The Third Way

It’s 8:00 a.m. After an hour of looking at spreadsheets, working math problems, and drinking two cups of coffee, I decided to take a break from the seemingly never ending work of graduate school and blog.

Most mornings, I try to read for pleasure for a while before I dive into the world of economic theory and linear and matrix algebra. I’ve been chewing on Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be for a while now. Wink focuses on the “powers” that dictate our world and calls for nonviolent opposition to those powers carefully not confusing nonviolence with pacifism. According to Wink, Jesus abhors both passivity and violence. Jesus articulates out of his own experiences a way that evil can be opposed without it being mirrored or emulated.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

The following is an excerpt from Wink’s book regarding the previous quote:

“Over and over we have failed to recognize this truth. In its resistance to Hitler, the United States became a militarized society. IN its opposition to communism, the U.S. was willing to incinerate the world as its opponents. To keep communism from spreading to Africa, Asia, or Latin America, the U.S. felt it had to move in with its troops, or manipulate elections, or unseat legitimately elected regimes, or assassinate leftist leaders. (If you’re still not sure if you believe this, check out Overthrow by Kinser or Our Own Backyard by LeoGrande. I own both, so feel free to borrow.) To fend off revolution in client states, The U.S. beefed up and trained local police and soldiers, only to watch the military itself become the gravest threat to democracy in one country it supported after another. To counter Soviet espionage, the U.S. created a spy network; to make sure that no one cooperated with the enemy, it spied on its own citizens. “You always become the thing you want to fight the most,” wrote Carl Jung, and the United States has done everything in its power to prove him right.”

Now, the purpose of that excerpt was not to make U.S. bashing the focus of this post. It is, however, a relevant example to all reading this. Becoming the things we hate as a result of fighting is relevant to any “monster” in our life. Not just big purported national security issues.

I think it’s funny how life lessons seem to repeat themselves in various unrelated aspects. I was sitting in my microeconomics class yesterday drawing one graph after another, when my professor began going off on one of his infamous tangents. We were talking about various utility functions (better known as the measure of what makes us the happiest as consumers), and he used the example of killing someone. Now, everyone in the classroom agreed that we would not kill someone for $50 dollars. Receiving $50 dollars was not worth the labor, mental distress, and other variables that killing someone would entail for everyone in the class. However, many people in the class said they would kill someone if the situation were changed. Maybe that situation is protecting loved ones, or saving a city from a vicious attack. The only difference between the killing for $50 and the other situations is price. The people willing to kill to save loved ones, for instance, are still willing to kill – just at a higher price. The people still were willing to become the thing they originally hated only it cost more. My professor concluded this example by saying, “All morals are for sell if the price is high enough.”

So, why this topic for a post? As I read people like Wink and Shane Claiborne, and as I hear the life stories of people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Leo Tolstoy and Dorothy Day, I think that they were onto something. The way of nonviolence, the way Jesus chose, is the only way to overcome evil without creating more evil. To continue with the economics theme, there’s always a trade-off. Jesus was creative and very active in his dealings with the evils of the world. Maybe we would do well to do the same, to not be violent, to not be passive, but to choose a third way complete with a little love and a lot of peace.

With that, school is calling.

Peace and love to all of you!