What Would You Kill For?

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, March 11, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

Note: This sermon was inspired by the current Study/Action issue being discussed and debated in the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association: ‘Peacemaking: Should the UUA reject the use of any and all kinds of violence and war to resolve disputes between peoples and nations and adopt a principle of seeking just peace through nonviolent means?

Two friends were hiking in the backcountry of Colorado when they came face to face with a very angry bear.  One of the two hikers quickly sat down, took off his hiking boots and began putting on a pair of running shoes.  “You’ll never outrun that bear,” his friend said.  “I don’t have to outrun the bear,” the man replied, “I only have to outrun you.”

Why must someone die in order for us to survive?  Why must we kill in order to live more fully?

Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who watched his country drown in blood and bombs, writes:

The terrible war flower
 has left her footprints-
 countless petals of separation and death . . .
Very tenderly, the wound opens itself in the
 depths of my heart.
Its color is the color of blood,
Its nature the nature of separation.

It is so easy to say: “I am against all war.”  It is so easy to say: “I support the cautious use of war.”  But it is so much harder to feel the violence that lives within our own hearts, to admit the hatred that might linger in our own minds, to acknowledge the brutality that that might bubble beneath the surface of our life.

I remember a time that my dear friend Arthur was ill; it was a long and difficult illness that would eventually bring a slow  and painful death.  I was so angry that my friend was dying, I was so angry at my friend for being so miserable while he was dying, and I was so angry at myself for thinking that way.  I felt helpless and at war with the world.  I was short-tempered, lashing out at everyone.  I was mean, and unapologetic about it.  It was a brutal side of myself I had never known existed.  One day I was so overcome with rage while driving that I had to work hard to refrain from flooring the gas pedal and slamming headlong into some pedestrians crossing in front of me.  I really wanted to hurt someone, to kill someone.  Something caused me to stop.  What and why?

In the last 100 years, 43 million military personnel have lost their lives during war.  In the same 100 years, 62 million civilians have been killed in wartime, 20 million more than military personnel.  (Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, p. 13)  That makes an estimated 104 million people dead because of war since 1900. 

But isn’t violence just part of being human? Isn’t this killing in our nature? Isn’t war inevitable?  Traditional thought says “yes.”   In the 1600s, philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that from the earliest of times humans lived in a war of every person against every person.  (William Ury, The Third Side, p. 30) Hobbes believed the natural human condition was a state of perpetual war, where no morality exists, and everyone lives in constant fear. Some 200 plus years later, Sigmund Freud agreed, saying: “under primitive conditions, it is superior force, brute violence, or violence backed by arms” (Ibid.) that is our norm.  From this traditional viewpoint, violence and war is inevitable.  Violence and war is our default mode.

But some recent research is saying “no” to this image our human nature.  Recent research is saying “no” to this image of our human history.

In fact, “there turns out to be little . . . evidence . . . for the [practice] of [widespread] . . . violence during the first ninety-nine percent of” human life on earth (Ibid. p. 33).”  According to William Ury, who directs the Project for Preventing War at Harvard, it is only in the last one percent of humanity’s time on earth, the last ten thousand years, that there is any clear archeological evidence of organized violence and warfare (p. 33). This suggests that evolving humans lived for 2.5 million years in virtual coexistence, in peace. (p. 25).  Granted, this time was before the upswing in the earth’s population and the subsequent rise of great cities and civilizations, but, still, if this is true, it suggests that war is a quite modern phenomenon. If this is true, perhaps killing is not part of our inherent human nature; perhaps it is a learned behavior of civilizations.  Perhaps it grows out of characteristics of humans living together in large communities?  Perhaps it could be unlearned?

Again, the words of Thich Nhat Hahn:

If I were a bomb
ready to explode.
If I have become dangerous to your life,
then you must take care of me,
but how?
. . . I need your care.
I need your time.
I need you to defuse me.

Could this be easier that we think?Dave Grossman, a scholar in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence, says the difficulty with soldiers throughout military history has not been teaching them how to use a weapon; it has been persuading them to actually use it. (H.J. CUMMINS, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, January 25, 1999)

In his book, "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" Grossman relates that “ancient battles were mostly "great shoving matches.  The killing didn't start until one army tried to flee, because even enemies couldn't bring themselves to attack while looking one another in the eye. That's why most war wounds were stabs to the back.” (Ibid.) This reticence to kill continued into the last 200 years.  “After the Battle of Gettysburg, in the U.S. Civil War, 90 percent of the 27,000 muskets taken from the dead and dying were loaded.”  Grossman suggests this is “evidence that [most] soldiers would load their weapons, but would not shoot.” (ibid.)

