9. THE PARADOX OF NONVIOLENT ACTION

The desperate willingness with which we historically have embraced a life after death as reward for this death in life is one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting the theory of filicide. We know we do not live, not really, so we construct myths to account for our death in life and to provide hope for release and reward. At the center of the myths we place the suffering child. Our filicidal dream is that the child rises again after death. That an image of a son's bloody death on a cross should have become a central symbol of our civilization indicates something of the extremity of our predicament.

We have the word, the concept, the myth, and the vision to express that dream: resurrection. Strangely, we do not have the word which logically would be used to express the first rising, the one that precedes this re-rising depicted in the central myth. That word, properly, would be: surrection. Perhaps the fact that we do not have that word is another of those strange instances of hidden knowledge contained within the language. If our birth is not a true birth but only a birth into death, then birth is not a proper surrection--so, naively, we do not bother with the word.

Rational analysis is an efficient, effective way of dealing with immediate problems of physical survival, as science and technology have demonstrated. We have been so impressed by the solutions to survival problems generated by science and technology that we have mistakenly assumed that the way of knowledge on which they are based, that of rational analysis, is adequate and sufficient for all other problems.

Rational analysis has two basic values:

--Survival value, and

--Play value.

The usefulness of rational analysis is, in fact, radically limited to the so-called physical realm. Once we have established ourselves with a modicum of security and comfort in that realm by means of science and technology, rational analysis ceases to have critical, essential value. To the extent that we then attempt to force solutions of nonphysical problems by means of rational analysis, that way of knowledge itself becomes dangerous and destructive.

To use Lawrence LeShan's perceptive terminology: rational analysis is a great help in finding solutions to structural problems--understanding why it is easier to pull a large piece of wood if it has wheels attached than if it doesn't. But rational analysis is a great hindrance in dealing with functional problems--traditional psychoanalysis did not cure anything, it only made it possible for a patient to accept certain fears and insecurities as normal.

Beyond the point where physical security and comfort are attained, rational analysis has at most play value. The problem of filicide cannot be solved by rational analysis. Rational analysis can do no more than demonstrate the existence and nature of the problem. We cannot stop controlling by controlling more, or better, or differently.

To return to the resurrection metaphor: how can we "rise again" if we have not yet risen the first time? Why should we die twice to be born once?

Kuo Hsi, Landscape.

That dilemma brings us to paradox. Western civilization has steadfastly refused to employ tools other than rational analysis over the long term. Language, which is to say, symbol manipulation in all its forms, has been our chief tool for rational analysis. As our desire for control has intensified, so has our use of that tool. Along the way we have experimented with other tools. For several centuries we tried out the many devices of religion, with mixed results. For several centuries we tried the many devices of art, also with mixed results. And we still have those tools with us, though we now use them either for sporadic solace needed in times of crisis, or for entertainment.

We have refined our discrimination of violences in this peculiar progress called history largely as a result of a long sequence of rational analyses. Historically, two reactions to analysis of our ways of violence may be discerned. The one encompasses that set of attitudes called "conservative." Those persons have tended to resist rational analysis and have opted for the status quo, with a strong tendency to defend the status quo in either religious or social-elitist terms. Those who have welcomed rational analysis have tended to do so with as much force as have those who resist it. These persons display a wide set of attitudes called "liberal." Their behavior frequently produces political revolution. The point is that both the political right and the political left are implicated in the ongoing violence which characterizes history.

As has become clear, the entire process of acculturation to which we subject children is a series of interferences, so many acts of violence committed on the children. But the end of our filicidal analysis also yielded up the insight that filicide is finally an internal act of violence. Thus any overt, social response-however well-intentioned-is, paradoxically, itself only another filicidal act of violence.

