Tag Archives: Pacifism

The Genocide Against the Orcs

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I have a piece up this week on the Atlantic about violence in the new Hobbit movie.

The post has generated a long comment thread. I posted several comments myself here and there…and I figured I’d highlight a couple of my longer ones here since I don’t know that anyone will read them otherwise. They’ll be a bit disjointed…but what the hey, it’s a blog.
 

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I think there’s a lot of truth to this. But Tolkien could also see racial antagonism (as between Elves and Dwarves, for example) as evil and hurtful. And the Hobbits (especially Sam) are kind of supposed to be working class too, in some ways.

As with the violence, I tend to see race as an issue that Tolkien struggles with, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.

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I don’t think sentience in and of itself predicates against the logic of genocide. In fact, I know it doesn’t. On the contrary, genocide really only makes sense in terms of sentience — you don’t use genocide to refer to the mass killing of the dodo, for example. The fact that the Goblin wants to find out what they’re doing first before killing them also seems beside the point. The issue isn’t whether they always fight each other in every circumstance; the issue is whether Tolkien presents goblins, orcs, etc., as people who can be good or evil or in between, and who it is a sin to kill if you don’t have to, or whether he presents them as vermin who should, ideally, be exterminated. I think he tends very much to present them as the second.

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No…it’s quite different. Twain was a committed anti-racist; Huck Finn is explicitly committed to racial equality in a way that was very courageous for its time…and for our time, for that matter.

Tolkien’s stance towards race is a lot more ambiguous. And…for those who say it was just of its time, it’s worth noting that Huck Finn was written a fair bit before LOTR. There were people at that time (Langston Hughes, for instance) who were anti-racist. Tolkien’s stance certainly could have been a lot worse — but comparing him to Mark Twain definitely shows up his limitations in this area.

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I think you can see the enjoyment of violence in, for example, Beorn’s attitude towards killing goblins, and the book’s satisfaction in the dead goblin and warg he displays in front of his door. Or in Legolas and Gimli’s contest to see who can kill more orcs. Or even perhaps in the Ent’s spectacular destruction of Isengard.

 
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Saying evil is real, and embodying that evil in a particular race or group of people — that’s the logic of genocidal violence. The claim that you need to kill every one of the enemies because they are genocidal — that’s how genocide is justified too. To say that it’s a fantasy sort of misses the point as well — genocidal fantasies are also fantasies. That other tribe, over there, isn’t *really* unhuman — it’s a story you tell. But stories can have real results. Fantasies can kill.

Like I said, this is a tension in Tokien’s work, not an absolute. He very eloquently argues for peace and mercy in many way. But he also finds genocide appealing. That’s the case for most of us (it is for me — I like lots of bloody body count films.) I think Tokien actually makes us think about that, sometimes quite deliberately. How do you fight Sauron without being Sauron? How do you pick up that ring without becoming the ring’s servant? Those are pretty important questions, not less so because Tokien sometimes (not always, but sometimes) seems swayed by Sauron’s logic of murder and force.

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the hobbit violence 615 fox

Spider-Dove

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This first appeared on Comixology
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Spider-Man’s origin story, as most everybody knows, hinges on a moment of moral turpitude. In Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, nerdy, put upon Peter Parker, having been bitten by that pesky radioactive spider, gains (dum ta da!) super powers, and starts a successful career as a professional wrestler. Basking in his newfound fame and bucks, Peter (in Spidey costume) is standing in some random corridor when he sees some random schmo fleeing from a cop. Cop yells to Peter to stop schmo, but Peter refuses ; schmo gets onto high-speed elevator and escapes.

The cop chews Peter out, “All you hadda do was trip him”! Peter, though, is unrepentant: “Sorry, Pal! That’s your job! I’m through being pushed around!” Peter walks off and then on the next page his uncle is murdered! And two pages later, Peter learns that the guy who shot his uncle is the same guy he allowed to escape! Oh, the irony! Peter has learned too late that “with great power there must also come — great responsibility!”

Anyway, back to that moment of moral turpitude. What exactly is Peter’s failure here? The cop says that Peter should have tripped the guy or stopped him somehow. He even threatens to arrest Peter for failing to help. But… arrest him for what? Do citizens really have a legal obligation to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals? Do cops even really want citizens to throw themselves in the way of fleeing criminals?

On the contrary, if you’re a cop chasing a perp, the last thing you want is for some civilian in goofy red tights to get in the way. What if the perp has a concealed weapon (and in this case, we know that the villain did have a gun by the next page)? What if the civilian tackles the perp and then gets shot? What if the civilian tackles the perp and somebody else gets shot? At the very, very least, from a police perspective, that’s an exponential increase in paperwork.

Of course, we know that Spidey could have taken down the baddy without anyone getting killed or even hurt. We know this in part because he’s got super powers. Mostly though, we know it because — Duh! — he’s a super-hero, or even just a hero. Heroes like Spider-man or Batman or Dirty Harry leap into action and save people. That’s what they do. And if they didn’t do that, there wouldn’t be much of a story, would there?

