The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: The Scapegoat Ruse

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has been pondering the ideas of Rene Girard: if our social orders are built on violence, and if we now decide to eschew violence, what becomes of social order? As Jesus said, 'Can't we all just get along?'}

It was the contention of the late Rene Girard, and a thesis defended by his many followers, that human beings are so innately rivalrous, so fiercely competitive, so covetous of our neighbors’ possessions that we will all kill each other unless we can agree on a surrogate, a scapegoat, to kill. Killing the scapegoat satisfies (temporarily) the community’s violent impulses; the scapegoat, as a consolation prize, is then lauded posthumously for having, by his or her death, healed the community.

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a proponent of Girard’s views, explains what this has to do with Christianity:

The surrogate victim (the scapegoat) mechanism gives stability to a group wracked by rivalry and violence; but that stability is unstable. The mechanism’s effectiveness depends on its being hidden from view and immune from understanding; the last thing the ruse can tolerate is an unveiling of its secrets. Inasmuch as the Crucifixion [sic] of Jesus unveils the innocent victim slain from the foundation of the world, it was nothing less than the arrival of the end of time in the midst of history.

Hamerton-Kelly continues:

The cross tells the truth about the world’s origin and survival as an ever-renewed structure of sacred violence dependent on the rituals of sacrifice, the myths of origins, and the laws of prohibition and punishment. This is the world of human beings organized by the ruse of the surrogate, around the mound of the posthumously idolized victim. The foundation of this world is the moment when life was made possible by death.

As rituals and myths are normally promulgated, controlled, and interpreted by religious authorities, Girard’s theory means that religion is and always has been complicit in the mechanism of sacrifice; historical Christianity, too, has been a purveyor and enabler of “sacred violence.”¹ Hamerton-Kelly acknowledges the unintended consequence of the Christian revelation:

The effect of the preaching of the Gospel in Western culture has been to unveil the secret of society’s survival and thus to put that survival in jeopardy. The more we are aware of the scapegoat ruse, the less it works to sustain the structures of the sacred within which we secure ourselves (somewhat) from violent disorder.

It’s simple, really: if we reject the “scapegoat ruse,” how then will we live? No society could survive if its members lived by Jesus’ example, which is why only sectarian splinter groups have ever attempted to do so. Non-violence, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek constitute an agenda for surrender, at least according to the wisdom of this world—the one in which we live. *

What, then, was the point of Jesus’ self-sacrifice? As Girard’s theory seemed to suggest: Jesus, the innocent scapegoat, was posthumously made into a divine figure and the basis of a new faith which in turn became an organized and institutionalized religion, perpetuating the mechanism of sacred violence. ² 

Girard could be categorized—alongside Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin—as one of the “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse”. Or so Hamerton-Kelly suggests: “Schmitt, Strauss, and Voegelin [also] feared the potential for chaos in Christianity’s vision and energy.” He then touches briefly on how the thought of those three resembled Girard’s, beginning with Schmitt: “While Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means, Carl Schmitt reversed direction and said that politics is war by other means. The distinction between friend and enemy, and the struggle for power between the two antagonists, are the essence of politics.” ³ Praising Schmitt’s redefinition as being “marvelously clarifying,” Hamerton-Kelly explains that, for Schmitt as for Girard, “The structure of sacred violence exercises the power that restrains history in its drift toward universal revolution. Like Girard’s ‘Order of the Sacred,’ Schmitt’s ‘katechon’ has the effect of holding back history and warding off chaos. ⁴ His thought,” says Hamerton-Kelly, “is a pagan version of Christianity, a [secular] adaptation of Christian theology to the service of sacred violence.”  ⁵

Strauss and Voegelin are admired by Hamerton-Kelly for “their negative attitude toward messianic or utopian expectation.” Fearful of disorder, they also defended, in their readings of the Old Testament, “the kings of Israel and Judah who struggled to manage history in their time” against “the prophets who railed at them in the name of a future judgment and a final utopia.” They agreed, too, that rather than embrace “messianic hope,” people should “find their dignity and significance in the dignified endurance of their present plight.”

Girard’s theory presumes that human beings are utterly incapable—except through violence—of curbing their desires or of controlling the rivalries which ensue from competition for limited resources. Like all theories, this has potential consequences, some of which are political; as Sam Kriss says, “For his new followers, Girard’s theory illustrates the central thesis of reactionary politics: whatever we claim to believe, and whatever fictions we build, human nature is always the same.” We have met the enemy, eons ago, and it is us.

