When Violence is the Answer

Questions will still remain.

A post this morning from

david roberts

ended up being the connecting node in my imagination for something I’ve been considering ever since the attempted assassination on Trump, but even more so in light of the riots sweeping the British Isles, and probably soon the rest of Europe. At what point, personally or collectively, does violence become justified? Is there an ethical way to engage in violence, and to what end should it be directed? And how does all of this relate to a properly oriented society and state?

Roberts describes an episode from his life some fifteen years earlier, when he was at a Jets game in New Jersey. An altercation between opposing drunken fans led to a misunderstanding wherein he was accused by the boyfriend of one of the disputants of hitting her and destroying a sign she’d brought:

The bald man took a step toward me and said, “You hit my girlfriend?” His tone and the sway of his shoulders and head gave off a sense of barely restrained menace. I could tell he was drunk by the unsteady way he moved.  

I said, “No. she’s wrong. I did not.” I had an authoritative tone, my voice commanding, my diction clear. I was used to being listened to. To being obeyed.

But my voice of command had no power in that concourse at that moment. The boyfriend was not interested in a debate, not interested in clearing up his girlfriend’s misidentification of me as her attacker rather than as the peacemaker.

He kept coming toward me, repeating “You hit my girlfriend?” It was less a question and more a prelude to the consequences he had in mind for me.

Roberts, there with his young son, responded by essentially running away. The rest of the article deals with his feelings relating to the encounter, where he wonders about his manliness and what the correct response should have been.

I should say that his actions that day were entirely correct given the circumstances. With children present, the priority should always be to extricate them from situations like that, immediately. There is absolutely nothing to be gained and everything to lose from sticking around, and God, who has given us charge of our families, well expects us to subordinate our pride to the end of their lives and safety. The only justification for engaging physically in that situation would be if one were cornered or otherwise unable to flee. Then, of course, a man threatening you is essentially threatening your family as well. The restraints are off at that point. Such would automatically apply in the home or any other place from which retreat would amount to a dereliction of one’s responsibility to defend one’s household.

Roberts is a smart man who understands that he did the reasonable thing, and he and his son may be alive and free today because of it. I suspect that what really bothers him is not that he didn’t fight so much as the worry that, if a fight were forced upon him, he would be unable to prevail. He notes elsewhere that he has been privileged over the course of his life to never having had recourse to violence. He is thus unsure of himself in that area, much as I would be confused in the world of moneyed New York.

To that end I would say that it’s never too late to gain some measure of confidence in that area. Get in shape, trade blows with people who know what they’re doing in a safe setting, and learn to operate a firearm. This isn’t by any means perfect, and it should always be born in mind that the only people who really ever get used to violence in a functioning society are criminals. But that of course brings up a much-debated point: are we still a functioning society?

I mentioned free in the last paragraph because apart from the physical dangers of brawling with strangers there is the fact that in many jurisdictions in the liberal West the state has largely abandoned its responsibility to ensure peace on the streets. The great leveling project of Neoliberalism is predicated on the notion that everyone is a blank slate upon which can be inscribed various economic formulas; when reality intrudes and real differences in humans- individually and collectively- refuse to conform to expectations, a condition known as anarcho-tyranny manifests itself. This is the default in most major cities, a two-tiered system of law enforcement wherein those who would follow the rules are expected to abide by them, while those above (global finance) or beneath (urban underclass, domestic and imported) are held to a vastly different standard. It’s plain to everyone this is the case; it manifests under different euphemistic guises- decriminalization, deincarceration, equity in sentencing, restorative justice, prison abolition, etc. What it amounts to is a kind of golf handicap for crime. The legal system is bent on accommodating this discrepancy to the maximum extent possible.

Had Roberts been a former Golden Gloves champion and stood his ground when that drunken thug accosted him, and struck the latter such that he were seriously injured or killed, the legal system in New Jersey or New York would have had a field day with the resulting trial. No one would have cared that Roberts was the one defending himself, that the other party initiated the violence, or that Roberts’ young son was himself in danger. A wealthy white man killing an unarmed teen scholar, probably still wearing his middle-school graduation robes? Tom Wolfe would have to rise from the grave to immortalize the story. Congress would declare a national F*** David Roberts Day as Democrat Congressional leaders got tattoos in the victim’s honor, while Republicans raced to denounce Kamala Harris and her party as “the real David Roberts” ruining the country. That’s a bit of a hyperbole, but not by much. If you don’t believe me regarding the signs of the times, ask Daniel Penny, or Jose Alba, the bodega owner locked up for defending himself against a man who came behind his counter to attack him (charges were dropped when the railroading became too obviously ridiculous).

