{"id":392,"date":"2009-03-11T19:20:18","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T02:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/?p=392"},"modified":"2009-08-01T00:55:36","modified_gmt":"2009-08-01T07:55:36","slug":"violently-non-violent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/11\/violently-non-violent\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left At Christian Universities, part 8: Violently Non-Violent"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a repost of an article done earlier in another context, but which seems to fit nicely into the series on The Left At Christian Universities.\u00a0 The previous post in the series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A few months ago, at a local Christian university, as I was entering a building to attend a conference on science and theology, I happened to notice a sign advertising the campus ROTC program, free tuition for going into the Army as an officer for a period of time following graduation.\u00a0 (ROTC is Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.)\u00a0 The ROTC sign was obviously at the entrance of the building, a major classroom building, so it would catch the eye of students who might be interested.<\/p>\n

I saw a young man whom I assumed to be a student, who picked up the sign and laid it down behind a trash can, out of view.\u00a0 I heard him say to a friend, as they entered, “That was non-violent, wasn’t it?”\u00a0 At the time, I was disinclined to say anything, thinking it was just a couple of students engaged in a prank, and because I was a bit late and in a hurry, I decided to restore the sign to its original location when I left the conference.<\/p>\n

When I got to the conference room, I saw that things hadn’t gotten started yet, and people were just chatting and waiting.\u00a0 Then I saw the young man who had hidden the ROTC sign.\u00a0 I admit to being slightly taken aback: one presumes that people who attend conferences on theology are people who seek to behave morally, and I could see no moral justification for moving the ROTC sign.<\/p>\n

So, before the conference got started, I walked up to him and said, “Are you the person who hid the ROTC sign?”\u00a0 He said he was, and repeated his “non-violent” line, and laughed, like he thought I would agree.\u00a0 I think he thought I was about to praise him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I said, “That’s actually a tacky thing to do.\u00a0 The sign is not yours.\u00a0 The property where it was displayed is not yours.\u00a0 The people who put the sign there had permission from the university, or it would not be there.\u00a0 So by hiding it, you essentially violated their rights, and the right of the university to make its own decisions, more or less a violent act, don’t you think?”\u00a0 He seemed taken aback (whether from embarrassed agreement, or simply the desire to avoid further conflict, I don’t know), and said he’d go back and replace it, which he did.<\/p>\n

As we left the conference, he said, “Peace, brother.”\u00a0 I said, “I have never wanted anything else, my friend.\u00a0 You, on the other hand, seem not to know the roots of the peace that you enjoy.”\u00a0 He looked at me like he’d never seen a green monkey, and walked away.<\/p>\n

I still thought the young man was a student, and a little later in the day I was describing the interchange to a colleague of mine.\u00a0 The young man was still around, participating in the conference, and when I subtly gestured to point him out to my colleague, he said, “That’s our new professor of religion,” and told me about the young professor’s scholarly background, his particular areas of academic interest, and the fact that he came from “an anabaptist orientation”, which includes a large pacifist strain.\u00a0 My friend named the exact denomination, but that is not the point here.\u00a0 My friend was trying to explain why the young professor would behave in this way, by situating him in his tradition of “non-violence”.<\/p>\n

I asked, “Why would he vandalize or steal another’s property, if he is claiming to be non-violent?”<\/p>\n

My friend, who has some sympathy with the non-violence perspective, said, “He probably thinks of it as a protest.”<\/p>\n

I said, “That’s fine.\u00a0 Protest away.\u00a0 But if you’re going to protest, you have to put a name and face on it.\u00a0 You have to be willing to face the people against whom you’re protesting.\u00a0 You have to say WHY you’re protesting, and connect your protest to a larger set of values that you think are superior to the ones you’re protesting against.”<\/p>\n

My colleague just laughed, because I have a bit of a reputation for being, shall we say, less than perfectly temperate in expressing myself.\u00a0 And yet.<\/p>\n

Here is the problem: as a society we have a lot of people who benefit from the price paid by OTHER people for the stability and peace that we enjoy.\u00a0 These people are too morally upright to soil their own hands, but lack the courage to really live in the way that a full commitment to their stated values would demand.\u00a0 They benefit from police, and the existence of prisons.\u00a0 They benefit from the enforcement of contracts (ANY government enforcement of ANY law carries the implicit threat of violence for non-compliance, at some point in the legal chain).\u00a0 They live in a society where the FEAR of law enforcement causes some people to behave better than they might otherwise.\u00a0 They live in a nation where the armed forces have repeatedly defended both our nation and the freedom of other nations, at various times and places, and again, they benefit from it.\u00a0 They travel to Germany for academic conferences whose main focus is to criticize the USA, all the while ignoring the fact that Germany might still be a totalitarian regime if not for USA military power and determination.<\/p>\n

In short, they benefit from that which they claim to hate, and do not refuse those benefits by going elsewhere, and living otherwise.\u00a0 They do not refuse to accept the tainted government money that underwrites at least a part of their income, even in private institutions, in the form of student loans and other financial aid.<\/p>\n

They remind me of non-slave owning southerners in 1850 buying cheap cotton picked by slaves, while feeling quite morally upright in their own personal lack of slaves.<\/p>\n

With one significant difference, of course:\u00a0 slavery was clearly a great wrong, but it is by no means clear that all violence is unjust or unnecessary or immoral.\u00a0 However, for those who believe that it is, how can they reconcile receiving a benefit from the very violence (or potential violence) they decry?<\/p>\n

The Amish came to a very moral solution to this, at least moral by their own lights.\u00a0 They simply withdrew, and did their best NOT to benefit from what they perceived as the evil of the larger society.<\/p>\n

But the modern “pacifist” academic Left, whether “Christian” or not, reserves the right to reap great benefit from the violence done by others in their name, all the while bitterly criticizing it (and sometimes in a cowardly fashion, as we have seen).\u00a0 Interestingly, the modern academic non-violent sort usually also believes in high taxes imposed on the rich to pay for social welfare of all kinds.\u00a0 And if the rich don’t want to pay, there are limits to non-violence, of course, as long as we don’t have to personally witness the US Marshall who arrests the income tax cheat (and God help him if he resists arrest).<\/p>\n

My favorite bit is when the non-violence types physically and verbally disrupt speakers from the Right.\u00a0 Sadly, most of these people voted for Obama, who may want to hurry up and lose in Iraq (which won’t help the Iraqi people live a less violent existence), but who also plans to invade Pakistan if Al Qaeda is hiding out there.\u00a0 (Al Qaeda is probably hiding in plain sight in Chicago, too…\u00a0 but that’s another story.)<\/p>\n

The next post in this series is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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