As a teenager in the 1970s, at the tail end of the 60s liberation movements, I regarded myself as a revolutionary and capable of violence in the service of social transformation. In particular, I called myself a “militant ecologist” and destroyed some construction equipment that was tearing up the woods near my house to put in some houses. A small cohort of the like-minded and I made threats toward my school (Alice Deal Junior High in DC), demanding an end to compulsory attendance and grading.
I felt sympathy, at 14, for people like the Weather Underground, even though their bomb-making petered out around when they blew themselves up, along with Dustin Hoffman's house in 1970. I said stuff like this, which I heard from people around me, and even my mother's parents, who were former Communist Party members. "It's a violent system," they said. "Changing it will require violence."
This was a source of fundamental debate among 1960s radicals: between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, for example, but also among little groups of hippies all over the country. Was violent revolution possible, or on the other hand was non-violent resistance practical? The advocates of violent revolution (or self-defense by force) like the Black Panthers and Weathermen squared off against the pacifist spirit of peaceniks like Pete Seeger or the King movement, including spiritual leaders like Bayard Rustin and Philip Berrigan.
The idea that we were about to have a violent revolution faded as the 1970s continued. I stopped thinking of myself as an urban guerilla and started to think of myself as an undergraduate. Also, my step-father Richard Abell, who’d been a conscientious objector in World War II, took me to a couple of Quaker meetings and tried to teach me about the history of the non-violence that King had preached.
It took me decades after that to commit myself fully to pacifism, though I never again engaged in violent action. But I just didn't think of myself as a pacific sort of person: I thought I was too angry and too realistic to embrace that pie-in-the-sky bullshit. We are violent apes, I thought. We can conceal that, maybe, but not eliminate it as long as we're human.
But a number of events in my own life and in the world moved me eventually. My brother Bob was shot to death in 1984. As the stories of mass shootings and the war on terror accumulated in the 2000s, I started going to Quaker meetings and listening to the "testimony of peace." In a meeting the morning after the Pulse nightclub shooting, I committed myself, in tears, to non-violence.
I stopped waiting to become a saint, stopped waiting for all violent thoughts and angry passages to be deleted from my personality. I was almost 60 when I fully committed: a radical personality transformation more and more unlikely. But people had told me for a long time that being a pacifist isn't a matter of being morally perfected; it's a matter of committing yourself to a particular ethical/political position. I wasn't going to become a different person, but could commit to different ethics, and found it urgent to do so.
It may be the case that violence can never be entirely eliminated. It may also be that certain kinds of social transformations could never be accomplished without violence. But it's also true that violence pulls us toward despair and meaninglessness. Or maybe I should talk for myself: I can't bear it anymore, what's happening in Gaza or Sudan, or what's happening on the streets of Chicago and wherever the next mass shooting occurs. I need a spirituality and a politics that describes a world that could be affirmed: precisely as I'm tempted to hopelessness, I try to hold on to a vision of a tolerable world. I want a spirituality and a politics that offers me that. I'll worry about how realistic it is next week.
The tradition of American pacifism, which I'm currently exploring in a podcast, is a beautiful 300-year outbreak in a society that’s often characterized as essentially violent. When we think of America, perhaps we think of wars and cowboys and guns and gunslingers and shooters and predator drones. We’re the country that invented nuclear weapons.
But we’re also the country that produced great pacifists at every stage, as though every historical development made its own opposite real. From the mid-18th century, with figures such as John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Samuel May (Louisa Alcott's uncle), Adin Ballou, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Bayard Rustin, America has produced both beautiful pacifist souls and also unbeautiful souls who found themselves able to commit to a beautiful ideal.
It’s often said that non-violence is mere capitulation to established powers (for example, Peter Gelderloos has made this argument in a series of books, including How Non-Violence Protects the State). On the other hand, violent revolutions typically lead to repressive regimes, and repressive regimes can only be repressive because they control forces of violence.
I want or need a politics or spirituality that holds out the possibility of moving, by decent means, toward decent ends. I'm not completely sure whether humans are capable of large-scale cooperation without the threat of violence, without being coerced. But if we're not, it's unlikely we can avoid extinction. Maybe violent apes, such as we are, won't be able to stop thinking about killing each other, but I think that we could learn to do a lot less of it in the actual world.
—Check Crispin's podcast: Peace Now! Great American Pacifists