Breaking the silence: understanding Dr King and nonviolence

A paper originally written in January 2008, when I was still at Kalamazoo College. I believe that much of it still bears true; though we are no longer at war in Iraq, we have since gone to war in Libya and are threatened with grim prospects in Syria and in Iran. Though my own views have since drifted a few degrees from their Anabaptist wellspring, I still believe that ‘the apathy of conformist thought’ remains the single greatest enemy of a just peace, and the single greatest asset of those who would condemn our nation to a state of perpetual war, and that saints and prophets are not to be taken lightly, particularly not in this day and age. It would be a profound disservice to Dr King’s memory if we remember only his comforting words of equality, so often quoted by the comfortable liberal establishment, and forget the more radical call in Beyond Vietnam to ‘rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society’, that the triple demons of racism, materialism and militarism may be the more swiftly vanquished.

It often seems that the common doom of the prophets of the Hebrew tradition – Moses, Nathan, Isaiah, Jeremiah – was that when they spoke, what they spoke was true and profound and relevant, but fell on sleeping ears which neglected them, scorned them or simply misunderstood them. Such prophets, in principle, were to be venerated, but in practise welcome for prophets was rare, and rarer still any kind of serious consideration for their message. Considering the Hebrew prophets, the resemblance the tale of Martin Luther King, Jr. bears to them is striking. Every American schoolchild hears of the accomplishments of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement and how they led the way to the end of racial segregation in law. They learn to honour him as a great man, even a martyred saint of sorts – a man with a dream, which in the end was realised.

But one problem with making Dr. King into such a saint is that it becomes all too easy to turn his veneration into a kind of pious somniloquy, to slip back into the slumber and apathetic silence which Dr. King had been trying to break. His iconic image has become complacent in its beatitude; the radical edge of his message of non-violent civil struggle has been dulled. The anxiety of Søren Kierkegaard that his work would ‘be conveniently skimmed during the after-dinner nap’ is difficult not to feel now on King’s behalf, especially during this season, when his name and legacy is certain to be preached in hagiographic reverence from pulpits whose voices will then shy away from speaking out against the war in Iraq and all the grievous social injustices accompanying it.

As an Anabaptist, I feel that the methods and philosophy of non-violence, as taught by Christ, Menno Simons, Ghaffar Khan, Gandhi, King and many others, are both invaluable and viable; I try my best to understand them, to articulate them and to live them. Though I have not experienced the discrimination and persecution and hardships that Dr. King and those who participated in the Civil Rights Movement faced, I have often been disappointed and frustrated at how often and how sorely non-violence is misunderstood, even among my peers. It is rarely met with contempt; more often it meets with infuriatingly patronising forbearance, of the sort reserved for mistaken idealists and hopeless daydreamers. It is largely dismissed as a nice dream, but one which could never work in ‘the real world’.

Upon reading Dr. King’s sermons, however, it becomes clear rather quickly that he may have had a dream, but the man was no idle dreamer. Having lived through economic and racial injustice and having seen the anger and resentment that it bred, he set forth a vision from which he expected true and lasting results. He realised that it wasn’t enough that we simply end a war overseas, but that we must take it on ourselves to build a peace, we ‘must with positive action seek to remove… conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice’. To this end, he articulated not the kind of love that is just a nice dream, just a ‘sentimental and weak response’, but the kind of love that demands dedication to a ‘long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world’ , the kind of love which understands and undertakes, in the words of G. W. F. Hegel, ‘seriousness, pain, and the patience and work of the negative’.

The radical love that Martin Luther King, Jr. made a part of his life and a part of his ministry, the love that transcends sentiment, can be neither silent nor somniloquent. If we decide (as a community and as individuals) that we want to represent social justice and human dignity, that we want this kind of love to be made manifest in our words and in our actions, silence – not speaking when something has to be said – is self-betrayal. For my own part, this means that mere pacifism is not enough. The kind of pacifism that sleeps through peace-time, only to awaken itself to outrage when war’s trumpets shatter that slumber, betrays itself. Wars like these in Vietnam and Iraq may spring from inflamed injustices and inequalities, whether real or perceived, but in democratic societies they thrive on ‘the apathy of conformist thought’. Any pacifism that sinks into such apathetic, conformist quietude, which opposes war but does nothing to prevent it, must be seen as ultimately self-defeating. Truly, in the spirit of Dr. King, we must and we shall continue in our principled opposition to this war in Iraq, which has been the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths, and which has blinded the society to other urgent issues of social and economic justice. However, if pacifists – myself and my fellow Anabaptists included – truly value a lasting peace as a positive end, out of moral respect for human life and dignity, then it becomes an imperative that we practise not merely pacifism, but an actual, effective discipline of non-violence in the service of social justice, even in times when war is not occupying our attention.

