So for those who can’t access the original post on the more restricted thread, there are three major strands or influences in my personal commitment to nonviolence:
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Jesus. I think the peace church tradition, as represented by recent thinkers like Yoder and Hauerwas, is right in seeing nonviolence as a core aspect of the Way of Christ. It’s not just a matter of Jesus’s explicit teaching (turn the other cheek, love your enemy) but an implication of the narrative heart of the gospels: Jesus’s crucifixion, his triumph over the Powers by accepting his unjust execution rather than mustering his own powers to fight back. As a lifelong evangelical Christian, I’m committed to following this uncomfortable and dangerous example (and rejecting the plentiful examples of Christianities that have chased power and security through violence).
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Levinas. I can’t claim a deep understanding of his work – I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to philosophy – but since I first encountered it I’ve been drawn to the idea of an ethic whose starting point is not rules or propositions but the experience of face-to-face encounter with another vulnerable human being. I think Levinas is right that if we dare to really let ourselves feel the ethical demand embedded in such a moment, we’ll find that it’s unconditional and infinite, a reality of which the Golden Rule in all its forms is a partial and inadequate articulation. Most ethical discourse, I fear, loses sight of that. It’s too eager to start from what someone else might reasonably demand of us and doesn’t stay alert to challenges beyond our self-protective limitations; it takes as axiomatic that the ethical way must always be possible, and doesn’t let itself be shaken and dissatisfied by impossibilities. Such an ethics, I think, is impoverished and too easily accommodates itself to unjust social structures. It’s important for us to grapple with what’s possible and reasonable, of course – an essential part of ethics – but if we make it the whole project, we’ll end up closing our ears to people in suffering in a way I find deeply unethical.
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Popovic. (I’ve talked about Erika Chenoweth’s academic work a lot, because she musters a strong comparative case drawing on hundreds of examples, but Srdja Popovic and Otpor are the ones who actually exemplify how to make this work against a genocidal dictatorship.) This is the practical rather than moral case for nonviolent resistance. Do it because it’s more likely to bring down an unjust regime or change an unjust law than a violent revolution is. Do it because tens of thousands of people withholding their cooperation in strategic ways is more damaging to a regime than a few thousand people taking up arms against it.
These are three distinct approaches, at tension with each other in several points, and you could accept one without being committed to either of the others. I’ve been open about my attraction to all three, but Popovic would be the first to insist that you can adopt nonviolence as a tactic without the kind of radical moral views of a MLK (taken from Jesus) or Gandhi (drawing on equally sweeping and deep-rooted values of ahimsa). The approach Popovic exemplifies is practical and empirically grounded rather than fundamentally values-based.
Some critics of nonviolence write as if identifying any situation where violence is necessary disproves the whole approach. While this might perhaps be problematic for the ethics of Jesus, Gandhi, or Levinas, it certainly doesn’t apply to the tactical nonviolence of Popovic. Let’s accept for the sake of argument that violent self-defense is the only tolerable option in a Nazi-style exterminatory genocide. That’s irrelevant to Popovic’s (or Chenoweth’s) claim that most resistance movements against dictators would be better served by adopting nonviolent tactics.
Nonviolent resistance has worked in states where a majority of the population started off supportive of the unjust regime. It has worked in states with a pervasive ideology. It has worked in occupations, where an invader population governs a defeated population. It has worked in states that ruthlessly assassinated the leader of the nonviolent resistance, states that killed thousands of dissidents, states that were willing to resort to genocide.
It’s not guaranteed to work in any case, but of course nor is violent resistance – and regime type or ruthlessness don’t seem too high on the list of factors that explain why nonviolence succeeds or fails. A lot has to do with the strategic choices of the resistance (happily for an author wanting to write a game focused on said choices). The ICNC FAQ captures a lot of good thought on this topic in relatively condensed form.
You might want to revisit your wording here. Killing the enemy before they harm you may not be justified, but most people would say that “killing the enemy before they kill you” is – that’s practically the definition of self-defense. And I don’t know of any pacifists who think that “killing yourself before the enemy kills you” is a good idea. A consistent refusal to respond with violence results in, at worst, the enemy catching and killing you while you’re trying to bring them down by nonviolent means – not in some kind of proactive suicide.
I agree that we shouldn’t take an overly idealized view of non-state arrangements or the coercion that they can entail. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that the state’s institutionalization of violence was originally for elite extractive purposes rather than any sort of general protection. Through liberal techniques and institutions, we’ve adapted the state to increase most citizens’ protection from some kinds of violence while keeping ourselves permanently subject to violence from state institutions. It’s possible that all in all, the liberal state is the ideal harm-minimizing solution for humanity, with only incremental progress possible in further reducing violence… but that feels a little too end-of-history for me to swallow it easily!
There have been Christianities that suggested that true nonviolence was an option only for a monastic or priestly elite – but that’s not at all what I’m suggesting. All of Jesus’s teaching applies to all his followers; none of it is for an elite. Turning the other cheek is hard, no doubt, and not everyone will live up to it, any more than everyone will live up to Jesus’s teaching about anger, generosity, forgiveness, or total dependency on God as loving parent. But to anyone who thought keeping his moral teaching had made them into “morally superior priests,” I reckon Jesus would have a parable to share.
I do ultimately think that the radical nonviolence of Jesus only really makes sense within a bigger theological framework. Like much of the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, it’s offered as a way of life for those willing to trust that the love of the Father is greater than the worst the world has to throw at you. It’s not a purely philosophical ethic that aims to make sense independent of other aspects of your worldview. To that extent, I don’t expect non-Christians to accept “love your enemies” as an overriding ethical principle – though as Levinas and Gandhi show, you don’t have to be a Christian to arrive at a similar endpoint by a different road.
It may well be possible, but this is a terrible example. The Soviet attempt to resolve the factional crackup of its Afghan client government by killing Amin wasn’t a quick and minimally bloody “decapitation”. It solved nothing, just drew the Soviets in further, and ultimately led to the massive-scale bloodletting that hasn’t stopped even today.
To close, let me offer a word of reassurance to anyone worried that XoR is going to turn into a screed for my eccentric views. The world is a complicated place where the most important things can’t be proven and we have to commit ourselves with the knowledge that we might be wrong (if we’ve not blinded ourselves with certainty-promising ideologies, anyway). My bedrock conviction is that just about everything people believe, they believe for at least a decent (and often good) reason, and I’d like to do justice to those reasons as best I can, even the ones that I’ve not been swayed by at the end of the day.
So yes, there will be
as well as more restrained but consistent violence. XoR will if I succeed include a plausible counter-story to the widely shared idea that nonviolent resistance could never bring down an evil empire; but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to offer the story of bringing it down violently, that nonviolence will be without its tradeoffs and downsides, or that any pathway through the story will be boring or light on event. (Hopefully! I’ll do my best.)