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Heroes live, cowards die
This whole rant is apropos of this thread on the Forge. Ron has this bit where he says this:
I'm talking about the straightforward and undeniable observation that asserting one's position through violence is absolutely required in real life. No ifs. No arguments. No possible bullshit denials. We all know that "finding one's warrior" is part of living life - the alternative is living in some form of fear.
Yes, pacifists too. That's a matter of finding someone who will be the warrior for you. Without machine guns emplaced somewhere, no Mother Theresa.
I'm not going to mince words around this. This is macho bullshit in its purest form.
The opposite of fear is not violence. The opposite of fear is courage. That is what it means to find your "warrior within" and, frankly, if you need violence to do that, you are one pitiful sunnuvabitch. Courage isn't violence, and to confuse the two is to make yourself and every other man into a monster. More often than not, violence is cowardice.
Or, as I said in Vincent's post, I just can't bring myself to call a Quaker any less of a man.
Something I should clarify -- I am not a pacifist. We are not perfect people, we do not live in a perfect world. There may be a time when I will need to perform some act of violence, and I'm probably not even going to hesitate about it if I need it. But damned if I'm going to mistake that weakness for manliness, or that cowardice for courage.
Courage is about a lot of things which people mistake violence for -- it is about striving, about struggle, about confrontation, about difficulty, and about pain. Courage is the ability to look through the confusion of a desperate situation and see with perfect moral and rational clarity the right thing to do. Courage is having the will to do the right thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And not a scrap of that has anything to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.
Cowardice is courage's opposite, with all that entails. It is retreating from the right path because it is too hard, less fun, difficult to see. It is about giving into the suffering of life, not striving, about backing away from confrontation, about backstabbing, about avoiding pain, about purposefully clouding your own moral vision so that you can say "I didn't know" when they come to lay the blame. Cowardice is about doing the easy thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And that often has an awful lot to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.
Mother Theresa didn't walk the streets of Calcutta untouched because the crooks were afraid of someone else's machine gun emplacements, and to say that is an insult. She walked the streets of Calcutta because other people, even thugs, could see in her rightness, propriety, a sense of purpose and a sense of holy dignity that they could never violate. The Quakers didn't live in peace because of the Puritan's massacres and the Southerner's slavery, but in spite of them and opposed to them. Ghandi didn't have a militia backing him up, just a sense of human dignity, a helluva good organizational talent, some charisma, and the courage to never back down from the right path.
To say otherwise is a cowardly lie, and I will not stand it from anyone.
To be courageous is to live with moral certainty. To be a coward is to live in fear.
Sometimes, the most courageous thing to do is to take the hit. Sometimes, it is to get up and walk away as fast as you can. Sometimes, it is to say what they want you to say. Sometimes it is to pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to not pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to embrace the other man. Sometimes it is the say "I love you still." Sometimes it is to say "I will not countenance this." Sometime it is to just sit there and take it. Sometimes it is to cry uncle. Sometimes, it is to cry.
It's complicated, contextual.
But it has fuck to do with violence.
I'm talking about the straightforward and undeniable observation that asserting one's position through violence is absolutely required in real life. No ifs. No arguments. No possible bullshit denials. We all know that "finding one's warrior" is part of living life - the alternative is living in some form of fear.
Yes, pacifists too. That's a matter of finding someone who will be the warrior for you. Without machine guns emplaced somewhere, no Mother Theresa.
I'm not going to mince words around this. This is macho bullshit in its purest form.
The opposite of fear is not violence. The opposite of fear is courage. That is what it means to find your "warrior within" and, frankly, if you need violence to do that, you are one pitiful sunnuvabitch. Courage isn't violence, and to confuse the two is to make yourself and every other man into a monster. More often than not, violence is cowardice.
Or, as I said in Vincent's post, I just can't bring myself to call a Quaker any less of a man.
Something I should clarify -- I am not a pacifist. We are not perfect people, we do not live in a perfect world. There may be a time when I will need to perform some act of violence, and I'm probably not even going to hesitate about it if I need it. But damned if I'm going to mistake that weakness for manliness, or that cowardice for courage.
Courage is about a lot of things which people mistake violence for -- it is about striving, about struggle, about confrontation, about difficulty, and about pain. Courage is the ability to look through the confusion of a desperate situation and see with perfect moral and rational clarity the right thing to do. Courage is having the will to do the right thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And not a scrap of that has anything to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.