Indeed, Spiderman’s real sin here is not against morality or society, but against the tropes that keep the genre afloat. Super-heroes have to act. They’ve got to fight crime. If they don’t, you don’ t have a narrative. Super-heroes have “great responsibility,” but it’s always the responsibility to do something. You could conceivably have an origin story in which Wombat-Man decked a baddy, the gun went off, Cousin Joe got shot, and the hero decided “With great power comes great responsibility!” And so Wombat-Man decides never to mess with crime again, and instead uses his phenomenal digging powers solely to aid with infrastructure projects! Again, you could have such an origin – but what you’d end up with would not exactly be a super-hero comic.

In real life, of course, and as this suggests, the responsible, way to use your “great power” might conceivably in many circumstances be to sit on your ass and do nothing in particular. Certainly, if George W. Bush had done that in 2003, America and Iraq would both be a good bit better off today.

What I’m talking about here is essentially pacifism. Pacifism is about as massively discredited as a major philosophy can be. Pacifism is appeasement, or it’s treason, or, (more kindly) it’s a nice idea but not really practicable. You can’t just sit by and watch that guy escape, Spidey! Hit him! He’s got weapons of mass destruction!

I can’t say that I’m a pacifist myself, exactly. But I think that people can be way too quick to dismiss it, essentially because reality is rigged just like that Spidey origin story. For whatever reason, probably having to do with our reptile hind-brains and/or a steady consumption of revenge narratives, the negative consequences of inaction tend to seem to us infinitely more insupportable than the negative consequences of action. If we step aside and something bad happens, we say, “Oh no! I should have done more!” On the other hand, if you wade in and things get completely fucked up, you often feel like, “Well, at least I tried. And think how bad it would have been if we’d done nothing!”

Which brings me to Amazing Spider-Man #184, published way back there in September 1978. My friendly neighborhood Internet tells me this was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Ross Andru. I must have read this when I was 8 or so; and I don’t think I even liked it all that much at the time. But I’ve remembered it all this time, in part because it is, rather bizarrely, one of the only super-hero comics I’ve ever seen that makes any effort to address either pacifism or the anti-pacifist assumptions at the core of super-hero comics. (The alternate-world Amish Superman in The Nail does not count. We will not speak of him again.)
 

 
Anyway, I haven’t seen ASM#184 in probably twenty years, but if memory (and a Web capsule summary) serves, the plot was a Bruce Lee rip off. Phil Chang is an awesome martial arts master, but he’s taken a vow of non-violence. Inevitably the evil Chinese gang wants him to join them. Their leader is the White Dragon, who is not only a martial artist extraordinaire, but also wears a white (natch) costume with a Chinese dragon style mask that looks staggeringly impractical, even by super-hero costume standards. Despite said mask, though, the Dragon is fully able to beat the tar out of the non-resisting Chang, and so he does – until Spidey comes to the rescue. Thank God someone is willing to fight, huh kiddies?!

That’s what you’d think the message would be anyway. In fact, though, Marv Wolfman’s script is surprisingly subtle. One exchange in particular has really stuck with me. I can’t quote exactly, alas, but to paraphrase, it went something like this:

Spidey: What in tarnation are you doing, anyway? The White Dragon is beating you to a pulp! He’s going to kill your family, you dope! Show me some of that kung-fu everyone’s been on about, won’t you? Are you a man or an amoeba? Come on, Phil! With great power comes great responsibility!

Phil: (and this I remember much better) There are failures in non-violence just as there are failures in violence.

I think that’s pretty profound. Yes, pacifism won’t necessarily solve all your problems. But then, fighting often doesn’t solve your problems either. Indeed, fighting can quite easily make things worse. You wouldn’t know that necessarily from reading super-hero comic books, of course — nor, perhaps, from public discourse in general. Which is why it might be worthwhile, sometimes, to remember that the power to right the world’s wrongs is given to neither man nor spider, and that we are all every bit as responsible for what we do as for what we don’t.
 

So what is pacifism? It is the uncompromising realization that we as humans are incapable of bringing about justice through violent retaliation. Hence, we relinquish all such acts to God in his sovereign and eschatological plan of judgment, justice, and mercy. Indeed, God have mercy on us.
—Mark Moore

Bend Your Knee

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No lesser a Christian than Martin Luther understood our predicament: Anyone, he wrote in On Temporal Authority, who tried ‘to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and the sword on the plea that all are baptized and Christian, and that, according to the gospel, there shall be among them no law or sword—or the need for either— . . . would be loosing the ropes and chains of the savage wild beasts and letting them bite and mangle everyone, meanwhile insisting that they were harmless, tame, and gentle creatures; but I would have the proof in my wounds.’

The above is a quote from Eric Cohen’s review of Christian pacifist Stanley Hauerwas’ War and the American Difference: Theological Reflection on Violence and National Identity. Cohen’s review nicely encapsulates the argument against pacifism — that argument being, that pacifism is well-intentioned but dumb, and that it will get us all killed. There are dangerous people out there in the world, and if we don’t use force to stop them, then, well, they won’t be stopped, will they? For Cohen, this logic is so clear that anyone who doubts it must be, literally, crazy. Or, as Cohen puts it, “if Hauerwas’ political theology is the true political theology of Christianity, then Christianity is a form of eschatological madness.”

