Beastly Violence
Micah 4:1-4
Matthew 26:47-56
Epiphany 7 (series)
February 23, 2014
Matthew 26:47-56
Epiphany 7 (series)
February 23, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
In Scotland
in the early eighteen hundreds the woolen mills were producing wool thread and
cloth at such a rate that shortages drove the price of raw wool up. Sheep did well in the Highlands of Scotland, so
many of the lairds, the hereditary masters of the Highland territories, decided
to “improve” their lands by converting them to the production of wool.
These
“improvements” would come at a cost, however.
The Highlands of Scotland were populated by communities of
Gaelic-speaking clansfolk who farmed small plots that were rotated among the
families of the community and who raised cattle and a few sheep on common
grazing lands. These were lands that, while
the title belonged to the laird, were used by the whole community under
arrangements that were hundreds of years old.
Laird and
clansfolk had lived in a mutually supportive relationship. The laird provided grazing land, farm plots, houses,
and protection from the cattle-thieving lads in the next glen. The clansfolk provided beef, wool and support
for the laird in his (or sometimes her) dealings with his greedy neighbors.
In the far
north of the Highlands was the territory of clan Sutherland, so-called because
to the Norse who came to control this land seven or eight centuries before, it
was the “Southern Land.” Lord and Lady
Sutherland began their “improvements” in 1807 by evicting ninety families from
their houses and lands. They were
provided with alternative land some fifteen miles away but had to tear down
their houses and carry the timbers to the new sites and live exposed to the
elements until they could build new houses.
But as the
clearances continued, they became more and more brutal. In the spring of 1820 three hundred families
were removed from their homes by the simple method of burning their homes
down. With no place to go, turned out by
the lairds who were supposed to protect them, the clansfolk suffered terribly, the
aged, the sick and the children most of all.
Many died hunger and exposure. Some
made their way to the cities to try to find work in the mills. Others emigrated to Nova Scotia and other
parts of Canada and still others by their thousands to the Carolinas in the
United States.
I tell this
story, not because it is unique, but precisely because it is not. The system that I have been calling the beast
is always ravenously hungry. It must
grow or it will die. So, it is perfectly
willing to use violence to get what it wants.
This violence appears whenever the commons are enclosed for private
profit.
This was
true in late 1700s and early 1800s when the commons in the Scottish Highlands
were enclosed for the profit of the lairds.
It is still true today in Chiapas, Mexico, as ethnic Mayans resist the
military aggression of the Mexican federal government as it attempts to break
up the common land holdings of the people for the profit of a few. And let’s not forget that the very land on
which we meet this day has its own bloody history of the confiscation of common
land from its original inhabitants so that it could be turned into private
property for the profit of individuals and their families.
It is a rare
property deed that does not come with blood on it. Almost always the acts that made it into
private property were perfectly legal. The
papers had been drawn up and were all in order.
But behind the legal language and the signatures, as the folk of clan Sutherland
knew full well, loomed the violence of the firebrands, clubs, muskets and
bayonets.
The beast
has a long history of hiding its violence behind the law when it can, but when
it cannot do that, it justifies its violence by using a myth that Walter Wink
has called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.”[1] The Myth of Redemptive Violence tells the
story of violence in such a way that violence becomes normal and, indeed, the
foundation for what is good and true. The
basic form of the myth is:
- The order of the world has been disturbed and chaos threatens.
- Violence is applied to whoever has brought this disorder.
- The order of the world is restored.
This basic
myth comes in thousands of variations, but it lies at the heart of many of our
stories. The myth is the basic plot of
most episodes of NCIS and Law and Order, every episode of 24 Hours, and most of
the Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a kid. The Myth of Redemptive Violence drives our
foreign policy. It makes violence appear
so necessary, so natural, that we would rather let our children go hungry, we
would rather let the unemployed be evicted from their homes, we would rather
sink our children into decades of debt servitude, than imagine that we could
cut our military spending.
Like all
really effective myths, the Myth of Redemptive Violence filters our perception
of the world and shapes our thinking, so that we are unable to imagine
non-violent responses to the threats we face.
If we raise objections to violent responses, people look at us in
disbelief and say, “So we should do nothing?” as if there were no alternatives
to violence.
