Violence as Virtue?
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My first month attending the boarding school on the prairie, I found myself the subject of a kind of commonplace boys’ school bullying. One night, during our forty-five minute break before lights’ out, I heard a knock on my door and when I answered it, received a massive dose of water spit-squirted from someone’s mouth at my face and chest as “a joke”. For a second, before humiliation registered in my mind, I stood frozen in the doorway. This gave the perpetrator enough time to start dashing, laughing, back to his dorm room.
Without thought, I sprang after him, enraged. Although I had always been the kid who preferred to sit in the clover field with the bees rather than enter the rough-and-tumble of the fights on the playground, I was a sprinter. I quickly caught up to him, getting my foot in his doorway as he attempted to slam the door shut on me. He swiftly retreated, jumping up on his bed where I grabbed him around the throat with my left hand, pressing his head against the cinderblock wall. I drew my right hand into a merciless fist. I pulled my arm back, envisioning the bloody jaw, the oozing eyeball, and the fractured nose as my fist moved with fury to pound this little shit’s head between the bones of my knuckles, backed up with the full thrust of my arm, against the unyieldingly hard, concrete wall.
“It’s a fight!” came the excited cry from someone in the crowd that had poured into his bedroom behind me, eager to witness some action. The words floated to me as if I were underwater. The hot rage swiftly drained from my blood. I was suddenly quite coldly rational and alert. Everything moved in slow motion. “Fight! Fight!” came the chant of the crowd. The asshole whom I was poised to murder stared at my intent and scowling face. This was not what he was expecting. I could see fear in his wide open eyes as I calculated how to land the most forceful, bone-shattering punch I had ever attempted, desiring to crush fragments of his eye socket and skull into his brain without remorse.
“Fight!” As the word pierced my ear, I realized I was about to throw away my academic future. I suddenly glimpsed a flashing calculation of loss — loss of scholarship, loss of the opportunity for a better education, loss of my parents’ faith in me. I knew the school would not care if the attack was provoked. I was a scholarship boy, not a wealthy donor’s son. I would be expelled. If I seriously injured this little shit, I would be seriously injuring myself. I needed to pull back from the violence in my hands.
I brusquely slapped his skull against the wall with my hand firmly gripped around his throat. I wanted to make sure he knew I was in control of his fate, then I pointedly dropped my fist and shoved my way angrily out of the room, out of the dorm, and up to the chapel on the hill. I sat behind the chapel and wept, wondering what was going to become of me. I had threatened an act of violence, even if I had done no injury. All my contemplation of Tolstoy’s exhortations to take the mandates in the Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount literally (“turn the other cheek, do not avenge oneself, do not repay evil with evil, pray for those who persecute you…”) — all this rushed into my heart. In my rage I had been prepared to kill, to murder him in that moment. What if he pulled a similar stunt again? Would I relent and do whatever damage I could to him? I stared at the distant and twinkling stars. I knew God was there, was in those stars and in the night air around me. I dried my tears and released my fate to God. I returned to my dorm, which was now silent under lights’ out. No one but my roommate saw me return. He said nothing.
No report was made. I was never physically harassed again. My threat of retaliatory violence had established a protective aura of safety around me. The Jeffersonian declaration, “Enemies in War, in Peace Friends” had been made loud and clear. The threat of violence led to security, despite my ideological preference for pacifism.
Anecdotal evidence: my threat of violence worked. Why? Perhaps because my retaliation was quite specifically targeted. Maybe because among my dorm-mates, I was indisputably an innocent victim of the initial aggression. Or because I was in a cultural setting that expected such challenges. Possibly because my retaliation was limited but the warning of no second chance (no mercy in the future) was clearly implied. Maybe because I established myself as honorable in other ways. It could be because my oppressor was somewhat rational and did not pursue further harassment. Maybe because the challenge was more individual than structural (I was not targeted due to race, for example). Maybe because the media environment (dormitory gossip) was able to accurately and effectively relay the story which made clear my justifications for violence (the spitting provocation). Maybe because the sense of Jeffersonian justice (the right of the people to alter or abolish an oppressive government) was acknowledged by the wider community.
Jefferson’s Declaration, July 4, 1776, made it quite clear that the colonists would use retaliatory violence. The colonists had already committed acts of violence against the British by that point, including a year and a half earlier when, on December 16, 1773, a group of colonists dressed as Indians engaged in a rather costly act of property destruction. Even MLK gave a semi-approving nod to the property destruction of the Boston Tea Party when he wrote in the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.” King did not openly advocate property destruction, but in this passage, his opposition to it is certainly muted.
Without doubt Martin Luther King Jr. would have opposed the revolutionary warfare (and killing) that Jefferson approved of in the Declaration (though Jefferson portrayed violence as being forced upon the colonists). King’s opposition to warfare was about much more than simple opposition to violence per se. Warfare inevitably involves demonization of the enemy, civilian casualties, channelling moneys that otherwise might go to helping the poor and oppressed, etc. all of which MLK staunchly opposed. As the 1960s moved on, King found himself more and more in opposition to the Viet Nam War (a position which alienated even some of his earlier civil rights followers, to say nothing of bringing the ire of the national government upon him). In an ecological model of transformative change, is there a place for defensive violence and retaliation? What of property destruction?
