Pacifism and other 'sissy' things

But what about peaceful protests and that sort of thing, where they just all go and sit down somewhere in a group? They're not being violent, but they are still resisting oppression and 'struggling' in a way.

Does this make them not pacifist anymore?

edited 5th Sep '11 10:11:56 PM by LoniJay

Yes and no. Peaceful protests carry their own drama with them; Martin Luther King Jr, for example, was able to continue a struggle against racism and for civil rights with peaceful means. Gandhi, too, was so attractive a figure because he struggled against an oppressive British regime. None of them were what I would call pacifists, however, since pacifists would rather allow evil to go on instead of fight against it; Gandhi himself did not consider himself to be a pacifist, and disliked the idea. Arguably, if they were true pacifists, the world would not have taken such an interest in either of them, since they would not have struggled against anything. The minute pacifism becomes about struggle, then it cannot be called pacifism any longer.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong. I would never say that violence is good; however, humans are naturally attracted to struggle and conflict, and pacifists seek to reject this. That is why people are not attracted to pacifism, because it goes against their natural inclination towards struggle.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:24:12 PM by tropetown

... That's not pacifism. That's apathy.

I think we're working on different definitions of 'pacifism'. I define it as not doing anything that will cause harm to somebody else. That doesn't mean you can never oppose anything.

"(War Is Hell had been around before Vietnam; World War I being the big catalyst for this idea that war wasn't glorious, mainly due to the meaninglessness of that war, as well)."

American civilians did not witness the horrors of WWI. Vietnam was their first direct point of reference. The idea had been around since the dawn of time, anyway. Book VI of Paradise Lost is dedicated to this idea.

"humans are naturally attracted to struggle and conflict, and pacifists seek to reject this."

No, they do not. That's not what pacifism is.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:26:22 PM by kashchei

In opposing something, you must naturally cause it harm. Apathy is different from pacifism, since apathy is simply not caring; pacifism is actively allowing things to happen to you out of a belief that causing harm for any reason is worse than actively preventing evil.

American civilians did not experience the horrors of Vietnam, either; there were, however, a number of poems and literature dedicated to the War Is Hell theme released all over the world, America included. It would be impossible to ignore the fact that European foreign policy had completely changed as a result of such a brutal, pointless war.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:29:03 PM by tropetown

Not fighting back is actively preventing evil, in the eyes of a pacifist, assuming we are talking about a pacifist benighted enough to think that evil is a functioning concept in reality.

Is "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" really that difficult of a concept to grasp?

edited 5th Sep '11 10:28:49 PM by kashchei

No, but if you allow someone to keep putting eyes out because you are afraid of harming him, the end result will be the same. Not fighting back is not preventing evil in any sense of the word; all you are doing is shifting the burden of prevention onto someone else.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:30:39 PM by tropetown

Ah. See, I think the point of pacifism is to avoid harm to people (and possibly other life forms), not to avoid harm to ideologies or abstract things.

If that were the case, a pacifist would never be allowed to do anything or say anything. They couldn't vote, because that's harming the politcal party they don't vote for. They couldn't ever express an opinion like "I think that was wrong" or "That isn't a good idea", not even about the most minor of things.

They couldn't even buy anything without supporting and opposing something.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:30:23 PM by LoniJay

Yes and no. Sometimes, you do need to harm people: I would love to hear the person who would think that the British and French should have continued to appease Hitler in World War II, since that is what a true pacifist would advocate. Also, notice how I said that people in general won't be attracted to pacifism? That is because people are not naturally inclined to forgo struggle for quietly rolling over and allowing themselves to be harmed.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:33:37 PM by tropetown

Sorry, what? I don't see how that post is relevant to the above ones.

