Pacifism

I’m not a pacifist. I was for a while. Sometimes I respect people who are, as pacifism can be an ethical principle, and anyone who adheres to their ethical principle in the face of the world has my admiration.

But it can also be an ideology. If you think what’s wrong with the world is “some people commit violence” and the world can be cleansed by “removing the people who commit violence”, then I have problems.

In particular, I will never participate in the dehumanization of people who have committed violence. They are not some special type of monster. They are fallen and broken like the rest of us. The most self-aware people I know lie awake at night, fearing that if they had been born in Germany a hundred years ago, they could have been Nazis.

I will remind people, that dehumanization is wrong is both a moral and objectively true fact, according to this blog. You can’t wish away the complexity and inner emotional life of a person just because of a thing they did. Even if it was violent.

And there are some people who never punch, but who manipulate status and emotions, who do much more damage, than people who kill. (That was the best thing about Sherlock S3E3.)

By and large, violence is an emotionally indulgent, self-defeating tool. Your side scares their side with some violence (against easy, vulnerable targets.) Their side gets righteously enraged and fights back (against easy, vulnerable targets.) All that happens is that both sides are scared by their monstrous enemy, and a lot of weak people in the middle get crushed. I’ve never seen a plan for violence that didn’t sound like that, fundamentally.

But hey, sometimes violence has done good things. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 (not even the distant past!) sounds pretty unambiguously good. To deny that would be to twist the facts to fit my moral philosophy, and oh hey, there’s ideology again.

I can as a default rule say I won’t waste time considering whether violence is a good plan - but I can’t say it has always been a failure. Life is complicated that way.

So I stand with the Pacifists 99% of the time, and agree with them more than any other group. Go them, even if I have not forsworn any respect for people who commit violence ever.

I have forsworn dehumanization.