VIOLENCE, PEACE, AND SELF-DEFENSE
From a talk given by Daniel N. Clark at Walla Walla University during a
peace-making event on April 29, 2013.
When people of faith or conscience address issues of
violence and peacemaking, a question that often arises has to do with the
difference between the world we’d like to live in, the world we’d like to see,
and the world we actually have.
Most of us, I think, would like to see a world where each
person is treated with respect, and where the use of violence simply wouldn’t
happen.
Those who share this vision of a Peaceable Kingdom still
have the question of how we get there from here, and whether we can get there
from here.
I’d like to present a vision of the Present Kingdom of God,
rather than a future Kingdom of God—a Present Kingdom in which everyone in this
room is able to be true to their highest values, regardless of what others may
do. As my wife Barbara’s song “Peace is
Now” tells us, consistent with Jesus’ message as well as the highest teachings
of other faiths, “Peace is Now, not next year or in a while,” though many of us
“are waiting for that better day a-coming.”
So what do we mean by peace and nonviolence or
violence? For me, having been raised in
a Christian church in Walla Walla, having joined the Quakers, the Religious
Society of Friends, after graduating from law school in the late Sixties, and
having studied the question of violence all my life, I can tell you that the
essence of a violent act for me is any action that treats others—other people,
other living things--merely as objects rather than as embodiments of the
Divine, of the sacred Subject, the Christ, or the Spirit of God, which I
believe all things to be. Our frequent objectification of other people, which
amounts for me to dehumanizing them, can involve actions that are physical,
psychological, or institutional. We all
know what physical and psychological actions are. Institutional or structural violence refers
to any social or economic structures that involve either the exploitation or
disregard of other people who are seen simply as a means to an end, our end,
rather than as values, or valuable in themselves, and as creatures of God.
War is certainly a prime example of violence that is
physical, psychological, and structural.
In training for war, we systematically dehumanize and demonize our
declared enemy, and we hope to accomplish that demonization both in the minds
of our soldiers and in the attitude of the general public which we ask to fund
and support the generalized violence against entire nations of noncombatants as
well as combatants that is involved in organized warfare. We seek to do that because it is hard to
train our troops and to enlist public support for the use of bayonets, bombs,
and other weaponry that is difficult to inflict on people we view as our
brothers and sisters, as our equals, and as children of God.
Nonviolence, on the other hand, for me is action that
respects the presence of the divine Source of existence in all others as well
as in ourselves. Such action can also
involve the use of physical force, psychology, and institutional structures.
Jesus tells us that what you do for the least of these you
do for me. He also tells us to do unto others as unto yourself, to love your
neighbor as yourself. What that means to me is that what we do to anyone, we do
to God, and we do to ourselves.
How can these fundamental principles, these fundamental
realizations, said to be the essence of all that is taught in the law and the
prophets, how can this truth be reflected in our own actions in the world
around us, and in our daily lives? Are
these understandings, as taught by Jesus and others who see the world as divine
and sacred, is this truth something that is possible for us to act on,
something practical for our daily lives? For Jesus, as an example, this
consciousness of the unity of his own being with his brothers and sisters was
so strong that he told us that if anyone forces you to go a mile with him, you
should go two miles. If anyone wants to
take your shirt, he said, also give them your coat. The remarkable depth of
respect that Jesus showed for other people and for everyone’s needs is unmistakable.
But does this mean that if someone violently threatens our
lives or those of our fellows we shouldn’t defend ourselves? For me, true nonviolence includes respect for
others and for ourselves, and doesn’t simply mean being passive to whatever
comes our way. But if this is true, how
do we go about defending ourselves “nonviolently?”
For me, the use of physical force to disarm an assailant who
is threatening us or others can be a nonviolent act as long as we use only the
amount of force necessary for our protection.
That means that we can be justified in seeking to disarm an assailant
who is threatening us, but that our means should be consistent with the
assailant’s own continuing value as a creature of God…And that once the threat
has been dealt with, just as we want and seek greater respect and understanding
by the assailant, we continue to acknowledge and treat the assailant as a child
of God.