Hauerwas would probably accept that designation happily enough — with the caveat that the efficient rationality of modernity is its own kind of madness, what with the gas chambers, the drone strikes, the enhanced interrogation, and the nuclear weapons always on the table.

Indeed, Hauerwas’ point is that war is not simply a natural disaster from which prudent nations must protect themselves with the minimal force necessary. Rather, war is its own logic and its own morality. This, Hauerwas says, is especially the case in America. He points back to Abraham Lincoln’s justification of the Civil War at Gettysburg. Lincoln, of course, said that the war had to be continued in order “that these dead shall not have died in vain,” and further “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Hauerwas argues:

A nation determined by such words, such elegant and powerful words, simply does not have the capacity to keep war limited. A just war that can only be fought for limited political purposes cannot and should not be understood in terms shaped by the Gettysburg Address. Yet after the Civil War, Americans think they must go to war to ensure that those who died in our past wars did not die in vain. Thus American wars are justified as a ‘war to end all wars,’ or ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ or for ‘unconditional surrender’ or ‘freedom’. Whatever may be the realist presuppositions of those who lead America to war, those presuppositions cannot be used as the reasons given to justify the war. To do so would betray the tradition of war established in the Civil War. Wars, American wars, must be wars in which the sacrifices of those doing the dying and the killing have redemptive purpose and justification.

“War,” Hauerwas concludes, “is America’s altar.”

Eric Cohen recoils at this conclusion, arguing that

There have indeed been times when we have used massive and terrible power against terrible enemies; and yet, right now, brave American soldiers endure great risk to themselves in an effort to avoid killing civilians. And while the history of America’s wars is hardly a story of moral perfection, it is, by human standards, a mostly heroic story of doing the right thing and doing it for the right reason.

Putting aside for a minute the accuracy of the claim that most of America’s wars have been righteous (the Philippines? Vietnam? the Indian wars?), I think Cohen’s rhetoric here is actually an almost perfect example of Hauerwas’ point. Specifically, from a just war perspective, or from a realist perspective, war surely should be limited and pragmatic, always fought with a consciousness of the tragedy, brutality, and terror which war unleashes. And yet, here is Cohen, responding to that argument, by characterizing America’s experience of war as a “heroic story.” Moreover, that story is not “heroic” despite our history of war; rather, it is war itself that confers upon us heroism. Even our “terrible power” gains a grandeur, since it is unleashed against “terrible enemies” — and never, of course, against children, or civilians. America is moral because of the wars it fights, the ways it fights them — and because of the very terribleness of the conflicts. The obvious corollary is that if we did not fight the wars, we would not be moral — we would not, for example, have the opportunity to exercise restraint by not shooting civilians (except of course, when we do.),

Thus, for Cohen, war provides America with its moral standing and its moral experience; its heroism, its bravery, its sacrifice. This is exactly Hauerwas’ point. War is how America understands itself as a good people; it is how we see ourselves striding across the world stage to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all.

If any war was fought to protect the weak, avenge the innocent, and establish justice for all, it was the Civil War. Hauerwaus acknowledges the evil of slavery, and insists that Christians were bound to witness against it. He insists, though, that the witness against slavery should not be war; that the moral opposite of slavery is not killing. For Hauerwas, to argue otherwise is idolatrous.

War is a counter church. It is the most determinative moral experience many people have. That is why Christian realism requires the disavowal of war. Christians do not renounce war because it is often so horrible, but because war, in spite of its horror, or perhaps because it is so horrible, can be so morally compelling. That is why the church does not have an alternative to war. The church is the alternative to war. When Christians no longer see the reality of the church as an alternative to the world’s reality, we abandon the world to war.

When I read that paragraph, I thought immediately of that superstar atheist, Christopher Hitchens, and his bloodthirsty reaction to the September 11 attacks.

Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Hitchens famously denigrates faith…but that’s not exactly a pragmatic, measured, calculus there, dripping with restraint and quiet reason. On the contrary, it’s in the genre of prophetic apocalyptic — it’s a religious statement. And the religion is, as Hauerwas says, the church of vengeance, the church of retribution, the church of death, self-justification, anger, honor, and war.

Hauerwas would like to get rid of war and violence — but what he really wants to get rid of is the church of war. As he says, the abolition of slavery (accomplished in part, of course, through war) did not eliminate slavery. There are still people who are enslaved today around the world. But the anti-slavery movement made it impossible for anyone to justify slavery. The church no longer says that it is god’s will for men and women to be chattel; the state no longer insists that it is righteous for some to be slave and others to be free. The abolition of slavery was the abolition of the church of slavery — and that abolition has had a massive, thoroughgoing effect on how people treat each other on this, our earth.

Hauerwas is asking Christians, specifically, to follow their faith to a similar confrontation with the church of war. He is not saying that all wars will be eliminated, or that all violence will disappear, any more than all slavery disappeared. Rather, what he wants is for the moral underpinnings of war to be systematically knocked out. He’s looking for a world in which Eric Cohen cannot use war to make the United States heroic; in which Christopher Hitchens cannot puff himself up as a savior/prophet in the name of cleansing violence. He’s looking for a world in which war is not the measure of reality or goodness, but rather a sin, indulged in only by those who have deliberately eschewed morality, heroism, faith, and sacrifice.