These were not men looking for violence. Violence was thrust upon them by a failure from above, namely, the manifest failure of the governing authorities to maintain public order. With authority and power comes said responsibility. Romans tells us plainly that:

⁴ For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

Those in political authority hold a monopoly on violence precisely because of, and only in deference to, this mandate. They hold their power from God to preserve a just public order and are positively prescribed to do so. Criminals should be fined, jailed, or executed as warranted. Anything less than that renders an authority accordingly fundamentally illegitimate.

Obviously, the state cannot be everywhere, nor should we wish it so. It is a well understood legal and moral principle in the West that self-defense is a natural right, mostly subsumed in the normal operation of the state, but devolving back to the individual wherever it is impossible or impractical for the state to intervene. In researching self-defense in Roman law I came across an interesting passage from the Justinian Codex, a digest of Roman law from the 6th century AD that records the precedents ascribed to various emperors over the previous centuries:

3.27.1. Emperors Valentinian, Theodosius and Arcadius to the Provincials.

We grant everyone the right to resist a soldier or a person in private station who enters fields as a nocturnal plunderer, or besets frequented roads with intentions of robbery, and who is worthy to be subjected to immediate punishment pursuant to such permission and to receive the death and incur the danger which he himself threatened. For it is better to forestall, rather than to punish the deed. 1. We therefore grant you permission to avenge yourself and make an act which is too late to be punished in court subject to this edict. Let no one spare a soldier when he becomes a robber and should be opposed by weapons.

Given July 1 (391). C. Th. 9.14.2.

The co-emperors here admit that they are unable to control neither normal brigands nor demobilized soldiers-turned-brigands. Many in both categories would have been barbarian foreigners hired on as mercenaries in one sense or another, who, in the absence of a strong state have devolved into predators of the general population. The emperors not only specifically clarify that the citizenry has the right to defend itself, but that it has the power to enact summary justice upon the criminals destroying their communities. The law itself dates from just over a century before the Codex was compiled and its inclusion should be taken as it being a settled matter of Roman law rather than an exceptional measure.

The Justinian Codex assumes that the people and the Emperor are basically on the same side in opposing crime and destruction. If one is curious what would happen if the state itself simply declined to enforce criminal law as a matter of policy, such a thing would be wholly beyond the imagination of either pagan or Christian Romans. A leader that sets criminals upon his own populace is a contradiction in terms, and would immediately face a rising from a general (or several). Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and authority will always naturally seek to exercise itself through some means. This again is part of the ordered universe created by God, natural law as a mirror of the divine. It was once so obvious as to not require positive justification, a legacy from both Athens and Jerusalem, and beyond.

Over and against this tradition is that of Neoliberalism, wherein the only real crime is implicating the hollowness of the ideals that support to rickety structure, like so many flying buttresses made from cardboard. Neoliberalism promises a system of global order, which it provides after a fashion. But rather than being oriented to the common good of the various nations of the world, the order it maintains is one of extractive, rent-seeking parasitism. Virtues that lend themselves to that end will be tolerated, but so will the vices, which are far more numerous.

There is nothing that advances this project more than mass immigration into settled communities. Nothing is so powerful a solvent against tradition, subsidiarity, neighborliness, social trust, and basic hope for the future. A whole cosmos of lived experience is replaced by a soulless anomie. That, of course, is the point- to drive all human energy into consumption, to break all ties to everything but the market, and to render any rough patches on the road to a grey-goo humanity smooth.

This obviously must be resisted. The question is how, and to what degree violence should be involved. In the first place, riots are pointless, understandable though they may be. The emotions are overflowing, and when the dams break and the banks spill over things end in a flood. Floods do two things- destroy indiscriminately and invite the focused energy and resources of the system in response.

It is not wrong to think in terms of water though. I’ve mentioned before my recurring image of the fountain, the well. Those are constructs, man-made artifices to control water, to bring it to proper human use. So be it here as well. But instead of a well or a fountain, let us consider a canal, or rather, a mill race. Imagine a water mill, an ancient piece of technology. Attached to it outside is a great wheel, a heavy wooden circle beyond the power of any one man to turn. It is linked through a wall to a great machine, lying dusty and idle behind a door held fast with a rusty chain. So long has it been in that state that common opinion holds that the whole mill is obsolete, not long to be replaced by something better. But you can see the power of the river flowing by just past it. You know the power of that water; you’ve just seen it flood. You realize that of that water could just be properly channeled, the wheel would turn again. So you examine the mill race and see that it is broken, full of holes and misaligned. You work to right it. And then you hear the splash of the heavy water cascading over the wooden blades, the creak and groan of the great wheel turning, and then the grind of rusty gears turning within. You are now ready to break the chain and go within, the get the machine producing again. You knew all along it wasn’t quite so obsolete as men supposed.