While history provides copious evidence of the human proclivity for violence, everyday life provides overwhelming evidence that, for the most part, people usually get along quite well despite the presence of conflicts and rivalries. We quarrel, we squabble, we argue, and we bitterly contest each other’s claims, but we do not ordinarily resort to violence. We do not require either scapegoats or a Leviathan to control us; we can, and we usually do, control ourselves.

In short, and as any parent knows who has watched two siblings squabbling over a toy, mimetic desire is a reality; but, as anyone knows who has watched two siblings share, it is not the only reality.     

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René Girard - Wikipedia

Robert Hamerton-Kelly - Wikipedia  It is worth noting that Hamerton-Kelly supported  America's 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying it was an example of violence being properly deployed on the side of the angels. 

¹ The sight of Christian ministers ritually blessing nuclear submarines comes to mind.

* Eric Voegelin repeatedly emphasized this point.

² I am inclined to think that Constantine gave the game away with the whole “In this sign you will conquer” business, a blatant distortion of everything which Jesus had preached. The imperial torch was passed from pagan Rome to Christian Rome: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

³ The “friend/enemy” dichotomy also reinforces morale: “Since opposition from the outside strengthens the centripetal forces inside a group, it is not altogether negative. The group needs its enemies for the sake of coherence.”

⁴ What "katechon" has been holding back apocalyptic violence since the end of World War II? Some would say the atomic bomb; others, I suppose, would say the United Nations. 

⁵ Girardians are inevitably ambivalent about “sacred violence”. On the one hand, Jesus unmasked it for what it truly is (scapegoating) and thereby discredited it; on the other hand, it holds the social order together (even to this day) and keeps sin “crouching at the door” (Genesis 4:7). 

We are all Girardians now...

Sunday Sermon: Sympathy for the Scapegoat

“You shall bring the goat whose lot falls to the LORD and sacrifice it as a sin offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.” (Leviticus 16: 9-10)

Wolfgang Palaver (from Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory):

Jesus is the innocent victim par excellence because he is not bound to violence and owes nothing to it. It was thus necessary for Jesus to be completely independent of the world for him to uncover the mechanism of violence at work in human culture and for him to become a victim of this violence. In other words, Jesus’ insight into the order of violence had to come from a source outside the human realm. Girard refers to this as "the transcendence of love, a form of transcendence that never acts by means of violence, is never responsible for any violence, and remains radically opposed to violence." Jesus is not dependent on the world of violence in which human beings are trapped. Jesus originates entirely from a God of love and nonviolence.

Only with the help of the grace of God can humanity free itself from the dungeon of scapegoat logic. Jesus’ resurrection is the spectacular sign of the entrance into the world of a power superior to violent contagion.

How, throughout the history of Christianity, did events so often take place that followed the pre-Christian pattern of collective persecution? How could biblical revelation lead to a cultural tradition that radically persecuted minority groups such as Jews and witches? For Girard, historical Christianity is characterized by a sacrificial interpretation of the Gospel Passion and the salvation brought by Jesus, whose death is thus misread as a sacrifice equivalent to those found in archaic religions. Christian theology often interprets the crucifixion of Jesus as a sacrifice ordered from on high to appease the wrath of God. As Girard puts it, “Thanks to the sacrificial reading it has been possible for what we call Christendom to exist for ten or twenty centuries; that is, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures, on the mythological forms engendered by the founding mechanism of scapegoating. Mankind relies upon a misunderstanding of the Gospel to re-establish cultural forms which remain sacrificial.”

The persecution of other groups is one of the characteristics of sacrificial Christianity; the systematic persecution of Jews, heretics, and witches, as well as all inquisitions, crusades, and religious wars are the direct result of this decisive misunderstanding of scripture. According to Girard, this form of Christianity is a regression to Old Testament conceptions of sacrifice; it is an intermediate form between myth and the gospels.

The equality of all humans before God no longer allows any containment of mimetic rivalry by means of hierarchical differences. With the dawn of modernity, these hierarchical orders collapsed, and the crisis of violence present at the foundation of civilization re-emerged, e.g., Thomas Hobbes’ conception of human equality as a state in which anyone can kill anyone else.

The modern world is at once both better and worse than its predecessors. The biblical unmasking of the scapegoat mechanism does not lead automatically to paradise on earth, but rather to dangers even greater than those that previously existed. The biblical demystification of the world has given rise to modern science and technology, which have provided mankind with the capability to annihilate itself.