Again, Hauerwas is definitively, defiantly Christian. His message, therefore, is specifically to Christians. It is Christians, first, he believes, who must determine not to kill each other. It is Christians, first, who must reject the morality of war for the morality of the Cross. On the one hand, this is something of a relief for atheists like myself. Since I’m not a believer, I can cheerfully keep paying taxes for cluster bombs and hating my neighbor just as I’ve always done. Still, there is a bit of discomfort there too. If, after all, Christians were actually to take up Hauerwas’ challenge, if they were actually to bear witness to nonviolence and transform the world — well, I’d hate to say it, obviously, but it would be hard to escape the suspicion that that might actually be the work of God.

Until that day comes, though, we are stuck with war. And since that is the case, it might behoove us all to spend less time questioning the sanity of pacifists, and more time thinking about what this thing, war means to us. Is war our tool, with which we visit justice upon a grateful world? Or, alternately, are we the tools of war, with which it performs the age-old work of violence? Who, in short, do we serve? And is there anything — be it life, honor, love, freedom, or faith — that we will not sacrifice, or have not already sacrificed, in its service?

The Long Peace and the Guillotine

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A slightly edited version of this ran on Splice Today.
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Towards the end of Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he asks “whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded.” “The answer”, he concludes, “is yes.”

Pinker condemns his (and our) forbearers for two reasons First, he shows that the rates of violent death throughout the world have been declining for almost as long as there are records. Hunter-gatherer tribes with no state system has higher rates of homicide than ancient empires; ancient empires had higher rates of violent death than did 18th and 19th century Western societies, and so forth. Second, Pinker argues that the decline in violence has been the result of enlightenment — in its technical sense. The ascension of Western Enlightenment values like democracy, free trade and human rights have civilized the formerly barbaric, religion-haunted, blood-soaked planet. Locke and Voltaire and Darwin said “beat your swords into abacuses,” and that is precisely what the world has done.

Pinker’s thesis is both optimistic and polemical. It suggests that the human species has made massive progress, and that that progress is attributable to Western Enlightenment ideology. Among the aspects of that ideology that Pinker praises are:large states (the Leviathan) which monopolize violence and thereby reduce interpersonal murde; democracy, which statistically appears to make states less prone to violence; free speech and broad education, since literacy and the distribution of books increases the ability to see other’s perspectives (and since the availability of books seems to correlate with the widespread decrease in violence); and the expansion of women’s rights, since women are overall less violent than men, and their influence tends to stabilize and civilize. Most importantly, Pinker praises scientific thinking itself, which Pinker credits with giving individuals a non-parochial perspective, allowing them to break free of the blinkered Prisoner’s Dilemma and see that peace is best for all.

The spectacle of a Western author and scientist triumphantly proclaiming the virtues of the West, books, and science is not especially surprising — though I was a bit taken aback when Pinker, a prosletyzing evolutionary psychologist, proudly proclaimed that one of the causes of the decrease in violence might be the spread of the ideas of evolutionary psychology.

But however clear Pinker’s biases may be, and however skeptical one may be of the thesis that we are the best people in all of history (and I am quite skeptical), Better Angels is an imposing, not to mention mammoth, brief. With 700 pages and graph after graph moving inevitably down and to the right over time, he shows, at the least, that by many measures violence per capita in our society is at world-historical lows. The claims that ours is an age of terrorism, or that Americans are less safe than they have ever been, is, patently, bunk.

Some of Pinker’s other assertions are more questionable. Here are a few.

—Pinker’s absolutely right that gay rights have improved enormously since 1950. But that ignores the fact that many the 1950s in the West was a particularly horrible time and place to be gay. Gay people were certainly worse off in the mid-20th century West than they were in Ancient Athens, or even in early 19th century England.

—His insistence that animal rights have been constantly improving since the Middle Ages seems somewhat contradicted by the rise of vivisection and animal testing. Even if, as he contends, people treated animals horribly in the 14th century, and even if, as he claims, vivisection has declined over the 20th century, science still tortures animals at rates that would impress (if not particularly horrify) our morally retarded ancestors. And this is without even discussing humanity’s role in our current ongoing planetwide species mass extinction event.

—Weapons have improved over time. This suggests that weapons, and war, have become more violent over time. Pinker responds to this by explaining that swords and arrows were plenty deadly — which rather begs the question. Nobody denies that arrows are deadly. But machine guns are a lot more deadly than that, and nuclear weapons are more deadly again. If you read John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, which discusses Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, you are impressed first by how utterly, hideously horrible Agincourt was — and then by how much exponentially worse Waterloo was — and finally by how monumentally, unbelievably terrible the Somme was. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the deadly effects of low tech weapons and medieval torture devices, but he spends little to no time talking about the much, much more deadly effects of our current arsenal. His silence on these matters speaks for itself.

One of the biggest question marks in Pinker’s book, though, is his handling of the first part of the twentieth century — the lovely years from World War I in 1914 through Mao’s famine in 1964, with the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, and several neighboring atrocities thrown in. If you’re trying to prove that the world has been becoming more peaceable, that’s an awful lot of relatively fresh bodies to sweep under the carpet.

