From Walter Wink's "The Powers That Be"
"The psychodynamics of the TV cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. This segment of the show
– the "Tammuz" element, where the hero suffers – actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the violent side of the self. When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression. Salvation is found through identification with the hero."--the author
The American scholar and non-violent activist Walter Wink is a progressive Methodist theologian, who has taught at Auburn Theological Seminary, various major universities as well as traveled to social "hot spots" like pre- Nelson Mandela's apartheid South Africa. The main ideas presented above are a small part of a book he wrote called "The Powers That Be" (1999), which is a condensation of a three volume book on Christian faith and non-violent resistence. (Notice I said resistence, not pacifism). I found it an interesting book to read because, like many other people I imagine, I find myself often unwittedly paying lip service to the idea of non-violence while stressing the need to be able to have a society project power by force over lawbreakers and terrorists of all stripes.
What is interesting is how much of this "myth of redemptive violence" is permeated into our brains from the very introductions of popular culture. The "Tammuz" reference above in Wink's quote refers to a Babylonian Creation myth that is over 6,000 years old. It basically tells about a god--Marduk--who subdued a female goddess of chaos by violence and created, through her destruction, a force of order that created the world as they knew it. Marduk then lorded it over the other gods in the Mesopotemian Cosmology, and was still in constant struggle against disorder.
Today, of course, we are no strangers to disorder. It is ingrained in our stories, not just for children but for adults. The world portrayed in the old-fashioned Westerns and the war and terrorist based films is one of bad people preying on the weak and unsuspecting. Wink sees a big problem in dealing with our free societies dealing with threats of this world and not becoming like these enemies. It is for this reason, that violence in itself it not redemptive and not radical enough to deal with the root of conflicts, that he feels Jesus taught not to resist violence with violence but to "turn the other cheek" and "give up your coat AND your cloak" and "go the extra mile". St Paul for good measure warned us not to "meet evil with evil".
How easy is this in practice? Not easy I'd say, but not impossible Wink would say. Too many people take the notion of turning the other cheek as a submission to evil. What Jesus meant to say in all his examples was something quite different than submission: you take the blow or the slap and hold your ground. There is a great scene in the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) where Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), the small-town lawyer of a black rape suspect in the American South of the 1930's, is spit upon by a bigot while he's trying to calm a mob. If you know this scene, you know that Peck the actor plays both the strength of not responding in kind, not to let a man reduce him for such an insult, lest his children see him and learn a bad lesson. It is an illustration I think Gandhi and Dr. King would have approved of , and I feel the better parts of all free people is to avoid violence to the very last possible resort.
Can violence be overcome when it is shoved at people on a grand scale? Well, there are concrete examples. In "The Powers That Be", Dr Wink points to the mostly peaceful end of the Communist world in the late-eighties and early nineties where 13 peaceful revolts in totalitarian nations were tried and all save China had a successful conclusion and transfer of power. Almost all European satellites of the USSR are now functioning as democracies, however imperfect, and, for another example, South Africa has had a non-blody stable transistion of power from minority white to black rule. More people are free, percentage-wise, in this world than ever before. That is a testament of power impossible to ignore. The fact that nation states in this modern world can "change their spots" without a Kymer Rouge or Nazi- style bloodbath should be encouraging to all of us, especially in a world where Islamofascist terrorist cells fancy that they can triumph over the Jeffersonian principles of freedom and pluralism.
Is there ever a need to resort to violence? To this reviewer, the answer is a definate "sometimes". But perhaps not as often as I thought. To die by the sword if you live by it always guarantees that one side will fail, so brute force has its limits, too.
Here is a link to a site offering more of Wink's ideas and concepts:
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