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UnitarianUniversalist
San FranciscoSociety
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1187 Franklin Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 415-776-4580 www.uusf.org
The First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco
WHY VIOLENCE IS DECLININGA Sermon Delivered at the
First Unitarian Universalist Church of San FranciscoSunday, January 25, 2015
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WHY VIOLENCE IS DECLININGA Sermon Delivered at the
First Unitarian Universalist Church of San FranciscoSunday, January 25, 2015
The Rev. Dr. John A. Buehrens, Senior Minister
Last week, when Cindy Pincus was preaching here on MLK weekend about #BlackLivesMatters, what I couldn’t help thinking was how, like Phil, my life has been relatively privileged, free of violence. And about those who have helped keep it that way, the police, our military, the public officials who have to make tough decisions about arrests, indictments, and how to respond to terrorism and new dangers, whether in our streets, airports, or in a place like Yemen or Syria. “By whose severe duty,” as a classic prayer for them puts it, “our lives are made more secure.” Not that they are always wise in how they go about it.
Back in the 1980s, we were living in New York City, where the crime rate was then rather high. Gwen and I were invited to visit Israel and the Occupied Territories. The first intifada was underway, and Gwen was nervous not only about going, but also about leaving our daughters, then still in grade school, in the care of a woman friend. We did get stones thrown at our bus on a visit to Jericho, so that I was tempted to buy a T-shirt in the Old City reading, ‘I got stoned on the West Bank.’ But I thought better of it. We arrived home the morning of Erica’s sixth-grade graduation, only to find that their caregiver, who had been provided with authorization for all emergencies, had wisely decided not to phone us. Not when Erica was mugged and robbed by some older girls; not when Mary had the same experience. And not when the two of them had a fight that resulted in a glass door slamming, cutting Erica’s wrist, requiring multiple stitches.
We were still absorbing this news when we had to head off to her graduation party with friends. Gwen and the girls were in a cab that cut off another cab making a turn. The second cabbie got out at the next stoplight, took a baseball bat, and began
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pounding on their taxi, smashing the windshield. The two drivers fought. The police came. Finally, when we were safely seated at the graduation party, I said to Gwen, “See? I told you we’d be relatively safe -- on the West Bank.” Where on my last trip, three years ago, I found more and more young frustrated Palestinians – not all, but most – now committed to non-violent resistance to the occupation, and not terrorism.
Would that it were so everywhere that injustice persists! But there is a classic calculation called “The Pacifist’s Dilemma.” Steven Pinker, in his book on why violence has declined, despite our impressions to the contrary, summarizes it this way. If a group or coalition and its opponents maintain peace, they each benefit, at least some. But aggressors are be tempted to be aggressive in order to make the game, “Winner Take All.”
“[T]urning the other cheek, beating swords into plowshares, and other [high-minded] sentiments . . . only work if one’s adversary is overcome by the same sentiments at the same time. [No wonder] violence can spiral upward or downward so unpredictably at various times in history.” But the long-term trend, especially in the last sixty years or so, is toward a reduction of violence. We tend to forget how “nasty, brutish and short” human life often was for our earliest ancestors. Rather than idealize so-called primitive societies, it might be wiser how often early burial sites show a high percentage of early humans died from human inflicted violence, not natural causes.
Tribes, nation states, even empires with their universalizing forms of religion, evolved in order to try to limit violence, at least within the given group. Although he has little use for those forms of religion he refers to as “tribal dogmas,” Pinker is an objective enough social scientist to say that the late Christopher Hitchens, in saying that “Religion makes everything worse,” almost willfully forgets the ethical, empathy side of religion – the side worth preserving.
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Perhaps the most mechanized uses of violence, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, have been by regimes that were actively hostile to that side of religion. But since World War II, with its mass murders and its use of nuclear weapons, reason and empathy and the rise of the political voices of those previously excluded from decision making – especially women and minorities – have combined to create a human rights movement that, I would say, is groping toward a secular form of global spirituality. At its best, it maintains a perspective on our beautiful, blue-green, fragile, crowded planet once thought available only to God and the angels.
