A New Pacifism

 by Sam Avery

 

A few days after the war began 74 of us marched along Broadway on our way from Quinn Chapel on 19th St to the U of L campus.  It was beautiful spring afternoon and the ninth leg of the Progressive Peach march, a ten-week event that criss-crossed the streets of downtown Louisville, protesting the invasion of Iraq and questioning the wisdom of making war without provocation.  Several of you here were with us that day.  Pro-war sentiment was running high – somewhere in the low seventy-percentile range.  In a metropolitan area of about a million people, we were less than one one-hundredth of one per cent.  But we were not the only protesters that day.  About a dozen flag waving “Patriot Warriors” followed us on the other side of the street, screaming insults and obscenities every step of the way.  We were terrorists, communists, cowards, Saddam-loving traitors, and worse.  Young men and women were fighting and dying for our right to, well, object to their fighting and dying.  I knew better than to yell back, but I couldn’t help thinking what I would say – if I let myself go – things like, “Wouldn’t they be disappointed if we weren’t exercising the rights they were fighting and dying for?”  But I held my tongue.  The street is a bad place for discourse – rational discourse anyway.  The sun was beaming down, the TV cameras were rolling, we were holding our side of Broadway, they were holding theirs, the police holding the street between.  As we turned onto 4th street and marched just outside the front window of the First Unitarian Church one young man from the other side of the street began a barrage that I will always remember.  “What about slavery,” he yelled.  “What about the Civil War?  What about Hitler?  What about the holocaust?”  I did not know what to say, or think.  But then I realized: He thought we were all pacifists!  

Am I a pacifist?  Well, I don’t know.  A pacifist refuses to fight.  He does not join armies and will not use violence, ever.  He abhors the maiming and killing of war and believes that there can be no justification for it – never – no matter how moral the cause.  He takes the Golden Rule seriously: As I would live, so I will not kill.  He or she is the moral paragon of the peace movement, any peace movement.  But what about the Civil War?  What about the holocaust?  I, personally, don’t know what I would have done as a young man in 1861 or 1941.  I do not know if I would have accepted the ultimate evil into my life in the name of forestalling an even more ultimate evil.  I don’t know.  I just don’t know the answer.  This is one of the profound questions of the human condition, one that we have to struggle with to understand what real men and real women have seen and felt suffered through history, a question that each of us should force ourselves to answer in some form or another.  It is an enormous question that we must not ignore, but it is the wrong question for our time.   It is a distraction from crisis at hand.  The Civil War and the Second World War were pre-nuclear.  War is not now what it was then.  They were fought at a time when you could kill several million people, cripple children, tear families apart, blow up cities, burn down houses, and still come out a winner.  Back then you could have a war that someone might win; you could lay waste to whole continents and still have a continent or two left from which to regenerate.  Civilization was bigger than warfare.  You could pay a horrible price and get something for your money.   Now warfare is bigger than civilization.  It can happen only instead of civilization.  The question of being for or against war is an entirely different question.  It is no longer a tradeoff between individual and communal or national survival; it is a question of evolutionary biology: The form assumed by our particular type of protoplasm will fail if it does not adapt to the technology that it has itself created.  It is really quite simple: Moral or immoral, horrible or heroic, warfare is incompatible with humanity.  It no longer does what it used to do.  It no longer frees slaves and stops fascism. The new pacifist does not ask if war has ever worked in the past; he or she asks if it will work in the future.


