Heaven is an Earth without Violence
On the Theory of Nonviolence
When I was a kid, one of the required readings for school was a book about a teenage boy in a frontier family who struggles with his commitment to nonviolence as the Indians (yes, they were called Indians), who were on their war path, headed to his home. The family had guns for hunting, but they were also Mennonites and did not believe in the use of violence. He struggled with wanting to protect his sister and mother but also wanting to stay true to his beliefs. He remained steadfast, and the Indians came and slaughtered his family.
And this made me so righteously angry. I was angry at the Indians for killing the family, but even more angry at the boy and his father for not fighting back. I could not forgive them for what they had done, or rather, for what they didn’t do. But there was something else there as well, I was also angry at myself. I wanted to fight, and not really just to protect my family, but I wanted to kill the Indians, because I was afraid, because I wanted revenge. That the son didn’t fight back unnerved me so much, not just because how against nature it was to not want to use violence even to protect one’s own family, but also because in this great unjustness of not returning violence with violence, I felt some guilt and shame. It was as if his nonviolence was like a mirror that showed some darkness within me, and if I was there, I might have wanted to kill the family myself just to hide this guilt.
But nonetheless, I did not reject this book, because in truth I had the same feeling. I was born an ideological proponent of nonviolence, even if practically speaking I was torn. As early as I remember, most of me abhorred violence, though a part of me was still intoxicated by it. I had always been (at whatever age I found out about it) against prisons, against war, against violence in any manner — which we can define as the forced imposing of one’s will over and against another person. I’m ideologically against violence not only (as we are all likely to agree) when it is committed by an aggressor, but also when it is in service of order and control, also when it is meted out in retribution for some wrong committed, and even when it is employed for defense of life, liberty, and possessions. Violence is never moral. There is no legitimate use of violence. Consenting to violence as a just means for some good end, corrupts those ends. Violence is always wrong.
Why do I believe this? Why did that boy in the story believe it, even if he didn’t know it yet? Why, for that matter is this a recurring theme in religion? As I see it, we are caught up in a cruciform universe; in order to get out of this cycle we are in, we must disavow violence, and with it our notion of justice which is oftentimes simply the sublimation of our thirst for blood. This is what Tolstoy believed, that we try to justify violence, even the violence committed in self-defense or as punishment, because we don’t yet ‘recognize the consciousness’ the brought us out of a beastly nature.
We find ourselves in a karmic cycle, but we don’t have to be the taxman for karma, we can refuse to act against the other, and by doing so, end the cycle. And this pacifism is not passive, but rather nonviolence is the consequence of love, and love would do anything to save rather than condemn the other. This is the mystery I believe that is hidden in the apocryphal lake of fire: if all the saints stand before the fire of destruction, holding their unrepentant, unsaved children, willing to lose their own lives, just like Jesus did, they will gain not only theirs but the lives of all of humanity.
But enough of all this talk of utopia! We live in the real world! This is the question that is always asked of nonviolence: what is the alternative? How can we live in a world without prisons, without police, without armies, without violence? Leaving aside all the Jains, Sikhs, Mennonites and many others who somehow find a way to persist despite their commitment to nonviolence, lets address the problem at the root.
Reality is constituted by our relations, the relations between people, and upon which we construct an edifice of objectivations. Money is an example of such a reified object. But underneath it all, is just us. Society is a consequence of our relationships. Change ourselves, and the relationship changes. We have constructed a reality of scarcity, of competition, of justice, and within this structure, this matrix, we cannot find a way out. It’s not our fault, we were just taught this way by nature, but nature itself can change. While the world runs on money, rejecting money doesn’t seem to make sense. But the end of money is to become a commodity, and if we don’t want this to be our end, then we need to create a new structure. We cannot think a new thought within an old mind. We cannot envision the new without first letting go of the old. In a new structure of unlimitedness, money instead becomes the idea that no longer makes sense. Once we change, we change our relationships, and when enough of us change, the structure changes, and a new world arises.
There is a world of violence and a world of love, and love is the antithesis of violence. Love cannot do violence against another, even if to ‘educate’ them as we often hear nowadays. We cannot usher in this new world by force, to do so would be to destroy it before it even comes into existence. This is what Marxism and the left in general tragically misunderstands: you cannot legislate righteousness, or you become the very evil you think you are trying to eradicate.
But maybe we’re not there just yet. Maybe we still need more time. Like you, maybe I’m not ready to give up my toys. But we don’t have to wait 1000 years. When death comes for us, we are forced to let go anyways. In dying, we turn the other cheek to death, we might as well turn the other cheek to nature while we’re alive. This would be our greatest revolt against a nature ‘red in tooth and claw’, to refuse to continue the cycle of violence. And even if we’re not ready to let go of violence just yet, we could at least take the first step: to reject violence on principle; to treat violence, even that which is done in retribution, even that which is done in self-defense, as not some righteous or noble act, but if anything, as an ugly necessity.
