STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND RELIGION
By Ignatius Jesudasan, Jesuit social worker, currently Librarian at Jesuit Regional Theology Centre, Channai, in Global Peace Vol. 5, No. 2, December 2005
People who respond to charges of violence against them do so generically, by pointing to the violence of the historical social structures within which they and all others are operating. Conflict between the past and the present generation and between the present and any envisaged future is an ever-continuing historical phenomenon. In what does the so-called structural violence consist, which becomes the source of every kind of inter-personal, inter-group or inter-ethnic and international conflict?
The modes of precise answer differ among serious respondents, and depend on the aspect of the issue upon which they focus. Mahatma Gandhi, who raised the whole Indian nation against foreign British rule as an unnatural and anti-Swadeshi act of violence, also defined the State itself as the most concentrated organization of violence. In this, Gandhi located structural violence in the violation of proximate geographical boundaries and in remote-controlled concentrations of power. This definition of the remotely centered State as concentrated violence would remind one also of the Marxian maxim of the withering of the State as prerequisite for violence itself to wither away.
Rene Girard, an anthropologist and author of a famous book on the subject called Violence and the Sacred, locates violence, as did the Buddha, in the conflicting nature of social mimesis or the imitative pattern of human desire. He explains this pattern as the turning of our focus from the direct object of our desire to the persons who possess it, whose ways we seek to imitate in order to outdo them in that which we monopolistically want and desire to possess. Girard thus moves on to locate structural violence and its resolution in a politically ritualized practice of the scapegoat mechanism as a strategy of projecting the internal violence of any community on and to a falsely identified and helpless external or socially peripheral victim. Incidentally, in the words of Jesus, the victim of circumstance may be defined as “one whose time has not yet come” and who must abide.
If we relate Girard’s theory of violence to Gandhi’s, we are able to see a continuing historical pattern of the small fry trying to copy and imitate the big fish, in an effort to become a bigger fish than the currently or previously dominant one. In this pattern, lust for power, and securing it by eliminating all threatening competitors, lies at the root of its violently unnatural concentration. All the same, such a pattern of behaviors is evident in all the prevalent economic, political, and even religious practices. Hence the solution cannot be expected to come from these spheres. The search for alternative understandings and solutions must move beyond them. (emphasis mine, the transcriber).
To continue the search for a theoretical understanding of violence and its elimination, I propose what appears to be its deeper socio-ethical root and foundation. I would name it as the false ethical structure of violence. I see it consisting of the dichotomization or falsely posed mutual exclusion and opposition between good and evil. I say this because none of the concrete good and evil that we know and fight or argue about is as totally and absolutely exclusive as the abstract or total good and evil, which we cannot know. We ourselves are neither absolutely good nor absolutely evil, but concrete mixture of both good and evil in diverse kinds and measures. This is how and why we are able to observe good coming out of our apparent evil, and evil coming out of our apparent good. We would readily admit our mixture of good and evil, unless we pretended to be God almighty, untouched by the least shadow of sin, prejudice or ill will. The Gospels tell us that even Jesus declined the epithet of good master, because he understood that in its unqualified form, goodness belonged to God alone and to no single human being. Without the whole of humanity being good, no single individual could be either whole or good.
But our sad ethical fact is that we are not shamelessly and joyfully ready to admit our mixture of good and evil. We take ourselves with such blind and naïve pride to be pure gold or spotless and impeccable saints. The individual ethical arrogance implied in this attitude sets in motion its equally implicit social dynamics or agenda of absolutizing or totalizing good and evil. It exclusively identifies all good with one’s own group, and all evil with the other or opposed group. The ethically and logically consistent political sequel to such closed identification of good and evil would be the extermination of the supposedly evil other through total war, such as the battle of Kurukshetra, in which the supposedly wholly good Pandevas win against the supposedly wholly evil Kauravas. It is such a naïve war that President Bush is waging on Iraq today, by treating its previous regime of so-called terrorists as wholly and solely evil.
