Thought for the week: Bob Johnson’s fighting talk

‘Here was a deficiency disease.’

Does the Peace Testimony apply in prison? Or, since Gaza, anywhere? Or is it merely a religious relic, with as little relevance as Stonehenge?

It’s easy enough to ridicule. I recall hearing one expert on violence, Stephen Pinker, contemptuously deride the Peace Testimony. He had no doubts: everyone would have to be as idealistic, even as unworldly, as Quakers, to make any difference. Moonshine and fairytales were more likely. When you’re already falling off the cliff, he suggested, it’s fatuous to remind you to stick to the path.

But if you take a closer look at violence, as I did in Parkhurst Prison, a different perspective emerges. It’s much more like a disease. It’s highly infectious, and it can cripple people for life, especially children. All too often, it’s lethal. Like other diseases, however, it has well known causes, clear remedies, and obvious factors for its prevention. Quakers knew this back in 1660.

A disease then, but don’t expect sufferers to tell you anything sensible about it. I got to know fifty murderers in prison, and what was striking about them was that none of them knew where this disease came from. Agatha Christie wrote her bestsellers on the basis that murderers had sensible, understandable motives, but they don’t. ‘He/she had it coming.’ ‘A red mist came down.’ ‘I just lost it.’ If you rely on perpetrators to enlighten you, you’re sunk.

But then so were doctors when asked to cure scurvy. Once, it was thought that you got a disease because something was done to you – a fall, some violence, or an infection. Here was a deficiency disease. You got it because something was missing. Something that didn’t happen.

No one doubts, now, that vitamin C is essential for health. But it took the Royal Navy fifty years to take limes on long voyages. Many sailors died before the penny dropped. So what’s the thing that’s lacking that leads to violence? What needs to be present, if violence is to be eliminated?

Every one of the murderers I knew had been taught violence. Bring up a child in a violence-free home, and they’ll learn to talk rather than kill. Conversely, tell them you only win if you hit, and that’s what they’ll do. You don’t have to look far to see where violence comes from – but you do have to look.

So what’s the cure? You have to approach violence with confidence. You have to ditch your own coercion, and persuade sufferers to listen, to agree, and to discard their violent upbringing. But they won’t even start unless they trust you. Why change what they’ve always believed? Listen to any warmonger’s rhetoric – they still believe that you cure terrorism by killing terrorists. They haven’t learned that violence is highly contagious. They don’t relax, smile and stop wanting to kill, unless you convince them that humans are born non-violent – precisely what Quakers told us, all those years ago.

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Comments

Not only did it take the Royal Navy half a century to come to believe that fresh fruit prevented scurvy, they then forgot! The reasons are complex (for one thing, they switched from lemons to limes and limes in fact don’t have much Vitamin C in them, so that was confusing) but seem to have a lot to do with not having any theory to explain why lemons prevented scurvy. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the mechanism was understood and reliable treatment for scurvy was possible.

What theory, what explanatory mechanism, of peace can we offer?

By Keith Braithwaite on 2024 01 18

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