I’m continuing with the excellent read Engaging the Powers, by Walter Wink, an analysis of the mythology and spirituality of violence from a Christian perspective. This is the best book that I have yet read on the topic of violence and the spiritual basis for nonviolence.

I’m on the chapter, “On Not Becoming What You Hate,” in which he discusses the way violence spreads by mirroring itself in its victims. In a sense it’s like a virus, infecting everyone with whom it comes into contact. It’s so invisible that no one realizes that the violence itself is the enemy; instead we use it to defeat those whom we believe to be our adversaries, little realizing that we have become the enemy.

We become what we hate. The very act of hating something draws it to us. Since our hate is usually a direct response to an evil done to us, our hate almost invariably causes us to respond in the terms already laid down by the enemy. Unaware of what is happening, we turn into the very thing we oppose.

This applies universally, Wink says, from intrapsychic to international conflict. From personal failings …

The alcoholic who tries to “resist evil” quickly discovers that the very attempt to conquer the compulsion by main force is futile.

… to national ones.

“The more a tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate in a violent mimesis,” writes Rene Girard; “the resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror image of the other.” With what visage, then, did the United States emerge “victorious” from forcible resistance to Hitler’s evil? We have adopted a permanent war economy and a militarized conception of national security. We see it as our duty to police the “free” world, and we fund a huge army staffed, if necessary, through involuntary conscription. We have created an invisible apparatus of surveillance and espionage that seems incapable of distinguished patriotic protest from sedition, is unaccountable to public authorities, and inaugurates wars without consent of the Congress. We have increasingly come to rely on military intervention instead of diplomacy, force rather than negotiations. We are one of the major purveyors of armaments to nations all over the globe, many of whom purchase weapons at the cost of the welfare of their own people and the destabilization of their own regions.

We have, in short, granted Hitler a degree of victory by adopting elements of the ethos and mentality of Nazism.

“You are what you eat.” That this is literally true on some level was acknowledged by tribal peoples, who felt a strong connection with and gave thanks and prayers to the animals they hunted down. Some believed that they took on characteristics of what they ate.

The truth of this concept is borne out through a look at our history and our society.

… In overcoming the enemy, one tends to swallow not only his better qualities, but also the worst, and to become like the vanquished through victory.

Some examples:

William Irwin Thompson comments … “Japan is now Los Angeles and Detroit, and Big Sur, California, is a Zen Mountain Center. Germany is now a consumer society, and we are the largest militarist state in the history of the world. We have become our enemy.”

Wink cites example after example of people who rise up against injustice through violence, only to adopt the same role as their oppressors once victory was achieved. In a very real sense, though the actors continue to change, the roles remain the same.

One example is that of the Jews.

Jews emerged from the nightmare of Hitlerism and the Holocaust crying “Never again!” and are now treating Palestinians brutally. Torture and massive overreaction to legitimate protests grow in their inhumanity.

Jewish writer Marc Ellis says,

The tragedy of the Holocaust is indelibly ingrained in our consciousness. Contemporary Jewish theology helps us come to grips with our suffering; it hardly recognizes that today we are powerful. It holds in tension Holocaust and our need for empowerment. Consequently it speaks eloquently for the victims of Treblinka and Auschwitz yet can ignore Sabra and Shatila [the sites of massacres in Lebanon at least consented to by Israeli armed forces]. It pays tribute to the Warsaw ghetto uprising but has not place for the uprising of ghetto dwellers on the other side of Israeli power. Jewish theologians insist that the torture and murder of Jewish children be lamented and commemorated in Jewish ritual and belief. They have yet to imagine the possibility that Jews have in turn tortured and murdered Palestinian children. Holocaust theology relates the story of the Jewish people in its beauty and suffering. It fails to understand the contemporary history of the Palestinian people as integral to our own. Thus, this theology articulated who we were but no longer helps us understand who we have become.

A domestic example of mimetic violence — how we create the criminals that plague us:

Why do prisons fail to rehabilitate criminals? Because, says Mark Mason, who has been there, the criminal justice system does everything possible to socialize prisoners into the ethos of penitentiary life. The prisoner is taught, by the guards, administration, and other inmates, how a criminal walks, talks, breathes, looks, reacts. Prison strips a person of a sense of self and conditions one to act like a criminal in order to fit into the group. Consequently, as high as eighty percent of released convicts return to prison. Having developed a “criminal self,” having identified with the criminal life and criminal population, most find that they cannot live a life apart. The criminal justice system not only is a school for crime; it actually molds people’s souls into the very identity prisons are supposed to make them renounce. Having become alienated from their true selves, they can live nowhere else than in this hellish circle of the damned who have nothing left but a collective negative identity.

Wow.

Vietnam veteran and Buddhist monk Claude Anshin Thomas decried the violence of many members of the peace movement (I quoted him in a recent post); Wink explores this as well:

The ancient pattern of violent resistance being transformed into its opposite governs collective life from the nation to the family. We are addicted to violence, and the irony is that this addiction is as prevalent on the left as on the right.

The radical left fringe of the anti-Vietnam War movement, for example, correctly identified the evil our government was doing in Asia and adopted the same violent means to oppose it. Nor was that all; they became the actual image of what they hated. Like the Powers they opposed, they became secretive (as terrorists must). This forced them to abandon all attempts to build a popular political base, so they became increasingly elitist, an oligarchy that “knew what was the best for the rest of us.” To counter messianic American imperialism they became messianists in turn who would impose their good on others. Here, as so often, the thesis lived on in the antithesis.

The implications of this sort of mimetic violence abound, for it goes even farther — not limited only to our intrapsychic conflicts or interpersonal relationships, nor to international relations, but to the planet itself.

We have played out the principle of mimetic counterresistance even in our relationship with nature. By 1950 many scientists recognized that DDT was toxic to a wide number of species, but we were already “hooked” into its use. For while malarial mosquitoes were becoming increasingly immune to DDT, discontinuing its application was not an easy matter because the DDT had virtually exterminated the other species that fed on the mosquitoes. By 1980, forty-three types of malaria-bearing mosquitoes had become resistant to the leading insecticides. As a consequence, the incident of malaria in some countries has increased a hundredfold in the last fifteen years. One response has been simply to increase the toxicity level of pesticides being sprayed, in a bizarre parody of Cold War politics. Violent reaction has become a reflexive twitch that threatens the very ecosystem itself.

And, at the other end of the spectrum, individual health.

Western allopathic medicine plays out the same total-war scenario. Prevention through diet, meditation, stress reduction, and exercise has until very recently been almost totally ignored by doctors in favor of “fighting” disease by ingesting highly poisonous chemicals that are deadly not only to harmful agents but to helpful ones as well.

What Wink calls Jesus’ Third Way is the path of the spirit, the way of the spiritual warrior. It’s really the only long-term way to survive.

Nonviolence is a spiritual challenge of epic proportions. It calls upon the soul’s authentic longing for heroism, for risking one’s life for an infinite stake, for self-transcendence in giving to others.

… Reality appears to be so constructed, whether physically or spiritually, that every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. Thus every attempt to fight the Domination System by dominating means is destined to result in domination. When we resist evil with evil, when we mirror it, when we lash out at it in kind, we simply guarantee its perpetuation. The way of nonviolence, the way Jesus chose, is the only way that is able to overcome domination. To those trapped in the assumptions of domination, nonviolence must appear suicidal — a crucifixion. But to those who have looked unflinchingly at the record of violence in the everyday world, nonviolence appears to be the only way left. And not just for Christians; for the world.