Chapter 9
The Delimitation
of Non-Resistance
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That society is the greatest
where the highest truths become practical.
--
Swami Vivekananda.
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Garrison
expressed the obligation of non-resistance in its strongest form, and would
admit of no exception or qualification. He declared that he would not defend his
wife by force in case of an assault, and for such extreme expressions he has
been freely criticized. For my part I do not object to overstatements (if this
is one). They have their dramatic value, and carry their cause when a carefully
trimmed shaft falls short. Just as an athlete makes his muscles rigid one at a
time, first the right arm and then the left, now the waist muscles and then
those of the legs -- so mankind may well exercise its various powers to the
utmost in turn. The all-round man is the ideal, but until we can produce him we
must specialize more or less. I delight in the strong expression of an idea,
from Francis of Assisi to Nietzsche, for I find the same muscle imperfectly
developed in myself. Each muscle needs the greatest development, and perfection
will come with the equilibrium of the most vigorous opposites, and not with
their atrophy. Pull your side of the boat and let me pull mine. Too much time is
wasted in port's swearing at starboard and starboard at port. Your main duty is
to be sincere and to be strong and to pull.
But
I believe that Garrison was right for other reasons than these. He was conscious
of a new moral obligation to refrain from violence of all kinds, and it came to
him as an abstract unqualified principle of universal application. It is of the
very nature of moral principles that they transcend present environments and
point to the future. The fact that they are impracticable is the very source of
their strength, for the attempt to apply them tends to transform the world. What
dead things our principles would be if we could actually live up to them! They
create and regenerate because they are impossible. It is impossible to be
perfect in an imperfect environment, and yet it is our duty to be perfect and
this inherent contradiction in the moral world is the reason for the paradoxical
character of all great teaching and the guaranty of perpetual improvement in the
human race. Hence we cannot express our obligations in too strong and absolute
terms, and the task of whittling them down to suit emergencies emasculates them
and renders them useless.
Take
the obligation of telling the truth. Every man feels the beauty of this
principle, and yet we know that there are occasions upon which we might utter
falsehoods and justify ourselves in so doing. But is it not still true that the
act of lying to an armed enemy, for instance, to save the life of a child would
be an unpleasant act -- that it would cause us a certain degree of offense --
that we would wish to escape the apparent necessity? Is it not difficult to
conceive of such a lie on the lips of a Jesus or a Buddha? and do we not
instinctively take it for granted that they would find some other way out of the
dilemma? And so with courage and cowardice. Where shall the line between them be
drawn? At what degree of danger may the brave man be justified in flinching?
Surely there is but one proper rule of action and that is, Never flinch. Nature
will draw the line without our assistance. I am convinced that the attempts to
delimit and define moral laws of this kind is demoralizing. They will delimit
themselves sufficiently in practice. We must accept them in their fullest sense,
and then practice them as best we can, being assured that the mental perplexity
which besets us is a part of the growing pains of the race. Not at all that such
principles must be accepted as objective, dead, literal laws, but rather as
living principles with all the transforming potencies of life. The injunction of
the Decalogue against slaughter has never been improved upon. "Thou shalt
not kill," said the law-giver, and unloosed a living moral principle -- a
seed with infinite possibilities of growth contained in it. It was not
understood or applied. It never has been understood or applied. Perhaps it never
can be, but therein lies the very secret of its power and immortality. Morality
is not a matter of rules but of tendencies. Our own language shows it. (And what
wonders of ancient and forgotten wisdom are buried in our language!)
"Right" and "wrong" (wrung) mean "straight" and
"crooked." Ethics involve the direction which we take to a goal, and
are of necessity relative to us and our present position. The goal should be
forever beyond us. "Hitch your wagon to a star." "Thou shalt not
kill." Turn your prow that way. Avoid killing. Kill just as little as
possible. It should go against our grain to pull up a weed or cut down a tree.
And some day when this sense of the sacredness of life has been fully cultivated
by the very necessities of slaughter which surround us, we may find ourselves
graduated into some sphere in which we may really live and let live, and find in
turn some new, inaccessible goal held up before us.
But
it is a mistake to assume to behave in accordance with a rigid formula
expressing a principle which is still too far beyond us. Garrison felt the full
obligation of nonresistance. Whether he would have felt it in the case of an
attack upon his wife or not, it is impossible to say; but we must not masquerade
upon a plane to which we have not yet attained. I would not advise a man to act
counter to his best instincts in such a case, but rather to endeavor to
cultivate those instincts. We may be pretty sure that in such a case Jesus would
not have killed the aggressor, but until we have his spirit we can hardly
justify ourselves in adopting his method. The spirit of violence is an evil
spirit, and it can only be effectually cast out by the spirit of love. If we
have not that spirit of love which would render acts of violence impossible to
us, it is futile to attempt to act as if we had, upon any preconceived
intellectual theory of what we should or should not do. The doctrine of
non-resistance is not a cold principle to be applied like the rule of three to a
mathematical problem, but a living power of the soul. Avoid violence. Indulge in
it as little as possible. Do not worry yourself about any possible exceptions to
the rule, but press on toward the goal. It seems to me that these are the best
precepts.