I recall in the 1990s visiting the Pentagon, to call on then Secretary of Defense William Perry – a Unitarian Universalist. Opposite his desk he kept a large photograph of Earth taken from space. His wife was ill, and he was stepping down from office. He had other photos that he showed me. Of blowing up nuclear missile silos with his Russian counterpart, to reduce that form of danger. And spoke quietly about his regret that, following Black Hawk Down, neither the US nor France had sent so much as battalion of paratroopers to intervene in Rwanda, to prevent genocide there. Reminding me why I’ve never been able to be an absolute pacifist; only a persistent advocate for reducing violence.
Perry was succeeded by another UU, former Senator William Cohen of Maine. And the next day I called on Eliot Richardson, who resigned in protest as Attorney General in the Watergate Crisis over Pres. Nixon’s so-called “Saturday Night Massacre.” He, too, had been Secretary of Defense. I ask him how he could account for our small, not exactly militaristic denomination supplying three people to head the world’s largest military force. In his Boston Brahmin accent, he replied, “One might hope . . . that it has something to do with our commitment to reason.” Indeed!
But is violence really declining? A careful social scientist, in almost 700 pages with over a hundred charts and tables, Steven Pinker pretty conclusively shows that it is -- but not smoothly. Nor everywhere, obviously. So why don’t we know this? Well, it’s not the
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business of the news to give us the good news! What we ask the news to do is to warn us. We are hard-wired by evolution for fight or flight, for fear or danger. So editors and producers, I learned in media training, know what makes a story we’ll read or tune-in to: not the five W’s that make for a narrative (who, what, where, when and why), but rather the five C’s that capture attention: conflict, controversy, contradiction, character flaws, and colorful language or behavior.
I don’t mean in any way to lull us into a sense of complacency. There is much violence and injustice still to reduce and resist. But I would argue that we are being sentimental and obtuse when we try to pretend that things are only getting worse, or are simply hopeless. Perhaps despair is the one unforgivable sin; the sin, as scripture puts it, against the holy Spirit.
To be sure, I have had my personal frustrations in trying to prevent needless violence, and losing. None worse than when I took the risk of flying to Baghdad after Christmas twelve years ago. My late friend, Bob Edgar, then General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, was heading a delegation of American religious leaders trying to dissuade President Bush from invading Iraq. The United Nations was still doing “weapons inspections,” hunting for Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” Our delegation, including leaders from faith-based agencies experienced in the aftermath of humanitarian crises, went to do “humanitarian inspections.” Guided by UNICEF, and by hosts in the Iraqi Christian community, we dodged Saddam’s “minders” and formed our own conclusions. That invading Iraq would cost a half million needless civilian deaths, just as the sanctions regime had. Create over two million refugees. Fracture the country into sectarian fragments. And be the single most expensive, damaging, and futile use of American military power overseas since the Vietnam War.
After returning, and before the invasion actually began in March, I personally gave some forty public speeches saying this. Visited with Ted Kennedy as we all tried to get
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through to the White House. They would not even meet with us. Unreason was in the saddle. And only rarely since, have I indulged myself like this in saying, in essence, “We told you so.”
I could say more about organizations like the World Conference on Religion and Peace, founded by UUs, and their often successful efforts to limit violence. Suffice it to say that, all impressions notwithstanding, religion is generally NOT the cause of violence in our world. Sometimes, yes. But more often the combination of reason, empathy, hope, and courage that reduces violence arises from that quality which is more than belief, but is aptly called faith.
So if you want to reduce violence still further, keep the faith, friends! For as the Prophet Micah put it, “With what shall we come before the Eternal? Shall we come with sacrifices, with fatted calves to offer? Would the Eternal care if we gave streams of oil and thousands of rams? No, what the Eternal asks of us is that we seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly together.”
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