But Pinker goes for it. He first attempts to make World War I and World War II vanish into statistical noise mostly by adjusting them for world population. At 55 million, World War II is overall the largest catastrophe in the history of the world. However, if you adjust for world population, it is only the 9th largest. The biggest would instead be the An Lushan revolt in 8th century China, which Pinker says killed 36 million people over 8 years; a number which would work out to 429 million dead proportionally in the 20th century. Other conflagrations which beat WW II proportionally are the Mongol Conquests (40 million raw, adjusted to 278 million by population) the fall of the Ming Dynasty (25 million raw, adjusted to 112 by population) and the annihilation of the American Indian (20 million raw, adjusted to 92 million by population.)

It’s certainly worth remembering that people have done hideous things to each other for a long time. Even if no one is really sure that the An Lushan rebellion killed quite 36 million people, there’s no doubt that a staggering number of people died. Even if the Fall of Rome lasted over three centuries as opposed to the 6 years of World War II, 8 million dead is still a ton of dead people, as are the 40 million killed over the century of the Mongol Conquests. The recent past was by no means the first era of murder on a massive scale.

Still, one might argue that geeking out on statistical weighted tallies of dead is more than a little obscene. And one would be right. Human beings aren’t just numbers. Every dead person matters. Pinker insists again and again that the romantic ideology of the Nazis had nothing to do with enlightenment modernity and its march towards clear eyed utility, but he is least convincing on this point when he starts to fiddle with his death tolls in order to make his graphs look pretty. Counting World War I, World War II, Mao’s famine, Stalin’s purges, the Russian Civil War, and the Chinese Civil War, 142 million people died through atrocity in the first part of the twentieth century. That’s twice as many people as lived in the entire Roman Empire, and probably 10 times as many as lived in the entire world before the agricultural revolution. Does that make the number less obscene? More? What exactly does even asking the question accomplish? People look back on the early twentieth century as one of unique horror not because they’re naïve, or foolish, or because they’re not as scientifically astute as Steven Pinker. They look back on it as a period of unique horror because it was a period of unique horror.

For all his tables and weighted numbers, Pinker is honest enough to admit as much. He argues, however, that the unique horribleness is not a function of modernity, but an aberrant blip caused by the insanity of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. “Tens of millions of deaths ultimately depended on the decisions of just three individuals,” he insists. He adds that without the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand, there would have been no World War I. The early twentieth century, therefore, tells us nothing about violence in general, except that bad luck sucks.

The problem with this is that bad luck is universal. Insane assholes have existed forever. Genghis Khan (who Pinker discusses) for example, was a blight on the face of the earh Christopher Columbus’ genocide of the Arawak peoples ranks him as one of the monsters of history.

Both Genghis and Columbis killed and tortured lots of people. But they didn’t kill and torture anything like the number of people Hitler or Mao or Stalin did, for the simple reason that state apparatus and technology had not developed sufficiently to allow them to do so. As Tyler Cowen argues , the increase of state power, damps down individual violence, but it can vastly increase state violence as well. Thus, slavery has always been a bad thing, but it took centralized European states to create the rationalized, large-scale African slave trade that even Pinker calls “among the most brutal chapters in human history.” Cowen suggests, therefore, that “one way of describing the observed trend [in violence over time] is ‘less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.’”

Which brings us to nuclear weapons. Pinker argues forcefully that nuclear weapons need never be used, and that our ever-growing conflict-aversion may help keep them in their silos forever. One data point he uses here is the Cuban Missile Crisis. According to Pinker

Though the pursuit of national prestige may have precipitated the crisis, once Khruschev and Kennedy were in it, they reflected on their mutual need to save face and set that up as a problem for the two of them to solve.

That’s certainly a comforting way to think about it. However, in most accounts I’ve read, the resolution was achieved less through mutual face-saving, and more through Khruschev unilaterally deciding that he didn’t want to destroy the earth. This wasn’t, in other words, an example of an ultra-civilized meeting of minds; it was, instead, the usual pissing match, which one monkey ended by baring his throat.

This interpretation seems to better fit the facts, inasmuch as Khruschev’s face wasn’t saved; he had to back down and remove his missiles from Cuba. Kennedy’s quid pro quo — removing missiles from Turkey — was done in secret so that the President wouldn’t be punished at the polls for “weakness”. Gary Wills in Bomb Power concluded that Kennedy “risked nuclear war” rather than lose public standing. I’m able to type this today not because two world leaders behaved in a civilized and dignified fashion, but because Khruschev was not as much of an insane asshole as Kennedy. And he was not as much of an insane asshole, arguably, because he didn’t have to worry about an electorate. So much for the peaceful influence of democracy

The thing that is most troublesome about Pinker’s book, though, isn’t so much the occasional fissure in the argument as the tone. The suggestion that your grandparents and mine were moral fools is not exactly typical, but it’s not isolated either — and it’s not confined to the past. John Gray points out that Pinker tends to label certain peripheral groups (Muslims, for example, or hippies, who he blames for the rise in murder rates in the 1960s) as less civilized. Therefore, violence is associated with these groups because they are backwards or not sufficiently rational, rather than a function of power disparities or politics. As Gray says:

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region?

