Back to God & Pacifism

"A couple of weeks back I read Carter Phipps's article in What Is Enlightenment?, and it threw me for a loop. Indeed, once I launched myself out there in the blogosphere as some sort of peace evangelist, I started to wonder what peace truly meant in my own belief system, the system that I rely on to inform and guide my day-to-day, and hopefully moment-to-moment, decisions. So I've been digesting the impressions from that article, and tonight I sit at my keyboard and begin the arduous task of crafting a response.

The article (which you've hopefully read!) is titled, Is God A Pacifist? My first challenge came from an old pagan buddy of mine from my Tavern Rogue days in a small, colonial village somewhere in the bogs of Tidewater Virginia, who harangued me about the article's premise being flawed since there is no god. We quibbled a bit, and it seemed to me we were arguing semantics. If we were to frame the debate around the question of the existence of this separate Being who, clad in beard, white robes, and golden scepter and seated on some massive throne in the clouds from whence harsh judgment and insider tickets were dispensed according to one's deeds, then yes, Calvin the Younger, I concur that there is no god. But the problem with this argument is this; to "prove" the non-existence of God based upon the fact that humans have historically misconceived the nature of the Divine is no proof at all that there is no such thing as God. God is Love, the creative force and organizing principle behind all manifestation, and it's only a matter of time before quantum physics gives us perhaps a better name for this vast intelligence.

OK, but quibbling over operational definitions aside, let's get back to the question of whether or not God is a pacifist. In his article, Phipps begins by relating a conversation with a peace protester in those strange, twilight days between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Once the sense of national unity began to fray, two opposing views on God's stance emerged. As Phipps frames the dialectic, on the one hand were

    "the more conservative, or neoconservative, faction—a majority if you believe the polls—who    were gradually coming to accept a more interventionist role for America in the world. They        believed in the use of military force and were ready and willing to head into the minefield of Middle East politics to rid the world of a dangerous dictator. In the name of democratic values, the argument went, we must be willing to break the back of tyranny in a part of the world that has often been the seedbed for terrorism. On this end of the spectrum were much of the traditional religious community—mainstream Christians, Evangelicals, American Baptists, conservative Jews, and so forth. And the implication of the position, whether stated directly by the Pat Robertsons of the world or simply suggested by Bush's “axis of evil” doctrine, was that God was on the side of America in this particular confrontation—that God was a supporter of freedom and of democracy and would like nothing more than to see the American eagle triumphant in the unfortunate but fundamentally good war on the globally destabilizing reality of rogue states and international terrorism."

So that's the side my mom and grandmother (with her pictures of W festooning the walls of her stuffy little bedroom, God bless her!) came down on. That's the old-time religion, the fire and brimstone, bring on the apocalypse style of Christianity under which so many of my pagan friends tend to lump anyone who professes to be a Christian. Why it never occurs to any of them that this view seems to leave out the entire New Testament is beyond me. After all, isn't that the part of the Bible that made Christianity possible? OK, so,

"On the other side of the fence was the more liberal cross-section of the country, including parts of the Democratic Party, which staunchly opposed the idea of war and roundly denounced the administration. This faction included the more liberal, ecumenical members of the mainstream religious community, and they were joined by a number of other spiritual or pseudo-spiritual movements, including American Buddhism, the self-help movement, the New Age, New Thought Christianity, et cetera. They took a resolutely pacifist stance, criticizing all talk of war. And the strong implication was unavoidable: that God, the spirit, or at least the moral and spiritual high ground, was in fact on their side—the side of pluralism and tolerance, the side of peace and reconciliation, the side that would not so easily kill in the name of a dubious American agenda to unilaterally order the world as we saw fit. “God is on the side of peace,” read the man's sign in Vermont."

If I'm reading the Gospels correctly, this end of the spectrum seems a lot closer to the teachings of the guy named Jesus. OK, so what's bugging Phipps?