Indeed, like the Hebrew prophets of antiquity, Dr. King spoke a prescient, profound message which still rings true. This truth, in his message of non-violence, deserves to be taken seriously and understood, at a level deeper than simple sentiment. Here we are, forty years after he delivered the sermon at Riverside Church in New York. In this time of war, we again wander the Mosaic wilderness of our own social conscience. The time has come when we must ask ourselves whether we undertake the seriousness and pain, whether we with patience and work take up the struggle for social justice, and speak for a peace that will last. As Dr. King himself put it: ‘This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response.’

On culture (and those laying claim to it)

Three months ago, President Hu Jintao of the PRC wrote an article in the periodical of the Chinese Communist Party, Qiushi, regarding China’s culture and its status on the international stage. He seemed to be under the distinct impression that ‘hostile foreign powers’ are attempting to lay siege to Chinese culture, to undermine it and to Westernise it, dividing China against itself, by ‘conduct[ing] long-term infiltration’ in the ‘ideological and cultural sphere’. More recently, several responses have been made to Mr Hu’s article, including one by Sam Crane of The Useless Tree, one by Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks. These responses do make some decent points, but the larger issues are somewhat evaded. What is culture? What is driving its change? To answer these two questions is to pose two further: who produces it and who benefits from it?

Sam Crane’s argument goes straight down the liberal-libertarian line of folks like Hayek and Friedman (and yeah, let me tell you… when I think ‘culture’, first thing that comes to mind is the economics department at the University of Chicago): culture is ever-changing, a market-driven artefact of the creative individual, and anything a government does can only serve to stifle and disrupt its creation. I am sure this would come as news to the beneficiaries of the National Endowment for the Arts, among other people, but I get ahead of myself. Sam Crane identifies ‘culture’ only with its reified products – in this case, rock-and-roll music – and its worth only with the popularity or economic success of those products. This is, to say the least, an incredibly narrow view which does skirts around the fears of folks like Hu Jintao and Rick Santorum rather than addressing them head-on, and does no justice whatever to his own side of the argument.

After all, culture is not just our consumption habits. At least, for me it isn’t – and I say this as a metalhead and a fan of Renaissance and Baroque church music (not as contradictory a set of tastes as one might imagine). If heavy metal as a genre were to sink or swim according to its popularity and economic success, it would have died in the ‘90’s and been replaced by grunge or whatever the hell Metallica turned into with the Black Album. But it didn’t die. People were drawn to the music on a deeper level; its artists played it and its fans listened to it for love, not because they wanted to get rich or because they wanted to be seen as ‘in’ (and if they did, they were very quickly outed as poseurs). There is a healthy culture (a ‘subculture’, one might say) surrounding heavy metal, because there is a real community surrounding the music, there are real values (loyalty, fraternity, steadfastness, defiance to the bitter end, overcoming even overwhelming adversity) associated with the music, and there is a musical history which each metalhead is bound to respect or at least acknowledge. Is this culture ‘driven by creativity’? Naturally it is. Does it ‘change’? Sure. But such a glib description of culture does it a vast disservice, because (to continue with my previous example) it is possible to distinguish good heavy metal from corporate shit – and such judgements are not just the domain of ‘elite intellectuals and impresarios’. The culture that endures is defined by the values which inspire people to create; and if your sole value is what is profitable, what you produce is not healthy cultural output at all.

Speaking of creativity, though, as a writer and an artist, let me tell you that I’ve written, drawn and painted both for love of the subject, and for marks (‘profit’, as it were), and I can tell you right now which end results were better. The greatest artists’ motivations were never profit (else they wouldn’t be artists!), but rather a love which transcends the self. If the artistic inspiration that drives culture is not something that can be forced (as Mr Crane very rightly notes), neither is it something which can be bought and sold in a market, appealing only to love of self. It is, in the end, only in the numinous realm of the sacred that the aesthetic can be healthily understood and realised.

