Is it EVER okay to start a revolution?
Have you noticed the following inconsistency. . .
Take a moment to reflect on your current accumulated knowledge of history. What are the three most violent events that come to mind?
Let’s do the inconsistency first.
For those on the Left, a spirit of perpetual revolution is an integral part of the activist DNA.
For those on the Right, it’s a little less clear.
Every American “patriot” will speak of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence as being among the greatest events to have ever taken place in history.
The revolutionary spirit of the Founding Fathers is regarded by America-lovers as being among the most noble and courageous models of pursuing liberty at all costs.
Overthrowing a government that is perceived as being tyrannical is the Red-White-and-Blue dream, is it not?
Yet many conservatives who are apparently so Pro-Revolution when it comes to the rebellion against the British government in 1776 (where we would have all been colonists and Englishmen at the time and not “Americans”, mind you), would immediately scoff and balk when thinking about the events that transpired on January 6th, 2021.
And despite the symbolic gravity of what happened (as well as the risks of what potentially could have happened), the practical outcome of what actually happened was many unarmed people walking through one building (often being voluntarily let in by security personnel), staying within the confines of the velvet ropes (since it’s important to be respectful when conducting an insurrection after all), live-streaming and taking selfies.
Exhibit 1: Dangerous Revolutionaries Who Threaten Democracy
This is not to downplay what happened and the message such a demonstration would end up sending.
However, what do you think the probability of the J6 event resulting in a successful overthrow of the government was, assuming that was even the intent of 99.9% of the people who were there? Did anyone watching the CSPAN livestream that day truly believe that the MAGA people were going to become our new Senators and sign Trump in as President Dictator?
Maybe. But I would be curious to hear what reasonable chain of logic would support assigning anything more than a 0.001% probability to this.
Regardless, Republican leaders were quick to condemn the demonstrations and talk about what a dark and un-American day this was in US history.
Yet presumably these American Revolution-loving leaders gush over the great and “noble" colonist escalations of:
The Boston Tea Party: Where the Rebel Force ⭐️ dressed up as Native Americans (a big faux pas in 2023. . .), illegally boarded three ships, and destroyed all of the cargo.
The Gaspee Affair: When Rebels burned a British customs ship.
Tarring and Feathering: What colonists would do when they strip a tax collector naked, pour hot tar on his skin, and glue feathers on him.
Can you imagine what that would have been like? I’m sure sensible, “above-it-all”, good citizens (now branded “Loyalists”) were completely befuddled when looking at the actions of these brazen, peace-disrupting rebels.
Yet apparently, according to the more sophisticated 🤵♂️, “responsible citizen” wings of conservatives today, the 1776 Revolutionaries were the “good guys” while the J6 building trespassers are the proverbial scum of democracy.
How dare you make any comparisons to the Founding Fathers. . . Don’t you know that was the only time in history where the leaders and their system of government deserved to be replaced?
The reasons 1776 colonists had behind their cause were legitimate and exclusively based on virtue [you know, holy things like not wanting to pay too much in taxes, believing that the government wasn’t acting in the people’s interest, restrictions on autonomy, yada yada yada].
Yet any similar “reasons” someone would have for wanting urgent governmental reform today are silly and must be based on outlandish and nefarious misinformation.
Do you see the inconsistency? Which will it be — is agitating the government when you don’t like how it uses its power, a good or a bad thing?
The grand irony is that those who were most passionately motivated to show up in Washington, D.C. and then walk into the Capitol building on January 6th were precisely those who were most captivated by the meme of the 1776 American Revolution.
It was a colonial LARPing dream come true.
The most aggressive J6 people likely believe that the spirits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are smiling down upon them, as they sit in their solitary confinement cells 😶🌫️.
Regardless of whether you think something like what happened during January 6th is better or worse than other politically motivated disruptions like the Weather Underground bombings, my main point in this first part is to have us wonder: Why, exactly, do we think something like the American Revolution was necessarily a good thing? And if one believes that 1776 was indeed a good thing, what differentiating features would make J6 a bad thing, given the apparent similarity in ethos and liberty spirit between the two?
It seems to me that the only consistent positions are:
Both events were bad.
Both events were neutral/arbitrary.
Both events were good.
If you disagree, then based on what could you say that one was bad and the other was good? Some subjective threshold for when “enough is enough — the government is too corrupt” ?
Leaving aside the specifics of the times, the underlying question is:
Is it EVER okay to start a revolution?