As he says in the article, and this thought has crossed my mind on many occasions, there is nothing wrong with the concept of peace, but somehow, the way it's bandied about in protests and anti-war lingo, it seems "inadequate." Peace just doesn't seem like a realistic option in the current insanity in which we find ourselves embroiled; there are too many people, too many conflicting ideologies, too many "fevered egos" (as Bill Hicks used to say), and too few resources to simply ask everyone to stop fighting. So where does this leave us?

Phipps goes on to deliver one of the most cogent, articulate explorations of what "peace" means on many different levels. He talks about how it has gone from being the exclusive domain of countercultural freaks and hippies and into the sober world of academia and learned think tanks. He also takes a lighthearted poke at one manifestation of the peace movement that tickled me for obvious reasons:

"Judging by the back bumpers of our nation's cars, we seem to be busy either building peace, creating peace, thinking peace, teaching peace, giving peace a chance, waging peace, or visualizing world peace. We have books that promise “forty more ways to be a peaceful person” and “108 steps to create a more peaceful world.” And in a society where The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq was recently published, I imagine that Peace for Dummies can't be that far behind. What do Miss America contestants want to work for? World peace. In a time when war and conflict are still so prevalent around the globe, sometimes it seems that the only place peace has broken out consistently is on the bumper stickers, key chains, and T-shirts of countercultural chic. Peace, it seems, has become a commodity of cool."

Peace for Dummies! Why didn't I think of that!

So when we speak of peace, do we mean some hippy-dippy notion of a beautiful green world where Arab and Jew, Iraqi and American, Christian and Moslem, black and white, man and woman, lion and lamb can all frolic together in some blissed-out utopia? Because I have to agree with Phipps, it seems that this version is what a lot of people have in mind. I also have to agree that it's not realistic.

Some of the other versions of peace explored:

• Pacifism -- generally regarded as the absolute avoidance of war and violence. "Pacifism is generally understood to be a rejection of violence—usually, as Michael Nagler points out, a rejection of war. It is often called 'nonresistance,' a term derived from the biblical phrase, 'Resist not him that is evil' (Matthew 5:39), presumed to mean that Christians should uphold Jesus's example of not fighting back against injustice. "

• Active Resistance -- often confused with pacifism, but not the same thing! This is often what happens at "protests;" people use violent methods to "fight" for peace. I remember before the invasion of Iraq, there was a protest in Austin where hundreds of people lined both sides of the Congress Avenue bridge. We were waving at people driving across, and they were waving back, smiling, flashing peace signs. Most of the signs carried peaceful messages (mine was a simple "Pray for Peace"), but some compared Bush to Hitler, others called him a murderer, others showed oil morphing into blood. And then a handful of folks started trotting up and down the sidewalk, saying that in 15 minutes, "We're going into the street, man! We gotta block traffic!" That just made no sense to me. Because as soon as you start to interfere with somebody else's peaceful drive home, you are no longer creating peace! The tone of the demonstration changed dramatically when people began running into the street. The drivers of stopped cars honked angrily, and the police, who had been peaceful observers up to this point, quickly stepped in, made a bunch of arrests, and broke up the whole gathering. Remember the words of Thich Nhat Hanh!

• Nonviolence -- perhaps a subtle distinction from pacifism, but this insight from Phipps really opened my eyes to the nature of nonviolence: "The term 'nonviolence' entered the English vocabulary in 1923 as a translation of ahimsa, a Sanskrit word adopted from Hindu scripture by Mohandas Gandhi. Ahimsa means 'the force that comes into play when every vestige of the desire to harm is eliminated,' says Michael Nagler. And force is probably a good word to use because nonviolent resistance is hardly passive."

