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...war."
Holding explicitly fundamentalist position may seem a strange thing for an intellectual to do, but it's not. Plenty of intellectuals, plenty of people generally, hold such positions. People who oppose slavery often oppose it categorically, can't imagine supporting it in any circumstances, regardless of noble goals or enlightened modes of slaveholding, would not be open to a utilitarian assessment of whether it's desireable to have the institution of slavery. Plenty of intellectuals, plenty of people generally, hold similarly categorical views of torture, rape, abortion, capital punishment, racism, female genital mutilation, genocide, ethnic cleansing. What practices it feels right to reject categorically will vary with who we are. But most of us draw a line somewhere.
My pacifism being the fundamentalist position it is, I can't give a very clear rationale for why I hold it, nothing that leads inexorably, by agreed-on rules of argument and evidence, from axioms to a conclusion. I can, though, identify some of the experiences and emotions that I'm aware of when I look at my own pacifist life. Before I'd become a pacifist, before I had any political positions of my own at all, I found that the company of some pacifists was the company I liked to keep: the pacifist draft resisters I met and talked with during the Vietnam War, whose courage and serenity and commitment to principle I was inspired by, whom I wanted to resemble. I hate war, hate its systematic, dehumanizing violence. I know--from what I've read and heard, not from my own sheltered experience--that war is hell, whatever noble reason it may be fought for. I regard human life as sacred. As Gandalf tells Frodo, "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." Or, as we read in Genesis, "God created human beings in the image of God." I like holding radical positions. (I especially like holding positions more radical than those of my parents, with their mix of socialist ideals and left-Democratic practice and opposition to particular wars but not to war in general.) I know that the actions I've taken to express my pacifism are usually moral by Hemingway's criterion: I feel good after them. I feel more and more that without a commitment to pacifism I can't think clearly, have no space in which to move; I need the absolute commitment in order to see what happens next, and without that commitment I can feel myself slipping into an acceptance of what's horrible.
But that I haven't come to pacifism through argument doesn't mean that argument is irrelevant here. What follows is just that, a series of arguments about aspects of pacifism. Not all of them are flattering, many are pessimistic, none is conclusive. But none is despairing.
I. Useful Qualities
Serious pacifism has to be realistic, tragic, and responsible. "Realistic" was Martin Luther King's word: "I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances. I felt then, and I feel now, that the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian non pacifist confronts." That's a fine formulation. King states it too modestly, I think, too tactically--"the [realistic] pacifist would have a greater appeal," he writes. Probably that's true; pacifists not "claiming to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian non pacifist confronts," or for that matter from those that any serious observer of the human condition confronts, would probably be listened to more respectfully, satirized less harshly. But even if they weren't, their position would be a sounder one.
Pacifism also has to be tragic, has to acknowledge not only the evil impulse in human nature but also the certainty of some pacifist failure. That's not to say that pacifists shouldn't tell stories about pacifist success, of course, stories about Gandhi, about the personal and collective triumphs of the American civil rights movement, about the nonviolent overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic. Such stories are good to keep in mind when nonviolent action seems useless, when we need a remedy against despair.
But they have to be juxtaposed to grimmer stories, for example, the story of the civil rights activist Mickey Schwerner, murdered by the Ku Klux Klan along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in 1964, vividly told in Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire:
Only Schwerner's last words confounded the Klansmen themselves.... The Klansmen heard nothing fearful or defiant, nor...
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