Make no mistake, violence always represents a failure to live as men were meant to live. We are creatures designed to play in a garden. Any harm we inflict on one another, even on evil men, is a concession to our fallen nature. Anyone contemplating any sort of rebellion against any sort of illegitimate authority should be mindful that in the first place all measures should be taken to mitigate the effects of any violence involved, and second, that that will itself prove mostly hollow.

The Roman Catholic Church posits a notion of just war, whereby strict criteria must be met before a lawfully constituted authority can engage in armed conflict. Orthodoxy does not recognize such a tradition in the same sense, but both recognize that in our fallen world, sometimes violence becomes inevitable. Men must defend their homes and families. But at the same time, killing and maiming one’s fellow man always represents a tragedy. Basil the Great offered the opinion that men engaged even in justified conflict, or who had killed in war in the service of “true religion,” still needed three years of penance before he could take communion. King David did right in God’s sight, was God’s own anointed, but could not build the Temple because he was a man of blood. Violence is something to be taken very seriously, not merely in terms of armchair strategy, but in its cosmic significance.

There is indeed a positive Christian duty to resist evil. But it should also be noted that absolutely nothing good will come of any resistance to external evil without a corresponding war within. There is a reason things have come to pass as they have in the West, and it’s not because of Freemasons or Jews or foreigners or even liberalism. It’s not the presence of some alien element so much as the absence of a necessary one. We have lost the faith. The situation we find ourselves in, reading in the news about fentanyl killing our neighbors or young girls being raped by grooming gangs; this is our chastisement. I do not mean here that the great evils that have befallen the individual victims of these crimes are some specific cosmic punishments, but rather that the prostrate condition of our civilization that permitted such abuses speaks to our having been conquered, though by all telling we’ve won all the wars. The Temple is sacked, and rather than finding ourselves in exile like the Jews of old, we, for our particular sins, are colonized. We, who in our arrogance imagined we could liberate the world are in turn occupied by it, presided over by creatures unworthy to be the satraps of Nebuchadnezzar.

So in terms of anger, violence, and revolution, let us all first look within. Let us repair the channels through which the great river ought to flow. Then, properly empowered, let the engines once more turn over, the trip-hammers falling in rhythm, plowshares pounded into swords. Let the machine hum once more.

There is an obvious and final question here, regarding the mill and everything else. Perhaps a bit of allusion first. Parsifal, the most innocent of Arthur’s knights, arrives in the hall of the Fisher King, the Grail Castle itself. The King is wounded, and the only cure is to drink from the Holy Grail, but he cannot until someone pure asks him a spontaneous question. Parsifal has in mind to ask, but doubting himself, declines. The castle disappears, and he wanders as a knight-errant for twenty years until, chastened and humbled by his adventures, he happens once more upon the castle, and asks, finally- whom does it serve?

The below is the speculation of a schoolteacher, not a theologian or a geostrategist. I make no special claims to earthly or supernatural insight. I speak in terms of what history and faith lead me to believe is a possible development based on current and past trends as I understand them. Take it as such.

Whom does the mill serve? The one and the same as the source of the river that powers it. The energy it harnesses and the produce of its systems work toward the ends of God, His people, and all who would serve Him in turn. In practical terms, it is impossible to say exactly how this power would devolve upon what earthly representative, but if history is a guide, it will be a man, a leader, perhaps one already born. This man will be a warlord, not born to the purple perhaps, but of a yet unseen royal race such as described by de Maistre. Others have spoken of a Red Caesar, a man of rightist political inclinations, another Franco. The one of whom I write will be far more comprehensive. This is the Καισαρ Λούκος, Caesar Candidus, the White Caesar. White because he comes in humility and piety, white being the color of purity and holiness, Christian but still hearkening back to the caste of priests of the ancient Indo-Europeans, a white-clad David among white-clad Levites. A priest king, Ισαπόστολος, a new κατεχον against the evil. White like the forces of rectifications past, who sought to undo the revolutions that have plagued humanity for centuries.

If there is any sign he might be known by, it would not lie in his greatness, but his sacrifice, and his giving over his victories to Christ. He will love what Christ loves and hate what He hates, a true knight, a man of peace offering his sword to the Lord. I cannot say if such a man is now living. I cannot say if he ever will. I could not but speculate beyond my generalities as to the specific signs that might serve to identify him. Perhaps we approach the end times, and our reckoning, and my theories are wholly worthless. But perhaps not. Men no better or worse than us have been given Constantine and Charlemagne. Perhaps some worthy emperor awaits the service of great engine we might empower once more. Perhaps we can once again become worthy. Woe to those who stand against such a host.

Ἅγιος ἅγιος ἅγιος Κύριος σαβαώθ, πλήρης πᾶσα ἡ γῆ τῆς δόξης αὐτοῦ.