NONVIOLENCE: THE LUXURY OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY

“Ultimately there are two sources of power: force and legitimacy. People obey out of fear of violence or out of respect for authority. Civilization and order come from putting force at the service of legitimate authority. . . . But both force and legitimacy remain essential to order. Force without legitimacy brings chaos: legitimacy without force will be overthrown.”

Robert Cooper, former advisor to Tony Blair

“Who would Jesus bomb?” is a telling phrase being bandied about by some in the peace movement. It is a play on the slogan, “What would Jesus do?” (or “WWJD”), which has spread through Christian communities like wildfire and can be seen on everything from mugs to mousepads to baseball caps. The phrase is supposed to remind one of the moral standard that Jesus set in his life and actions, hopefully inspiring similar aspirations. And given his clear predilection for peace and nonviolence, similar aspirations could well be taken to mean pacifism. In fact, since the early history of the church, scholars tell us, those who have sought to emulate Christ have adopted a strong antiwar stance. The early Christians would not join the Roman army, and many chose martyrdom rather than kill in the name of Caesar. Many of the original Christian writers were resolute pacifists, and it was a stance that lasted for several hundred years after the crucifixion. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Christians started fighting in the Roman army. St. Augustine set the tenor of Christian thought on the subject with his doctrine of a “just war.” War could be permitted, the reasoning went, if it was waged for just reasons, a standard that still informs Christianity to this day.

But what really changed? The answer is more political than theological. The Christians came to power. Emperor Constantine converted, and the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire. And the philosophy of pacifism looks a little different when you are the one holding the reins of authority, responsible for administering affairs of state. Indeed, more often than not, nonviolence and pacifism are the luxury of the opposition party, of those who don't have to deal with the challenging realities of practical governance. It's one thing to call for peace; it's another thing altogether to have to come up with workable solutions for a world that unfortunately doesn't yet conform very well with the vision set out in the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today's peace movement might do well to take this message to heart, as they have tended toward “rants against the Bush administration” combined with “pacifist rhetoric,” as political analyst Mark Satin puts it. Religion commentator Alan Wolfe could just have easily been speaking about much of the antiwar movement when he wrote recently that “liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it.” But if we blindly cling to the ideals of peace and nonviolence even when they fall short of real-world application, then we run the danger of leaving the day-to-day realities of governing to those who may not bring the same degree of conscience and concern to the use of deadly force. This point was illuminated during the process of researching this article. In a conversation with Professor Abdul Aziz Said of American University, an inside-the-beltway peacemaking expert and a deeply spiritual man, I asked if he ever saw the need for the use of violence in politics. “No, I couldn't use violence,” he said. “I try to only use nonviolence.” Moved by his conviction, I nevertheless had to ask: “Do you think that in government, there are times when we must use violence?” He paused for a moment and then chuckled, “I think that that is why I've never been in government.”

Whatever our attitude toward the machinery of state, we are all still beneficiaries of government power. We enjoy the relative peace and security provided, for example, by a police force. After all, what is the purpose of the police if not to enforce the rule of law under the carefully applied threat of state-sanctioned force? “There comes a time when one cannot preach nonviolence without recognizing the hypocrisy of enjoying a security provided by violent means,” said the South African activist Frank Chikane, at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in the eighties. What would happen, for example, if you removed all law enforcement from North America? The implicit force of law is always there in the background, exerting a subtle tension to behave within certain boundaries, and to uphold common standards in the way we conduct our lives. “Pacifists may be individuals who have gone beyond a level of violence in themselves,” says author David Rieff, “but it does not mean that we live in a global society of individuals who have done the same.” However much we have evolved over the decades and centuries, we have not evolved beyond the rule of law. And it is that implicit power, and the threat of force that lies behind it, that allows for a freedom we might otherwise never know. “Law is the persuasive application of conscience,” says Jonathan Granoff, president of the nuclear watchdog organization the Global Security Institute. And that “application of conscience,” sometimes forceful, provides a tension that is evolutionary, exerting a constant upward pull on the general society to conform to a higher level of social organization at a local, national, or even global level. It can be a foundation not only for peace but for a freedom that makes higher human endeavors possible. And as we take tentative steps toward global governance, the creative ways in which we are able to apply legitimate and beneficent force, either through skillful means, subtle persuasion, or strength of arms when absolutely necessary, will go a long way toward determining the success of any attempts at greater international solidarity in the years and decades to come.

“You need force for any social organization to endure,” explains Jim Garrison. “Those utopian communities that think, 'Well, we're all liberated, so we can do without force,' quite quickly, as we see in example after example, fall apart. The proper appreciation of force comes out of the recognition that the shadow side of the human being is not quite integrated yet and needs to be kept in check, sometimes at gunpoint. It is actually a full appreciation of the role of force that is the genesis of real freedom. Without force, anarchy ensues and freedom is destroyed. But with order, with an appreciation of hierarchy and the force that's needed to enforce hierarchy, people can really experience a civility and freedom that are not possible without it. Force and violence to me are not bad things that we overcome when we're enlightened. Rather, they're constitutive parts of the natural process itself.”