It is relevant. You just said that a pacifist does not advocate harm to people, did you not? Well, what do you think those German soldiers were? A pacifist (and I don't think you're a pacifist) would say that it was wrong to wage war, since it would directly harm people. Someone who simply wishes for peace, on the other hand, would recognize that sometimes, war is a necessary evil.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:37:13 PM by tropetown

Yes, but I was only disputing your definition of a pacifist, and stating why I think it isn't plausible. Because by your definition nobody is a pacifist.

I hadn't said anything about the times when pacifism is the right/wrong choice, yet.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:37:27 PM by LoniJay

The definition of pacifism I am using is "fighting or opposing using no violent or harmful approaches" how about all of you?

If it solves the problem at hand, yes. If not, then non-peaceful means will be necessary. Either way, people are not naturally inclined to peace; they'd sooner follow a demagogue into hell than they would become forever peaceful.

War and violence should not be used for their own sake, as nihilism for its own sake is repulsive. At no point will I advocate violence as the best way, however, denying that it has its place is foolish and unrealistic.

edited 5th Sep '11 10:43:33 PM by tropetown

"No, but if you allow someone to keep putting eyes out because you are afraid of harming him, the end result will be the same. Not fighting back is not preventing evil in any sense of the word; all you are doing is shifting the burden of prevention onto someone else."

Which is a fair point, but it has nothing to do with people being attracted to struggle of any such nonsense. I do believe fighting is sometimes necessary - but I believe it is more necessary to know how to choose your battles.

total Pacifism doesn't work for a number of reasons. The primary one being unable to oppose people who do bad things.

The idea that it's sissy though, I find odd. It takes a certain conviction of belief to say "No war, never." even if I find the idea untenable.

It worked in India, didn't it? If you make a martyr of yourself, you shed the international light on your compatriots' plight.

That only works if either it shames the enemy into stopping or it attracts the pity of people strong enough to fight for you and win. All other times end in defeat.

Tropetown, I was with you up to this:

Pacifists don't deny struggle; they don't even deny conflict. They deny physical violence. There's a very fundamental difference there between those three things.

It certainly is true; it is the reason for the rise of Nazi Germany, it's the reason for the rise of fundamentalism, and it is the reason for the spread of Christianity. Had any of these people simply said "this is good, and this is evil", could they have ever moved people to action? Would people's hearts have been stirred by simple logic? No, in order to draw people into any type of movement, they need to feel as though they are now part of a higher dramatic struggle; otherwise they will become apathetic and lose interest. The civil rights movement, for example, gained momentum because it was framed as a struggle against oppression. People had known for years what was going on, however, it only gained momentum when leaders arose, called out an oppressive system, and made them want to rise and cast off the shackles in a struggle against racism and bigotry. Had they done nothing, or had they not framed it as a struggle, instead as, say, a simple matter of law or some other such triviality, it would have died in obscurity. Communism, like I said before, was framed as a class struggle; had it merely approached the issue of poverty from a philosophical stance, it would not have gained as many followers as it did.

The reason why some people will not be moved by the effect of the dramatic (the number of people is much smaller, however, than you realize) is because they have had this desire superimposed by a limiting distortion of their true moral yearning. "Good and evil", as it is thought of in traditional morality, is a distortion of what humans truly strive for in a moral sense; the aversion to what we often call evil is simply the aversion to nihilism. Evil, as I said before, is not the ultimate undesirable state: the ultimate undesireable state, in all its forms, is death. As creatures of life and meaning, we are naturally averse to death, meaningless suffering, and nihilism, which is moral death. The important part of the struggle between "good and evil" is the struggle: however, because evil often represents nihilism and death, we are naturally opposed to it. This does not mean that we are not drawn to "evil" when it is given purpose and drama, rather, we are at once repulsed by the inherent meaninglessness of death and suffering, but are drawn to the dramatic circumstances under which it occurs.

Feel free to comment; I'd be happy to debate or explain further.

