On Political Violence

What is your personal Metaphysics of Violence or Nonviolence?

It may be an opportune time to determine what your actual opinions are on the moral status of violence. 

As Biden asserted in his oval office address regarding the assassination attempt on Trump: “There's no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence, ever.”

But many have observed the irony of this statement, in the midst of current geopolitical and social conflicts. Even if there's no place for this kind of violence — violence against prominent political figures with the protection of the state —there is clearly a place for other kinds of violence.

The very same leaders issuing these condemnations continue to condone and fund the genocide in Gaza, while violently suppressing protests here in the U.S.; in fact the very apparatus of government as we know it implicitly considers various modes of violent coercion essential to its operations. We are used to the idea that the state is allowed to inflict violence. But condemning certain forms of it as “political violence”, while it may make sense as an intuitive rhetorical gesture, and even be welcome in diminishing conflict, remains contradictory and inadequately defined.

What are your thoughts on violence? 

On my feeds at least — which granted can be both indicative and deceptive at once — there are many expressions of revolutionary energy, on both the right and the left. I see people whom I’ve always assumed to espouse an implicit nonviolent philosophy intimating that they’d be willing to condone revolutionary violence in certain contexts. The extremity of global injustice, or perhaps the bombarding nature of our encounter with it in virtual spaces, is disturbing the implicitly pacifist assumptions of my own culture group — though perhaps these assumptions were always only my own.

For hen I ask myself this question about violence — when I consider the prospect of any kind of violent revolution — my knee-jerk response is that in spite of the incalculable injustices of our present form of social and economic order, I oppose violence categorically. I oppose violence against human beings.

But it's worthwhile to look deeper and ask myself — why? Is this just an expression of my inset assumptions? My cowardice? My centrism? My privilege as a white, middle-class-raised male who’s never had to face significant violent threats to his own survival?, etc.

It's very easy to hold certain values that you've never actually examined. And by examining these values, we can come into more coherence in our dialogue with one another. Moments of upheaval are also moments of opportunity, when the destabilization of our circumstances occasions a reexamination of our values — an opportunity either to close the gap between our deepest values and our present actions, or to discover what we’ve always truly believed in the first place without knowing it.

The word violence comes from the Latin violentia, which is in turn from the noun vis, meaning “force” or “power”. It was essentially used in much the same way we use it in English — in the sense of using physical force against someone, or “violating” someone or something in the more abstract sense, like violating something sacred in the context of religion, or violating sensibilities, causing outrage or shock.

Despite this overlap of meaning, the Roman state, both as a Republic and in the Imperial period, had a somewhat different attitude to violence than that which is being espoused by our current political leaders. Violence was explicitly and implicitly used to establish and maintain social order. It was a show of power and even a form of entertainment, as in the gladiatorial competitions.

Roman institutions were deeply influential in shaping our current political structures here in the U.S. Nonetheless, our present iteration of empire is one whose political rhetoric is also shaped by a philosophy of nonviolence, one that is substantially derived from Christianity. The gladiatorial games did not die out in Rome until they were banned in the 4th century by the Emperor Constantine — and that entailed a new value system that categorically rejected violence, offering a vision of radical nonviolence as an emphatic, if perhaps unattainable ideal.

Nonviolence is central to the Christian message, and its injunctions to that effect dwell at the root of the cultural consciousness of the civilizations its shaped, even if those civilizations have failed or declined to follow them. Blessed are the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). You've heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I say if anyone slaps you on the cheek, turn the other cheek also (Matthew 5:38).

For as the whole history of so called Christian civilization indicates, this Christian value of nonviolence is often suppressed. Even philosophers relatively early in the Christian tradition, such as Saint Augustine, developed conceptions of “Just War” — that in certain situations, physical violence is, in fact, condonable and still conformable to Christ's message. This contrasts with various theorists of the Early Church, like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Tertullian and others, who took Christ’s injunction against violence more literally, and advocated an accordant Christian withdrawal from the circumstances of political life where war and “political violence” were bound to occur.

This notion of just uses of violence, even within Christian civilization, shows up in other places across the Western philosophical tradition. Various philosophers across that tradition develop theories of sovereign violence, those exceptional cases whereby it's appropriate for the persons in charge of the state to employ violence on the people within the state or in other states in order to maintain overall wellbeing.

Thomas Hobbes, for instance, felt that the foundation of the state in the first place was the fear of violence — and so the sovereign of the state, the agent in charge of its maintenance, is justified in using violence to maintain its relative stability. The justification of violence is the fear of even more violence.

In the 20th century, the German philosopher (and Nazi) Carl Schmitt, originated the concept of the state of emergency, or state of exception — that situation where, because of certain pressing dangers, the state is allowed to break its own laws in the name of enforcing its ultimate stability, which allows for state violence in the name of the public good.

I mention all of these things just to account for the fact that we've allowed for a system where certain contradictions are able to exist. On the basis of our collective antipathy to violence, we allow certain forms of violence to occur, and our leaders condemn certain forms of violence while at the same time promulgating it.

Is a state of nonviolence actually possible? Is a life of nonviolence actually possible? 

Or is there something caked into the very nature of existence, that involves damaging or injurious force imposed by one being onto another being? Do I do violence to the world simply by being, with every blade of grass that my foot presses upon, with every little bite of salad that I take?