So it seems nonviolence, in this instance, is a synthesis of pacifism and active resistance. Phipps goes on to show how Ghandi, though nonviolent, was hardly passive! In fact, nonviolence is often confrontational, but always intentional. Now here's where an important shift in the argument comes into play:

Peace has always had a strained relationship with nonviolence. The focus of nonviolent resistance, from Gandhi to King to Walesa to Mandela, has really been on change, on the evolution and transformation of an unjust society. And all of those individuals have been concerned with that transformation over and above the maintenance of any state of peace or quiet social harmony. “Look at Martin Luther King. He was going throughout the South during the civil rights movement getting arrested,” says Jim Garrison, cofounder and president of the State of the World Forum. “Look at Jesus. Jesus said to love one another, but he was so confrontational with the Orthodox leaders that they killed him. They wouldn't have killed him if he was just sitting there in the temple saying, 'Let's sit here and pray.' ”

This sheds light on my motivation and aim of the whole Peace Meme project: I'm not so concerned with achieving some pie-in-the-sky peaceful utopia, but what I really want is to see society change. (Of course, this leads back to another of my fundamental beliefs, drawn from  Franklin, Emerson, and a host of mystics throughout the ages, that the only way to see society change is to change myself. But you can read about that in any number of other posts on my blog.) Let's go back for a moment to Dialectics 101, in which change (synthesis) always emerges out of the conflict between a thesis and an antithesis. Follow me for a moment as we backtrack to the beginning of the argument:

Thesis: Life in America before 9/11

Antithesis: Arab extremists destroy World Trade Center and 3000 lives.

Synthesis: That brief period of shared grief, unity, and solidarity that emerged post-9/11. What happens to a synthesis? It morphs into a new thesis, of course, and if we look at that image of "God Bless America" and let's go get the bad guys (even if we not-so-subtly pull the old bait-and-switch on who the bad guy is), this becomes the new thesis.

New thesis: "War on Terror"

Antithesis: 2006 Midterm Elections -- i.e., this isn't working! This growing wish for peace, or more accurately, for change, is part of the emerging zeitgeist at the close of 2006.

Synthesis: Who knows? While the utopian ideal of global peace is not realistically going to emerge in the immediate future, what might happen if we all realize the dynamic, volatile cycles of world events were not worth getting attached to? What if the violent nature of world events never changes, and the only thing we can change is our response to this violence? Hmmm, perhaps we're finding a leverage point here.

So back to the whole God angle for a moment; Phipps explores the many conflicting messages in all the major religions about the roles of peace and violence in human interaction. The early Christians were intense pacifists of the "turn the other cheek" variety, often offering themselves gladly to the gladiators and the lions . . . right up to the point, that is, that the Roman Empire became a Christian state, and then it was quite all right to use violence in the name of the Lord. Other religions have similar paradoxical relationships to teachings about peace and violence. One of the more compelling instances cited by Phipps is Dietrich Bonhoeffer's assassination attempt on Hitler; hard to fault a guy for that! So what are we to make of all these contradictions? If we look back at our original dialectical struggle between conservative Christians and progressive Christians, it seems a strong case for either side can be constructed. So, are we stuck?

Not necessarily. When Phipps turns his lens away from religion and points it at nature, the argument becomes even more engrossing:

Evolutionary biologists like to tell us that, in nature, external stress is what forces an organism to change and adapt to new conditions of life. “Stress is the only thing that creates evolution in living systems,” biologist and author Elisabet Sahtouris emphasizes. And much the same could be said of human culture. Gandhi may not have been a biologist, but he applied this principle well, and the power of his movement increased the stress on the British colonialists to the point that it became intolerable for them to continue their unjust occupation.

Stress is necessary for change. If we were in a homeostatic, perfectly balanced, peaceful state, nothing would change. In fact, probably nothing would even happen! And since we're all fairly convinced of the old adage that nothing is constant but change, it seems that this is the human condition, at least for the time being. How do we live in a world of constant flux? And what is God's will in all of this? Why is this the natural state of things?

So if we cannot condemn religious terrorism merely on the grounds that it is violent, where does that leave us? Are we destined to live in this fragile global society with religious actors running around the world stage committing spiritually “justified” acts of violence based on some very dubious interpretations of the sacred? At the very least, it is important to understand, as Appleby points out, that one can have authentic religious devotion and still manage to draw some extremely dangerous conclusions about the “will of God.” As he puts it, “The numinous power of the sacred—conveyed through the imperfect channels of intellect, will, and emotion—does not come accompanied by a moral compass.”