Girard references the increasingly virulent struggle in the modern world to be viewed as the victim, a kind of "radicalized victimology". According to Girard, Nietzsche was correct in saying that persecution, in the future, would only take place in the name of victims. The radicalization of the biblical concern for victims is ultimately opposed to the Christian spirit. Girard: “This new totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. Its adherents denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves.” The proponents of this ideology seek the abolition of the Ten Commandments and all other prohibitions in the effort to enable the boundless fulfillment of desire. Mass consumerism constitutes a complete unbridling of desire and threatens a sacrifice of nature in its entirety.

Girard does not preach impending doom, nor does he secretly hope for any act of divine vengeance; instead, he argues that "a radically Christian appropriation of history can only be apocalyptical," as the world is more and more liberated from ancient forms of servitude but also deprived of sacrificial protection.

Girard: “If men turn down the peace Jesus offers them—a peace that is not derived from violence and that, by virtue of this fact, surpasses human understanding—the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a cultural crisis whose radical effect will be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences.” 

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René Girard - Wikipedia

High on the hill stood a lonely scapegoat...

Sunday Sermon: "He Was a Friend of Mine"

He Was a Friend of Mine

He was a friend of mine
He was a friend of mine
His killing had no purpose
No reason, or rhyme
Oh, he was a friend of mine

He was in Dallas town
He was in Dallas town
From a sixth-floor window
A gunman shot him down
Oh, he died in Dallas town

He never knew my name
He never knew my name
Though I never met him
I knew him just the same
Oh, he was a friend of mine

Leader of a nation for such a precious time
Oh, he was a friend of mine

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Roger Mc Guinn

He Was a Friend of Mine lyrics © Reservoir Media Management Inc

(109) The Byrds - He was a friend of mine (Remastered) - YouTube

Sunday Sermon: A Cold Despair

{Maxim Gorky was one of Russia’s great writers of the early twentieth century. The following was written in 1917, after the Russian revolution but before the Bolshevik takeover. Europe’s Great War, which Gorky addresses in this essay, was in its third year; Russia’s ‘bloody nightmare,’ however, was just beginning.}

Maxim Gorky (from Untimely Thoughts):

Some tens of millions of the sturdiest and healthiest people have been torn away from the business of life—from the development of the productive forces of the earth—and have been sent to kill one another.

Having dug themselves into the ground, they live in rain and snow, in filth, in cramped conditions; they are being worn out by disease and eaten by vermin; they live like beasts, lying in wait for one another in order to kill.

They kill on land and sea, destroying daily hundreds and hundreds of the best and most cultured people of our planet, people who have created what is most precious on earth, European culture.

Thousands of villages and scores of towns are being destroyed, the centuries-old labor of a great many generations has been undone, forests have been burned out and cut down, roads have been ruined, bridges have been blown up, and the treasures of the earth, created by the persistent and painful labor of man, lie in ashes and dust. The fertile topsoil has been destroyed by the explosions of mines, mortars, and shells and has been gouged with trenches; barren subsoil has been exposed, all the land is churned up and is polluted by the rotting flesh of the guiltless dead. Women are raped and children are killed—there is no infamy that is not permitted by war, there is no crime that is not justified by it.

This is the third year we have been living in a bloody nightmare and we have been brutalized and lost our senses; art arouses a thirst for blood, murder, and destruction; science, violated by militarism, obediently serves the business of the mass annihilation of people.

This war is the suicide of Europe!

Just think how many healthy, splendidly endowed brains have been spilled out on the filthy ground during this war, how many sensitive hearts have stopped beating!

This senseless extermination of man by man and the destruction of the fruits of great human labors are not limited to material damage alone—no! Tens of thousands of maimed soldiers will not forget about their enemies for a long time, until their very death. Through their tales about the war they will pass on their hatred to children, who for three years have been fed on impressions of the daily horror. A great deal of enmity has been sown on earth during these years; this sowing will produce an abundant growth!

And yet for such a long time and so eloquently we have been told about the brotherhood of men, about the unity of mankind’s interests. Who, then, is guilty of this diabolical deceit, of creating this bloody chaos? Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty of this crime, each and every one of us.