To bring this closer to home--if someone were to come into
this gathering right now with an automatic weapon threatening to use it, I
would personally try to do everything I could to disarm them—both out of
respect for my own safety and for everyone else’s safety. If able to disarm them, though, and when our
safety is assured and the threat is gone, at least for the moment, I would not
seek to dehumanize them by giving them a kick or otherwise trying to injure
them, as if they had no further value.
At least I hope I wouldn’t do that.
If we’re convinced that the world is God’s creation, and
that the Kingdom of God is truly within us, in all of us as Jesus said, then
that doesn’t mean this is true only at some time in the future, or only for
some people, it means that it’s true now for each of us. And we need to act on that truth.
How successful we are in living out that realization on a
daily basis, however, may well depend on how well prepared we are in advance
for the type of confrontations Jesus spoke about and that we read and hear
about in our own day, confrontations with violence that in some form most of us
will encounter in our lives.
When we’re personally threatened physically or threatened
verbally, we’re often caught off guard, off center, and our immediate response
is to react disrespectfully ourselves, which tends to be the easiest thing and
often the only thing that occurs to us.
To not be drawn into the violence our would-be adversary is engaged in
often requires considerable thoughtfulness and creativity on our part. These traits can be increased and nurtured
through preparation and training in nonviolent skills, or what is sometimes
called the use of transforming power.
We know that soldiers as well as boxers train extensively to
be able to effectively use violence for their ends or the ends of those they
agree to serve. Christians and other
people of faith or conscience also need to train to effectively use nonviolence
in order to be true to our own values and principles.
As an example, several years ago our local Quaker meeting
sponsored nonviolence training sessions in which we invited members of the
community to attend weekend trainings that included role-playing scenarios in
everything from interpersonal nonviolence among individuals to potential
service on a domestic or international peace team, which might be deployed in a
situation of civic unrest or oppression, to actively work for peace and justice
under potentially violent circumstances.
In our local area, the Walla Walla Valley, we successfully
used such a team in Milton-Freewater a number of years ago when there had been
two interracial murders, and tensions between Anglo and Hispanic communities
were running high.
On the international level, I had the privilege of being one
of the founders of an organization inspired by Mahatma Gandhi called Peace
Brigades International, and of being the chair of its Central America Project
Committee that over the years has placed unarmed international volunteers in a
variety of countries including
Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Columbia and Mexico, countries where
civil wars or unrest were often rampant.
Peace Brigades volunteers not only in Latin America but in Sri Lanka,
Indonesia, Nepal and other places have accompanied threatened people who were
nonviolently demanding their rights, and often sought and are seeking justice
for family members or friends who had been disappeared or kidnapped by
authorities.
In addition to the work of international teams defending
human rights, history shows us occasions in which entire governments have
fallen because of massive nonviolent civilian resistance to oppressive
conditions, demonstrating for us an alternative to the destructive civil wars
that continue to engulf nations and their citizens in our time.
Mahatma Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King and the American
civil rights movement in the United States, the fall of the Aquino regime in
the Philippines, as well as the overthrow of the Shah’s government in Iran, are
all examples of the ability of people to defend themselves and their rights
without engaging in the violent actions so many people see as their only
choice, though they often lament the destructiveness and injustice that
normally accompany widespread acts of violence.
When we wish for and advocate for peace, what we are really
asking for, I think, is respect for ourselves and others. For peace to prosper and prevail, we have to
learn to live out that respect now in our own lives. That means respect for others in our individual
actions, in our words, and in our social institutions.
George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends,
urged us to live in the virtue of that life and power
that takes away the occasion of all wars.
If we remember Jesus’ teaching that what you do for the
least of these you do for me, that we are to do unto others as unto our self,
and that we are to love our neighbor as our self, then our actions will in fact
remove the occasion for war.
And if we resolve to learn war no more, but instead to
devote ourselves to learning the ways of peace, we’ll actually be able to live
those teachings and to walk in the Kingdom of God now, rather than in some
imagined time in the future. As famous American pacifist A.J. Muste put it,
“there is no way to peace—peace is the way.”
Let’s do better!
