Judith Butler on Nonviolence: A Critique
I admire Judith Butler’s plea for nonviolence, but it annoys me, too.
Hoboken, June 7, 2024. I recently griped to Smaran, my fellow woke professor, that intellectual bigshots have neglected war. He replied, Have you read Judith Butler’s book on nonviolence? I hadn’t, so I bought it. I critique it below.
First, a bit of background. Judith Butler, a philosopher at the University of California Berkeley, is the archetypal woke, social-justice warrior. Butler is among the world’s most cited scholars, even though their writings are notoriously knotty. For more on Butler, see this recent New Yorker profile.
I heard Butler speak in 1998 at a symposium on Freud at Yale. Butler suggested, as I recall, that roles like “father,” “mother,” “son” and “daughter” are socially constructed rather than strictly biological. More than the substance of their talk, Butler’s style impressed me. I sensed beneath the tangled rhetoric a ferocious desire to expose and free us from our delusions.
I have that same reaction to Butler’s 2020 book The Force of Nonviolence. The prose is offputtingly dense and jargony, but Butler’s deadly seriousness kept me enthralled. Butler broods over state-perpetrated violence, defined broadly to include bombing, shooting, beating, incarceration and other means whereby governments control people.
States invariably justify their violence as self-defense: cops and soldiers are protecting us, the good guys, from them, from bad guys, whether muggers or Saddam Hussein. These justifications implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, rank people according to whether they deserve to live. Butler calls those deemed undeserving “ungrievable,” because their suffering and death don’t merit mourning.
An obvious example of this distinction: When the U.S. wages war in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers are grievable. Non-Americans, even civilians, are ungrievable; we shrug off and even cheer the harm inflicted on them.
When you look at how states employ violence within and outside their borders, you see that the ungrievable are often people of color, indigenous populations, migrants and other groups at the bottom of the social hierarchy. These, Butler elaborates, are victims of “racism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, and the systemic disregard for the poor and dispossessed.”
In other words, those who are most vulnerable are most likely to be targets of state violence. When the ungrievable protest their ungrievability, as in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, they are subject to even more state violence.
The old conundrum arises: How should the oppressed seek justice? Butler rejects armed resistance, noting that violence often breeds more violence. Moreover, armed movements can become so focused on military strategy that they lose sight of their original political goals; violent means eclipse moral ends.
Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Butler advocates resisting violent oppression nonviolently. Rather than ranking people according to their grievability, nonviolent activism assumes that all lives are equally worth saving. Nonviolence, Butler writes, “does not make sense without a commitment to equality.”
Butler emphasizes that nonviolent resistance is not an easy path; far from being passive, it requires energy, ingenuity, persistence and great courage. Butler espouses a “militant pacifism” that employs strikes, boycotts and other means. Yes, occupation of college campuses come to mind.
Butler warns that unconscious urges could undermine our commitment to nonviolence. They cite Freud’s speculation that a self-destructive impulse, or “death drive,” lurks within us. Then there is psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s conjecture that we hate those we love and on whom we depend: as infants, we loathe our mothers because they aren’t always there to suckle us.
Given these dark psychic undercurrents, Butler doesn’t expect us to actually attain a nonviolent, egalitarian world, in which no one is “subject to violence, systematic abandonment or military obliteration.” Rather, nonviolent egalitarianism is an unrealistic, utopian ideal to which we should aspire.
That, more or less, is Butler’s thesis, and here’s my major objection to it: It does not depict war as a problem that we can and must solve. According to informal surveys I’ve carried out over the past two decades, most people see war as inevitable, a permanent part of the human condition.
This fatalistic belief is wrong empirically and morally: Empirically, because it ignores abundant evidence that war is a self-perpetuating cultural habit, or meme, that arose at the dawn of civilization. Morally, because the belief that we can’t end war is self-fulfilling.
Butler’s grim view of human nature reminds me of the Darwinian theory of war promoted by Richard Wrangham, Steven Pinker and Edward Wilson. Citing the violence of chimpanzees and tribal human societies, Darwinians propose that natural selection instilled in us a predisposition toward lethal group violence.
Butler’s fatalism is Freudian rather than Darwinian, but it’s still fatalism, and it’s based on even flimsier scientific evidence than its Darwinian counterpart. Butler’s book recalls Just and Unjust Wars, philosopher Michael Walzer’s classic examination of moral arguments for war.
Walzer acknowledges that even the most just war is barbaric; look at the Allied fire-bombing of civilians in Germany (and France!) and nuclear-bombing of Japan. Walzer nonetheless dismisses the end of war as a utopian pipe dream, the stuff of “myths and visions.”
A related objection: Butler urges us to recognize our mutual vulnerability and interdependence and to see all lives as equally precious. That asks too much of us; it comes too close to the Christian admonition that we love our enemies.
Butler brings to mind the old civil-rights slogan, “No justice, no peace,” which implies that universal justice is a prerequisite for peace. I prefer “No peace, no justice,” which acknowledges that war breeds, exacerbates and perpetuates injustice. The more we move away from militarism, the more we approach a truly just, egalitarian world. That’s my hope, and prediction.
Finally, I can’t resist a swipe at Butler’s style. I’d love to assign Butler to my students, but I fear most will find her baffling. Butler loathes hierarchies, and yet their rhetoric resembles a bouncer barring riffraff from an exclusive club. That’s not a paradox or irony; it’s a contradiction.
Butler has important things to say about our most urgent problems, inequality and violence. Access to their ideas should be easier.
Further Reading:
Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!
Is Killing Children Ever Justified?