Pugnacity and Pacifism

Pugnacity and pacifism are vying for our souls. Neither will ever win, but each vies to dominate our thought and our action. They are vying as much in their appeals to our idealism as to our sense of realism and practicality. This great struggle, which is perhaps also the great struggle of all ages, is hidden from us as never before. It is right before our eyes, but we do not see it. Rather than see pugnacity or pacifism as issues at all, much less as centrally involved in our lives and our destinies, we see instead issues about rights and justice, or about crime and punishment, or about nations and their security, or about ethnic minorities and terrorism. Because these other issues are lively and urgent and fill our conscious concerns, they blind us to the struggle between pugnacity and pacifism. The subjective demands obscure the objective reality.l Most of the time, neither pugnacity nor pacifism is even called by its own name. The task for a cool philosophical realist today is to see pugnacity and pacifism for what they are, to recognize the sharp contrast between them, and to acknowledge the plausibility and pervasiveness of each as strategies for coping with life's challenges. Later, when our eyes are opened, it will be apparent that we need to move firmly and decisively in our public and our private lives away from pugnacity toward pacifism. For now, our passions generally keep this issue hidden from us. If pugnacity and pacifism are to be contrasted as polar opposites, they must be put OIl the same scale; they must be different dimensions of the same thing. I take pugnacity and pacifism to be opposing strategies or dispositions, rather than opposing doctrines or rules of behavior. 2 A doctrine is either true or false, whereas a disposition or strategy is judged by its results rather than its truth. There are, no doubt, various propositions, true or false, that can be set forth in support of each opposing strategy, but a strategy is not another one. Nor is a strategy necessarilya rule that gives a definite decision in each situation, though there are strategies in the form of computer programs (for chess, for example) that have this algorithmic character. A strategy is a tendency to act or respond in a certain manner, which generally leaves a great deal of leeway for variation in details. Among pacifists, for example, Schweitzer, Gandhi, and King all exhibited a tolerance for such varia tion. No doubt doctrines can be articulated that express opposing principles that lie "behind" and "justify" the opposing strategies; but I am going to treat such doctrines as secondary rather than primary, and their relation to the dispositions as merely descriptive rather than justificatory. By pacifism I mean a habit or strategy tbat might be defined as the disposition to respond to threats and challenges by attempting first to understand the obstacle, or the persons presenting the threat or challenges, and then to incorporate the initial obstacle, or the initially opposing interests, into a harmonious or mutually agreeable solution. 3 By pugnacity I mean a contrary habit or strategy which might be defined as the disposition to respond to threats and challenges by attempting first to knock the opposing persons or obstacle out of the way, and then to propose a solution that takes no account of the obstacle or of opposing interests. Either of these dispositions may be backed with principles or even ideologies, but neither need be. It is because pugnacity and pacifism are primarily dispositions or habits rather than ideas that we can be so deeply committed to them without being conscious of them. Pugnacity and pacifism are not often thought of as true opposites. Most people would more readily give gentleness as the opposite of pugnacity, and militarism as the opposite of pacifism. These: common oppositions are, however, far too narrow. While