We are expending millions of lives and enormous reserves of working energy on murder and destruction. Great quantities of enormously expensive explosives are being produced; wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives, these explosives vanish into thin air, scattering to the winds the country’s wealth. The question is not one of billions of rubles, but of millions of lives that are being senselessly destroyed by the monster of Greed and Stupidity.

When I think about this, a cold despair grips my heart and I feel like yelling madly to the people: Wretched ones, have pity on yourselves!

It was not only the senseless brutalities of war against which Gorky raged. The day after he wrote the above, he penned the following in response to an incident in St. Petersburg.

The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood.

I don’t know who shot at the people the day before yesterday on the Nevsky, but whoever these men may be they are evil and stupid, men poisoned by the venoms of the old, rotten regime. It is criminal and vile to kill one another now that we all have the wonderful right to argue honestly and to disagree with one another honestly. Those who think otherwise are incapable of feeling and realizing that they are free people.

Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism; they are base arguments and they are powerless, for to violate somebody else’s will or to kill a man does not mean and never can mean killing an idea, proving a thought wrong or an opinion erroneous. The great happiness of freedom must not be darkened by crimes against the individual; otherwise we will kill freedom with our own hands.

It is time for us to understand, that the most dreadful enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings, that chaos which has been cultivated in our souls by the monarchy’s shameless oppression, by its cynical cruelty.

Are we capable of understanding this? If not, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force against man, then we have no freedom. It is simply a word which we do not have the strength to invest with the proper content.

I say that our inherent enemies are stupidity and cruelty. Are we able, are we even trying to combat them? This is not a rhetorical question, but a question of how profoundly and sincerely we understand the new conditions of political life, the new evaluation of man’s significance and of his role in the world.

It is time to cultivate a feeling in ourselves of aversion to murder, a feeling of revulsion towards it. I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were these not the arguments against which we protested, were these not the means of repressing our will, the means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.

Our most merciless enemy is our past. We must find within ourselves the strength to get rid of its infection, to throw off its filth, to forget its bloody outrages. A greater maturity, a greater thoughtfulness and wariness with respect to ourselves—this is what we need!

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Maxim Gorky - Wikipedia

What the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin called “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel” eventually destroyed Maxim Gorky, breaking the spirit of a man once known for his fierce independence. The above passages were composed, as I mentioned, in April 1917, just after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas and six months or so before Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover. Even after the October Revolution, however, and in the face of escalating “Red” (Bolshevik) terror, Gorky continued to write, and to publish, denunciations of violence and incipient tyranny, both of which he saw as betrayals of revolutionary promises. His friendship with Lenin pushed to the limit by their disagreements, Gorky eventually left Russia for almost a decade, returning only after Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s exile, and Stalin’s ascendancy. In the end, for reasons that remain unclear, Gorky capitulated and, in his last years, became an apologist for Bolshevik/Stalinist excess, that is, for the same violence and brutality against which he had for decades ceaselessly spoken. 

 

Sunday Sermon: What Kind of a Nation?

{Before moving to Montana, I lived in Buffalo NY for over thirty years. My children and grandchildren live there. I have close friends who live there. I make the trip from Montana to Buffalo once a year to visit the people I love and care about the most in all the world. I want to tell them all, "Stay safe," but what is the point of saying that in a world where a trip to the local grocery store on an ordinary Saturday puts you at risk?}  

Robert F. Kennedy (speaking to a crowd in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, the night of Martin Luther King’s murder):

On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these difficult times.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

So I shall ask you to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and for compassion.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

 

{Photo from WGRZ, Buffalo NY}

In Violence We Trust

 

"Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing." (Joseph de Maistre)

Theologian Walter Wink contends (in his book The Powers That Be) that humankind lives by what he calls “the myth of redemptive violence,” a myth which originated in many places and at many times, and which assumed many forms, but which had one consistent message: violence is necessary to defend order against the constant incursions and threats of chaos, and to defend good against evil. “Any form of order,” writes Wink, “is preferable to chaos. Life is combat; it is a theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong.” Long before Darwinian evolutionary theory focused on “the survival of the fittest,” human beings had embraced the notion in practice; “The gods favor those who conquer; conversely, whoever conquers must be favored by the gods.” Might does not necessarily make right, but it generally puts an end to the discussion.

Wink elaborates on his thesis:

The belief that violence ‘saves’ is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last (and, often, the first) resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook is the religious character of violence, which demands from its devotees an absolute obedience-unto-death. The Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today. 