Why do I make this distinction?  I make it because the old pacifist, the one who will not fight any war, is too brave, too heroic, too principled, and probably not as grounded in realpolitique as most of us.  More importantly, he is not numerous.  Remember those 74 people marching outside the window here, those one hundredth of one percent of metro Louisville marching down 4th street?  How many would we have been if we all had to be pacifists in the strictest sense?  What’s one percent of 74?  That’s about how many.  Pacifism has a bad name in America because this country has had a generally good experience with war.  War defeated fascism, made the world safe for democracy, ended slavery, brought us our independence, and gave us the half of Mexico that they weren’t using anyway.  It made us who we are today.  Taking a stand against war is too close to cowardice, too close to being against who we think we are.  Brave as it may be, it is telling other very brave people that their sacrifice is wrong.  It puts other good people in the position of defending war.  For that reason we must define a new pacifism that does not try to unfight wars that we have already fought.  To make the peace movement an effective force we need to make pacifists of those who have supported, and fought, wars of the past.  We need people willing to fight for what they believe in but who acknowledge that the world is not what it was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I want these people on our side of the street.  I want people who love and respect their country, people who are brave and willing to give of themselves, people with vision and practical sense.  In fact, I want everyone on our side of the street who has eyes to see that nuclear technology has made a qualitative and absolute difference in what it means to be a human being on this Earth.  I want people over here who realize that the paradigm of the sovereign nation state will not survive the current era.  I want them all to be new pacifists, whether or not they fought or would have fought in 1861 and 1941.  I want the pro-war then to be anti-war now.  These are the new pacifists.  I want them on our side of the street. 

The new pacifism is only now beginning to take shape.  It is against all wars?  Well yes, sort of.  Nuclear war is likely to evolve from a conventional war, therefore, the elimination of all forms of warfare has to be the goal of the new pacifism.  But until strong, permanent, and enforceable institutions are in place for the resolution of international conflict, war will be with us.  It will not disappear by any sudden change in human nature.  War will not go away on some glorious day when we all decide to be nice to each other.  It will disappear only when international law is strong enough to suppress it. The new pacifism, if it is anything, will be practical and realistic.  It will not concentrate on perfecting an absolute moral position against war; it will concentrate instead on facilitating a transition from violence to peaceful due process.  It will point out to those who claim that war is written into human nature that peaceful due process is something we already know how to do.  We do it all the time.  It is called the rule of law.  It is a matter of enforcing between nations the same basic legal mechanisms that we enforce within nations.  There is nothing other-worldly about it – conflicts will remain, distrust and division and hatred will remain – we just won’t be allowed to go war over them.  Nations, religions, and ideologies will go on being nations, religions, and ideologies, but their interactions will be subject to the rule of law.  There will be justice in the place of violence.  Moral?  Sure.  Radical?  Not especially.  Idealistic?  Maybe.  Practical?  Consider the alternative: There is nothing quite so practical as survival.  Where the old pacifist saw warfare as a problem of human nature, the new pacifist sees it as a problem of human organization.  Let nature be what it is; let us be quarrelsome, prejudiced, selfish, and narrow-minded, but let us do so within the rule of law. 

The new pacifism begins where the old pacifism leaves off.  It takes a moral stand against war and goes on to tackle the question of security.  If we refuse to fight, who will defend us?  This is the question that has plagued the traditional pacifist.  Security is the number one function of government.  We have to be safe.  In the pre-nuclear age we kept ourselves safe by killing, or threatening to kill, those who would kill us.  For better or worse, that is what we did and that is how we survived to this day.  But how do we provide security now, in an age of hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles?   The new pacifist is forced to look deeper than horrors of modern warfare to the underlying divisions in the human community that lead to warfare.  He or she must take a stand not only against participation in war but against the national prejudice that causes it.   National security does not exist in the nuclear age: we will have global security or no security at all.  This means a complete re-definition of what it means to be human.  We will no longer be Americans or Chinese or Nigerians first and human beings second.  We will remain American or Chinese or Nigerian, with our separate cultures and traditions, but we will be human beings first.  Nothing less will do.  This is the fundamental realization of the new pacifism.  It is glorious, it is moral, it is poetic, it is idealistic, but more than any of these, it is practical.  It is the hard-nosed reality of the twenty-first century.  The day of the independent nation-state is gone.

 

And when that time will come there will be the deep peace of human unity.  We will claim all people.  We will know the beating of other hearts in other lands and there will be a greater understanding of who we are. We will act as one in relation to the climate, to the oceans, and to the forests. We will not then, as now, spend one half of our public resources preparing to kill one another.  We will use for good our power and accept the gift of this garden.