On the consumption side as well, cultural production can be either healthy or unhealthy. You can either watch or listen to or otherwise support cultural productions which you like, or you can support cultural productions which someone else (usually someone with orders of magnitude more money and power than you have) tells you to like. Advertisement is the reigning example: huge corporations would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns if they did not alter people’s consumption habits in their favour. Sadly, reigning economic orthodoxy is completely and wilfully blind to the root causes of a person’s preferences. To use Sam Crane’s example, the college-rock band Carsick Cars played at a club where 200 people were still waiting outside the doors to get in when they closed. Now, were all of those people there because they genuinely wanted to be, and really enjoyed and were inspired by the music? Or were they there because the Carsick Cars were on 97.4 FM all the time (I don’t know if this is actually the case) and they thought going to a concert would make them look ‘cool’? In other words, were the people going there fans or poseurs? The liberal-libertarian position does not care about this distinction, and indeed goes to massive lengths to deny its existence (all revealed preferences being equal); the people who are served by this are not, of course, consumers or even the majority of producers, but rather only the large producers who have the capacity to command higher market shares through advertising. This is as true of cultural output as of anything else.

Fourthly, dismissing fears of imperialism as mere ploys to ‘bolster the political power of [an] authoritarian regime’, however appropriate it may be in this example, is not a wise move in general. As someone who has spent time amongst the Navajo and Hopi cultures in his youth, I am familiar with the tactics used by those purporting to support their ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’. There is good reason to fear them, as they were subjected to a very deliberate form of cultural warfare. Their traditional economies were undermined at every turn by government-sanctioned theft of their land (and subsequent forced relocation); they were forbidden from practicing their own native faiths; and their languages were actively suppressed in the schools their children were compelled to attend. But I am sure that the present generation of these now struggling cultures are immensely comforted by Mr Crane’s bromides that the cultural changes to which they were subjected were ‘inevitable’, and that ‘foreign bogey men’ were not in the least to blame for their present plight. Though China has been subjected to this degree of outright domination only thrice in her long history, and her culture has survived each time on its own strengths, the purveyors of ‘free trade’ indeed knowingly attempted to curtail Chinese self-expression (to say nothing of their dignity) for their own profit and power, and resorted to force of arms when their attempts were thwarted by the likes of Viceroy Lin Zexu. The fear of domination by imperialist powers (not only Britain, but also the United States, Germany and Japan) is a very real and long-standing one. Hu Jintao may indeed be taking advantage of that fear for political gain, but Mr Crane does no service to his own argument by ignoring the underlying historical rationale. If recognising the destruction which globalised market forces and the governments behind them have historically wreaked (and in some ways continue to wreak) on people who have historically been subjected to colonialism makes me a ‘culture warrior’, then I make no apologies for being one. (I guess it also makes Skyclad and Anthrax ‘culture warriors’, so I’m in some good company there.)

Culture is not only product. It must refer instead to the shared values and norms, passed down from generation to generation, of a community. And it always makes reference to something outside itself; as Zhu Xi put it, culture (or ‘ritual’) is the representation of Heaven-imparted principles (『禮者，天理之節文也。』). Though certainly culture should imply what people are doing now, it is wise to distinguish between what people do that is psychologically and socially healthy for them, and what is unhealthy. Government control may not, in many cases, be the way to go about it. But then, neither is ignoring the systematic aggression inherent to a globalised, hegemonic and equally government-backed culture.

Rectification of names

Allow me a few moments to get this straight. A civilian scientist working on a project in the interests of the national security of his country is assassinated using a motorcycle bomb by an assailant who did not make himself or his political affiliation known beforehand. What would we call this if it were done within our borders? Terrorism, right? So why are our authorities not calling a spade a spade when it happens to another country, even if that country does not always see eye-to-eye (to say the very least) with us? And should we not be calling out the cheerleaders of such operations (and they are sadly not few) as giving aid and comfort to the terrorists responsible, whether they are part of Mossad or the Mojahedin-e Khalq?