What about chaining yourself to a block in the middle of a highway, or to a tree slated to be cut? What about sugar poured in the gas tanks of bulldozers about to destroy a creek? What about deflating the tires of gas-guzzling cars in rich neighborhoods (with warning notes left for their drivers)?[1] What about smashing bank windows to an institution that makes loans to deforesters? What about shutting down an oil pipeline? What about kidnapping and executing an oil company executive? What about setting fire to a community which is dedicated to strip-mining? What about poisoning the water supply of an entire city that consumes resources ravenously?
A succinct objection to retaliatory violence is summed up in the quote attributed to Mohandas Gandhi (or Canadian Parliamentarian George Perry Graham), “An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” But how would such a policy play out in a conflict over polluting? Moreso, can violence be carefully limited to corporate (or state) property destruction and not violence against living beings, works of art, or against people’s personal homes or possessions? I know from my own losses, and from witnessing the losses of others in mudslides and fires that personal “property” is more than just “stuff”. For those of us lucky enough to have property, possessions can have great meaning to the point that they are a part of ourselves. But a corporate pipeline or a public bridge is not the same as a locket with family photos or your grandmother’s hand-crafted quilt, or a copy of the Tanakh brought from the shetl by ancestors who escaped the Holocaust.
Can violence and destruction be put to ethically good use? Are there meaningful differences between violence against living beings and inanimate objects? Between destruction of the human and of the non-human? Between physical and psychological violence? Between the destruction of the public versus of the private? Between personal property and corporate investments? Is there “good” versus “bad” violence?[2]
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In the 16th century Chinese Buddhist classic adventure novel, Journey to the West (or Monkey), the main character, the Monkey of the Mind, is in charge of leading a pacifist monk, Tripitaka, across the western wilds to India in search of scriptures. In chapter 14, Monkey, the monk, and their motley crew are accosted by a group of demon bandits who declare their identities as, “One of us is named Eye that Sees and Delights; another, Ear that Hears and Rages; another, Nose that Smells and Loves; another, Tongue that Tastes and Desires; another, Mind that Perceives and Covets; and another, Body that Bears and Suffers.” Taking his mission to protect the monk seriously, Monkey immediately springs into action and beats them all into meat-patties. He returns, proudly, to Tripitaka who, instead of praising him for his swift action and thanking him for saving his life, immediately berates him for having taken life (which is against Buddhist teaching). Monkey is furious with this reprimand and stomps off, abandoning the quest altogether.
The passage bursts with paradoxes. Had Monkey allowed the demon-bandits to attack the party on their quest, they would never have made it across the mountains to obtain the holy scriptures. Instead, they would have been sidetracked and then slaughtered by the Senses, aborting their spiritual goal. One goal in Buddhist practice is to move beyond the senses and not be seduced by them, thus Monkey is dutifully carrying out a proper Buddhist practice in slaying the senses. On the other hand, respect for life, even if it is that of an evil creature, is an essential ethical principle of Buddhist teaching. By destroying the Senses through violence, Monkey has violated one of the most sacred tenets of Buddhism. Which character is right? Monkey, to forcefully crush the skulls of the demonic Senses? Or Tripitaka, the monk who demands non-violence?
Journey to the West is not so didactic as to spell out an answer to that question, but as their adventure continues, Monkey learns to restrain himself from raging violence (even if its end goal may seem righteous), and the monk learns to accept the violence against demonic forces carried out for the greater good. Perhaps the answer to the question about tactics resides in the ecological model: both are necessary. No biosystem can be sustained comprised of only violent carnivores, nor can a complex, diverse, and resilient system be made of purely non-violent herbivores. Both may be necessary at certain times.
Whatever techniques we adopt, we must keep in mind that the principles of action must accord with the goals of the action: vitality, diversity, and sustainability. If they do not accord, the actors become rightfully open to the charge of hypocrisy or idiocy. Wholesale mass-suicide/sacrifice for a noble cause is not sustainable. Assassinations or murder do not promote vitality.
I am currently personally unwilling to take the steps to engage in property destruction. But I have come to see that, in the face of the ever-increasing violent environmental destruction wrought by the fossil fuel corporations’ actions (abetted by governments and their militaries), the loss to life and ecosystems through heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, flooding, and fires is growing ever greater. Though I may not be willing to fight fire with fire, just as Tripitaka is unwilling to use violence, perhaps I can embrace others’ roles as predators who cull the parasitically infected from the herd, provided that it is still within the ethical guidelines of vitality, diversity, and sustainability. Perhaps I should be willing to openly condone the carefully considered, targeted destruction of corporate and state property when the ultimate goal is incontrovertibly to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[1] Andreas Malm’s challenging consideration of the usefulness of property destruction and sabotage in the fight against global climate destabilization is superbly instructive. His How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021, published by Verso) will not tell you how to blow up a pipeline but it will raise worthwhile critiques of pacifism, present short histories of activism, and, along the way, provide anecdotes about climate-related actions, such as the car-tire deflation I have referenced from pp. 79–84.
[2] For the cycle of increasing frustration and violence, see Hillary Beaumont, “The activists sabotaging railways in solidarity with Indigenous people”. July 29, 2021. The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/29/activists-sabotaging-railways-indigenous-people