Are there any circumstances whatsoever, that would justify a forceful (non-legislative, law-breaking) removal of a nation’s current leaders from their seats of power?
Of course the answer to this question depends on one’s worldview.
If you have a nihilistic, Game-of-Thrones kind of perspective, then who cares — pick a clan and may the best player win! ⚔️ It’s all about arbitrary power games and manipulation of language, right?
Today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s regime, and tomorrow’s regime will tell the children a story about the great and noble victory over yesterday’s tyrants.
However, as a Catholic (or religious person in general — which means I believe in existence of moral laws that transcend arbitrary power games), I find that the question becomes more interesting.
The issue of whether revolution is ever morally justifiable is dependent upon whether one can legitimately make a macro extrapolation of the self-defense problem.
Here’s a snippet of what the Catholic Church teaches about self defense:
The only morally acceptable level of violence, in private matters, is the bare minimum necessary for preventing yourself from being killed by someone else.
If someone is attacking you with the intent of killing you, you have the “right” to neutralize that person’s attacking efforts with the proportionate amount of force that would diffuse the attack.
Anything “extra” in your force that would be motivated by feelings of revenge or some desire to cause suffering would be considered a sin.
This micro, person-to-person example is fairly straightforward to understand. Though even here, a complication arises around the threshold of sufficiency — how do you know what level of force is “enough” or “appropriate” in response to stymying the initial act of aggression? Could you ever be 100% sure that you didn’t overdo it, in your act of retaliatory violence?
I would hate to ever have to be in that situation, and I imagine those who have acted lethally in self-defense must often be plagued with the thought: “Did I really have to kill the attacker in order to save my life?”
So then, how can we relate this micro, person-to-person moral dilemma to the macro topic of the ethics around revolution, whose proponents would be inclined to frame the issue in terms of "self-defense” against an oppressive “system”?
If the ambiguity around what amount of force constitutes a reasonable response is difficult to decipher in the basic examples, it only gets more blurry when zooming out into the big geopolitical picture.
The moral threshold for action is further complicated by the fact that everyone has a different subjective feeling around what it means to be “threatened”.
Two people experiencing the exact same circumstance could have completely distinct reactions based on their respective beliefs:
Person A: This “attacker” isn’t that serious. He’s just a crazy or misguided person who will probably leave us alone.
Person B: You don’t understand. . . more attackers are right around the corner, and before long we won’t have any rights and it will be too late to defend ourselves.
Both of these individuals are making predictions around what will happen next based on their own if-then assumptions and the patterns they believe they are seeing.
Let’s further analyze the perceived pattern motivating the revolutionary:
A. Somebody who “represents” the existing group that is in power commits an unjustifiable act of violence or theft against someone outside of that power group.
e.g. Joe the government employee attacks George. George didn’t do anything to “deserve” that.
B. The rest of the existing power group pretends the act of aggression didn’t happen or even frames it as a good thing.
e.g. Joe gets away with it. The officials who are in power did not punish Joe. Perhaps they have even verbally encouraged Joe to engage in such discriminatory behavior against George.
C. The revolutionary feels some solidarity with the victim, which creates a sense of fear and outrage.
e.g. “What if this happened to me, instead? It could have just as easily been me in George’s circumstance, especially since I look like George and/or share some of George’s beliefs.”
D. The revolutionary believes that the unjustified act of aggression was not an isolated incident, but rather a deterministic fruit of a broader contagion.
e.g. It’s not just that Joe did something bad. It could have just as easily been any other randomly chosen member of the existing power group committing that act of violence. Since Joe is a member of the “government”, the entire group of government people is culpable.
E. By way of two-fold solidarity and stereotyping, the revolutionary now convinces himself that he is under threat and therefore needs to act in preemptive self-defense.
e.g. “Since George = me & my tribe and Joe = every government employee, we need to defend ourselves against the threat of the government aggression.”
**End Scene**
Notice what happened in stages C, D, and E. The revolutionary imaginatively connects to the experience of someone else, which then stimulates his moral feeling of self-defense to a degree where he has convinced himself that he needs to act preemptively, before he himself is persecuted.
This pattern of thinking migrates from the clear-cut micro scenario of self defense where one observes:
I am, indisputably and objectively, under attack. (e.g. someone is swinging a knife at me)
to the increasingly assuming:
I might be under attack soon. . .
This other person is under attack, and that is basically the same thing as me being under attack. . .
