gandhi's career, he wrote to Leo Tolstoy, asking permission to print up tens of thousands of copies of one of Tolstoy's writings on nonviolence, to be circulated in India.  They corresponded back and forth, and their mutual respect was powerfully evident.  Gandhi, for his part, describes his relationship with Tolstoy as that of "...a humble follower of that great teacher whom I have long looked on as one of my guides."  Gandhi went so far as to create a community, in which he and others lived out the values Tolstoy taught.  It was called a "Tolstoy Farm," on which Hindus and Muslims and Christians worked side by side.

There are other influences on the both of them, of course.  But Christian faith was an influence on Gandhi.  Meaning: your statement about nonviolence, bold as it is, isn't just wrong about Christian faith understood theologically.  It's also materially and provably incorrect as a matter of historical record.

So, a suggestion, should you choose to ever make that argument again in one of the talks you give.  Human history, like the interplay of neurons and the the fabric of our time and space, is a complex and interwoven thing.  When you reduce it to the clumsy binary negation of anti-theism, you are no longer describing the real.

Just be aware of that.  It matters.

Peace and Blessings,

David

Guns, Gandhi, and Nonviolence

Having noted the dangerously self-absorbed demonstration being planned for DC this upcoming July 4th in a recent post, it was interesting reading through an article on provocateur Adam Kokesh in today's Washington Post.

His plan to march with thousands of others into the District, all armed, all locked and loaded, well...it's so obviously dangerous that even folks like the NRA and the even more strident Gun Owners of America have distanced themselves.

More fascinating, perhaps, was Kokesh hauling out the word "satyagraha" to describe this open-carry firearm protest he's misguidedly leading.  Satyagraha is, of course, a Gandhian term, describing the essential nature of nonviolent protest.  It's translated as "soul force," and was used to describe the spirit that pushes for reconciliation even in the face of violent resistance.

To an objective observer, nonviolence appears as nonviolence.  That is its deep strength.  Observing, for instance, the peaceful marches of Gandhian resistance to British rule, there was no question as to where violence lay.  Those who gently presented themselves before the club and the whip were clearly and self-evidently nonviolent.

Similarly, the singing, dressed-for-church marchers who were hosed and gassed and set upon by dogs in the American South were obviously and self-evidently nonviolent.  They turned the heart of a nation towards changing an oppressive system.

Defiantly carrying a loaded .223 Bushmaster carbine down the middle of a thoroughfare is blindingly, obviously different.   It is definitively not nonviolence, because open-carry is inherently a threat display.

Like the bared fangs of a chimp, it is the threat of violence to ward off violence.

This is not true if you're carrying your rifle in the woods during deer season.  It is also not true if you're at the range.

But if you wander around with a gun out in the open...in a mall, in a restaurant, near a playground, near a school...you aren't doing so for any reason other than to present a threat.

That action says: "I can kill you.  Don't mess with me."

Whatever eventually happens with this misbegotten mess of a demonstration, it is not...nor could it ever be...rationally and objectively described as "nonviolent."

Reading the Quran: Nonviolence

Given the popular view of Islam among many Americans, the idea of nonviolence as a Muslim virtue might seem something of a stretch.  Shaped by media inputs, our collective consciousness is filled with images of enraged mobs, Kalashnikovs, and smouldering ruins.

Read in snippets here and there, the underlying ethical paradigm of the Quran can also seem..err...a little on the truculent side.  There is much talk of war, and the repetition of metings-out of both physical and theological punishment for infractions can get a little overbearing.

A fair reading of the Quran, however, will discover that those bloodier/more vengeful bits are leavened by calls for hospitality, justice, and charity.  For those who embrace the principles of nonviolence, however, there's more to it than simply finding a balance between interests.

Nonviolence is not equitable.  It does not focus on finding the perfect balance between competing interests.  It is also not passive.  Passivity in the face of hatred, injustice, and oppression is not nonviolence.

It is vigorously, firmly, and directly restorative.  It is the pressing out of grace into the world.   Morally, it is rooted in the Golden Rule, but it goes further.   It does not fold up in the face of abuse, but positively affirms our radical connectedness to one another, and defies brokenness with active steps towards healing.

And in reading the Quran itself, the Golden Rule is never directly articulated.   It can be inferred from certain commands to be forgiving, and to be equitable, but an explicit statement of compassion as the highest governing principle of sentient beings is just not there.

That is not true for Islam as a whole.  The Hadiths...the semi-canonical stories of the Prophet Muhammed's life...have direct and explicit reference to that highest ethic.  But again, up until my reading of the Quran, I have not been able to find anything  in the most authoritative text of Islam.

This has been a source of some spiritual challenge for me as I've explored Islam.  The ethos of radical, transforming love of both neighbor and enemy is absolutely central to Christian understandings of what is Good with a capital Gee, and that in my prior explorations I've found only tangential reference has been...well...difficult.

Because if it is not there, the Ruh is not there.  That Love is the evidence of God's presence.

But in this reading, I encountered a little story about violence that seemed...for a bright moment or two...to capture the essence of nonviolence.   The Prophet Muhammed was fond of retelling the ancient stories of Torah.   It's a regular staple of the suras.

And in Al Mai'dah 27-32, there is a retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, that most primal act of human violence.  It's not exactly the version of the story that we hear in Torah...but the Quranic retellings almost never are.

What was most interesting about this retelling was that it included the response of Abel to Cain's raging, murderous intent.  Abel knows his life is in jeopardy, but affirmatively refuses to respond violently to Cain.  He tells Cain that he will not meet violence with violence, instead affirming that real justice lies with God, whose law and power makes them as one.   In harming me, you harm yourself and your connection to your Creator, says the Quranic Abel.  He stands firm in this, even to the point of death.

