VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Congregation of Ann Arbor May 29, 2005 ON this weekend when we remember the wars of our nation and the men and women who gave their lives in these conflicts, it is my conviction that the best way to honor them is to look for ways of creating and living peace so that no one else ever has to die or be harmed in a war again. If wars were to cease, much of the violence that people have to suffer would be reduced. Violence, in and out of war, is one of the great riddles of human existence. Why, in a world filled with menace and pain, disaster and threat, illness and death, do we kill, attack, maim, rape, terrorize, and hurt one another in all the ways that we do? Aren’t tornadoes and cancer, drought and floods, viruses and ten thousand other perils to life and limb sufficient challenges to our survival? Isn’t the absence of violence to be preferred? Don’t we feel safer when we are not afraid of being assaulted? Isn’t some form of peace better? Apparently not. Humanity has mostly chosen war and violence as the way to live. In the 5,600 years of recorded human history, we have averaged two to three wars every year, more than 14,600 in all. In the second half of the 20th century, our species fought 161 wars At the start of 2005, there were 22 violent conflicts raging somewhere in the world. Chris Hedges, who for 20 years and more covered war as a journalist, gives us some cold, hard numbers about the impact of all these wars. In the 1990’s alone, he observes, “2 million dead in Afghanistan; 1.5 million dead in the Sudan; some 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda; a half million dead in Angola; a quarter million dead in Bosnia; 200,000 dead in Guatemala; 150,000 dead in Liberia; a quarter million dead in Burundi; 75,000 dead in Algeria.” And the numbers rise and rise through other wars in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere. Twentieth century wars took the lives of 62 million civilians. Our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have added to the totals of soldiers and civilians killed in action. These numbers and other ghastly statistics are not secrets. They are well known to us all, though we may not want to focus on them very often. Politicians and military leaders who plan wars know these terrible consequences. Yet they proceed with their plans, some of them quite blithely, as though the young men and women sent into battle and the civilians who will inevitably get in their way and be harmed were no more than plastic toys, easily replaced. In addition to the casualties of war, millions of women have been raped, millions of children have been battered by their parents and older siblings, many a friend has struck out in anger and killed someone dear to them, gangs have attacked each other and even children have been known to slaughter one another. We in America seem to be fascinated by violence. Our entertainment, our advertisements, our language are all saturated with images of violence. Our most popular sports include two, football and hockey, in which violence is part of the game, the more the better. American history is full of our love of violence, from the brutality we displayed towards the Original People of this land from the beginning of the European invasion to the endless wars of conquest we have fought to wrest this continent away from other claimants to its possession. Proclamations of peace hide us from the truth that we prefer war and violence. Kathleen Turner tells of going to a church recently for the baptism of a friend’s child, and later in the service hearing the pastor pray these words: “O Lord, be with our country, our president, our military. We pray for peace in the world. We really do. But not at the expense of our way of life.” What kind of peace is it we pray for if what we really want is a continuation of our way of life? If we are willing to kill and destroy to achieve our goal? We appear, as James Hillman suggests, to have a “terrible love of war.” In his book of that title, Hillman argues that war is normal and therefore “wars will go on; they will not cease and they will not change.” He speaks of war as sublime, the height of a kind of religious ecstasy. War is so deeply interwoven into the fabric of human life as to be ineradicable. If that is so, if the thrill of battle, the psychic release that a violent act can bring, the enjoyment of holding power over another through violence or the threat of violence really are the deepest truths of our humanity, there is a real question as to whether or not our species can survive. The dreadful weaponry at our command, from bombs of massive destructive capacity to a variety of biological and chemical agents of equally deadly force, make the continuation of the human race unlikely if war and violence are an essential part of who we are. Let us for the moment imagine, as the eminent evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky did, that cooperation and caring are deeper truths of our humanity than competition and hostility. If we really do want to live peacefully with one another, what would it take to bring this aspect of our humanity to the fore? The first task is to learn why we fight. Why do we choose violence as a means to achieving our ends? Why go to war rather than the negotiating table? Only if we know why violence is so much a part of human life can we find ways to curb its excesses if not eliminate it. One possibility is that it is part of what we are, that is, built into our bodies. Sigmund Freud argued that