Pinker’s disavowal of the effects of politics is consistent with his vision of rational enlightenment, which he sees as specifically outside of power relationships or communities. Science and reason, he argues, allow for “an Olympian, superrational vantage point — the perspective of eternity, the view from nowhere.” For someone who claims to find so little of worth in God-talk, that’s some oddly theological language there interlaced with the self-vaunting. Or does it not count as theological if your divine ideal is human? And on what grounds, then, do you so entirely disavow the enlightenment’s relationship to Marx?

None of this upends Pinker’s thesis, of course. But it does suggest that some caution might be in order. We should acknowledge, and celebrate, the reduction of violence in the world where and when it occurs. And we should acknowledge the part modernity has played in that, and in many other advances. But Pinker himself notes that elevated self-esteem — perhaps we could say hubris? — is one of the many factors that can lead people to violence. There are others of course, such as a faith that one has discovered the ultimate true path that will lead the world to peace. Or, for that matter, a faith in the transformative power of evolutionary progress, sometimes known as eugenics, from which some bad things have flowed in this, our modernity.

Pinker likes to see himself as a contrarion, but reason, science, progress, and self-regard are hardly anathema in our world’s wonkish corridors of power. Since one of the gifts of the enlightenment is a questioning of orthodoxies, it seems only reasonable to question the orthodoxy of enlightenment as well. Among other things, we might consider the possibility that there is something morally retarded in believing that we are the most morally advanced individuals to ever walk the earth. Perhaps we could also think of peace less as an algorithm and more as a gift, for which we make ourselves continually worthy through humility and contrition. Acknowledging our successes is certainly part of that, but so is admitting to our failures. Modernity is both our long peace and the guillotine. I don’t think that downplaying the second will extend the first.

Two-Fisted Pacifism

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This was first published on Splice Today. I thought I’d reprint it since I talked about Stanley Hauerwas here earlier in the week.
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When I first thought to write about The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight In It, a 2000 PBS documentary recently released on DVD, the U.S. was only involved in two wars. In the time between pitching the idea and receiving the documentary, the U.S. picked up a third. So now we’re fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Possibly by the time this is published, we’ll have taken on a fourth. Obama hasn’t shown much desire to invade Iran, but maybe he’ll get a sudden inspiration. Who can tell?

“The Good War” of the DVD title refers, of course, to World War II. But it could refer to Libya too…or either Iraq war, or the Civil War or World War I. All wars are good wars. Who would fight in them if they were bad?

Oddly, given the title, the question of good wars and bad wars doesn’t really come up much in this documentary. A couple of COs do note that, given Hitler and Pearl Harbor, WW II was an extremely difficult war to opt out of. One objector says that, when asked what should be done about Hitler, he had no response. Another suggests that the U.S. was not willing to try the program of peace — but the interviewer doesn’t ask what exactly that program might have been, and so it remains a mystery.

Instead the documentary mostly focuses less on sweeping ethical dilemmas, and more on the individual histories of the COs. The result is a typical PBS experience. Lots of people are interviewed in front of bookshelves. Lots of period footage rolls by as obtrusive music tells you how to feel about, for example, the insane asylums where many COs worked. Lots of earnest narration is delivered in a voice similar to Ed Asner’s (said narration provided, in this case, by Ed Asner himself.)

There’s nothing especially wrong with any of that. For those already familiar with the story of COs in WWII, I’d imagine that this would offer little new — but for people, like me, who haven’t studied the period, there’s plenty of interesting detail. Perhaps the most intriguing section, for me, was the discussion of how many COs volunteered for medical experimentation. Stung by charges of cowardice, a number of COs allowed themselves to be starved nearly to death or to be injected with hepatitis and typhus. Some died. The documentary doesn’t mention what, if any, useful knowledge was gained from these endeavors. I presume if life-saving drugs had been developed, they would have told us. It seems likely, therefore, that these men, out of a mixture of personal pride and societal pressure, sacrificed their health and risked their lives for nothing but the career advancement of bureaucrats. They might as well have been in the army. Except, of course that they didn’t have to kill anyone.

It’s nice to see evidence that pacifists can be as foolishly macho as anyone…though you have to tease that insight out from the general tone of benevolent hagiography. Admittedly, if you’re going to idolize someone, these folks seem like a decent bunch. Bill Sutherland, longtime advocate for African-American rights and a committed pacifist, talks with admirable equanimity about how his four years in prison was not an interruption of his activism, but an extension of it — he spent his time inside fighting prison segregation. Sam Yoder, a Mennonite CO, comments with rueful humor that when he returned home after the war, “no band was there to welcome me back” — and then proudly announces that his own two sons have obtained CO status.

What’s for the most part missing from these tales of individual heroism, though, is a sense of how they connect to a wider picture of war, peace, and community. The logic of war isn’t built on individual heroics. That is, people see service in war as heroic, but war isn’t usually justified on the basis of that heroism. It’s justified on the basis of its effectiveness. You defeat the German hordes by bombing them. You defeat the evil Libyans (in aid of the good Libyans) by bombing the first (and, ideally, not the second.) Heroism is nice, and will be celebrated, but it’s not exactly the point.