Let’s be a little bit realistic for a moment. The United States will not always remain the world’s sole hegemon, and if we are going to manage our civilisation’s wane in status with anything resembling grace, we are going to have to pay some attention to the moral ground we occupy, because ultimately our nation’s virtue is the sole source of whatever ‘soft power’ we can effectively wield. This was Yan Xuetong’s view regarding China, if you will recall. Part of our behaving virtuously is condemning terrorism and murder of civilians not only when people we don’t like do it, but also when our allies do it. Otherwise, we only lend more moral ammunition to the likes of Iran’s leadership, and weaken our chances of building bridges on real issues of national security with powers such as Russia and China. The ghosts of Cold Wars past need not haunt either our present or our future… but they will, if we continue to behave in the way we are doing now, turning a blind eye to grievous injustices done to civilians of other nations, carried out by our allies.

Pointless video post - ‘We Drink Your Blood’ by Powerwolf

I was thinking of discussing the history and theology inherent to this song (exposing the insecurities and tensions of the mediaeval nobility between the pacifistic religion they espoused and the inherently violent position they occupied in society, and so forth), but immediately thought better of it when I realised that this is a freaking Powerwolf song. They don’t think through these things, why the heck should I look for anything deeper? Big, blunt, heavy, pounding anthemic German power metal with aesthetic Gothicism and Catholicism to spare in spades (particularly with all that choral and organ work) is what one can expect from Powerwolf, who have been largely a one-trick dog since day one; their newest release Blood of the Saints is absolutely no exception. And yet, just like a big, dumb, loyal puppy (even if that is a werewolf puppy) one simply can’t hate on them for doing what they do; I’m fond of these guys for the same reasons I like HammerFall and Turisas. They know what they want to play and they go right ahead and play it, in spite of all the ironic grins and chortles that they inevitably provoke with their over-the-top theatricality.

Enjoy!

A good reason to switch to Linux-box Samsungs?

In a recent report by Beijing-based NGO, the Institute for Environmental and Public Affairs, Apple ranks dead last on a watchdog survey of 29 global communications and IT companies on transparency on health and environmental issues (British Telecom, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung rate tops in transparency and addressing environmental problems linked to their suppliers; I was somewhat relieved to see that Lenovo wasn’t too far down the list). ‘But’, as Eric Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money put it (and thank you, Eric, for the links): ‘at least Apple workers in China are forced to sign pacts to not commit suicide’. Of course, this kind of poor performance on environmental and labour issues is not exactly a new story for Apple (here is the original Daily Telegraph article and op-ed), but it is one that requires much by way of retelling.

To me, the phenomenon of Apple fanboy-ism is a rather laughable one. Apple, partly on account of its top-down corporate structure, poor customer service, closed architecture, et cetera, lives and dies on its image; to be fair, they have projected that image masterfully. Even to the point of convincing its fans that everything they do must be above-board.

Subversive politics and the post-action movie

This post by John (and the Guardian op-ed to which it links) has been on my mind quite awhile, and it is very troubling to my mind as a fan of action movies that part of the culture I am supporting in such patronage is, to borrow the terminology of Methodist theologian Walter Wink, a myth of redemptive violence. Such a myth certainly colours very much of our popular culture, particularly in the wake of 11 September when it very effectively and conveniently simplified for popular consumption a complex problem in international relations which led to the suffering of thousands of innocents – now inflated to millions worldwide as a result of the shifts in our foreign policy (‘cryptofascist’, as it may very well be, or otherwise). America loves the vision of a black-and-white world in which problems are easily whisked away with a twirl of a pistol and a roguish grin, and the Hollywood action movie has traditionally been the way in which the average American could indulge this fantasy. This fantasy is something which I have been rightly trained since childhood (spent in a Radical Reformed community) to resist.

… And yet, in spite of all this, I still love action movies. And the action movies I love most all tend to go against the grain in some fairly fundamental ways: Peter Weir’s Witness. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (thank you, Andreas Modinos!). David Fincher’s Fight Club. Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers. Whether they subvert the action film’s fundamental premises, mythic elements or plot arc in order to explore nonviolent alternatives (as Witness does) or whether they deliberately crank the archetypal action plot arc up to 11 in order to poke fun at the pretensions of the genre (as all of Verhoeven’s action movies do), these – I suppose post-action movies is as good a term as any – are certainly worthy of a second and a third glance. Though they are still characterised by explosions and gunfire and special effects, they fulfill the same function vis-à-vis the Hollywood culture critiqued by Rick Moody that the Gospels did to Imperial Roman ‘evangelical’ literature, or that Shrek did vis-à-vis Disney and the traditional fairy-tale: a retelling of a mythic story which seeks to undermine the basic premises of the myth.