This is not an isolated instance.

At the end of World War II, US army researchers discovered that our boys over seas had a terrible “kill rate.”  Army research showed that in World War II, seventy-five to eighty percent of the American soldiers in combat did not fire at another human being. “That means that for every 100 soldiers who got a clear shot at the enemy, only 15 [to 20] actually fired.” (ibid.)

“Enter psychology.”  The US military “concluded they had to find some way to overcome this human impulse against killing. They turned to something called ‘operant conditioning,’ a process of stimulus-response-stimulus-response-stimulus-response that, over hundreds of repetitions, conditions a person to do just as the trainer wants—without thinking, simply as a reflex.”

“In the US military, the operant conditioning took the form of ever-more sophisticated target practice,” taking the thought out of the process of killing. Round targets were replaced by “human silhouettes, then pop-up human forms.” (Ibid.) “Finally, [in our high-tech age, the military began using] realistic video simulations of combat”  (the exact kind of first person shooter video games our kids play at home or in the arcade).

What was the result of this conditioning?  “It helped raise U.S. military kill rates to 55 percent by the Korean War, and 90 percent by the war in Vietnam.” (Ibid.) 
Have we finally learned to turn human beings against their inherent nature?

I offer this question with no intention of being disrespectful to those who serve in our military.  I offer this question with great respect for those here this morning who have served our country in the armed forces.

But as religious people, we must ask the question: “What causes us to choose war?”   “What causes us to kill for a cause?”

The answers are many.  For some, there seems no other choice.  War chooses us.  Violence visits our home, our country, our city, our family, and that fire ignites a defense reaction that seems to sweep every other option away.

For others, there also seems no choice.  We are drafted.  Duty calls.  That duty is met.  Others learn to kill because of a desire to protect ideals of freedom and democracy, or the desire to stop an evil force moving against humanity.

“What drives our choice to kill?”

Others learn to kill for money.  We have crafted a society in which the armed forces offer, to some of us, the only real chance to advance in the world.  In our country where economic justice is far from a reality, joining the military seems the only option to many young people who live in poverty or as racial minorities.  The inequality of this country forces some to pick up a gun in order to lift up their lives.

Some learn to kill for an education.  College is expensive, and the military offers a way to receive tuition help.  After World War II, the GI Bill forever changed this country by providing unparalleled access to higher education.  That education was turned into good paying jobs.  Many of us, myself included, live lives of privilege because of the GI Bill, either directly, or through parents or grandparents.  I wonder how many of the anti-war protesters in this country would be willing to give up the lifestyle a past war has given, a lifestyle we return to at the end of our protest marches?

Others learn to kill for greed and power and control.And some of us learn to kill to create a meaningful life.  Author Chris Hedges explains: 

“The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life . . . It gives us resolve, a cause.  It allows us to be noble . . . Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives.  We want more out of life. .  . War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us.  It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought.  All bow before the supreme effort.  We are one.”

Hedges continues: “Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning.  And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.  (Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, p. 3, 4, 7, 10)

Dare we find new ways to unify people, another way to shape life’s purpose? Is it possible for us to unlearn this most unnatural act? 

This is what is so revolutionary about the formation of the United Nations.  However flawed the UN may be, it is the first time humanity has collectively engaged these questions.  This is what is revolutionary about millions of people taking to the streets all over the world four years ago, crying out against the impending US invasion of Iraq. 

Four years ago, on March 18, the night before the war began, I stood in a park with hundreds of others in Richmond VA.  I held a small candle and stared out into the night sky, knowing that all over the world, at the same time, millions of others were holding candles under that same sky, all of us holding the hope that humanity might reach beyond violence. 

Four years later, our candles have not burned out.  Four years later, we’re still standing under that same sky.  Four years later, we’re still holding onto that same hope.

This, I believe, is what it means to be human!  This, I believe, is what it means to be a human people of faith.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have placed our ultimate faith in humanity itself…a dangerous place to put it, yes, but put it there we have, in the belief that the human heart, which holds both wickedness and goodness, can be taught to lean toward the good.

To be human is not to solely strike and kill.  To be human is not to solely blast and bomb. In the words of Parker Palmer, to be fully human is to stand, together, “in the tragic gap between the reality of our world and our culture on one side and what we know to be right on the other. We must live within that tension, and avoid base cynicism and irrelevant idealism.”

Standing together in that place begins with a confession of the violence within us.  Standing together begins with an appraisal of the untruths we believe.  Standing together begins with a search for a new mechanism of meaning.  Standing together begins with an attempt to act another way.

Until we do so, we live and we die as less than human.

Blessed Be.  Amen.

©Copyright 2007 Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved.