Of War and Peace

As I watch my Unitarian Universalist denomination lurch toward a possible reincarnation as a “peace church,” I find myself thinking many thoughts.

As a UU Buddhist, I am strongly inclined to a pacifist perspective.

As a rationalist, I have a hard time actually being one.

It’s like vegetarianism for me. I find it a persuasive philosophy. At least in it’s more moderate forms. But I’m also achingly aware of my biology. My desire for meat comes honestly with my humanity. My teeth bare witness to my ability to eat just about anything, but very much are designed to tear meat. And the way my eyes set in my skull bare witness to the fact I come from a long, long line of predators. Let me rephrase that, we come from a long line of predators.

The best argument for vegetarianism is that it is an ethical stance. It goes to some degree against our nature, but it does so as witness to, as some-time Unitarian Charles Dickens so eloquently put it, “our better angels.” It is bearing witness to possibility.

So, too, there is war, and there is witnessing against it.

We are pack animals. And we are by nature violent. And moving from the abstract, I believe in self-defense.

Today there is a struggle going on that has no good name. The sobriquet given by the Bush administration “War on Terror,” is a factual misstatement. Terror is a method not a goal. I do think that phrase “War of Civilizations” has some truth to it. But I find it more in the sense of that quote attributed to Karl Marx (not a Unitarian at anytime), “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” We are in the farce stage, I fear. But a deadly stage, nonetheless. There are people who want to kill us, you dear reader, and me – because we’re Americans or Canadians or Europeans, or any of those cultures that carry the mark of contemporary Western secular civilization. They want to kill us and replace what we have with a fundamentalist theocracy.

Now it happens to be Muslim.

(I’m terribly aware that our own homegrown Christian fundamentalists have very similar feelings and given a slightly different mix of circumstances I could imagine a True Rock of Faith Fundamental Christian Church telling its young men to die killing atheist homosexual Hollywood heretics has the blessing of our Savior himself complete with some highly edited quotations from scripture guaranteeing a favored place in Heaven.)

But the fact on the ground is the violence facing us from people who are not interested in a dialogue or some form of compromise. They want a fundamentalist Caliphate that straddles the world.

I think the debacle in Iraq not only should bring the judgment of history down on George W Bush, if there were justice, he would not only be impeached but imprisoned for what he has done. I believe this because he ignored the real dangers facing the nation and instead frothed up a fantasy about the dangers in Iraq fed in what seems to be equal parts by neo conservative “democratic” imperialism, a desire to control oil and some sense he should finish the job his dad pulled short of, killing Saddam Hussein. Well, it looks like he’ll get the last of those…

But 9/11 was a marker that this war of civilization, farce or not, has come home. And even though the President of the United States bungled his response, a response continues to be called for.

And, again, I feel people have a right to defend themselves.

Against that background there are the pacifist arguments. These are also countercultural statements, assertions of hope for human dignity in the face of the worst. They often point out the laws of unintended consequences perhaps always sully even the most nobly conceived wars. And for the most part the only payoff is blood poured upon blood.

I’ve just begun reading a little book by Pema Chodron. I’m a big fan of hers. She’s a Buddhist nun who has written a number of very practical books on how to deal with various things we encounter in our lives. This one is called Practicing Peace in Times of War.

It has some good advice. But I also feel it shows up some of the problems of an unreconstructed commitment to pacifism. First, not directly a criticism of the thrust of her argument, but a serious problem for addressing our current situation, Pema terribly mangles the term fundamentalism. She defines it as being “very self-righteous about our personal point of view.” While the warning about self-righteousness is true and important, this is not what fundamentalism means. Fundamentalism is a world view that rejects modernity in favor of a golden age in the past which should be reclaimed. It appears to happen in most every religion. It is dangerous when it is joined with guns.

And a reasonable and loving encounter with fundamentalism is often fatal to the reasoned and loving.

Setting this concern about what fundamentalism is aside and considering the main points Pema Chodron is suggesting, she correctly points out that anyone who lives in anger and self-righteousness and self-absorbtion is already caught in the jaws of continuous suffering. I fear to go to war is inevitably to be caught in the jaws of these demons. They simply come with the emotions necessary to wage war. To enter such conflict is to lose no matter what other consequences there may be. Now, I haven’t proceeded very far in her book and I’ll give a fuller reflection on it when I’m done.

However we make our personal commitments to peace, to wittnessing a better way, to transforming ourselves into instruments of authentic peace; still, then, sometimes, people with guns come anyway. And if we aren’t worried for ourselves, what about our spouses, our mothers, our children?

Then what?

Of course, there is that long view which I find very important, and is something which Pema seems to point. (Although I’m not sure yet.) That is given a little time, we’re all dead. Given the complexity of our short lives, our deeply interwoven destinies as fragile inhabitants of a very small planet, itself fragile; perhaps the main question is how do we choose to live within those constraints? And there the circle closes and we’re back to ethical choices…

So my denomination struggles with this, hearts torn.

And so do I.