Transforming Violence

Violence always transforms. That’s the first thing and the first meaning. Every dramatic play and every movie which has violence in it tells you this. The world is different after triumphant violence. Peace has returned, so now we can get on with our lives while continuing to tell the heroic story. This is also supposed to be the case in what we call reality. The Second World War is the all-time textbook example. The allies destroyed a lot of very bad people, the world was started over and everyone was happy. Right? Well now you come to think about it, no, not really.

Apart from the fifty odd million people killed it’s not at all certain that things were started over. If WW2 grew out of WW1 we could say the Cold War, and all its proxy battles from Vietnam to Afghanistan, grew out of WW2. This is what Girard is talking about in Battle to the End. The pairs of dueling rivals just keep getting bigger and more apocalyptically armed, the next one inheriting the legacy of the last, until we blow ourselves to kingdom come.

It is clearly possible to see things played out mechanically that way. But there is also a peculiar contemporary dimension which I think Girard did not pay enough attention to and yet fits entirely with another of his categories. We now have a war against terrorism and it is by definition a faceless enemy. The character of terrorism is that it can strike anytime anywhere, but it does not possess clear territory with a state, an army, industrial infrastructure etc.

It’s as if violence has learned its own lessons and rather than hurtle down a dead end street has morphed once more in order to preserve itself as a human way of being. Instead of containing itself within big national or imperial systems more and more it is a free-floating global entity, without boundaries, hidden within the soul of the individual.

Every suicide bomber who detonates him or herself has no knowledge of whether that bomb kills anybody let alone whether the event was militarily or politically effective. The suicide bomber does not belong to a traditional this-worldly cause with its organization, its tactics, its battles, its experience of victories and defeats and living to fight another day. Sure, there is belief in some ultimate historical victory and in the meantime there is also the whole thing of going to heaven and its boundless pleasures, but none of this is able fully to explain the critical lack of this-worldly perspective in the individual fighter. It does not seem to explain the Islamic women and neither does it explain the lone-wolf mass murderers of our own society, the public place shooters who kill colleagues, strangers and then themselves, or fly a small plane into an IRS building. We hear of these incidents almost weekly and people readily make the link between political terrorists and what these people are doing. What ties them all together is the transcendence of violence itself.

Violence has escaped the containing power of the state and the cyclical rhythms of war and peace. It has become a steady-state of human affairs which infects everyone at one degree or another. The apt Girardian concept is permanent sacrificial crisis, a situation where violence takes over the mimetic human creature so literally he or she becomes possessed by it. He has nowhere to go except a terminal explosion. In the past the way out was the scapegoat, discharging all the violence on one blameworthy figure. But now that figure is always resurrected, declared innocent by one side or the other, or the individual experiences himself as the real and ultimate victim. And so the only way of discharging the violence, of ending the unwinnable argument, is to go out yourself with the final blinding flash. And that is to be infected with the transcendence of violence.

In such circumstances the state devotes itself more and more to invigilating every individual in its range, which means wire taps at home, drones abroad and security everywhere. It is an infinite and doomed program but it is the one meaningful thing the state can do in its traditional role of containing violence. It means also, however, that the state is reduced more and more to a double of the terrorist, prepared also to use the same methods: assassination, torture, bombing outside of declared war, justification of illegal acts. And this could well mean—contra Girard—that the final apocalyptic showdown is not so much between two state-sized super-armed adversaries but between the asymmetric symmetry of state versus citizen. This is the famous Orwellian nightmare and it’s just as possible as Girard’s more Napoleonic vision.

“Transforming violence” can also mean, therefore, that the role of violence itself is being transformed. It is morphing before our eyes, creating a strange inhuman kind of society where cameras watch our every move and nevertheless in-flight bombers still elude detection, where there are metal-detectors in primary schools and yet the next stranger you meet can carry a hidden grudge that will end your life. What then does it mean to be a Christian in these circumstances?

It is to bring about the third meaning of “transforming violence” where violence is the object of transformation not the subject; where violence is not itself the pathway of change, but the pathway to be changed. It is a question of challenging and changing the deep character of the human, a construct rooted in violence, into something wonderfully new, a creature rooted in love. In our present moment of history this is anything but an abstract idea and it changes the meaning of Christianity radically, from a heavenly other-world salvation to a profound and revolutionary option for this one.

It is as easy to understand Christian transformation of violence as it is to grasp the possibility and effect of forgiveness. In some ways forgiveness seems like not doing anything: it is not holding something against someone, it is non-retaliation, non-violence. But to do this “not” from a faith perspective allows, at the same time, something enormously active to take place. It allows the living Spirit of love to flow into a situation, at first imperceptibly, but then more and more unmistakably. Forgiveness in Christ is not a moral act. It is an ontological one. It turns the world on its head and in the process green shoots of new creation, of a completely different mode of relation, begin appearing before our eyes.

This today is the most intensely political act anyone can make. It is the most intensely re-creative. And the great thing is that it can happen anywhere, in any situation, from the most trivial domestic situation, through workplace tensions, up to the level of national and international politics.

And yet if Christians really took this seriously the day may quickly come when the practice of radical forgiveness could be seen as an act of treason.

Tony B.