Honestly, I wish it had left off there, because in that story lies the essence of nonviolence.

But the Quran goes on, and as it does so, it subverts the story with an explication of how to deal with those who war against the faith (Al Mai'dah 33).  This involves killing, crucifying, and maiming...or if you're lucky, being driven from the land.   It's not the best transition.

This illuminates the primal and essential challenge for approaching and interpreting Quran:  the issue of fundamentalism.   And it is to this that I will turn in my next post.

Oakland, The Black Block, and the Ethics of Anarchy

Given the absence of any membership fee for the Occupy Movement, it was perhaps inevitable that there'd be the kind of unpleasantness that was seen in Oakland this last week.  Yesterday, the reportage of the actions of a few non-representative human beings was extensive, as the seemingly inevitable masked and black-clad young men smashing things made their always-welcome appearance.

Their actions diluted and distracted from what appears to have been an entire day of nonviolent direct action, as large crowds of demonstrators...families, kids, veterans, young people, blue-collar workers, and folks of all races and creeds...loudly but peaceably expressed their resistance to the structures of consumer culture that have cast our society out of balance.

Many media outlets identified the window-smashers and rock throwers as representing the actions of anarchists.   They're wearing black?  They're smashing things?  Must be anarchists.

Here, though, I must demur.

There were anarchists present in Oakland that day.  The anarchists, however, were the ones who showed up during the daylight hours.  They were the the students and moms and the kids and the workers.   They were the peaceful ones, the players of music, the chanters of slogans.  The smashers and throwers and breakers of [stuff]?  Not anarchists, not really.

Why not?  Aren't they the archetype of the anarchist, so definitive that they might show up in a children's picture book, under "A is for Anarchist?"

Anarchy, as I have and will continue to assert, is the fundamental ethical refutation of coercive power.   "No-power-over" is, after all, what that word means.  It stands in radical contrast to the power of the state and the subsidiary but related power of the marketplace.  It is not a system of government, but instead an ethic, a worldview that defines the actions of a human being no matter what the structural context in which they find themselves.

From that as a conceptual foundation, engaging in violence means that you haven't grasped or internalized the ethic you purport to live by.  Violence is, after all, the application of coercive power.  If you claim to reject coercion as inherently destructive to the integrity of human beings, and yet inflict direct and material harm on others to get what you want, then you have not internalized the slogans you wear on your black t-shirts.

You aren't an anarchist.  You're a hypocrite.

There is more to anarchy than saying "I can do anything I want, and no-one's the boss of me."  That is the ethic of solipsism, the delusional assumption that the entire universe revolves around you and your needs.  That ethic gets along just fine with consumerism.

Anarchy goes deeper, requiring an individual's rejection of violence even as a means of achieving their own needs.  For that, an anarchist turns to nonviolence, expressing their will while intentionally refusing to allow the ethos of violence to define them.

The folks who smashed and burned are no more anarchists than those men who recently attacked and cut the beards and hair of peaceable Amish-folk are Amish.

If you yield to the ethics and instruments of the Enemy, you serve the purposes of the Enemy.

Alinsky, Gandhi, King, and Jesus

One of the reasons that community organizing schtuff appeals so much to progressive Christians is that it reminds us of the great and noble movements of the 20th century. We recall Gandhi's radical call to the people of India to peacefully liberate themselves through nonviolence. We recall Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and how he applied those same nonviolent techniques during the civil rights movement. In those memories, Christian communities find significant inspiration. Both of those movements were defined by an ethic that is fundamentally sympatico with the central teachings of Jesus.

Whether you describe it as nonviolence or satyagraha or "soul force," the assumption of those movements was that violence begets violence. The only way for a powerless community to liberate itself from oppression was to abandon the violence that underlies all oppression. Instead of violence, the communities would aggressively apply nonviolence. That didn't mean inaction, but rather direct action that intentionally assumed that the opposing side was human, and capable of grace if confronted by grace. It's the whole "loving your enemies" thing, applied to the challenge of injustice.

As Rules for Radicals was written in 1971, I was curious to see just how Alinsky would deal with nonviolence as a central ethic for transformative community organizing. The answer was interesting. In his recounting of the movement for Indian independence and the civil rights movement, Alinsky makes it clear that he views nonviolence as a tactic, and not an ethic.

This is unsurprising. When he uses the words "morals" or "morality" in Rules for Radicals, he almost invariably "puts them in quotes." Ethics are, for Alinsky, imaginary things. If a moral code helps you effectuate change and articulate power in a community, then great. Stick with that moral code. If that moral code gets in the way of your goal, then to hell with it. All that matters is what works to move you closer to your goal of change.

From that worldview, Alinsky argues that when Gandhi used nonviolence, he only did so because it was a tactic that had a chance of working. Had the Indian people been able to throw off British rule with force of arms, then Gandhi would have told them to take up their rifles. Or so Alinsky suggests.

Similarly, the use of nonviolence by the civil rights movement was just a tactic that matched the needs at the time. If African Americans had the numbers and the clout to rise up in violent revolution and succeed, then they would have. He suggests, looking at where race relations were in 1971, that eventually such a path might be taken. By Any Means Necessary, as some used to say.

There is some truth in Alinsky's assessment of nonviolence. As he points out, nonviolence only works as a political instrument if your opposition is willing to accept a shared humanity. Nonviolent resistance would have worked rather badly against the Nazis. Then again, it did prove itself rather impressively in Imperial Rome during the first and second centuries.

Yet by claiming that nonviolence is just a tool in the organizer's toolbox, a tactic to be whipped out or packed away depending on the circumstance, Alinsky shows he really doesn't quite understand it. To successfully practice nonviolence, it has to be a defining ethic, both the ultimate goal and the value that suffuses and defines every moment of life.

Particularly the hard ones.