I remember
listening to a conversation on NPR—yes, I listen to NPR—between a program host
and a guest “expert” on international terrorism about the situation in
Afghanistan. This was two or three years
ago when there was a possibility of isolating the more radical factions in the
Taliban by negotiating a settlement with its more moderate elements. The guest was absolutely dismissive. “Well,” he said, scornfully (you could hear
his lip curl!), “you can try negotiating if you want, but sooner or later
you’ll find that negotiation doesn’t work and you’ll have to use military
force.” It was an astounding
statement. Remember, he was talking
about Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, the place where foreign policies
go to die. Everyone from Alexander the
Great, to the British Empire, to the Soviet Union, to Barack Obama has discovered
the same thing: Afghanistan is relatively easy to take and impossible to
hold. No peace has ever been imposed on
it from the outside. Military force has
never worked in Afghanistan. And yet the
Myth of Redemptive Violence won’t let us see any other choice.
The guest
said, “You can try negotiating if you want, but sooner or later you’ll have to
use military force,” as if it what he was saying were obvious, when in fact it
was clearly, demonstrably false. It
makes far more sense to say, “Well, you can try military force if you want, but
sooner or later you’ll find that military violence doesn’t work and you’ll have
to negotiate.” I waited for the
interviewer to raise an objection. I
waited in vain.
And here is
the power of the Myth of Redemptive Violence: it so naturalizes violence that
any other alternative seems impossible and even morally wrong. When the story of the Sutherland Clearances
is told through the Myth of Redemptive Violence, it is the impoverished clansfolk
who become villains and the violence of the lairds and their agents becomes the
hand of God in bringing order and progress.
The beast
must tell this myth not only to justify its own greedy violence, but also
because we human beings are not really naturally all that violent. The military psychologist, LTC Dave Grossman,
has studied the act of killing in combat and has concluded that almost all of
us are deeply inhibited from killing other people, even in self-defense, especially
face-to-face and at close range.[2] In World War II more than eighty percent of
the infantry riflemen who fought on the front lines never fired their weapon at
an enemy soldier with the intent of killing them. They fired high. They didn’t fire at all. But they refused to use their rifles to kill
another human being.
In response,
military training methods have changed. Instead
of using circular targets for rifle practice, I trained by firing at
silhouettes. When I hit one, it fell
down. I was conditioned to respond to a
human silhouette by firing at it and immediately rewarded for hitting it. The second change is the use of video and
laser simulations that make training more realistic, in other words, first-person
shooter video games and laser tag.
Only five
percent of today’s soldiers refuse to shoot to kill and enemy. Score one for military training. Except that overcoming our inhibitions in
this way exacts a terrible psychological cost.
Soldiers come back with wounded souls precisely because they did what
they were trained and ordered to do.
My point
here is that the combination of a system that must grow to survive, a myth that
justifies violence that serves as the basic plot line of much of popular
culture, and a culture that is saturated with violence have given us a beastly
world. In this world some of us are
victims of violence, some are direct perpetrators, but all of us are implicated
in the evil, injustice and oppression of violence itself.
Those of us
who are followers of Jesus cannot simply leave it at that. We may argue about the teachings of Jesus in
some areas. He said hardly anything at
all about sex, for example. He gave us
no guidance about the use or abuse of alcohol.
But he clearly and emphatically taught and lived non-violence as a way
of life. To take on baptism is to commit
ourselves to following this path.
We live
surrounded by a culture that excuses, justifies and even glorifies
violence. We cannot imagine that living
non-violently in the belly of the beast will be easy or even that it will make
immediate sense. Jesus’ non-violent
teaching is disturbing and unsettling even for us who are his followers. Let’s admit that. We are worried about whether it is
practical. We are not sure we can live
up to its demands.
There are
some things that give me hope, both for myself and for my world. For one, we have a book and a story that are
fired by a different story than the Myth of Redemptive Violence, a story that
is richer and more humane and, frankly, more interesting. We have each other, for another. If we will keep our baptismal promises to
each other to “surround [each other] with a community of love and forgiveness…that
[we] may be true disciples who walk in the way that leads to life,” we will
have the support we need for doing the strenuous work of freeing ourselves from
the grip of the beast. That means, of
course, that we will need to go beyond the usual, polite conversation that
promises not to pry too closely into the condition of my neighbor if my
neighbor promises not to pry too closely into mine. It means that we need and will accept each
other’s help in seeing through our own self-deceiving myths and self-justifying
excuses. It means that we will offer
this help to each other as well.
None of this
sounds easy. None of it is easy. Accepting the freedom and power God gives us to
resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they present themselves
is not a matter of throwing a switch; it is a hope toward which we strain
throughout our lives. But it is a good
hope, for all its being hard. It is the
hope of new life that has been born in us at our baptism and still grows toward
its maturity. It is a hope toward which
we move by God’s gracious call to us and God’s power at work within us. God dreams this for us. God knows that our world is waiting for this
hope to be realized in us so that it, too, might know goodness, justice and
sweet, sweet freedom.