The official creation myth of the West, as Wink notes, is the narrative found in Genesis, wherein God speaks all things into existence out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. In this account, “Chaos does not resist order. Neither evil nor violence is part of the creation.” Biblical creation portrays a good and peaceful world into which evil and violence quickly intrude (“the Fall” and “Cain and Abel”); that unwanted intrusion creates a problem requiring a solution. Jewish and Christian scriptures are accounts of both the persistence of the problem and God’s quest for a solution.

Other creation myths, however, tell a different story. Wink turns to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, from approximately 1250 BCE; “In this myth,” he writes, “creation is an act of violence.” After elucidating the details, Wink summarizes: “Marduk [the youngest of the gods] murders and dismembers Tiamat [the mother god] and from her cadaver creates the world. Order is established by means of disorder. Chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is prior to order (symbolized by Marduk). Evil precedes good. The gods themselves are violent.” Unlike Genesis, in which evil unexpectedly disrupts a good creation, “In the Babylonian myth, violence is simply a primordial fact.”

According to Walter Wink, “the basic mythic structure [of the Enuma Elish] spread as far as Syria, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Germany, Ireland, India, and China,” suggesting, at the very least, that something in it resonated with mankind’s primordial sense of the nature of existence. “Typically, a male war god residing in the sky fights a decisive battle with a female divine being, usually depicted as a monster or a dragon, who resides in the sea or the abyss (the feminine element). Having vanquished the enemy by war or murder, the victorious god fashions a cosmos from the monster’s corpse.” Wink observes the gendered elements of the story, “the violent suppression of the feminine,” and the subsequent “subjection of women to men in the social order.” The basic message of this creation myth is chilling: “Human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin is violence. Killing is in our genes. Humanity is not the originator of evil, but merely finds evil already present and perpetuates it. Our origins are in the blood of an assassinated god. We are the outcome of deicide.” ¹

Wink proceeds to cite examples from late-20^th-century American pop culture—movies, TV shows, even cartoons and comic books—to demonstrate how thoroughly embedded in our society is the idea of “redemptive violence”. The good guys never want violence, of course; they are always only reacting to the violence of others (of villains). It is not our fault that bad guys force us to do such terrible things (e.g., torture, bomb civilian populations, launch drone attacks, etc.); violence just happens to be the only language “they” understand. We didn’t start the fire, after all; it was already burning since the world was turning.

“The myth of redemptive violence,” concludes Wink, “is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known. No other religious system has ever remotely rivaled its ability to catechize so totally. From the earliest age, children are awash in depictions of violence as the ultimate solution to human conflicts. Nor does saturation in the myth end with the close of adolescence; the basic structure of the myth underlies the pap to which a great many adults turn to escape the harsher realities of their everyday lives. It is as if we must watch so much ‘redemptive’ violence to reassure ourselves, against the deluge of facts to the contrary, that reality really is that simple.”

Finally, as if all that were not bad enough, at some point, claims Wink, “Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself. It is no longer a religion that uses violence in the pursuit of order and salvation, but one in which violence has become an aphrodisiac, sheer titillation, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships. Violence is no longer the means; it becomes the end.”

Let’s be honest: not only is violence, as H. Rap Brown famously said, as American as apple pie, it is, along with money, the very foundation of our culture. We do not merely accept violence; we do not merely condone violence; we revere violence. Violence is at the heart of our national myths, from Yorktown to the Alamo to Gettysburg to Little Big Horn to Normandy to Iraq. We need not be embarrassed by this admission, nor need we apologize for it; America’s faith in violence mirrors that of every civilization in history. We are not, it turns out, so exceptional after all.

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¹ I will not belabor this point (not here, at least, and not now) but will merely note what Wink chooses to ignore, i.e., the startling resemblance of his synopsis to Pauline Christianity (“the blood of a murdered God”). One could argue that Christianity reintroduced into Judaism the element of “redemptive violence” which Genesis lacked.

Saturday Lecture: Choosing Nonviolence

Manfred Steger, from Judging Nonviolence (2003):

It is time to challenge the dominant ideology of violence.