Cowardice is courage's opposite, with all that entails. It is retreating from the right path because it is too hard, less fun, difficult to see. It is about giving into the suffering of life, not striving, about backing away from confrontation, about backstabbing, about avoiding pain, about purposefully clouding your own moral vision so that you can say "I didn't know" when they come to lay the blame. Cowardice is about doing the easy thing, even if it means your life, even if it means someone else's life. And that often has an awful lot to do with the wretched, miserable impulse to hurt other people and make yourself feel big.
Mother Theresa didn't walk the streets of Calcutta untouched because the crooks were afraid of someone else's machine gun emplacements, and to say that is an insult. She walked the streets of Calcutta because other people, even thugs, could see in her rightness, propriety, a sense of purpose and a sense of holy dignity that they could never violate. The Quakers didn't live in peace because of the Puritan's massacres and the Southerner's slavery, but in spite of them and opposed to them. Ghandi didn't have a militia backing him up, just a sense of human dignity, a helluva good organizational talent, some charisma, and the courage to never back down from the right path.
To say otherwise is a cowardly lie, and I will not stand it from anyone.
To be courageous is to live with moral certainty. To be a coward is to live in fear.
Sometimes, the most courageous thing to do is to take the hit. Sometimes, it is to get up and walk away as fast as you can. Sometimes, it is to say what they want you to say. Sometimes it is to pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to not pull the trigger. Sometimes it is to embrace the other man. Sometimes it is the say "I love you still." Sometimes it is to say "I will not countenance this." Sometime it is to just sit there and take it. Sometimes it is to cry uncle. Sometimes, it is to cry.
It's complicated, contextual.
But it has fuck to do with violence.
Re: Resetting
(Anonymous) 2005-05-23 10:15 am (UTC)(link)"Shot four puppet governors all in a line
Shook all tha world bankers who think they can rhyme
Shot the landlords who knew it was mine
Yes its a war from the depth of time" - RATM
Civilisation is merely the SYSTEMATIC usage of violence in the maintenance of social order. That is why the police exist - to exercise violence against the citizen.
Civilisation IS violence, merely controlled violence. All history is the history of class war. The use of violence by a private citizen, unempowered by the mandate of the state, is not immoral or unacceptable.
- contracyle
Re: Resetting
As to the police: the police exist to keep order, not to practice violence against the citizen. They might have to do that in the course of their job, but that is not their primary motivation or purpose. And as a response to that they do so, and the "all of civilization": "So, because it is, that makes it /right/?"
Sorry, Gareth, but others have said the same thing you have, and it hasn't stood up any better (adding quotes of Rage Against the Machine lyrics doesn't do anything for your argument).
Re: Resetting
(Anonymous) 2005-05-24 07:37 am (UTC)(link)Why they did was reference the real world, rather than the world of notional abstract speculation. And that is a critical issue when you want to make assertions about morality. And thus they most certainly DO support my argument, not least becuase they are not my own words.
No, causation of harm to another thinking, feeling being is not inherently immoral. How many people do you think you will find who consider killing Saddam Hussein to be IMMORAL? Very few I'd venture, and probably only those with a dogmatic hostility to violence.
If someone is strangling you, is it IMMORAL to kill them? If you are starving and others are guarding the granary, is it IMMORAL to eat over their dead bodies?
This is fantasy-land I'm afraid. Make a perfect, unconflicted world, and then you can say that violence is immoral. In this real, material world, violence is NOT inherently immoral - it may be a bad idea, it may even be traumatic for everyone involved, but IMMORAL it is not. You say that others are "not so casual" about death but they most certainly are - they were in fact SO casual about it that the majority supported an illegal war that killed a hundred thousand people very recently, didn't they?
You say my arguments have not "stacked up" more than any other arguments, but I say the same.
Re: Resetting
As well, just because it is necessary does not mean it is the best possible solution, or that there are not better solutions. Again, this is mistaking one thing for another: as in the previous post "because it is, does not make it right."
As to your "Well, everybody else..." arguments, I'm sorry but you're basing your arguments on a logical fallacy: the bandwagon. But you should first note I wasn't talking about majorities and minorities of thought when I made my statement about others not viewing the practice casually.
Note that I said "others" not "everyone else" or "the majority" or "most people"...just "others", so when you argue about how many people voted to go to war, or how many people would kill Saddam (and there it is again, "because everyone wants to, it is right?"), you aren't even responding to a claim being made, you're just up finding an excuse to be up bitching on your personal soapbox.
You also contradict yourself by arguing this: if violence is civilization and it is not wrong to utilize violence upon a perceived or possible threat, then what's wrong with the war? How is the war illegal or unjust if violence against Saddam Hussein and his regime was not immoral?