Let it ride? Tony D’Souza avoids an argument but addresses a question

‘Isn’t resisting the lie what being a Quaker is about?’

‘Where to guvnor?’ said the taxi driver, leaning out of his cab.

‘Camden Town, please.’

There is something comforting about a London taxi cab, I thought, as I climbed into the back. They arrive out of nowhere in the teeming city and rescue you like a St Bernard dog might rescue a stranded hiker in the alps. There is a feeling of continuity and safety about getting into a black cab.

‘I had one of ’them Quakers in the back of my cab once,’ said the driver, pointing to Friends House, near where he picked me up. ‘They’re pacifists you know,’ he said. He amassed so much disgust in the word ‘pacifist’ that I thought he was going to spit, but was prevented from doing so because his window was closed.

‘Yes, Quakers. I believe they are pacifists,’ I said, lamely, beginning to feel that this journey might be much longer than I thought.

‘Yeah. Pacifists – shirkers I call them. Cowards and shirkers the lot of them. Just imagine if we had all been pacifists when Hitler had started up. We’d all be talking German now.’ He paused for a moment, perhaps for effect, and looked out at the traffic. ‘Pacifists… (that need to spit again). ‘I hate them. I hate them all.’

Now, I have not reached the age I have without getting some wisdom. There are arguments I need to have, and there are arguments I do not need to have. The skill, of course, is knowing which is which. Arguing with this taxi driver would be like pushing water uphill, so I decided my best option was not to react, at least not yet.

When I got out of the taxi at Camden Town, I paid him, and handed him a Quaker Quest pamphlet.

‘Why not drop in at any time and discuss what Quakerism is really about?’ I said.

I left him to it. I needed a large coffee and time to think. The question I wanted to answer was: What does pacifism mean to me? Here is my brief attempt to answer that question.

I have never been to war. But I need to quote someone who has, so I have chosen Erich Maria Remarque, and all my quotations come from All Quiet on the Western Front, specifically from one conversation between front line soldiers.

The first casualty in war is the truth, and the first objection to war is that it is based on a lie. Our front-line soldiers discuss this:

‘How do wars start?’

‘Mostly by one country offending another.’

‘A country, I don’t follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a forest, or a field of wheat.’

‘No, no – it’s the people as a whole. It’s the State. It’s the State that goes to war.’

(Here is the first, or primary, lie. The state is merely an idea. Whether a democracy or a dictatorship, the concept of the state exists as a means to wield power. ‘The state’ appears to be a fact but it is merely an idea that owes its reality to the willing acquiescence of its subjects.) Our soldiers go further: ‘Most of us are simple folk. Labourers, workmen or poor clerks. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen regarding us.’

(In peacetime, these men would likely be friends and might share a drink together, but the primary lie forces them into a situation where ‘they are set against each other like mad dogs’.) In the beginning was the lie, and the lie begets more lies and so the darkness spreads: ‘There are more lies told by the other side than by ours. Think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says we eat Belgian children. Those fellows who write those lies are the real culprits.’

The lie forces innocent men to accept the horror of war and robs them of their individuality and their capacity to reason. When wars occur, we are either swept along with the insanity of it all or we have the courage to resist. Resisting means standing against the tide of public opinion and facing the consequences, often very serious, of what that stand may entail – from ridicule and social ostracisation to imprisonment and, in some countries, execution.

But isn’t resisting the lie what being a Quaker is about? It’s about, or should be, standing up for truth no matter what. Standing up to the big lie, and doing it through the strength of an unshakeable inner conviction. I do not believe Quakerism is just about having a liberal mindset and being part of the ‘awkward squad’. These ideas, and others, may have become an accretion on the modern label of ‘Quaker’, but being a Quaker is much more than that. I think it’s really about being a living example of truth every day.

Living truth in our lives every day definitely means not having to talk about it. I could have gotten into an argument with that taxi driver, but the prompting of love and truth in my heart did not lead me to believe it was going to be helpful either to him or to me.

‘Would you be a pacifist if a German was raping your wife?’ was the question asked of conscientious objectors in the first world war (and probably in the second). It was not really a question but a taunt, because it lacks any logical rigour. To begin with, the question would hardly ever have to be answered because the scenario is so unlikely. And secondly, the answer is obvious. Nobody would be a pacifist under those circumstances. All propagandists know how easy it is to pervert logic to serve a cause.

If and when I need to stand up for the cause of truth, I will know. I will also be given the courage to do it from a strength that is not my own. Yet I do not know, from moment to moment what the promptings of love and truth in the heart will demand of me. Truth is not fixed by belief, like a bug in amber. For this reason, I don’t believe in any dogma that says I must be a pacifist. It just doesn’t work that way for me. The letter kills, but the spirit is a living thing. I can trust the inner promptings of love and truth to lead me to do the right thing in any situation. For this reason, I cannot rule out ever taking up arms, for example, against a regime so obviously vile as Hitler’s.

If we live for and through the truth, we can’t go wrong, but we must be alert to its guidance. A journalist once pointed out to Gandhi that what he had just told him contradicted what he had said on the same subject less than two years previously. Gandhi shrugged his shoulders and said ‘My dear fellow, my allegiance is to the truth, not to consistency’.

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Comments

Thank you, Tony.

By gturner on 10th June 2021 - 22:30

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Donald Swann’s answer to that question was “I don’t know, but I certainly wouldn’t fly over Germany and bomb his grandmother”.

I don’t know how long the journey would take, but if you had said “I’m a Quaker” without starting an argument, what would happen?

I went to an Army presentation once, in a red silk shirt for maximum visibility, and sat in the centre of the tiered seats. The officer talked of things like nation-building- they had not been in Iraq very long. At questions, I made the first, and made my honed rhetorical point about the army being for “killing people and destroying things”. One up to me. After, I chatted to the officer and someone else came over and said “What if it was 1939- what would you do about Hitler?”

I was silent, but delighted later to read the answer in The Friend: “I wouldn’t have started then.” The problem came from the Treaty of Versailles. Or if the problem was the war of 1870, war-mongering only repeats the cycle.

So, you could have argued, and each honed your points.

Or, you might have given him an object to pour out his anger at. Driving a black cab must be a stressful job, and it need not hurt you. If he shouts at you, he might not need to shout at anyone else for a bit. You might even relieve his stress enough to prevent an accident!

Or you might have made him think. He has just been very rude, though not intentionally. What does he do now?

By Abigail Maxwell on 14th June 2021 - 9:36

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