Not only is it difficult at best to discern the "will of God," but if we look at the natural world around us, there is very little evidence that God is a pacifist. On every level of existence, from the subatomic to the galactic, something is eating something else, and the processes of creation and destruction are in a constant, violent, cataclysmic dance. If we are looking to man for a way to stop this cosmic dance, we are indeed barking up the wrong tree! This is the way things evolve:

“Phenomenal existence itself seems to be a violent mode of being,” writes eco-theologian Thomas Berry. Simply put, we don't live in a Leave-It-to-Beaver universe. It's violent, it's wild, it's out of control, but it does have one extraordinary thing going for it. It's evolving, it's changing and developing, and no one could question the unbelievable success of the evolutionary process—from the Big Bang to the Big Dipper to the Big Apple—that ultimately has created all of us.

So what about peace and pacifism? Where is the God of Peace in the heavens above, or for that matter, in nature all around? Peace, order, and equilibrium are simply not as central in this new conception of our cosmological heritage. Gone is the once-dominant paradigm of a steady-state universe in equilibrium. Gone is the notion of a natural world that exists in some relatively pristine, peaceful, unchanging state. We live, as complexity scientist Stuart Kauffmann points out, in a universe that is expanding, self-organizing, and always creating “novelty and diversity.” And we live in the midst of a biosphere, scientists tell us, that is dynamically poised on a dangerous edge of disequilibrium, a creative sort of chaos that contains just enough order to keep it from spinning out of control.

It seems to me, at this point, that peace is not the ultimate goal, but it is a means to a goal of being more in tune with the nature of the dynamic processes unfolding around us. Let me see if I can state this in different terms: if I can get my head around the fact that people who blow stuff up for "religious" reasons, and people who kill people who blow stuff up for a different set of "religious" reasons, are both reacting to stress and trying to effect change in the world, that's different from the black and white terms that state that one side is "good" while the other side is "evil." I know that idea is derided as moral relativism, but what it really is is a good, honest, objective look at reality; the nature of change is often violent, but it is occurring as a result of evolutionary patterns. Or maybe I can state it thusly: it may take this current madness, which has brought us to the brink of extinction, in order to finally take humanity to another evolutionary level all together, a level that might look more like "peace."

I've been wrestling with how to summarize the end of Phipps's argument, but it seems to me that it is so rich, so cogent, and so important that I include the final three paragraphs of his article:

This evolutionary vision has already begun to impact the work of a number of pioneering philosophers, mystics, and theologians, who see in this conception of nature not a pacifist God, but a creative, self-transcending divine impulse seeking ever higher expressions of itself in this world. And as this vision begins to work its way through our culture, many believe we will see paradigm-changing effects on the way we think about a host of issues, not the least of which are war, peace, and conflict resolution. As Thomas Berry points out, “Everything depends on a creative resolution of our present antagonisms. I refer to a creative resolution of our present antagonisms, rather than to peace, in deference to the violent aspects of the cosmological process. . . . Neither violence nor peace in this sense is in accord with the creative transformations through which the more splendid achievements of the universe have taken place.”

Dr. Don Beck, who worked in South Africa to help that society transition out of apartheid, uses a new model of cultural development based on similar evolutionary principles. He explains that human nature and human culture are also governed by the same deep principles that we find at the heart of living systems across the universe. If we want to genuinely resolve conflicts, he suggests, then we would do well to pay attention to how they work. “What we have to be able to do is learn how to manage emergence—not peace, but emergence. Trying to create peace means we're operating in a closed system, and then once we bring tranquility, harmony, and unity, everything will be fine. But that's homeostatic, equilibrium thinking. It's not human nature. Human nature is evolutionary, dynamic, always shifting. So, if our attempts at peacemaking are based on homeostasis—getting this group and this group to stop fighting—it won't work out.”