There’s no similarly utilitarian argument voiced here on behalf of pacifism — at least not with any consistency. Instead, everyone agrees you should stay true to your conscience. In one of many mini-bonus-documentaries included on the disc, for example, Daniel Ellsburg argues that he was truer to himself and to his patriotism when he released the Pentagon Papers than when he enlisted. And he’s both moving and convincing when he says it. But…what if your conscience tells you to go off and kill Japs? What if your conscience tells you to bomb Libya in order to prevent a genocide? Does that mean that some people are right to go shoot each other and others are wrong? Are there different ethics for different people depending on what conscience God happened to hand them?

It’s clear that many of the people here don’t believe that. Kevin Bederman, an Iraq war CO interviewed for another mini-doc, characterizes war (in an engaging Southern drawl) as “the most base thing human beings can do to each other.” Other COs note the importance of love. Some reference Ghandi’s ethic of peace.

What the documentary never does, though, is to actually castigate people who fight. There is no denunciation of warmakers. And without that denunciation, it’s difficult to see the ethical choice for peace as the only ethical choice. The COs are right…but the warmakers aren’t wrong.

I’m sure that this is not the attitude of many of the people interviewed here. George Houser, for example, publicly refused to register for the draft in order to protest the possible U.S. entry into World War II. That was undoubtedly based on his feeling that preparations for war were wrong. But the documentary dwells on his heroism at the expense of the critique — not quite realizing that without the critique, the heroism loses its point.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas in his book Dispatches from the Front argues that for Christians, non-violence is not an ethic or a theory, but a way of life which is “unintelligible apart from theological and ecclesiological presumptions.” Pacifism doesn’t arise from an inward-turning confrontation with conscience; it comes out of a particular kind of communal faith. He adds, in reference to the first Gulf War

Surely, the saddest aspect of the war for Christians should have been its celebration as a victory and of those who fought it as heroes. No doubt many fought bravely and even heroically, but the orgy of crusading patriotism that this war unleashed surely should have been resisted by Christians. The flags and yellow ribbons on churches are testimony to how little Christians in America realize that our loyalty to God is incompatible with those who would war in the name of an abstract justice. Christians should have recognized that such “justice” is but another form of idolatry to just the degree it asked us to kill. I pray that God will judge us accordingly.

Hauerwas, in short, is able to do exactly what the documentary will not : he is willing to say that if the path of nonviolence is right, and those who follow it are heroes, then the path of violence is wrong, and those who follow it are…at the least, not heroes. His non-violence is not about his personal conscience and what’s right for him. It’s about what’s right for him, and for his community, and for his God, and by extension, for his nation and the world.

Though the documentary has a lot of practical advice on avoiding the draft and obtaining CO status, it’s all offered very much for those who might want it; there’s little in the way of evangelical fervor. Nobody here says, damn it! You…yes you, watching this! It’s your moral duty to become a CO! Which is a shame because, inspiring as many of these personal stories are, if we’re ever going to get to a place where we’re waging, say less than two wars at a time, I think we’re going to need a pacifism with a bit more fight to it.

The Amish Plot Against the Superheroes

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I’ve been reading The War of the Lamb, the last book written by John Howard Yoder. Yoder was the most important theologian of pacifism in the last century or so, I think. Appropriately enough for a pacifist theologian, he was a Mennonite.

And, of course, the subject of Mennonite’s made me think again (mostly to my sorrow) of writer and illustrator Alan Davis’ 1998 JLA alternate reality exercise The Nail. For those fortunate enough to have missed the series, it’s high concept is that John and Martha Kent ran over a nail on day that Superman’s rocket ship landed on earth. As a result, the Kent’s didn’t find the ship. Instead (as we learn towards the end of the book) an Amish family found it. Since the Amish won’t interact with the rest of the world and since they are (like most Mennonite sects) pacifist, the fact that this family discovered Supes meant that he never became a superhero; he just stayed on the farm. Without his iconic presence, superheroes (and especially aliens) are distrusted, Lex Luthor becomes mayor, no one is tough enough to stand up to Kryptonian technology…etc., etc. In short, things go to the bad, and it’s all because of the stupid Amish.

Most superhero comics are stupid, and The Nail is no exception. Still, there is something of the idiot savant about it. Davis was looking for a way to neutralize Superman and, by extension, all of superdom. What is the opposite of the superhero? The obvious answer is, a supervillain. Too obvious — and, incidentally, untrue. Superheroes and supervillains are part of the same world, the same milieu. Superman being a supervillain doesn’t remove or negate him; it just puts him front and center in a different role (Earth 3! And god help me that I know that….but anyway….)

So, supervillain is no good. But…what if you make him a pacifist? Then he’s ineffectual, irrelevant — he’s nothing. Which is to say, it’s not supervillainy that’s the opposite of superheroics — it’s pacifism.

The book in its final pages, then, glorifies superheroness not primarily through derring-do, but rather through a thumbnail repudiation of non-violence. This repudiation is sealed by the gratuitous and gruesome obliteration of Superman’s Amish parents, who barely get a panel or two to express their misguided philosophy before Davis reduces them to ash. That’s what you get for keeping Superman down, you religious weirdos!