Considerations of this kind, moving from political violence to violence in a more general sense, involve us in metaphysical considerations. And because of the upheaval of current conditions, it's also a good time to revisit some of these fundamental orientations to the nature of reality itself. By “metaphysics” I don’t necessarily mean mystical arcana or spiritualistic speculations; rather I mean the ultimate principles of reality itself, such as we can apprehend and discuss them. For just as we’re in a moment of geopolitical flux, we are also, relatedly, in an era of value-transformation and paradigm shift in this philosophical sense. The metaphysical materialist mechanism of Eurocentric modernity — the notion that everything is just matter operating according to mechanical forces, with no demonstrable “spiritual” element, is beginning to give way to something new and as yet undefined, both in popular culture and in philosophy and the sciences themselves.

Hence, what are the consequences of different outlooks on the nature of reality, for your ethical attitudes to violence?

For instance, if you hold ultimately that everything is one — we're all part of one cosmic unity — then what difference does it make if one part of the cosmic whole does violence to another part of the cosmic whole? Maybe you could make the argument that you're actually doing the whole some good, by being the part that you are and causing violence to another part (like Hobbes’ sovereign, serving the state by being willing to violently subdue disorderly parts of it).

A radical monism can make room for violence if it's part and parcel of the so-called order of things. For instance, going back to the Roman world again, Stoicism, which was very popular in that context, emphasized the unity of the cosmos, whose metaphysical starting point is this very assertion that we're all part of one cosmic body.

On a personal level, Stoic philosophers tended to advocate a kind of transcendence of violent impulses in their own lives, not to give in to anger or wrath or to seek revenge by dealing somebody violent injury. Nevertheless, that system of cosmic order, that metaphysics, still ultimately condoned the use of violence, particularly on the part of the state, to maintain the order of things in its proper way. For instance, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’ beloved book, Meditations, that perennial bestseller that I and others get so much inspiration from, was in fact written while he was at war with German and Sarmatian barbarians at the edges of the empire — writing journal entries about spiritual tranquility and peace while literally killing people.

This brings to mind, again, the paradox of condemning political violence as a modern politician while you condone it and fund it in other contexts.

Christian metaphysics, on the other hand, posits that there's more than just one cosmic body, at least in most of its formulations. There is an actual reality to the separateness of creator and creation. There's a reality to the separateness of me and you. There's God and the human, and there's one human and another human. And so it's an ethics of recognizing and honoring the Other, even considering the other as equal with oneself, insofar as the Other can be recognized as such.

This is, in fact, my own value system. It's ultimately grounded in a faith, and in things that are unprovable — but it's also an intuition about my encounter with other beings that I recognize as sentient. On the basis of the mystery of that encounter, the interruption in constitutes in the flow of my subjectivity, I seek (in theory) to recognize the other and to honor them, to serve the other as coequal with myself.

In the process of being a human being, I do end up doing violence to non-human beings. I am a vegetarian, but I slay and devour vegetables with willingness.  I recognize the otherness of these nonhuman beings, but I don't consider them as localized, concrete centers of experience in such a way that violating them as a discrete other in ending their life as a lettuce plant or whatever is, in fact, a violation of that value system.

But I do hold that that which I can recognize as a person demands my moral responsibility and moral recognition. And so, such as I’m capable of articulating it to myself, it is on that basis that I categorically oppose violence — such that if we end up getting into some kind of civil conflict, even if there's a clear “side of justice”, and even if a party or a system, “deserves it” retributively, I oppose that violence as well. That is my as yet mostly untested pacifism, and those are its reasons.

I recognize there are holes in these arguments, and perhaps even glaring exceptions in my own lattice of values — there are many ambiguities in the business of being. The philosophy of non-violence is broad and diverse, and encompasses many traditions, and here I have only grazed its surface. I could just as easily draw on other such conceptual frameworks, e.g. ahimsa in Hindu and Buddhist thought, or many other traditions.

But the point I’m making here is that the sociopolitical conflicts we now face, precisely insofar as they reveal contradictions in the implicit value structures of our society, offer us opportunities to reexamine our own values as individuals and in the collectives to which we belong.

If you oppose violence, what is your metaphysics of nonviolence? What are the exceptions to your opposition? Or do you think violence does indeed have a place? I ask this because it may indeed be the case that we will face situations, those of us who haven’t already, where the question of the Sacredness and Inviolability of the Recognizable Other, the commitment to nonviolence implicit in this Christian-but-secular-but-also-postsecular paradigm, becomes a real and not just theoretical thing for us to confront.

Perhaps these were some of the confrontations going through Thomas Matthew Crooks’ head when he resolved to shoot Donald Trump. Consider how different a path of action he took than Aaron Bushnell, of whom I’ve written elsewhere, whose self-immolation in protest of the U.S. involvement in Israel’s invasion of Gaza is an instance of violence to one’s self in ostensible service to the larger whole. What are the respective value systems that underlie these radical acts?

Biden says we need to “cool down” the rhetoric. This may be true and helfpul in a sense — to usher in a rhetoric of love, that assumes the mutual recognition of the other in the discourse — the recognition of a fellow being that deserves honor and respect. 

But I think we also need to deepen the rhetoric — to go down to the roots of our value systems, to assess what we’re really about, rather than making assumptions about what our values are, and then not even acting on them — as when politicians condemn violence one day even while they perpetuate it the next. 

Think, act, be loving and be safe.