Expressed in cold numbers, the social and environmental impacts of violence are truly frightening. Researchers have calculated that war-related killings in the twentieth century exceeded 105 million people, including 62 million civilian victims. Still, there is little indication that we have learned the bloody lessons of the past. Let us consider contemporary (2003) American society. Today, US citizens own a total of 70 million rifles, 65 million handguns, 49 million shotguns, and 8 million other long guns. More than 15,000 Americans are murdered each year. Every day in the United States four women are murdered by a male partner. Each year, 6 million women are beaten in their homes. Each year, as many as 6.9 million American children may be physically abused, depending on the definition used. Total homicides in the United States since World War II are estimated to be at least 750,000, thus exceeding the 650,000 total battle deaths in all of America’s major wars. The prison population in this country has exploded to 1.8 million, including almost 4000 convicts who await execution.

The pervasiveness of our culture of violence makes reliance on force a normal occurrence. Add to this culture of violence the widespread and easy availability of arms and you get an explosive recipe. To be sure, the obsession with violence is not exclusively an American phenomenon. Yet many studies have shown that Americans are far more accepting of violence than citizens of other nations. Rates of violence are much higher in the United States than in any other industrialized nation. For example, there is a dramatic contrast between rates of violence in Canada and the United States, two countries that share a long common border and many similar values and cultural traits. For more than half a century, levels of violence as measured by homicide rates have consistently been four times higher in the United States than in Canada.

From the day they are old enough to sit in front of a television, American youngsters are fed a steady stream of media images and sound bites that often depict violence as heroic and inevitable. Jeff Bleich, executive director of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence, has long argued that violence constitutes a central pillar of the American belief system. We encourage boys—and increasingly girls—to believe that in order to become honorable persons, they must demonstrate that they are willing to use violence. Our enthusiasm for guns, our glorification of war and the military, our choice of superheroes, our appetite for violent sports games, and our use of belligerent language reflect the myriad ways in which we put violence at the center of our collective identity. And yet, violence is a financial drain on the resources of a nation. Conservative calculations show that the U.S. nuclear weapons program alone cost taxpayers almost $6 trillion during the last five decades.  

One reason why nonviolence is so easily dismissed in public discourse seems to be obvious: a serious consideration of nonviolent strategies might create an alternative vantage point from which the alleged normality of violence could be challenged. This widespread reluctance to afford the subject of nonviolence a more prominent place in our public discourse and educational programs points to the remarkable power of social forces with vested economic and political interests in protecting the business of violence—be it violence-glorifying entertainment, war, or the global arms trade. Often hiding their commercial interests behind the language of “security” and “necessity,” these forces habitually downplay the feasibility of nonviolent politics. Instead, they present violence as a universal urge or a set of unalterable biological behaviors sewn into the very fabric of human nature that get played out on the allegedly anarchic stage of international politics. The nonviolence movements of the twentieth century are dismissed as either grand moral experiments that ultimately failed or rare exceptions that merely confirm the (violent) rule.

All human behavior is learned. Every human being has the biological capacity for violent and nonviolent behavior; people are not ‘naturally’ one way or the other. The deepest sources of human violence and aggression are to be found in culture and the social environment. Violence is not an inevitable feature of human nature but a learned behavior that can be changed. The idea of humanity remaining forever confined to violent societies is but a dangerous myth of pessimistic ‘realists’. Unless we are willing to accept the very real possibility of our planet’s destruction as the result of our learned aggressive behavior, we must develop the courage to break the cycle of violence.

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Manfred Steger was born in Austria. He studied at Rutgers University and has taught in Hawaii, Australia, and mainland America. The author of the 2008 book The Global Imaginary, he is considered a leading scholar on neoliberalism and globalization.

Sunday Sermon

Jim Forest:

What is the most basic story in the modern world? In its purest form, it’s the western movie; call it the Gospel According to John Wayne. At the core of that gospel is a good man with a gun defeating bad men with guns.

The story needn’t be set in the Old West. The core elements adjust to any setting: rural or urban, past or present, or a Star Wars future where distances are measured in light years. The Gospel According to John Wayne can also be the Gospel According to Luke Skywalker or the Gospel According to Clint Eastwood. The moral is the same in any case: We are saved by deadly weapons and the courage and skill of those community defenders who wield them.

In the classic Western version, it’s the story of men who are evil to their core threatening decent people in a newly-settled town in the lawless West in which there is a battered saloon at one end of the street and a newly painted church and school house at the other. Endangered by pathological killers, the well-being of the townspeople depends on the courage of one brave man and those, if any, that he is able to rally behind him. The iconic scene is the gunfight on Main Street — one man with a gun facing another man with a gun and both pulling the trigger. There is sometimes a prefatory scene before the shoot-out in which we see the reluctant hero open a drawer and grasp his revolver, a weapon he once put away with the hope of never using it again. He is not, such scenes make clear, a man of violence but now there is no alternative. He straps on his holster, inserts six bullets in the gun’s chambers and walks out the door knowing he may be dead within the hour. In fact he survives. Goodness triumphs. It’s the men who love killing whose day ends in coffins.

