Wednesday, 23 April 2008

• The practicality of nonviolence - an excursus

  It's all very well to understand that Jesus and Paul taught nonviolent engagement against evil, but so long as we continue to believe that violence always succeeds where nonviolence always fails, we will never learn to take Jesus quite seriously. Honestly, though, I despair of really speaking convincingly on the issue - conversion is required, not merely agreement. Until we can learn to see "the enemy" as people, and work for their good as well as ours, mere intellectual assent does no good.
  
  The myth of redemptive violence is a spell that must be broken, not a hypothesis that may be proven false.
  
  Still, I offer here a couple of stories I have encountered recently, and a handful of statistics that can at least illuminate the way for those considering the entire nonviolence discussion.
  
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  The most common scenario that critics of nonviolence as a way of life like to posit is, "What if someone breaks into your house and is going to harm your wife or children?" A similar common scenario is, "What if you encounter someone being raped?" The person asking this always seems to assume that violence would be a guaranteed solution, as though the average person would have no problem assailing an intruder without unintentionally seeing himself or the very ones he seeks to protect harmed in the process.
  
  But leaving the unassumed impracticality of violence aside, I was excited to find a story that incorporates some of both these elements into it: a violent intruder and the risk of rape.
  
  Angie O'Gorman, who lived alone, was awakened late one night by a man kicking open the door to her bedroom. The phone was downstairs. She described him as being verbally abusive as he walked over to the bed. As several thoughts went through her mind, she knew with a certainty that the only way either of them would escape the situation unharmed was to regard each other as people - not as victims or aggressors.

  I asked him what time it was.  He answered.  That was a good sign.  I commented that his watch and the clock on my night table had different times.  His said 2:30, mine said 2:45.  I had just set mine.  I hoped his watch wasn't broken. When had he last set it? He answered.  I answered.  The time seemed endless.  When the atmosphere began to calm a little I asked him how he had gotten into the house.  He'd broken through the glass in the back door.  I told him that presented me with a problem as I did not have the money to buy new glass. He talked about some financial problems of his own. We talked until we were no longer strrangers and I felt it was safe to ask him to leave.  He didn't want to; said he had no place to go.  Knowing I did not have the physical power to force him out I told him firmly but respectfully, as equal to equal, I would give him a clean set of sheets but he would have to make his own bed downstairs.  He went downstairs and I sat up in bed, wide awake and shaking for the rest of the night.  The next morning we ate breakfast together and he left.

  Now, this is not a normative story.  Not every intruder will repond this way to having their immediate needs addressed and met.  But would any sort of violence have achieved as good a result - or any better?  O'Gorman recalls thinking clearly, as she awoke, the pointlessness of keeping a handgun under her pillow, "Somehow I could not imagine this man standing patiently while I reached under my pillow for my gun."

  And, clearly, O'Gorman is not a normative "victim."  She had received training in crisis aversion, and had committed herself beforehand to finding nonviolent alternatives to crises.  Had she perceived violence as the only answer, and realized how hopelessly outpowered she was, she would likely have fallen exactly into the victimhood mentality that intruders assume.  (Intruders expect either victims or attackers, and are prepared for either.  What they do not expect is for someone to engage them as people, to cooperate with them while asserting their own personhood, to provide concern for their true needs.  This is much of the advantage of nonviolence.  Nonviolent reactions cause wonder, which calls for what O'Gorman calls "a context of conversation."  This is incompatible with the violent impulse, and often diffuses a situation where threats or attempts of violence escalate it.)

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  A similar, shorter homily is shared by Nancy Forest Flier in Past Violent Shores.  A woman was walking home from a supermarket on a deserted street, and realized that she was being followed, virtually stalked, by a larger man.  As she reached a dark section near an alley, she heard the footsteps suddenly advance more quickly, and as they got closer she wheeled around and smiled, and handed him the bags, saying, "Thank God you showed up.  I hate to walk alone in the streets, and these packages are so heavy."  Naturally, he escorted her home safely.

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  If all this sounds too personal, too small scale, too unlikely, then consider a national defense scenario by the Sandwich Islanders against a French ship-of-war during the height of French colonial sea presence.  The Sandwich Islands had placed a tax on French imports of wine and brandy, to discourage alcoholism among the natives, and the French responded with force. 

  The ship arrived and blockaded the island and gave them a few hours to lift the tax before they would invade.  During these hours, the lady of the French consul went from home to home on the island and offered the citizens quarter on the ship, to minimize civilian casualties in the ensueing firefight, but each home answered, "Oh, I don't think it will come to that."  Nobody took them up on the offer.

  When the time limit was up, the French stormed the beach, and advanced on the island, and encountered no resistance.  The marched on the governance building and the island's fort, and laid quarter there for several days.  The citizens of the island continued to go about their day-to-day lives as well as they could, and continued to offer no resistance, as their king had instructed them.  When the government refused to lift the tax on imported liquor, the chivalrous Frenchman attacked the fort, dismantling it and all of the armaments within.  Then they marched back to their ship with their flag displayed in "victory."

  Casualties: zero
  Damage: one fort, clearly unneeded

  A similar situation occured on the island of Palau in Micronesia, against U.S. military powers in the early nineties, with similar results.

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  But if those who argue for the impracticality of nonviolence say that such things are perhaps possible with "civilized" armies like the French, British and Americans, but wholly impractical against despots and tyrants, then consider the following array of statistics provided by professor Walter Wink.

  In the period of just 1989, thirteen nations, comprising over 1.5 billion people, which was at that time nearly 1/3 of the population, experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded in every case except in China, and which were completely nonviolent (on the part of the participants) in every case except Romania and parts of the southern Soviet Union.  (The nations: Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Chile, China.)  In 1990, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia achieved independence nonviolently.  If we add the countries touched by major nonviolent movements between 1986-1991 (the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Israel, Burma, New Caledonia, New Zealand), and other major nonviolent movements of our century (the independence bids of India and Ghana, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1979, the struggle against authoritarian governments and landowners in Argentina and Mexico, and the civil rights movement, United Farm Worker movement, anti-Vietnam and antinuclear movements in the United States) the figure of those who have been directly affected by nonviolent social change reaches 3,337,400,000: approx 60% of humanity. 

  "All of this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence does not work in the "real" world."

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  In the end, I don't expect these stories to convince anyone who insists that violence is needed and that Jesus' teachings on engaging evil through nonviolent means was either idealistic, nonliteral or "interim" (thank you, Schweitzer) that nonviolence is truly at the heart of the gospel. 

  But I hope that this handful of facts and stories can provide food for thought for the open-minded, can provide hope for those who see Jesus' ideal but despair of its practicality, and can perhaps even surprise those staunch critics of the gospel. 

  -ND

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