Dismissing out of hand the value of that adolescent foolishness known as existential paralysis, we are then left to learn the discrimination of filicidal violences. At first glance, we seem to find ourselves in a double-bind. We are damned if we act, and we are damned if we don't. But notice what happens if we consider the classic double-bind situation in the light of the theory of filicide. The exquisite pain we derive from any existential double-bind is only a masochistic variation on the basic filicidal theme of control: the individual attempts to escape responsibility for his or her own actions by demonstrating rationally that all action is at best foolish and at worst tragically painful. Notice that these two possibilities are only philosophical reformulations of the two basic myths--Orestes with his tragic success, and Oedipus with his tragic failure. Such a double-bind is possible only for a creature so intent on absolute, perfect answers that he or she is blinded to all other possible ways of knowing. The fact that we cannot avoid violence no matter what we do is a fact that the absolutist, writhing in the wondrous pain of success/failure, is unwilling to accept. Yet, paradoxically, that fact provides a way out of the filicidal, acculturative conundrum--or at least points toward a way out.

It is likely that filicide, pretty much in the form we have it today, is going to be with us for quite some time. As always--whether we recognize it or not--our only choice will continue to be at what level of violence we choose to exist. It would be easy to create a filicidal ideology, actually an anti-filicidal ideology--a program of necessary and desirable reforms of society and the family in order to end the brutality that children experience. One point for such a program is the idea of letting the children go. For most people that would be a dangerously threatening suggestion. Other, far more threatening examples spring readily to mind, the most potent of course being the reform of child-rearing in such a way that children would be as overtly sexual as they wish--or wish not--to be from a very early age, both among themselves and with adults. The day when these and many other reforms are realized is inevitable. To demand such changes now would itself be rape of the most primitive kind--rape of the minds of millions of concerned, well-intentioned, loving parents who are very frightened and very confused in their own lives and who are rearing classically frightened and confused filicidal children.

Both the revolutionary and the reactionary find it possible to act bloodily and to justify their actions through an extreme form of identification with various patterns of violence. The revolutionary has an answer to the world's problems and attempts to make the world over into that answer. The reactionary finds the status quo pleasantly worthwhile and strives mightily to defend it. One of the pitfalls in the process of discriminating violences is the construction of one's personality in such a way that the personality comes to equate itself with the very act of discrimination.

So we take the process of perception one step farther and call it "apperception." Apperception may be understood as doubly removed self-consciousness. Put another way, it is thinking thinking about thinking. It is a nonjudgmental rendering of the self in all its facets, both violent and nonviolent. We arrive again at paradox: it is the self observed and--another Western heresy--not interfered with. (The Heisenberg Principle is only an externalization of filicidal violence down to the quantum realm.)

Turner, Sunrise with Sea Monsters (detail).

In both East and West this kind of apperception, attainable and useful though it is, has more often than not degenerated into an abdication of individual responsibility. We retain the form, unaware of the inner vacuity. The range of empty, once magical gesture proceeds from the simplistic phenomenon of so-called prayer by television evangelists, through the somewhat more complex structures and poses of the various filicidal religions, to the thoughtful, troubled, meditative ascetic who physically withdraws from contact with society.

* * *

Our acts may or may not have meaning. Or they may occur and exist in such a way that they simultaneously have meaning and do not have meaning. Or in such a way that they neither have meaning nor do not have meaning. The very high energy levels involved in any act of physical or mental violence obscure the act and its echoes so thoroughly that questions concerning whether any of our acts have meaning or not are little more than clever pastimes for anorganic minds. Yet is that not always, always the question behind all questions: does my pain matter?

Each answers that question explicitly or implicitly with a life. And each answer is different. Both the revolutionary and the reactionary answer with a loud "Yes!" The reactionary says: Yes, my pain matters but there is nothing I can do about it now so I am acting in such a way as to make it stop when I retire or when I die. The revolutionary says: Yes, my pain matters and I am acting in such a way as to make it stop either now or very soon.

* * *

The sixty-third chapter of the Tao Te Ching begins with the radical suggestion:

wei wu wei

the literal meaning of which is:

action not action.

Action without action. Action without interference, without violence. Language resists such heresy. One translator tried: to act in repose--which conjures up images of carefree billionaires pushing buttons in Las Vegas penthouses, or time-worn Tibetan yogis pulling telepathic strings from Himalayan caves.

To act without acting. To interfere without interfering. Analysis stops here because it cannot deal with the paradoxical possibility of control without controlling. And we are left--not with silence, but with laughter. In the distance the attentive ear hears the oh-so-gently mocking, always encouraging sound of laughter from the eternal mystery of grace.