It’s far from an ignoble story. There is real courage in it — the readiness of an honorable man to risk his life to protect his defenseless neighbors from wicked men whose death we who watch the film cannot help but wish for and, once it happens, welcome. If only briefly, it seems the world has been made a safer place.

The big problem with the Gospel According to John Wayne is that it hides from us the troubling fact that there is no such thing as a completely evil person — also the uncomfortable fact that there is no such thing as a completely good person. There are no bad seeds. Our DNA obliges none of us to commit murder.

For John of Kronstadt, a Russian priest of the nineteenth century, to become aware of this was one of the main challenges of life. “Never confuse the person,” he said, “with the evil that is in him, because evil is but a chance misfortune, illness, a devilish reverie.” John’s insight was not developed at a comfortable distance from the rough side of life — he was parish priest in Kronstadt, a port city with thousands of sailors and more than its share of drunkenness, crime and violence of every kind.

In common with ordinary Russians at the time, John of Kronstadt avoided dehumanizing labels for men who had been convicted of criminal actions. They were instead commonly referred to as “unfortunates.” It was this attitude that helps explain why so few executions occurred in pre-revolutionary Russia. Those who were convicted of murder and other grave crimes were instead sent to labor camps in Siberia.

In the latter part of “Gone with the Wind,” the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, returns to her family plantation, Tara, after Southern defeat. Scarlett finds the mansion intact though the crops have been burned, her mother has died of typhoid, her father is insane with grief, her two sisters are ill, and most of the slaves have run off. Forced to take up labor that in better days had been done by slaves, Scarlett’s life now centers on reviving the plantation through blood, sweat and tears, even if the paradise that the Tara plantation once had been for her is lost indeed.

When a drunken Yankee soldier arrives and seems poised to rape Scarlett, she stands on the mansion’s grand curved staircase, revolver hidden behind her back, then, at the last moment raises the weapon and shoots him in the face. Afterward, in shock, she says to her sister-in-law, “I’ve done murder.” To her credit and the credit of the storytellers, Scarlett uses a razor-sharp word, murder, that doesn’t mask what she has done. After pulling the trigger and seeing at close range the death she has caused, perhaps Scarlett realizes she might have protected herself without becoming a murderer.

The Gospel According to John Wayne remains a compelling story — the brave lone man who puts himself in the line of fire and kills a human monster whose death is a blessing for every decent person. Moral: The community can only be protected by good guys — or good women — killing bad guys. Rare is the movie in which the hero is allowed to find a bullet-free, nonviolent solution! Film after film, the implicit message is that, in confrontations with evil, there are no non-lethal — still less nonviolent — solutions. It’s a kill-or-be-killed world, period, next subject.

https://jimandnancyforest.com/2013/09/gospel-according-to-john-wayne/

{Note: I have lightly edited Mr. Forest's prose.}

Sunday Sermon

Thomas Merton (from his introduction to GANDHI ON NON-VIOLENCE):

The proper sphere of man’s activities as a being of logic, of courage, and of wisdom…is in the public and political realm [where] he shares words and deeds, thus contributing his share of action and thought to the fabric of human affairs. Now, the public and political realm is that where issues are decided in a way worthy of free man: by persuasion and words, not by violence. Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. Any society which is geared for violent action is by that very fact systematically unreasonable and inarticulate. Thought is not encouraged, and the exchange of ideas is eschewed as filled with all manner of risk. Words are kept at a minimum, at least as far as their variety and content may be concerned, though they may pour over the armed multitude in cataracts: they are simply organized and inarticulate noise destined to arrest thought and to release violence, inhibiting all desire to communicate with the enemy in any other way than by destructive impact.

A society that lives by organized greed or by systematic terrorism and oppression (they come to much the same thing in the end) will always tend to be violent because it is in a state of persistent disorder and moral confusion. The first principle of valid political action in such a society becomes non-cooperation with its disorder, its injustice, and more particularly with its deep commitment to untruth. ‘Satyagraha’ is meaningless if it is not based on the awareness of profound inner contradiction in all societies based on force…

It is not possible for the truly nonviolent person simply to ignore the inherent falsity and inner contradictions of a violent society. On the contrary, it is for him a religious and human duty to confront the untruth in that society with his own witness in order that the falsity may become evident to everyone. The first job of a ‘satyagrahi’ is to bring the real situation to light even if he has to suffer and die in order that injustice be unmasked and appear for what it really is.

