For thirty years I’ve been connected to a married couple who, for that length of time, have adhered to an unorthodox, synchronistic, non-Christian religion. Too young to have been hippies in the 1960’s, they still speak the language and slang of that era, so that their chatter is as obsolete as “twenty-three skidoo”. They’re Green, but have never had any ethical doubts about their own bourgeois comforts, their travel abroad, or Christmas gifts given to them even though they don’t observe Christmas. They’re good people in a vapid and uncomplicated way.

While always ready to lecture on some worthy humanitarian effort, personal generosity hasn’t been their strength. They’re takers, not givers. This, I think, is an emanation from their awareness of being separatists, outliers. They view people unlike themselves as spiritually and politically deficient and immune to the diffusion of their beliefs…like brute members of a cargo cult or natives charmed by glass beads and little mirrors. You might guess that they’re liberals. They are; they’re also pacifists.

In the mid 70’s, the male of the couple educated me, in tones normally used to admonish the insane, that had he been eligible for the draft: “I would have been a CO! Absolutely no question about it!” This was both a statement and a condemnation. I think my own service was an annoyance or conundrum for him, or both. But we’ve never discussed it, sinner to saint, killer to pacifist, and it doesn’t matter. Knowing everything worth knowing, he’s just not curious about anyone else.

I hold no resentment for those who can’t fight. I never expressed this to my relative because it wouldn’t have mattered to him, in the way that a proselytizer or seeker of Truth would welcome affirmation, however small. While I can’t see into his heart, his pacifism seems to be a conceit; he’s not a pacifist, he’s just non-violent.

Most of us are non-violent, for reasons that have nothing to do with doctrine or principle or religious orthodoxy; we just don’t make a big deal about it because the logic of non-violence is acceptable in the world, and because being violent is difficult. Being non-violent is nothing to write home about. There’s certainly no test at the Gates of Heaven with questions about who you didn’t hurt. Somewhere Jesus said or implied that you get no praise for doing the things already expected of you.

But there IS a problem with non-violence dressed up as principled pacifism, and my relatives exhibit it. To them, all sides to a dispute are equal, or their claims so equally just that some application of Reason would prevent violence. This is an impossibility - and neutralizes good and evil - even within a moral system which encompasses Satyagraha - the principle of non-violent resistance applied by Ghandi in his campaign against British rule.

Ghandi’s pacifism was total, down to his infamous, and misunderstood, remark, that European Jews should have committed suicide rather than resist their annihilation by the Nazis. But he was not being evasive about, or complicit in, the enormities of fascism; it was implied that IT MATTERED TO GHANDI WHO WON. Ghandi was being direct about his pacifism, he practiced it himself to real effect and at great personal cost. His focus was personal and mass sin, a concept completely missing in the non-violent philosophy of the worldly, rational couple stuck in my life.