 

I never got the chance to say all this to the young man across the 4th street on that brisk Saturday afternoon, and I had tried to say it, I’m sure he would have had a thing or two to say to me that might have made just as good a Sunday morning message.  But let me tell you, I was itching to tell him off and I admit I’d still like to tell him a thing or two.  He got me worked up, which is exactly what he was trying to do.  But he made me think, and I thank him for that.  He made me sort this thing out.  In fact, I would not have been able to say all this to him because I had not yet thought it.   And that is the final point I will make: We never know quite where it is we are going with these things.  Truth, as Gandhi and King would tell us, is not “in” one side or another of a social movement, it is not a possession of this thinker or that leader; it is something that is reveals itself in the struggle.  We need people out there opposing us to help bring truth to the surface.  At the Dharasana Salt Works in 1930, it was the police breaking up the demonstration who brought the injustice of British rule in India to the conscience of the world.  Gandhi wasn’t even there.  In Birmingham, in 1963, it was Bull Connor who changed America and made it big enough for all people and all races to live.  King was in jail.  In the struggle for world peace we need people like the young man across the street to bring truth to the surface, whatever that truth may be.  We may not know, in our time, what that truth is.  We need him over there, shouting, screaming, taunting us, exposing our inconsistencies, telling us we are wrong.  From theYin proceeds theYang, and from the battle between them, the force of truth.  Thank you, young man, whoever you are: may you live a long and happy life.

But… wait a minute, young man, before you go there’s one other thing I’ve been meaning to tell you. Whether or not I am the pacifist you say I am, you need to know that of all the wars you praise and glorify, of all the Crusades and just causes and Holy Wars you want me to die for, of all the glorified violence you would have me afflict on the innocent, this particular war you celebrate, this shooting our way into someone else’s country, this bald aggression on a nation one tenth our size that never attacked us, never thought of attacking us, and never had the means of attacking us, this one-sided schoolyard bully brawl you compare to the struggle against slavery and genocide, this senseless, worthless, and pointless spilling of human life has to be the stupidest war I have ever heard of in my life.  So take that!  Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Intro:                            Informal, Last Notes, New Pacifism

 

Deep Peace:                 Meditation

 

Flowers of Joy              Words: asks for balance, Will happen

 

Closing Words             Peace is the only future we may have.

 

 

 

 

Order of Service

July 9 2006

First Unitarian Church

 

Chimes                                                             (Sam)

Prelude:                                                                        (Bon and Susie)

Call to Worship                                                            (Holly and Mike)

Intro                                                                             (Sam)

Reading 585                                                                 (Susie)

Hymn 207: Earth was Given as a Garden                      (Joanne)

Chalice and Covenant                                                   (Holly and Mike)

Reading 584                                                                 (Susannah)

Song:  Deep Peace                                                       (Sam)

Meditation

Reading 578                                                                 (Bon)

Special Music:                                                  (Sam)

Offertory:

Message: The New Pacifism                                         (Sam)

Hyms 318: We Would Be One and

159: This is My Song                                                    (John)

Chalice Extinguishing                                                     (Holly and Mike)

Closing Words                                                 (Sam)

Postlude:                                                                      (Bon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Flowers of Joy

 

            There will come a time when I will gather flowers,

            Wreathe them for your hair, twine them for your bowers.

            And they will not then as now go to the graveyard mourning

            Another hero home, another friend’s last returning.

O when that time will come, and it may come tomorrow,

That’s when the flowers of joy will equal the flowers of sorrow.

 

There will come a time when all your tears down starting

Mean anger with a lover, sweet sadness at a parting.

And you will not then as now be weeping for the pleading

In hungry children’s eyes, for broken bodies bleeding.

O when that time will come, and it may come tomorrow,.

That’s when the flowers of joy will equal the flowers of sorrow.

 

There will come a time when we will walk together.

You can take my hand; we’ll laugh and talk together.

And we will not then as now be fearful of each other,

Afraid to claim all people everywhere our brothers.

O when that time will come, and may it come tomorrow,

That’s when the flowers of joy will equal the flowers of sorrow.