Nonviolence [is not] a sentimental evasion or denial of the reality of evil. It [is] a clear-sighted acceptance of the necessity to use the force and the presence of evil as a fulcrum for good and for liberation…The greatest of man’s spiritual needs is the need to be delivered from the evil and falsity that are in himself and in his society. Tyranny, which makes a sagacious use of every human need and indeed artificially creates more of them in order to exploit them all to the limit, recognizes the importance of guilt. And modern tyrannies have all explicitly or implicitly in one way or another emphasized the irreversibility of evil in order to build their power upon it.

A belief in the finality and irreversibility of evil implies a refusal to accept the precariousness and the risk that attend all finite good in this life. Indeed, the good that men do is always in the realm of the uncertain and of the fluid, because the needs and sufferings of men, the sins and failures of men, are constant, and love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day. The good is not assured once for all by one heroic act. It must be recaptured over and over again.

The greatest of tyrannies are all based on the postulate that there should never be any sin…since sin is what should never be, then it must never be, therefore it will never be. The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.

[Hannah Arendt wrote:] “Non-violence has a different logic. It recognizes that sin is an everyday occurrence which is the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by their constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as to begin something new.”

The only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time from the same tyrannical automatism of the violent process which contains in itself the curse of irreversibility…the only way truly to ‘overcome’ an enemy is to help him become other than an enemy.

We Have Not Done Enough

Jacques Ellul's VIOLENCE: Reflections from a Christian Perspective concludes with a chapter on "The Fight of Faith". Like much of Ellul's work, this chapter is elusive and riddled with paradox: alternately baffling, infuriating, and inspiring. It was Ellul's constant intent to oppose any interpretation of Christianity that allowed for accommodation with the world or for an easy conscience on the part of Christians; he insisted that Christians must never seek to escape the tension of being "in the world but not of the world," but must instead accept that sometimes excruciating tension as a given of the Christian life. Like Kierkegaard a century or more earlier, Ellul was a determined and relentless afflicter of the comfortable Christian.   

I offer that as prologue to the following passage, found in the middle of "The Fight of Faith," a passage which strikes me as utterly astonishing even coming from Jacques Ellul: 

If the time comes when despair sees violence as the only possible way, it is because Christians were not what they should have been. If violence is unleashed anywhere at all, the Christians are always to blame. This is the criterion, as it were, of the confession of sin. Always, it is because Christians have not been concerned for the poor, have not defended the cause of the poor before the powerful, have not unswervingly fought the fight for justice, that violence breaks out. Once violence is there, it is too late. And then Christians cannot try to redeem themselves and soothe their conscience by participating in violence. 

Atheist that I am (and Ellul explicitly and quite reasonably exempts non-Christians from his indictment and from the demands he associates with the Christian faith), I still can't help but see how simple it would be to replace the word "Christians" in the above passage with the word "we": that is, to acknowledge that it is only because "we" individually and collectively have failed to right the wrongs of this world that injustice persists and that violence therefore breaks out in response—a violence that "we" too often join or even incite as a way of exculpating ourselves. 

From my years as a member of an Episcopal congregation in Buffalo NY, I recall the power of reciting the "confession of sin" contained in the church's Book of Common Prayer. The version we used stated: 

Most merciful God, 
we confess that we have sinned against thee 
in thought, word, and deed, 
by what we have done, 
and by what we have left undone. 
We have not loved thee with our whole heart; 
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. 
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.  

I believed then, and I believe now, that the two most powerful words in that prayer are "we" (a statement of solidarity in our human inadequacy, an admission that we simply have not done enough) and "repent" (a promise to try harder to work together, to do more, and to do better).  

I did not necessarily back then believe in "God" and I do not believe in "God" now; but I have never ceased to believe in the "we" of that confession. Sinfulness (or, as I prefer, "inadequacy") is too much of a burden for any individual to bear, but so too is the work of setting the world aright; which work, I have come to believe, is ultimately what we people—Christians, theists of various kinds, atheists, secularists, all of us--are for. 

https://www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/chapter-4-the-fight-of-faith/