Yes, that’s Jimmy Olsen as the supervillain. Don’t ask.

Anyway, following this sequence in which Supes sees his (Amish) parents killed, and then attacks the evil Jimmy superOlsen, the Supes and Jimmy battle. Unfortunately, Supes (being Amish and not good at fighting) can’t beat him. Luckily, though, Olsen spontaneously disintegrates because his powers are unstable (again, not worth explaining why.) In the aftermath, Superman decides to become a standard issue superhero, and the implication is that his innate awesomeness will defuse the anti-alien hysteria that has swept the world.

So…parents killed, check; vengeance inflicted, check; dedicate life to superheroics to honor parents, check. Except that, from the point of both the drama and the plot, Superman’s repudiation of nonviolence is completely superfluous, and even, arguably, detrimental. Supes could have just as easily handled Olsen through nonviolent means — getting in his way, or holding on to him. Since Olsen essentially disintegrated on his own, the outcome would have been the same — except that Supes would have actually kept faith with his parents rather than betraying their beliefs for nothing. Similarly, if the world is terrified of malevolent aliens, the sudden revelation of an even more powerful violent alien in their midst seems unlikely to calm things down. On the other hand, had Supes revealed himself to the world as a superpowerful alien who embraced nonviolence and noninterference in the affairs of the world…well, it seems like that might have been a more effective statement.

The logic of the story Davis has constructed, in other word — with Superman as Amish — seems to lead naturally to a parable about the triumph of nonviolence. After all, if the greatest hero in the world is a pacifist, it makes sense that you’d end up with a story in which pacifism is heroic. Unless, of course, you see pacifism and heroism as mutually exclusive, in which case the heroism comes, not from the pacifist witness, but from repudiating your entire past in order to embrace violence in the name of your dead parents who would, undoubtedly, be appalled.

Davis’ story also resonates oddly with broader arguments about pacifism. The usual dig against pacifism is that it is foofy pie-in-the-sky nonsense. As an ideal, it’s all well and good, but in the real world, violence is sometimes necessary. Davis’ story makes this argument by, in part, going out of its way to make the Amish impractical to the point of callousness. Not only do they advocate non-intervention, but they argue that their son shouldn’t help Batman in any way, even though he’s being beaten to death literally on their doorstep. This is surely a bastardization of Amish beliefs; the Amish, after all, can vote; they can interact with outsiders. The depiction here is a caricature, intended to make their position seem ridiculous…and unrealistic.

But the irony is that the world where Superman stays in his Amish community and doesn’t interfere in the outside world is actually more realistic. Because, you know, Superman doesn’t interfere in the world. Because there isn’t a Superman. Nobody has to resort to violence to defeat supervillains, because there aren’t supervillains. The DC Universe is unrealistically violent. The opposite of the superhero is the Amish not just because the superhero is violent and the Amish are not, but because the superhero doesn’t exist, and the Amish do. What happens at the end of The Nail is not an eruption of realism into the Amish fantasy of nonviolence. It’s an eruption of fantasy violence into the Amish’s realistic pacifist community. Perhaps that’s why the Amish parents have to be so summarily dispatched; if they were allowed to stick around, they’re solidity would have made Davis’ entire farrago of nonsense dissolve into mist.

In The War of the Lamb, John Howard Yoder talks a little about heroism, specifically in terms of Martin Luther King and Che Guevara. Both men, he points out, were killed; both have, as a result, been viewed as martyrs. Yoder points out that following King’s assassination:

] Many leaped to the conclusion that nonviolent alternatives had thereby been refuted. At the same time, all over Latin America, the fact that Che Guevera had been gunned down in the Bolivian mountains did not mean that guerrilla violence had failed. Why not?

The inconguity is even more striking when we remember that King…had expected to be martyred. This was true both in the general sense of the knowledge that nonviolence will be costly, undergirded by the Christian readiness to ‘share in the sufferings of Christ’ and in the more precise sense that King gave voice to ominous premonitions in the weeks and days just before his death. Che’s defeat, on the other hand, was not in the Marxist scenario. On the general level, for the Marxist the victory of the revolution is assured by the laws, as sure as those of mechanics of dialectical materialism. In the narrow sense as well, Guevara, just before he was captured and killed, was still expecting to win as head of the violent insurgency in Bolivia.

Is there not some flaw in the logic here? Of a man who predicted his death, who explained why he accepted it, whose work did not perish with his death, the critics argue that his view is refuted by that death. Of the other man, who premised victory and whose campaign did collapse with his death, his faithful proclaim his resurrection…. The Marxist believe that their hero’s death is powerful on some other level than his military defeat. Whatever that reasoning may be called, it is not standard Marxist pragmatism, but some kind of apocalyptic myth.

The Nail suggests that, for “apocalyptic myth,” we might substitute “genre fairy tale.” The narratives that justify violence are, predominantly, not about realism, but about revenge or excitement or masculinity — which is to say, they’re pulp. Perhaps, The Nail suggests, nonviolence isn’t wrong because its unrealistic, but rather because it gets in the way of the really quite embarrassingly stupid stories we like to tell ourselves.
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For more on superheroes and pacifism, here’s my essay about Spider-Dove.