Understanding the big-picture vistas of evolution and human development does not necessarily answer the nitty-gritty questions about if, where, when, why, and how to use violence. Nor, for that matter, does it tell us the right thing to do in the sands of Mesopotamia. But it can begin to expand the context in which we are asking these crucial questions, and make us deeply consider what our goals are, as we look to transform the tremendous conflicts that  beset our world. Peace, pacifism, and nonviolence will no doubt continue to play a role as important moral sensibilities that inform our personal and political lives, but they may have to share the limelight with other emerging spiritual values. Our rich cosmological and biological heritage is giving birth to a new vision of the spiritual impulse, one that incorporates the evolutionary principles at the heart of living systems. The more we understand about the developmental processes of life, including our own lives, the more we can develop solutions appropriate to the complex, multidimensional human world that we live in. We can hope that those solutions may be more effective at leading us toward a lasting and comprehensive peace, but that does not mean that peace itself will be the ultimate goal of our efforts. “If people try to put peace ahead of evolution, they won't get either,” says Michael Nagler. “If they put evolution ahead of peace, they'll get both.”

I am reminded at this point of one of the main theses of Dr. David Hawkins's pioneering work, Power vs. Force: that is, many human problems arise from a misplaced focus on the content of our experience rather than the context. Indeed, this letting go of attachments to the concrete and recognizing the great ebb and flow of energy in the universe is one of the core principles of all great spiritual traditions. Therefore, it seems to me that an individual's best chance at achieving world peace is to concentrate on one's own contemplative or meditative discipline. Letting go of our desperate need to be right, letting go of our inflated egos, letting go of our petty justifications and resentments, all of these practices are just as valid as storming the barricades and fighting the Man.

Is God a pacifist? I don't know. Ultimately, I believe that the Creator is a pacifist, though he, she, or it often uses violent means to make manifestation possible. I like Berry's reference to creative resolution. That makes sense to me. I still don't have it all figured out, and predict that I never will. So until then, I'm going to drive around with my "Support Peace" ribbons all over my car. I hope you will too!

Thanks, Carter Phipps, for wrestling these intense ideas down to the mat and putting them out there for us to chew on.
 

 

Comments

[rayleus]

Excellent article, JC. I'm glad I took the time to read it as it encapsulated a lot of my own thoughts and specific ideas I was going to post on the this blog.
I strongly believe the "Peace Movement" needs to identify itself, and be identified, as "The movement to expose, contest, and thwart efforts by others to incite violence for their own selfish or misguided purposes" (rather than "The movement to lay down and do nothing while evil overtakes the world" - which of course is favorite characterization of the Peace Movement's opposition).
While it is certainly true that individuals must work on their own inner natures and that the beneficial effects of this combined self-evolution will certainly lead to a more peaceful world, I also believe that most people are already fairly well evolved and suffer from having to operate under an incomplete and distorted fact situation. Consider the example of a man who is at first enraged at a conspirator's assertion that his best friend has recently slept with his wife. When he discovers the claim to be false and motivated by the accuser's desire to break up the marriage, this man becomes easily able to restrain himself from punching his best friend in the face, or perhaps doing worse. He may want to punch the liar in the face, but that person's punishment will more likely be that he/she will never be trusted again.
What we fail to consider is that such insidious "Iagos" live amongst us, often in the more powerful positions of religion, politics, and information media. Read your Shakespeare (JC and William) and you'll realize that human nature is unavoidable - we can't eliminate that buttons within us that can easily be pushed. What we CAN do, however, is pay closer attention to who is pushing them and why. Only then can we apply our objective reasoning to properly address the troublesome situations that arise in our personal life as well as the life of our societies.
Violence is necessary. It is not a necessary evil, it is simply necessary. But when? As a protective, self-sustaining last resort. Our police forces are taught to shoot to kill suspected criminals only when there is immediate, imminent threat to another's life. What can be said about someone who falsely claims "he's got a gun in his hand" when the accused is merely holding a hairdryer? Who is more dangerous?