we possess an “instinctual craving” for hatred and destruction that is rooted in our bodily processes. Robert Ardrey wrote a series of books to show that the human species has what he called “a killing imperative.” Konrad Lorenz suggested that, unlike all other carnivores except the rat, human beings have an innate and spontaneous readiness to do violence to their own species. Lorenz believed that this readiness was inherited from the so-called lower animals. In the process of transmission, we discarded the instinctive inhibitions against killing our own kind. We did so because we lack natural weapons, such as lethal teeth, claws, or poison, with which to protect ourselves. A recent article by a psychologist, David Buss, argues that natural selection has made killing part of human nature. Finding that 91% of men and 84% of women in five different cultures had had at least one fantasy of murdering someone, he became convinced that murder is on our minds. “Over the long sweep of deep time, “Buss writes, “killing has conferred such powerful advantages in the ruthless game of reproductive competition that natural selection has forged in all of us minds designed to murder. Murderers’ genes prevailed over those of their unfortunate victims, and we are their descendants.” Buss lists many problems that murder solves: protecting yourself, protecting your children, getting rid of an opponent, gaining a rival‘s resources, getting sexual access to a desirable woman, and many others. Violence is in our genes. Grace M. Jantzen offers a different theory of why we kill each other. In her FOUNDATIONS OF VIOLENCE, the first of three volumes on the cultural roots of violence, she argues that the western world has a “preoccupation with death” that is “acted out in the violent and death-dealing structures of modernity, structures of violence which have been well-learned from our classical past. From militarization, death-camps, and genocide to exploitation, commodification, and the accumulation of wealth, from the construction of pleasure and desire to the development of terminator genes, from the violence on the streets to the heaven-obsessed hymnody of evangelical churches, preoccupation with death and the means of death and the combat with death is ubiquitous…our language is full of metaphors of war, weaponry, violence, and death.” Violence is in our culture. Others suggest that violence grows out of religion. Religion begins in fear and insecurity, the natural state of the human being thrust into this world without any instructions on how to get along in it. We learn soon enough that in too short a time death will claim us. Along the way from birth to death, we face myriad perils. It is easy to see how divine figures are imagined who can help us out of our troubles. This heavenly protection is available only if our beliefs are pure. No other gods can be tolerated. Defending the honor of our god then becomes a justification for every conceivable kind of act of self-defense, including invading other lands, taking away their treasury, raping their women, exiling their survivors, destroying their culture. When we go to war, we take our god with us. God was many a flyer’s co- pilot in the Second World War, and praising the Lord and passing the ammunition got all mixed together. For many Americans, the Iraq war is being fought in the name of a Christian God, just as the defense against our troops has been waged by many Muslims in the name of Allah. The core texts of the three monotheistic religions of the west feature a deity of great savagery, commanding his people to slaughter other people to the last man, woman, and child. Other religions use similar justifications. God makes us violent. Which of these—our genes, our culture, our religions, or some other explanation--is correct is not clear. Discovering the answer is important because it is so hard to challenge violence when we do not know for sure why we are violent. One thing is clear: that whatever contributions genes or culture or religion or any other factor may make, all of us are involved. There is violence in the human soul. Finding out why it is there is a task for everyone. The second task is to learn what peace really is. It is not a product, which everything in our consumer-driven culture often seems to be. We cannot make peace. We certainly cannot buy it. We cannot hold it in our hands and admire its beauty or utility. It is not like a refrigerator or a chair, a computer or a pair of pants. It is not a product. It is also not a destination or a goal, not a place we want to get to and when we are there we can enjoy ourselves. Dr. Seuss showed us the foolishness of this approach to peace in his wonderful story I HAD TROUBLE IN GETTING TO SOLLA SOLLEW. It tells the tale of a lad overwhelmed with troubles, so he sets out for Solla Sollew, “Where they never have troubles.! At least, very few.” Of course, after going through many adventures to reach his destination, he discovers it is not the paradise he thought. The gate-keeper has lost the key and is leaving for another promised land where they “never have troubles! No troubles at all! What the lad finally learns is that wherever he is there will be troubles. It is right here, where he is, where we are, that he, and we, must learn to face the challenges and cope with them. Peace is neither a product nor a goal. Peace is an attitude and a process. Peace is about how we live right this minute, uniting means and ends in our lives. Peace is about speaking kindly and treating others with respect. Peace is about tolerance and appreciating diversity. Peace is about patience and the long view of hope. Peace is about sharing, caring, dreaming, loving. Peace is a way of life, like that described by the Universalist poet John Holmes: “Peace is the mind’s old wilderness cut down— A wider vision than our…(forebears) dreamed. Peace is the main street in a country town; Our children named; our …(parents’) lives redeemed. Not scholar’s calm, nor gift of church or state, Nor everlasting date of death’s release; But careless noon, the houses lighted late, Harvest and holiday: the people’s peace. The peace not past our understanding falls Like light upon the soft white tablecloth At winter supper warm between four walls, A thing too simple to be tried as truth. Days into years, the doorways worn at sill, Years into lives, the plans for long increase Come true at last for…(those of great) good will: These are the things we mean by saying, Peace.” For the past 25 years, I have found this congregation to live the peace we proclaim. We don’t all agree. We have different needs, different theologies, different political philosophies, different ambitions, different challenges. What we agree on and practice is found in the words on the boulder at the front entrance to our building: love not hate, respect not contempt, openness not exclusion. That is peace. There is a third task and that is to look for, support, celebrate, and join efforts of peaceful living. There are pieces of wisdom offered by wise teachers through the ages that can guide our spirits. There are also many courageous souls who can give us inspiration if we look at how they live, listen to what they say, and try to follow their example. Lao-tse, writing two and one half millennia ago, taught us an essential truth in these words, found at #602 in our hymnal: ”If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nations. If there is to be peace in the nations, there must be peace in the cities. If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors. If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home. If there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart.” Angry, frightened people commit violence and go to war. Greedy and power-hungry people hurt others and support war. Each person can contribute to a world of peace by being peaceful. The prophets of Judaism, speaking at about the same time as Lao-tse, gave the world a vision of peace. Micah spoke that vision in these words: “ …and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit every one under his vine and under her fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4:3-4) Every weapon we convert into a tool for productivity, every bomb and gun and grenade, every means at our disposal for damaging other people that we can change to a humane and useful purpose is a step towards a life of peace. Jesus taught us to love our enemies and do good to those who despise us. The truth in this injunction is less complicated than it sounds: the one we call enemy is human like us. If we hate the enemy, we are hating part of ourselves. This adds a heavy weight to our souls. Heck is a very young soldier in the Second World War in Nick Arvin’s novel ARTICLES OF WAR. One day a comrade is shot by a German sniper, who is almost immediately captured and then killed by one of Heck’s fellow soldiers. “The German’s eyes were a shade of blue-green that reminded Heck of the sea and made him think of sitting on the cliff with Claire. Blood oozed from the German’s chest and stomach. He looked to be about Heck’s own age, and he might easily have come from some Iowa town, as Heck had, except for the uniform.” What Heck discovered was the humanity in his enemy. Not a German. Not a Nazi. Not an enemy. Just a young man, like Heck. That is what it means to love our enemy, in this case too late. Sadik J. Al-Azm points to the Arab Islamic culture’s injunction against shamateh, taking pleasure in the suffering of others, as the same moral value. Mohammed Abu-Nimer is a Palestinian Muslim who exemplifies this ideal. He is an Israeli Arab, well aware of the sufferings of his own people but unwilling to ignore the sufferings of those on the other side. Here are some of his ideas for easing the brutal conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, ideas that clearly take no pleasure in the sufferings of others. They can easily be translated into other situations of strife. 1. Commit to dialogue that recognizes that Arabs and Jews have the same historical rights to the land, that Arabs and Jews have equal human rights, and that honors religious and cultural pluralism. 2. Provide humanitarian aid across all lines of division. 3. Take nonviolent direct action: say to Israeli soldiers at the 450 checkpoints that this is wrong; say to Hamas that suicide bombing is wrong. 4. Advocate for human rights together. Pay attention to the wisdom of Rudyard Kipling, who was such a strong defender of the British Empire and the many little wars in which it was engaged. Then his son was killed in the First World War, and he wrote these lines: “If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Never, never support war or violence until the truth has been told about why it seems so important to go and kill people. George Orwell spoke for the warriors when he said that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” In a harsh world, it may well be that there are times when rough men are needed to do violence. Maybe. But it is a too well known and too little honored fact that most wars begin with untruths, propaganda, lies. The war in Iraq certainly began that way. It is at least questionable whether support would have come from the vast majority of the American people and all but a handful of men and women in Congress if we had known there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam posed no threat to this country or for that matter to any other country, and that Saddam had no connection to al-Qaeda. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead and tens of thousands more living with grievous wounds. More than 1600 Americans have lost their lives and more than 12,000 have been wounded. Several hundred of our soldiers have committed suicide. Had the truth been known, that the causes spoken of for going to war were false, that the consequences of going to war would be brutal, would the American people have supported it? Never go to war unless the truth is fully on the table before us. That would stop most wars before they got going. There are many efforts to reconcile enemies and heal the wounds of war. There is Healing Through Remembering in Northern Ireland. There is the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa. Seeds For Peace is a summer camp in Maine for teenagers from areas of conflict around the world. There is the Parents Circle, founded by Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children in that grim conflict. Marla Ruzicka was killed in Iraq in April. She was 28. She was there, as she had previously been in Afghanistan, to establish an organization she had founded called Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. Its purpose is to verify civilian casualties and to provide aid to them. There was a conference in Petra, Jordan, a few days ago, which 25 Nobel Prize winners attended, focused on finding solutions to war and violence and poverty. Its theme was the recognition of all human beings as members of one family. When one suffers, all must rally round to help. Each of these and many more such efforts are small, under-funded, and get very little publicity. We have to look closely to find news of these kinds of groups, but we can ask our papers and television stations why they are not covering such stories and urge them to do so. When such stories do appear, we can send them to our congressional representatives and encourage them to pay attention to what such people are doing and even join them. One final thing: look for beauty, strive to create beauty. The key idea in Grace Jantzen’s study of the foundations of violence is that “beauty, creativity, seeks to bring newness into the world, a newness that is at odds with violence.” That is why Feodor Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save us,” and why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used those words in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize. Reach for beauty. Treasure beauty. Celebrate beauty. The beauty of flowers and bushes, the beauty of a tumbling waterfall, the beauty of an aria or sonata or jazz riff, the beauty of a graceful body dancing, the beauty of a child at play, the beauty of a loved one’s face, the beauty of achievement, the beauty of sharing, the beauty of love. Rebecca Solnit, in her inspiring little book, HOPE IN THE DARK: UNTOLD HISTORIES, WILD POSSIBILITIES, writes of people contributing to a better world by imagining new ways of living, new ways of sharing, new ways of being human. The dark, she tells us, and our times are dark, does not always mean despair. It can also mean opportunity, creative possibilities, hope. This sermon is grounded in the assumption that at the deepest core of our being, we want to live without hurting others. There are three important ways to help bring this about. First, understand war. Second, understand peace. Third, Live peace. Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel Prize winner and the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb, wrote a few days ago about the Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein Manifesto of 1955. It was directed at the threat of nuclear war, but Rotblat, now 97, feels that the thrust of the Manifesto is as relevant today as it was half a century ago. Its closing admonition holds as true for us as it did for the mid-20th century: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, A FORCE MORE POWERFUL: A CENTURY OF NONVIOLENT CONFLICT, Palgrave, 2000. 2. R. Scott Appleby, THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE SACRED: RELIGION, VIOLENCE, AND RECONCILIATION, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000. 3. Hannah Arendt, ON VIOLENCE, A Harvest Book, 1970. 4. Nick Arvin, ARTICLES OF WAR, Doubleday, 2005. 5. Wendell Berry, CITIZENSHIP PAPERS, Shoemaker and Hoard, 2003. 6. Chris Hedges, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Public Affairs, 2002. 7. James Hillman, A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR, The Penguin Press, 2004. 8. Grace M. Jantzen, DEATH AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF BEAUTY: VOLUME ONE—FOUNDATIONS OF VIOLENCE, Routledge, 2004. 9. Rabbi Michael Lerner, THE GENEVA ACCORD AND OTHER STRATEGIES FOR HEALING THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT, North Atlantic Books, 2004. 10. Rebecca Solnit, HOPE IN THE DARK: UNTOLD HISTORIES, WILD POSSIBILITIES, Nation press, 2004. 11. Lloyd Steffen, THE DEMONIC TURN: THE POWER OF RELIGION TO INSPIRE OR RESTRAIN VIOLENCE, The Pilgrim Press, 2003. 12. Howard Zinn, PASSIONATE DECLARATIONS: ESSAYS ON WAR AND JUSTICE, Perennial, 2003. Copyright 2003, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved 1