WHO IS AFRAID?
When Christ turned the other cheek, the last thing He would have wanted
any one to think was that He was backing down, or that He was merely
being a sweet, gentle, grieved person. He was inventing before
everybody, and before His enemies, promptly and with great presence of
mind, a new kind and new size of man. It was a more spirited, more
original, more unconquerable and bewildering way of fighting than
anybody had thought of before. To be suddenly in an enemy's presence a
new kind and new size of man--colossal, baffling--to turn into
invisibility before him, into intangibility, into another kind of being
before the enemy's eyes, so that he could not possibly tell what to do,
and so that none of the things that he had thought of to do would
work.... This is what Christ was doing, it seems to some of us, and it
is apparently the way He felt about it when He did it.
Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.
* * * * *
The last thing that many of us who are interested in the modern world
really want is to have war, or fighting, stop. We glory in courage, in
the power of facing danger, in adventuresomeness of spirit, in every
single one of the qualities that always have made, and always will make,
every true man a fighter.
We contend that fighting, as at present conducted, is based on fear and
lazy-mindedness; that it is lacking in the manlier qualities, that the
biggest and newest kind of men are not willing to be in it, and that it
does not work.
We would rather see the world abolished than to see war abolished.
We want to see war brought up to date.
The best way to fight was invented some two thousand years ago, and the
innocent, conventional persons who still believe in a kind of routine,
or humdrum, of shooting, who have not caught up with this
two-thousand-year-old invention, are about to be irrevocably displaced
in our modern life by men who have a livelier, more far-seeing, more
practical, more modern kind of courage. From this time on we have made
up our minds, we, the people of this world, that the only men we are
going to allow to fight for us are the men who can fight the way Christ
did.
Men who have not the courage to fight the way Christ did are about to be
shut up by society; no one will harm them, of course, innocent, afraid
persons, who have to protect themselves with gunpowder, but they will
merely be set one side after this, where they will not be in a position
to spoil the fighting of the men who are not afraid.
And who are the men who are not afraid?
To search your enemy's heart, to amputate, as by a kind of spiritual
surgery, the very desire for fighting in him, to untangle his own life
before his eyes and suddenly make him see what it is he really wants, to
have him standing there quietly, radiantly disarmed, gentle-hearted, and
like a child before you; if you are able, Gentle Reader, or ever have
been able, to do this, you are not afraid! Why should any one ever have
supposed that it takes a backing down, giving up, teary, weak, and
grieved person to do this?
Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in
effect: "Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit
the earth."
It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one's enemy
and coöperate with him than it does to do a little, simple, thoughtless,
outside thing like stepping up to him and knocking him down.
Coöperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is,
winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most
protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through
to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own
eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller
courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him
and fight him.
It is also more practical. The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to
win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most
afraid. And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who
stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them.
He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare
to do. They wonder what such a man thinks. If he dares stand up before
them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking?
What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have
some man-stuff in it. They prefer to wait and see what he thinks.
Courage consists in not being afraid of one's own mind and of other
people's minds. When men become so afraid of one another's minds and of
their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and
fight. They are cowards.
They do not know what they think.
They do not know what they want.