Witness is an incredibly powerful film (to which I was introduced by my parents) which explores the nature of violence in ways which it is very rare for a mainstream American movie to do. The hero John Book, played by Harrison Ford, is an investigator on a murder case in which the only witness is a young boy from an Amish community; ultimately, he is shot and forced to go into hiding in the very same community this boy comes from. Without giving away too much of the plot, one of the ironies of the movie is that the lifestyle of violence which has come as second nature to Book only serves to betray him to his enemies, and in the ending of the movie, the primary villain is shamed by Book before the Amish community into giving up his gun and answering for his crimes. Witness is still very much a cop thriller, but it is one which so adroitly handles its own thematic schema that it manages to present a worldview which is very much along Gandhian or Radical Reformed lines – itself a witness against the myth of redemptive violence in which Book (and, by extension, the audience) had been raised scripture and verse.

The Paul Verhoeven movies take exactly the opposite approach. Rather than subverting plot elements, they take these same elements (and the violence which inevitably accompanies them) to harlequin extremes to make their points. RoboCop is a prime example. Bookended by in-universe news reports and advertising for prosthetic hearts (‘And remember, we care!’) and family games such as ‘Nukem’, the primary fear of the film is that human beings themselves have become products; expendable commodities and replaceable cogs in a neoliberalised cyberpunk universe. The all-pervasive power in the movie, and all of its villains, are under the aegis of OCP (Omni Consumer Products), a defence contractor which has taken control of Detroit’s police force and plans to rebuild Detroit along high-modernist lines, allowing gangster Clarence Boddicker (played by Kurtwood Smith) first dibs in keeping the working class quiet and pliable with drugs, gambling and prostitution. This same Clarence Boddicker put to death Alex Murphy, a newbie cop whose remains and resemblance were used in the construction of the OCP’s prototype RoboCop, and whose memories remain in RoboCop’s programming only to resurface as ‘dreams’. The violence in the movie is so over-the-top that it becomes a form of black comedy in its own right, a parody of the very genre of which it is routinely held as an exemplar. The same is true of Starship Troopers, which takes the latent fascist elements of the novel it was based upon and turns them into the basic theme of the film.

Fight Club is something of a different beast entirely. It’s an action movie, but rather than being about explosions or even fistfights, it’s fundamentally about relationships instead. It may toy on occasion with political ideas, but always in ways which are psychological and painfully personal. It is a critique of capitalism and late modernity, and the ways it spells spiritual doom for the exploiting class as well as the exploited, but it goes out of its way to avoid presenting any kind of viable or desirable alternative, leaving the audience to ‘make up their own minds’ (cop-out? perhaps, but then this is also one). Violence is, very deliberately, the mythic escape (but, rather than being a solution to anything or being endowed with any salvific mythic qualities, it exists only for its own sake), and a form of authoritarian personality cult (Project Mayhem) the end result – but it’s one which is rejected by the narrator at the end.

The subversive currents in all of these movies do not, in themselves, add up to an effective countermyth to redemptive violence – but they do elevate these movies effortlessly above the mass of mindless garbage put out by the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, adding that extra edge that allows someone like me to provide an intellectual defence of the action movie, even if that defence is one which shows how the action movie genre has, at its best, ample room to parody and subvert itself.

I’m back

Returning to Pittsburgh from a voyage in the Middle Kingdom to meet my girlfriend’s friends and family, I finally can update my blog once more. I find myself exhausted, jetlagged and down with a horrific head cold, but nonetheless very much rested and at peace – much more so than last semester. The blog has undergone a name-change (to The Heavy Anglican) which has been a fairly long time in coming… though existentialism and neo-orthodoxy remain very much a part of my worldview, they’ve taken a backseat somewhat to my amateurish interest in matters of political economy, history, development policy, international relations and how those all relate to theology and religion. The thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Niebuhr and Barth certainly do touch on all of these (often quite closely), but I am finding that authorities from other traditions can bring insights which are just as interesting and enlightening, and several thinkers whom I have come to greatly admire (Johnson, Swift, Ruskin, Chesterton, Grant and the like) simply do not belong to the existentialist tradition, but rather share with it the common ancient Socratic-Platonic one.

Anyhow, much peace and good cheer for the Yuletide season to my gentle readers, and may we have a joyous Year of Our Lord two thousand twelve. It’s good to be back.