THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
PACIFISM, VIOLENCE AND PEACE-MAKING
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached November 4, 2001, at the First Unitarian Church of HonoluluThis sermon is not about whether you should approve of the U.S. government's response to the tragedy of September 11. The prosecution of that response is not going to be altered or pursued subject to opinion polls or protests. But I have a war going on inside myself over the issues surrounding all of this.
One night a Quaker pacifist heard sounds downstairs in his house. His wife elbowed him in the ribs and said, "Go see what that is." So he got up and got his fowling piece. He came down the stairs, and there in the dining room was somebody going through his silverware, taking all the best pieces. The Quaker pacifist pointed the fowling piece in that general direction and said, "Sir! I would not harm thee for the world but thou standest where I am about to shoot."
I am painfully aware that the human species has not been good at resolving conflict, especially international conflict, by means of war. We have usually waited to resolve those conflicts until war was the only alternative available or until that alternative had swept over us and we had no choice but to respond. A few times in our history we have seriously attempted to work at winning the peace after having won the war, but this, too, is rare.
I find myself responding with revulsion at some of the super patriotism going on across the country. I like the American flag and never have been terribly in favor of putting it down, but I am bothered a little bit by the ways in which it is appearing. I used to be a juvenile officer and in California there was a law that specified how the American flag was to be handled. I actually had to deal with a juvenile case where a young lady was arrested and the prosecutors wanted to put her in jail for wearing a blouse that they said was made out of an American flag. Now you can buy them anywhere! One young man was arrested for wearing an American flag on the seat of his pants. Now we see those patches all over the place. The attitudes toward it have changed. Nancy and I saw somebody's American flag that had blown off a car and was laying raggedy in the gutter. I was almost ready to stop and ritually burn it when I realized it was only plastic. Couldn't burn it anyway without making a mess.
In 1965, at a Unitarian Universalist summer conference in California, Rev. Paul Sawyer brought in Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters to do a part of the program. Paul was trying to communicate to the assembled multitude the significance of symbols and the fact that a symbol is not the thing symbolized; a leap of imagination that the species is wonderfully inadequate at making. In came Ken Kesey and his folk with a flag, parading it up and down the auditorium. The guy carrying the flag stumbled and it touched the ground. Everybody who was a part of the show went into a panic! "Oh, the flag has touched the ground!" They whipped out a copy of the law in California at the time that says whenever the flag is permitted to touch the ground it must be burned. They brought in a brazier and lit the fire. They put the flag in and burned it; then went outside and buried it with great solemn ritual. And 500 Unitarian Universalists had a cow! (See Tom Wolfe's, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test)
Paul's point about the symbol not being the thing symbolized didn't get across very well. The drama of the symbol was more powerful.
I have a habit of occasionally listening to right-wing radio and a few of those folk are talking, "Let's just go bomb the crap out of anybody that's not good old American Western Christian folk like us," which is frightening. Yet, I am deeply disturbed at September 11 and the assault, not just upon the U.S., but the attempt by one group of fundamentalist Muslims to involve the whole rest of the world in a war for reasons of their own.
I'm not a pacifist, but back when they still had a draft and I was still young enough to qualify for it, I tried really hard to get to be a conscientious objector. My draft board simply kept sending all of the papers back to me. I tore up my draft card and they sent me a new one. I burned it and sent them the ashes and they sent me a new one. They weren't willing to get sucked into that game, at all. So I was a frustrated conscientious objector who never was able to get the authorities to cooperate in letting me be self-righteous.
I have a long history of trying to alter public policy. During the anti-war days, during the civil rights movement, and through many of the other projects that have had to do with consumers' rights and with environmental issues, I have tried to significantly impact public policy. Out of that long experience I'm left also in a confrontation with this current conflict scrambled on my insides.
I understand morality to have to do with something a whole lot more than just my behavior. There are times when it sounds in the ethical and moral codes of our culture like the only thing that is important is whether or not you do anything naughty. These days it has come to mean whether or not you publicly appear to approve anything naughty -- never mind what you actually do.
What is missing from that is a sense of responsibility for the consequences of one's own behavior. I am very aware that I can do the correct, moral thing and have tragic outcomes. If one is going to attempt to respond ethically in this world, one of the first things that must be a part of that attempt is to accept the inherent ambiguity involved. If all we are concerned about is our own behavior and our own self-righteousness, then we are the poorer for it. If I am able to respond to evil in ways that limit it, and fail to do so; that, it seems to me, is immoral. Even if I have not myself done anything immoral, my failure to respond is.
This has been my problem with pacifism. Pacifism's focus is entirely on my behavior. I used to get upset with some of the folk involved in demonstrations of various sorts. It was important that they take a stand. It was not important that the stand be taken in a way, in a place, with calculated strategy so as to actually have some chance of impacting public policy. All that they were concerned about was that they demonstrate their position. A kind of moral self-righteousness that I find objectionable.
So I find myself being invited to participate in peace demonstrations here in town. They are not calculated in any way to attempt to impact public policy. They are to demonstrate our opposition and our moral rectitude. I have told them, "No."
