The Hindus saw humanity as made up of various castes. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, was a member of the brahman, or priestly caste. Many priests work their rituals undisturbed, in the sacrosanct areas of their temples, the way scientists work in their laboratories. Physicists like Einstein, and chemists like Louis Feiser draw on similar parts of the brain as a brahman priest. There are other castes: for instance Vaisyas, businessmen, who make money from cafes and hotels. And there are those who imagine an ideal society composed of only these two castes: who believe having the right attitude towards others can solve everything: an attitude which could be called the doctrine of justification by sentiment. But the wisdom of the sub-continent recognized another caste, which people who revere the brahman often disparage—the Ksatriyas, the warriors.
Warriors can do many things. Here in China the army was sent to Sichuan in the wake of the earthquake, to aid in clean-up and rescue operations. I saw TV footage of men wearing the uniform of the People's Liberation Army climbing through a rockslide to remove obstructions the tremor left in its wake. Their training for fighting an enemy in battle prepared them to respond to a hostile act by the Earth's crust. Warriors have existed in almost all cultures, and historically have met their enemies face to face, with wooden taiahas, or blades of bronze or steel. The twentieth century saw a technological pandora's box of new weapons: machine guns, bomber planes, atomic missles, depleted uranium, and napalm. These were designed in a laboratory, through the priestly rituals of science. And many were used by people who, like Skyhawk pilots, in the normal scheme of things, would never see their enemies face-to-face. These weapons made no attempt to account for combat status, killing not just non-combatant humans, but the subjects of the animal and plant kingdoms as well.
It is simplistic to say killing is disorder. Death is a part of nature, and a part of the cycle of life. Wolves eat caribou for instance. But the number of caribou they kill is usually limited by the hunger of their stomach. When the men in black helicopters show up to kill the wolves, the death they inflict is not limited by any natural appetite. And the men in black helicopters represent a group with its own plans for the lives of the caribou. A shepherd and a wolf both kill and eat sheep. But to say a shepherd's knife is the moral equivalent of a wolf's tooth is an insult to the perspective of both the wolf and the shepherd. The shepherd's killing of an individual sheep is part of a system which ideally insures the long-term health of the flock. Pruning an individual branch from the rose can redirect the vitality of the bush as a wholeAnd because it has different objectives, a wolf may notice things about a flock which a shepherd would never realize. Some analysis concentrates on numbers: during the Vietnam conflict, both the Pentagon and its domestic enemies focused on body counts: numbers of dead. But sometimes things are most effectively described not with numbers, but patterns. Sheep may die from disease, or because chemicals have poisoned the well. They may be killed by a wolf, or to feed a traveller enjoying the shepherd's hospitality. All these deaths resonate differently within the community—or rather resonate differently within the different communities concerned. Some interpreters find one type of death most offensive, others recoil from another.
I have just finished reading John Keegan's book the Face of Battle. He talks about how machine-guns, like so many twentieth-century machines, have rendered human beings clumsy. Soldiers are no longer told to conserve their lead, but to use as much of it as possible. Writing in the 1970s, he noted that only the British army operating in Northern Ireland still valued marksmanship. The presence of civilians in the religious conflict in that province of the former British empire forced the soldiers to regulate their weapons with human consciousness, rather than using their gun as automatically as a machine drill. Fighting in that environment also forced their captains to think harder about rules of engagement. Teaching a course about the English speaking world, I had to do some research on the plantation of Ireland. Most people describe the conflict as being Catholic versus Protestant. But the other side in the Northern Ireland conflict was also a particular version of the worldview which was brought into being by the man who made the Christian holy book part of German literature. Taking advantage of the space opened up by Martin Luther, John Knox and his followers from still-tribal Scotland did not content themselves with studying their scriptures, they remade the culture of those rugged mountains, and smashed the images of the faith worshipped in those mountains previously.
For people like John Knox, whose words are backed by enforcers, a word triggers a system which makes certain actions impossible, just as mass could no longer be celebrated where his followers had desecrated the altars. Orwell also compared words to weapons, talking about people responding in conversation as automatically as a machine gun spraying bullets. And there are those who attempt to use their words like napalm, to defoliate entire fields of human experience. Phrases like sneers about military intelligence. Ksatriyas in military uniforms may be able to offer advice about rechanneling the forces of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm destroys life and community for potentially limitless ideological goals rather than quantifiable personal advantage like natural hunger. There are many acts which fracture good order, and many voices needed to channel the awakening consciousness onto a fruitful path.
It is better for the rest of my mother's garden, especially the insect kingdom, if the gardener uses steel than if he uses chemical sprays. It will be better for the rest of Creation if the battle of armageddon is fought with assault rifles, than if it is fought with atom bombs or napalm.
Image: the Buddhas of Bamyan, dynamited by the students
