Peace

I have moved to Greece to be with Penelope.

We watched a Franco-Algerian movie the night before last about the assassination of the Greek politician Labrakis who offered resistance to the junta. It was called "Z" and was filmed 40 years ago. In addition to reinforcing my conviction as to the general indecency of social configuration in the modern state in all its forms, the movie deeply impressed me with its ethical depiction of violence. The state's goons are neither glorified nor caricatured. More to the point, the episodes of violence themselves elicit deep discomfort. They are chaotic, graceless, and above all aesthetically ugly. Violence is not offered as a currency to be conquered, hoarded and dispensed by the victor, but rather as a dehumanized and dehumanizing course of action that tars all who consent to become involved with it. There was none of the typically American, aestheticized and choreographed appeal to the violence. Nor--which is particularly significant--was there any trace of longing for counterviolence in the mise en scene. No promise of the redemption we have been taught, from the very first, to expect from violent reaction to injustice. This is realistic inasmuch as non-state actors who challenge the monopoly on violence are subject to summary elimination in the real world, and this escape from historical fantasy is by itself to be regarded as an achievement.

 

In our time, a time still so thoroughly dominated by the eternal promise of state violence on the one hand, and by the inexpressible, almost universal longing for total destruction of the state and of authority itself through an apotheosis of violence on the other, this kind of restraint in the depiction of violence seems nothing short of miraculous. I would compare it to the moral discipline of a person who finds a million dollars and who, instead of keeping it or returning it to the state, simply destroys it.

 

A wild thought, to be sure. This realization--of the difficulty of even beginning to conceive of peace--makes our situation seem all the more hellish and intractable. Yet the plain fact that a principled documentation of violence (that is to say, one that does not aestheticize it, succumbing to violence as eye candy, violence as a currency and commodity to be sought after and striven for) seems so subversive, contains the seed of liberation from that very intractable place. To soar up into the blue sky of utopian theory for a moment: If enough people are disabused of their received attitudes toward violence, the state may lose its sanction to wield it without limit. All proceeds from the regard for a single human life, which is holy.

 

To create a work of mass entertainment--moreso on celluloid than on cellulose--informed by this ethic is a considerable achievement, not least considering the ideological resistance that must be overcome on all sides in order to proceed, from the funders who must discipline the blood-thirst of their money to the actors who must discipline the blood-thirst of their emotions to the principals themselves, who must discipline the blood-thirst of their narration.

 

I have never felt as strongly allied to peace as I do this morning. It is the only impossibility worthy of our faith. I mean impossibility in the general sense: Violent repression and reprisal will always exist, and is inseparable from out nature. We must acknowledge this as the mariner acknowledges the shoals and the reefs that characterize his profession and constitute its boundary conditions. However, I do not mean 'impossibility' in the contingent sense. Through individual acts of grace and declarations of our faith in peace, especially when braided into a collective, with all its emergent strengths, we can check the evil and the chaos that threaten to engulf the world. What weapon can we possibly hope to deploy against atom bombs and Predator drones but our faith in peace?

 

This is my position: So much as a single additional act of violence is intolerable. Our only weapon against injustice--against the state, our enemy--is peace. It is a position that bears and requires reiteration every single day. To close this preliminary investigative seam I might offer this, by way of alloying this rather impractical and ineffable declaration: We must see the world for what it is. In order to be against violence (or against any given adversary) in any effective way, we must know what it is, know what constitutes it; we must accept the reality of it, we must accept the contingent, horrible realities it sprouts and the antecedent, horrible realities in which it is footed. Better: In order to declare it ethically unacceptable, we begin by accepting it ontologically. Or, winnowed down to the paradoxical kernel that is characteristic of all difficult truths: In order to declare X unacceptable, we must first have accepted it. Those who hope to make any dent in the armor and armories of merciless violence that rules the world must be equipped with the philosophical moves as dexterous as those of a ninja.

 

Very well. There are two things I want to get at here: Now that we have accepted violence ontologically, we must understand the scope of negative action to which it is susceptible, the true general purpose of opposing it (rather than the stated one), and what is the emancipatory attitude toward our own purpose in opposing it. First, since violence is an elementary player on our stage, a sine qua non in human affairs, its scope of susceptibility is a battle rather than a war. We must address it contingently, through actions or non-actions, after having thought about it generally. We may hope to prevent one murder, one execution, one act of torture, one war, but not to eliminate the category, which would consign us to wither among the vast horde of the irrelevant. The purpose of opposing it can be explained in a variety of ultimately unsatisfactory ways: To maintain a kind of rough equilibrium between good and evil that allows conscientious human life to continue is one way of conceiving of our purpose. How to raise children in good faith if we do not first offer resistance to evil? This equilibrium will not obtain in a vacuum. Power is undergoing a more or less incessant process of consolidation, and conscientious human life is succumbing to an overwhelming tide of dispossession, moral and physical regression, and the incessant conversion of man into slave. Many have concluded, perhaps with reason, that it might be best to dispense with the bequest entirely.

 

I think the truth is more closely (and more hopefully) approximated by saying that our (we know who we are) purpose in opposing violence is the fulfillment of our allotted roles. I think certain Enlightenment fictions make us take great pains to make our attitudes seem the result of choice, and I think that this is a sham. Each of us is born to be something, and our task reduces to fully being that something. Why does the poet write? Why does the boxer box? Why does the gambler wager? They are following their inclinations; they are articulating themselves; they are unfolding. Peace may seem revolutionary, impossible, eschatological, extraordinary--but those who seek to promote it were born to do so. They take their place in the pageant beside the gibbering horde born into the world to purvey and condone violence. And nobody will ever stop them from being what they are until being itself is arrested.

 

There is both oppression and emancipation in this tenet that holds that we are merely taking a lap around the track, clutching the baton we were born to hold before passing it on to the next generation, who will feel the same confusion as they receive it and sprint headlong toward their destiny. This is the irrefutable counterargument to Judge Holden's grim declaration in McCarthy's Blood Meridian that war was there before man was, and was waiting for men to wage it. Peace, too, was there, and it is still waiting for the people to make it real. Go then: Know what you are, and then be it!

 

~

 

Is decency inexpressible? Is it ineffable? Is suicide the logical conclusion of a moral stance of decency, given that it prevails in the face of every contingency? After all, matters as fundamental as eating require complex, invisible declarations of moral choice, of opting.