Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Lessons in peace, and war
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- Independent voice is silenced in merger
- TOP takes a hard knock
- Lagging on college access
- Alzheimer's drains minds and finances
From the RoundTable blog
In his best-selling history "Guns, Germs, and Steel," evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond introduced me to the Moriori, a peaceful Polynesian people who colonized the Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of New Zealand.
For centuries, they lived isolated lives as hunter-gatherers who had developed a society free of warfare. Then one day in November 1835, a shipload of Maori arrived and slaughtered most of the Moriori, cooked and ate their bodies, and enslaved the survivors. All of them.
I recalled the tragic fate of the Moriori the other week after a crazed gunman in Pennsylvania killed five Amish schoolgirls and wounded five more, an assault on another peaceful community that has gathered to itself no means of self-defense.
And I realized that the rest of us provide for their safety -- as best we can provide for anyone's -- from, well, the rest of us: the larger society that embraces modernity and the technological advances that allow the great mass of humanity to survive. But at an apparent loss to the soul.
A nation of so many professed Christians looked with awe and humility on the Amish in their grief, a community of believers whose lives are bound by tradition yet who live faithfully the most radical teaching of Jesus: that we are to love our enemies.
Of course, their "enemy," Charles Carl Roberts IV, a tortured man, had killed himself before police could capture him and the courts could attempt to exact justice in a situation where justice was clearly beyond any institution of man.
In witnessing the loving concern of the Amish for Roberts' wife and children, though, who can doubt the sincerity of their declarations of forgiveness for the man whose rampage tore at the heart of their innocent community?
Tore at, but obviously did not destroy. Through six burials, including Roberts', the Amish went their way as always, peacefully, uttering not a word of hate or vindictiveness.
People who reject revenge so completely surely would draw no healing from society's feeble attempts to balance the scales. Yet, had Roberts not put himself beyond its reach, society would have called him to account, and rightly so -- if not for vengeance, for the protection of other lives.
The Amish showed compassion for someone who did them a profound evil, and I can only admire their quiet strength. I wish all of society might emulate it more.
Still, I can't help but note that this pacifist sect has a huge advantage over the decimated Moriori.
The Amish live apart from the larger society, but it tolerates their separateness -- not only tolerates it, in fact, but offers the Amish its protection, whether they ask for it or not. A gunman barricades himself with hostages, pacifists or not, and police and rescue workers will respond. Count on it.
That tolerance of differences, when Americans are wise enough to let it show, is one of the greatest strengths of this country. And the sense of duty to protect innocents is a virtue that rivals even that of forgiveness, in my mind, at least -- separating me from those good people who wholly embrace Jesus of Nazareth's teaching to turn the other cheek.
Even at the cost of death? Of the deaths of others? Of your own children? Of anyone's children?
Revenge is never a good justification for violence, but defense can be. Thus, so many brands of Christianity struggle with the concept of the just war.
If everyone were so radical as the Amish in embracing nonviolence, pacifists might argue, the struggle would be ended. I don't have enough faith in humanity to expect that ever to be.
The Maori and Moriori were of common ancestry, Polynesian farmers who had colonized New Zealand around A.D. 1000, Diamond writes. The forebears of the Moriori went off to the remote Chatham Islands, where they learned to live peacefully to survive. The invading Maori descended from settlers of New Zealand's North Island, where warmer weather made them more fruitful in every way, and they multiplied -- and engaged in chronic, fierce wars with their neighbors.
When the Maori first arrived, the Moriori outnumbered them two to one and, despite inferior weapons, Diamond writes, could have overwhelmed the aggressors. But, as a society, the Moriori had no defenses. The Maori said they were enslaving the Moriori; the Moriori decided to offer their friendship and divide their resources. Before they could make the offer the Maori attacked and wiped them out.
We wouldn't let that happen to the Amish, even as we try to learn from their peaceful ways.
Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