@Madrugada: The definition of pacifism I'm using is perhaps closer to Suicidal Pacifism than anything. I certainly have nothing against people who wish to avoid violence, as humans are naturally averse to suffering and death. However, people who would rather allow suffering to go on in front of them instead of harming the one who would cause suffering are making the problem worse. Though, as was stated earlier, I wouldn't call them sissies, either.

edited 5th Sep '11 11:12:57 PM by tropetown

I'm curious as to why you feel that evil is a concept that features prominently in our world. It does not. There are indeed people who harm because they wish to harm. Everyone else harms because they think they need to in order to avoid being harmed themselves.

"The civil rights movement, for example, gained momentum because it was framed as a struggle against oppression. People had known for years what was going on, however, it only gained momentum when leaders arose, called out an oppressive system, and made them want to rise and cast off the shackles in a struggle against racism and bigotry. Had they done nothing, or had they not framed it as a struggle, instead as, say, a simple matter of law or some other such triviality, it would have died in obscurity. Communism, like I said before, was framed as a class struggle; had it merely approached the issue of poverty from a philosophical stance, it would not have gained as many followers as it did."

This is completely backwards. The movements against oppression do not rise because of semantics, but because people want to put an end to a highly undesirable state. If a catalyst is needed to unite them, it is not because they need to be fed an ideology, but because they need a certainty that their efforts will not backfire.

In fact, you need look no further than the class struggle - the proletariat will not rise up because their livelihood is dictated by those in power. It's all good and well to understand that this oppression exists, but if you're subsisting on the scraps the capitalist throws you, you're in no position to either bargain or fight for more. They have the resources to hold out. You don't.

edited 5th Sep '11 11:17:07 PM by kashchei

Not exactly correct. Without an ideology uniting them together against an oppressive force, they will not come together to fight it. They will suffer in silence, maybe defy the force individually, but without a common, greater cause, they will not come together and fight. Thankfully, because humans are attracted to struggle for a higher purpose, this common cause will eventually unite them, and they will come together and fight.

As for the class struggle, you have just proven my point. The reason communism was able to gain followers in the first place was precisely because it told the people exactly that; because they framed their lives around a class struggle, they were zealously devoted to emerging victorious from that struggle. In other words, though the oppression was there from the beginning, it wasn't until the communists told the people who joined them that it was all part of a greater struggle that communism began to take hold. Communism, by its very nature, upholds the idea that humans are naturally attracted to higher purpose and drama, since the reason it spread so quickly was because it gave the people both.

The list of reasons why communism doesn't work are long. You cannot deny, though, the fact that the idea of a class struggle is what caused so many people to become fanatically devoted to the cause. Logic does not move hearts, my friend.

edited 5th Sep '11 11:27:29 PM by tropetown

I'm not talking about communism. I'm talking about Marxism. What happened with real-world communism has no relation to Marx's ideal of the working class reclaiming the value of their labor. And, truthfully, I have no idea why you keep going on about higher purposes and what humans are drawn to as though you have some intimate insight into how everyone's private ideology functions. These are buzzwords and conjectures. They mean nothing. You're projecting your own views onto the rest of the world without even an attempt to back your opinion up with evidence.

edited 5th Sep '11 11:28:07 PM by kashchei

"I'm curious as to why you feel that evil is a concept that features prominently in our world. It does not."

While I would argue that evil is not really a thing, you cannot deny that many, many people believe it exists and has been used in the past to unify.

Hitler was that douche in Europe to many Americans, until the Japanese attacked and sided with Hitler, then he was evil incarnate.

Except that I have given historical evidence for why my views are correct. You have not given me any factual evidence to think I am wrong; in fact, every point you raise simply proves my original point, or is incorrect. If anyone else had raised disagreement, your statement would make sense, however, since it is only you at the moment, you'll have to do better than that. (By the way, any disagreement is welcome; another perspective would be quite interesting)

Exactly. This is a point I was trying to make; the drama of fighting against a great enemy will cause the people affected to unite against it. It's called the "rally 'round the flag" effect.

edited 5th Sep '11 11:34:11 PM by tropetown