I
can recall the case of a man who, following Garrison's example, refrained from
voting upon the ground that government reposed upon force, and that force was
the wrong method. But after a few years he found that he was trying to live on a
plane that was too high for him. Militarism and monopoly were ensconcing
themselves ever more securely in the stronghold of office, and his conscience
smote him that he did not cast his ballot against them. So he changed his course
and began to vote against the wrong, as he conceived it, and for the better --
there being no opportunity to vote for the best. And straightway his conscience
left him at peace. He was feeling his way, that was all. He did not deny the
validity of the law of non-resistance; only he had not grown up to its full
size. For him to masquerade in its livery, so far as voting was concerned, was a
clear case of false pretenses. He was inconsistent, but, as we have seen, life
is by its very nature inconsistent. The absolute logic of the law was qualified
by his own personal contribution of common-sense. Logic and common-sense!
Between them is stretched taut the throbbing web and woof of life! All
controversy, conversation, manners and customs, laws, undertakings, progress,
labor, craft, art, growth and life issue from their divergence. If ever they
shall coincide, then at last will the words, "It is finished," be
written once for all on the tomb of the universe! Meanwhile it is our business
to strive to bring our common-sense up to the plane of logic, in the blessed
certainty that we can never fully succeed. We preach logic and practice
common-sense, longing for an environment where they may be lost in each other.
We must pull our environments along with us -- a long pull and a strong pull and
a pull all together; but to act upon the logical consequences of a rule which we
have ceased to feel would leave us out of touch with our environment, disjointed
and unrelated, with nothing but a lifeless, unassimilated law to comfort us,
which is clearly absurd. In the last analysis the secret of sane living is to go
on compromising, while shouting, "No compromise!" The would-be
abstainer from voting recognized the fact that a perfect man would not vote, but
he felt like a hypocrite when he acted like a perfect man, knowing himself to be
nothing of the sort. The role did not suit him. I ought of course to be perfect,
but I must be perfect before I act perfect, and it is downright dishonesty to
imitate the empty acts of perfection.
This
matter of abstention -- from voting or violence or anything else -- suggests the
two opposite ways of regarding any cause directed against any evil. I may have
an overwhelming interest in the cause itself, so that I quite forget myself in
it. My one effort is to put an end to the evil. Or I may simply try to wash my
hands of it -- to clear my skirts of it -- and in my efforts to maintain my
personal purity I may neglect altogether the question of the progress of the
cause. Which is the better vegetarian -- the one who starves himself to death by
sticking to his diet under unfavorable circumstances, thus making himself a
living, or rather a dying argument against his principles; or the one who is
willing to eat meat for the sake of the cause? There is a good deal to be said
for the latter individual. And so the non-resistant who votes in the direction
of less force may argue that he is doing more for the cause than if he
abstained. He would be right; and the man who had risen to a higher plane and
abjured voting would also be right. At any rate it is difficult to see how
Garrison's scruples about voting affected his influence. As a matter of fact,
they kept him clear of the bootless embarrassments of third-party politics, and
those who separated from him on this issue were soon lost in the crowd who were
ready to accept any kind of a substitute for immediate emancipation.
There
is a refreshing simplicity in hewing close to the line and in rejecting all
temptation to casuistry. We blame the Jesuit writers of "confessional"
literature as if they were particularly immoral men; but it was not their fault.
The task of trying to determine how near a man may come to doing evil without
hurting himself is in itself depraving. Fire point-blank at the sun, and the
force of gravity will describe a parabola for you without your assistance. Try
to describe a parabola with your projectile and you will signally fail. We are
all climbers on the slope of a conical peak, much too steep to mount directly --
striving to reach the top. Our rule is, "Climb straight up"; and the
man who comes the nearest to this impossible feat will get there first. It is a
waste of time to speculate about angles and spirals. Our own inertia will take
care of that of itself. And it is consoling to know that the world is going
upward, ever more and more away from the plane of brute-force. In the education
of children, the treatment of prisoners, the conduct of wars, in every field of
life, we are becoming more and more civilized and humane and human. Who shall
fix a limit to this advance? Who shall say that barbarism ceases at this point,
and here the
race must cease to rise? I believe that this progress will be eternal, and that
Garrison in insisting that all use of force among men was wrong, was truly
indicating the proper objective of human progress.(1)
1. A
sign of the times is the recent book, "Resist not Evil," by the
well-known lawyer and political leader of Chicago Clarence S. Darrow, who
advocates the doctrine in its extreme form with great ability.
