I have been watching Peace is Peace is every step by Thick Nhan Hanh on YouTube. The video takes about an hour, it is not very good quality, but I was stunned and moved and kept watching the full 52 minutes. (If you click the link above you will get to it. I recommend all to watch this).
Why was I moved so much? There is quite a lot to tell about. The whole idea: a bunch of Vietnam veterans, oldies now, but rough. You see these rough guys doing exercises with Thich Nhan Hahn like a bunch of softies. One explains that he was in Nam at the age of 17 and had been responsible (his words) of killing more than 50 before the age of 18. This part is tearing me apart, having a son of 18. All this was moving.
But maybe more than that I was moved and intrigued by Thich Nhan’s speech. Both the words and the tone of his voice. Let me start with the latter. We hear speaking a man that suffered the Vietnam war as a victim. As a Zen monk he had chosen to fight for peace and not to choose the side of one of the two parties in war. As a consequence he has never been able to live in Vietnam, even after the war, because he was felt as a traitor. And you hear no remorse, no hate, no frustration in his voice. This in itself is an act of peace. A deliberate chosen one, because it is clear that his life was dedicated to fight for peace. His choice is to live peace as an act of life, every moment. This moved me even more, after reading the daily on the middle east conflict. You know this conflict has been going on for a long time, and that an awful lot of suffering is going on. If you see how devastated the Vietnam Veterans are and how they struggle now, decades after having been there to find peace in themselves, you know that there wil have to be done a lot of healing in the future.
This about the tone of voice, now the words. These where fascinating, both in an theoretical and practical sense. I can’t quote literary (again: watch the video!). But in essence he speaks to those feeling guilty about the killing they have done. He says: why do you take all the guilt for this? You where not there on your own. You were send by a president. The president was chosen by the people. You were the hands, but are the hands guilty alone? The interesting about this argument is that it is correct. America is an abstract phenomenon, consisting of several hundreds of million people, interrelated in a complex way. From all of their individual thinking, feeling and acting, based on a history of thinking, feeling and acting, within a wider context of the world, emerged this war. This is an insight, worthy pondering on. War as an emergent property. The way a highly structured and intelligent colony emerges from the individual, stupid ants. The way (the illusion of a) consciousness emerges from a relatively a little bit of grey matter with quite a large amount of interconnected cells . A big mass of little interactions, sum up to a new degree of abstraction, creating its own laws. Maybe each of the ‘little’ interactions is understandable: fear for being taken over by communists, regret about losing a highly profitable country, seeing movies about heroic soldiers and wanting to join that romantic lot, the need to earn your money, the stories about your father having rescued Europe from the Germans, the need to act as a president. Apart from that there are without doubt all of the real bad intentions of a few. And all together, this blends into something terrible, with its own laws and it can’t be stopped. (Well, it stopped eventually, but at what costs? And how much sorrow, grieve, remorse, hatred and pain is still there? I mean, even the mines haven’t been all moved away, the war still has its victims more than 30 years after it was ended).
This was exactly my point in my blog about ‘The benevolents’. It is creepy to see how atrocities can emerge from a bunch of people that are all on there own (or at least most of them) not of bad intention. (by the way, I stopped reading it. I still think it is a brilliant book but it is too much tot digest).
The argument is extra interesting since it has been misused after the 2nd world war. War criminals tried to hide behind it. They used it to mask there misdeeds and get away with it. For this reason there has been a long ban on the argument. Saying ‘i didn’t know’ ‘I was acting in commission’ are suspect.
Apparently the same argument can be valid and invalid in different contexts, depending on the intention it is used. The context of Thich Nhan Hanh is consolation, with the intention to take away or at least diminish the negative energy created by the feelings of guild of boys who where sent to Vietnam and put in a situation where normal man start to kill. As a means of defence. As a means of wrath, and probably in the end – as the mind gets dumb – out of fun or boredom or whatever stupid reason. Even if they went there voluntary, they could not be blamed for this alone. But Thich Nhan Hanh goes further. He says: do not take a grunge against those who send you. The leaders could have been victims of ignorance. Maybe if they knew how bad war is, they would have refrained. This is debatable, because I think they did know or at least could have known, but probably put it out of their minds. But I get his intention. If it is true that war is an emergent property of the complex system called ’society’, then it is useless to spend your energy trying to find the guilty ones. As a victims of war (as he calls the veterans) you should better spend your energy for more positive things, trying to get war, guild and hate out of your system, maybe do something positive. As his advice to one soldier who suffered from his responsability of the death of 5 children (in an ambush meant for soldiers). His advice: 40.000 children die each day right now. You can save 5 children today. Why spend you life time in regret about the children who died 30 years ago?
So if the argument ‘you were not responsible alone, you were part of a system’ is used to console, it is all right. If it is used to escape, it is not so right. Because it might be so that all of the players within the systems are so to speak ‘victims’, this does not take away all personal responsiblity. Thich Nhan doesn’t claim it does. He didn’t say ‘why do you feel guilty’, he said ‘why do you take all the guilt on your shoulders’. Here we are at an extremely interesting field, highly ambiguous. There are no right or wrong answers here. If this whole idea of war as an emergent property is right we are all responsible for all that happens. Because we all function in the system called ’society’.
I am a big fan of Dylan Thomas ever since I heard a recording of him reciting his poem ‘do not go gentle into that good night’. I heard that 30 years ago on the radio and can still hear him almost singing this poem. I remember that it was followed by a piece of music from Stravinsky, based on this very poem. I have never ever heard it again (if anyone knows where I can get the recording of the combination of poem and music, please let me know) but I did buy the Collected poems.