Thought for the Week: The Peace Testimony
Bob Johnson reflects on the Peace Testimony
Sixty murderers told me they didn’t want to kill – and then didn’t. There are several explanations for this, but only one is true. The obvious one is that they fooled me, they pretended to be ‘good’, but weren’t. This is the explanation prison ministers prefer, and use it to run our prisons. Another is that they were so frightened of ‘punishment’ that they decided to behave ‘properly’. Conventional wisdom supposes that murderers calculate the balance between mayhem and merit with nice precision, and then chose mayhem. By contrast Quakerism advises us to ‘utterly deny’ all outward force and coercion – and those murderers taught me why.
On the face of it, violence wins every time. ‘Might is Right’, as Otto von Bismarck put it so succinctly – those with the strongest arms or armaments guarantee thereby that they’ll win. And this infects political discourse today. The bigger and more destructive our weapons, then we’ll all be more secure. Smells a bit fishy, when you think about it – how can increasing lethality ensure longevity? Mutually assured destruction, or MAD, doesn’t sound all that sensible, let alone wise. When we devote huge amounts of our wealth to increasing the destruction, doesn’t a small voice ask: ‘Shouldn’t we be paying at least as much to construct rather than to destruct? Or is this the limit of our reasoning ability, our capacity as Homo sapiens? Are we doomed by our genes to die a violent death at our own insistence?’ Try arguing this with the person in the street, or with a radio interviewer, and they immediately give your opponent a bigger gun, a longer sword, a better vantage point – and ask you if you really want to see your mother slaughtered or your daughter raped. They start and finish with Bismarck’s axiom intact. Of course, a bigger gun can kill more people – one is reminded of North Korean artillery which currently ensures that Seoul is within range – but is it possible that Bismarck was wrong, not only wrong, but ‘utterly’ wrong?
To begin with, the murderers I knew would agree – their fathers would tell them: ‘If your enemy has a lump of wood, pick up a knife; if they have a knife, pick up a gun.’ A shallow Bismarckian logic, the same that ensured inexorably that Bismarck’s protégés would strangulate civilisation in 1914, from which we have yet to recover.
But wait, into this cauldron comes a still small voice, utterly impotent in some ways, but mighty in others. In 1660 a bunch of Quakers told Charles II they disagreed. Where were their battalions? How many rifles did they have at their immediate command? In Bismarck’s terms they were born losers. But what did the murderers teach me? If you spend five years getting to know murderers really well, to your surprise you find they really don’t want to be violent. Underneath, they were all, every one of them, born nonviolent. They won’t tell you this themselves, but if you offer them a trustworthy context long enough they will easily convince you, as they did me.
So, what’s happening? How can the Peace Testimony be universal, as I claim? What these murderers did was grow up emotionally. And there’s your answer. Parents may have to coerce their children to prevent them from toddling across a busy road. But people who coerce adults, as Bismarck prescribes, are keeping their recipients infantile. Nations need to govern themselves by forgoing parental-type coercion and implement fully informed consent, or else they suffocate. Big Brother is lethal. War is kindergarten tantrums writ large. 1660 Quakers knew this – do you?
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