It is important to recognize here a very human tendency to use analogies from person-to-person, face-to-face conflict, and apply them to international conflict. Those analogies are usually scrambled up, useless, wrong.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book before the Second World War called "Moral Man and Immoral Society." It's quite a fascinating book as a historical period piece. He spoke at Andover Newton Theological School when I was a student there in the 60's. He said that, if he were to write the book all over again, he would call it "Immoral Man and Very, Very Immoral Society." Part of the point he was making is that we keep behaving as if human beings in large groups behave in the same ways that three or four of us together in the back yard behave. We don't. The dynamics are different. The implications and consequences are different. The ways of understanding and responding to conflict at that level are different.
We often hear talk about non-violence. What is often missing is that this is only half the phrase. The full concept is "non-violent direct action." Non-violence is not about sitting back and not being violent. Non-violence is about finding ways to respond to conflict that do not contribute to the violence but that calculatedly attempt to contribute to the resolution and elimination of the violence. It is incredibly difficult. Non-violence is first and primarily a political strategy, not a moral position. Non-violence can be an effective strategy with an adversary who is trying to control people by coercion and threat. Ghandi used it that way to very great effect. As a strategy it is used to reveal the internal contradictions of the adversary's position and behavior. It requires organizing more people to resist than the adversary has the stomach or the ability to put down. And that's hard work. It works against an adversary who wants its use of violence to appear appropriate and justified. It uses the adversary's image of itself, or its desire to appear legitimate, against it. The strategy is to get the adversary to behave in ways that undermine the adversary's appearance of legitimacy in the eyes of its own supporters and of those they want to control. It does not work against an adversary who wants you dead and is quite happy and willing to accept any opportunity to carry out that desire.
To be effective, non-violent direct action requires a very careful analysis of the objectives, legitimacy and support that the adversary is receiving. It requires that the non-violent ones be very disciplined in targeting their action at the weaknesses of the adversary's objectives, its legitimacy, and its base of support. Just going out and demonstrating is seldom -- I would say, never -- an effective tactic to accomplish anything but feeling self-righteous.
Effective peacemaking requires more than attention to one's own interests. This is the awkward place we are at in the current conflict. Peacemaking requires attention to the legitimate interests of the adversary as well. Their interests may be inappropriately or unacceptably pursued, or incorrectly understood even by the adversary; but they are real and relevant. Any successful resolution of the conflict must involve dealing with those interests. Mere victory, short of annihilating the adversary, does not make peace. In the modern world, annihilating the adversary is simply not an achievable goal. Effectively stopping the violence is one first step in peacemaking. It is usually a necessary step, but it is only a first step.
One of the pieces that confronts us at the moment, is that the historical dynamics that produce the leadership of a group like Al-Qaida are very different from the dynamics that produce the ready volunteers willing to be led. This is part of what is sloppily but blessedly being repeated by the administration. Our war is not against Islam, but against a very specific expression of terrorism by a group that happens also to be followers of a very fundamentalist form of Islam. The dynamics that produce the leadership has as much to do with power as it has to do with any of the stated objectives. To respond to the conflict in ways that do not merely help the recruiters for Osama bin Laden's cause is incredibly challenging.
What is happening in the world right now, I think, is in many ways unprecedented. The U.S. government is trying to do something that really hasn't systematically and seriously been attempted before. There's nothing unusual about being attacked and declaring war. The easiest and normal response would have been to do exactly what it appears that Osama bin Laden hoped for: to precipitate a war between Islam and the west. Frankly, on the morning of September 11th, I was scared to death that Mr. Bush was going to attempt to out-Clinton Clinton and throw more bombs than Clinton had in relatively random directions. But our government has not done that. What is unusual is the attempt to make a measured response targeted at a narrowly defined adversary; to follow a political, diplomatic and military strategy designed to isolate that adversary and eliminate its potential for violence, taking care in the meantime to minimize collateral damage, and paying close attention to the inexorable law of unintended consequences. To engage in that kind of international action may well be historically unprecedented. It will be exceedingly difficult to pull off, even more difficult to sustain over any period of time. And finding the ways to handle the domestic political fallout from it is going to be almost as difficult. I do not see the American people sitting still for the long, protracted, very cautious, very careful project that our government is launched upon. How we handle that may have as much to do with how all of this turns out as anything else.
Contributing to my internal conflict is that I have no great trust in government. Ever since I became politically conscious I have seen what I consider to be colossal blunders by my government, sometimes for laudable reasons and sometimes for horrible reasons. The U.S. has been quite capable of doing the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing for the right reason and every possible combination thereof, all around the world from time to time. Which is not to say that my country has not done a great many things of which I feel proud, only that it has existed in the real and ambiguous world.
Governments ought never to be trusted -- ever. That is the nature of the beast. Our job in a participatory democracy is not to trust them, but to keep our eye on them; to see to it that what they say is going to happen is what happens. And yet, in the kind of conflict we are involved in right now, so much of what is going to happen and what must happen is going to happen behind the scene. You and I are not going to be able to know about it and CNN is not going to be able to show pictures of it. That's absolutely necessary and that's absolutely terrifying. And that's a part of the ambiguity we are going to have to tolerate as a part of dealing with the fact of the incredible vulnerability of modern society.
If my government does not always do what I think they ought to do, still this current response has earned my respect and support. I hope it works. I hope it can be sustained. I hope the American people can maintain the focus to support this unprecedented response. But a part of me is frightened at that and looks for easier answers, answers with much less moral ambiguity woven into the very fabric of them. I don't like that feeling, and I suspect that most of you are experiencing much the same ambiguity about all of this.
As that pacifist Quaker said, "Sir, I would not hurt thee for the world, but thou standest where I am about to shoot."