Gandhiji must have felt greatly embarrassed about himself and his image of India and Hinduism when he envisaged the battle of Kurukshetra as a literal historical probability. Hence he allowed himself the psychic violence and freedom to interpret Kurukshetra as a metaphor or allegory for individual and inner spiritual conflict and conquest. The fact is, even then he could not avoid admitting literal conflict at the individual spiritual levels, as contradicting his explicit negation to the literal historical ubiquity of violence. This would go to prove that Gandhi neither was, nor claimed to be, any more impeccable than the rest of us. Yet behind all our conscious and explicit claims, there lie unconscious assumptions and prejudices which contradict our explicit assertions, and which must be exposed in order to render us more and more transparently true to ourselves and to others. Among such assumed prejudices count our collective subjective totalization of good and collective objective totalization of evil. This is precisely the process of divinization of self and satanization of other.
Since this false total subjectivization of good and total objectivization of evil is the projective foundation and factor of incalculable social, religious and military conflict and violence, the ethical solution to conflict resolution must lie in the adoption of the social relativity of truth and of good and evil. It was because Gandhi had made this assumption his humble theoretical position and principle that he could engage in his self-purifying satyagrahic acts as a continuing search for the fuller and greater truth on his own and on his opponent’s sides. Satyagraha in principle implied as much faith in the opponent as in the Satyagrahi’s own self. Gandhi’s faith in satyagraha was rooted in at least an atom of goodness in the heart of even the worst social offender, sinner or enemy. This was why he ventured to propose Satyagraha to the persecuted Jews even against the fanatically hardened Hitler.
In so doing, Gandhi was almost literally echoing the ethical teachings of Jesus to his earnest followers. To love and forgive one’s enemies and thus to move from a field of total hate and enmity to a gestalt of unilateral peace and reconciliation was the moral imperative practical ethical teaching of Jesus for a conflict-free and non-violent world. It implied that even the enemy had morally to be believed to be both good and lovable. Even if he or she was not already good and lovable, they could be made good by the Satyagrahi’s own love and forgiveness, and so turn to “look upon him whom they had pierced.” This was the substantive message of Satyagraha that Gandhi derived from the teaching and example of Jesus. Thus he went on metaphorically to crown Jesus by dubbing Him a “Prince among Satyagrahis.”
The religious society – especially the Semitic Christian brand – has a major historical and pedagogical problem here and now, as also in the past and from its beginning. I would describe the problem as follows. Its priestly classes have, in the first place, scripturally-ritually “divinized” their historical prophets and founding saints or heroes. Thereby they have sought to create and maintain a theological distance between the worshipped and the worshippers through the act of worship itself. In the second place, ritualistic priestly worship has served as an escape from and substitution for ethical imitation of the non-violent lifestyle and teaching of holy prophet-martyr saints. Theology has substituted the place and task of the ethical transformation of society by making itself into an ideology of collective ethnic identity and its secular historical dominance. Priestly worship and theology have kept the believers in closer continuity with their biological evolutionary origin than with faith in their own desire and capacity for self-transcendence as conquest of collectively exclusive self-love.
This unwillingness of the priestly class to substitute and transform ritual worship with social action has been theologized into the common human incapacity to keep pace with the spiritual evolutionary possibility of self-transcendence and self-sacrifice, which the saintly heroes demonstrated by their ahimsa (non-violence). This reluctance has functioned only to maintain and increase the gap of the priestly sacredness of the ritualized moments, actions and beliefs from the day-to-day secular world of economic, political and military decisions and actions. Thus instead of upholding the non-violent heroes as other-empowering models of self-transcending self-conquest, priests have made use of them in ritualized religious worship to appease or reinforce the legalistically created guilty consciences and their violently other-negating, other-absorbing and other-conquering, collective identity consciousness. In all these ways, the holy names of the non-violent prophets and saints have been used as tokens of mutual group superiority to one another, and to gain and score a material, spiritual and psychological advantage or victory over one another.
To sum up: in renouncing their global ethical responsibility towards overcoming structural violence, in preference for the benefits of power which a homogenizing mono-ethnic, personality-cultic ritual worship conferred on them, priest-led religions have historically committed dogmatic structural violence to both the world and to their believers, as well as their saintly founders, who sacrificed their lives as witnesses to the possibility of establishing a non-violent world order. Thus needlessly violent martyrdoms are ritual-dogmatically perpetuated into an ongoing literal historical necessity. Priest-preachers symbolically-ideologically advocate it. Politicians and unwary citizens become the unwittingly credulous agents continuing its violent historical agenda. But everything which has been said about Semitic religiosity may apply with suitable modifications to other ethnic religious communions. END OF ARTICLE.