“Might” and “Basically” are subtle yet powerful subjective judgments that have all too often led fearful and desperate individuals to lash out.
Consider, as Jacques Ellul pointed out in his famous Propaganda, that every act of war is justified by its proponents as an act of self-defense.
Of course, this not to suggest such fears are always unfounded.
On the contrary, massive acts of genocide have occurred throughout history precisely because the industrious, mind-my-own-business citizens wanted to look the other way and pretend nothing was going on.
Such citizens held their own intellects in high esteem, telling themselves they would only consider hypotheses of corruption once the evidence became undeniably obvious.
There’s that threshold of sufficiency problem again . . .
Let’s get concrete and talk about Nazis. (Oh no! Godwin’s Law strikes again 😄 🙈)
If you lived in Germany, knowing the evil that Nazis perpetrated on the Jews, and you saw a Nazi at the local grocer purchasing a schnitzel… What would you do?
Would you attack him then and there? Kill him, even?
Would you wait to “catch him in the act”, at a point when the “defense of life” argument is more tangible and proximal, so you could be sure that he specifically deserves to be neutralized by your violence (as opposed to him being some sort of nonviolent Nazi plumber, if that were a thing. . .)?
Let’s say you knew for sure that this guy killed some innocent people last week. Right now, in this moment, he is just standing in line peacefully. Do you have the moral right and conviction to exercise justice then and there, in order to A) Deliver the capital punishment and B) Save future innocent lives from death, based on your prediction that this Nazi will continue to perpetrate evil?
And aside from this one Nazi, to what extent do you feel compelled to enlist in a broader revolutionary cause to overthrow the Nazi regime and exercise “self-defense” in every nook and cranny of German society, until all aggressors have been eliminated?
In doing so, you will become an enemy of the state. How do you weigh your conviction to this mission against the responsibility of looking after your kids or running your local business, where both your employees and customers rely on you for communal stability?
The answers are not obvious when deeply held yet conflicting values demand of you to rank them according to your meta priorities.
But is there ultimately a correct answer?
Surely the Nazi regime was “bad enough” to facilitate a moral obligation to overthrow it?
Or is the decision still not obvious?
How many innocent lives would a government need to take in order for a collective, revolutionary act of “self defense” to be objectively justifiable?
When does a grain of sand, added to other grains of sand, become a heap? . . .
Maybe the threshold for justifiable action will always be a subjective one, but as a lover of Truth, I find hasty jumps to “It’s all relative” often premature and inevitably unsatisfying, so before leaving the issue, I’ll do what any good Catholic should do and ask. . .
What would Jesus do? Would Jesus ever start a political revolution?
Since Jesus never explicitly rules on the topic of self-defense, this question entails a prediction of a hypothetical based on historical data.
What historical Jesus data can we glean from?
The following incidents come to my mind:
The Sermon on the Mount
• Jesus rejected the existing norm of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” but instead told listeners, “turn the other cheek when someone attacks you” (i.e. endure and make yourself even more vulnerable).
• He also said to “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
• This doesn’t really sound much like a “self-defense” spiel. In fact, it sounds like the opposite.
• The Church reconciles these statements with the concept of self-defense by claiming that the context here relates to daily interpersonal transgressions, rather than life-threatening encounters.
Arrest at Gethsemane
• When Jesus was being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter drew a sword and struck the high priest's servant, cutting off his ear. Jesus rebuked Peter, saying, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
• I.e. Despite the fact that physical imposition / arrest leading to death was imminent, Jesus rebuked his disciple’s attempt at “self-defense”.
The Woman Caught in Adultery
• Scribes and Pharisees brought a woman to Jesus who had been caught in the act of adultery. According to the Law of Moses, she should be stoned 🪨. Jesus responded: Jesus responded, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." One by one, the accusers left. Jesus then told the woman that He did not condemn her and instructed her to "go, and from now on sin no more."
• This is an interesting one. You could say that the woman was going to be attacked with stones, which created an opportunity for self-defense. Notice that Jesus diffused the situation, using just words.
• If the authorities there would have ignored Jesus’ words and decided to stone the woman anyway, would Jesus have intervened physically and used force to stop them? Seriously — think about this incident and what it implies.
• We’ll never know for sure what Jesus would have done, but it does seem unlikely that he would have used physical force to stop them. Why can we assume this? Well, there were no doubt plenty of other adulterous women getting stoned in Jesus’ day, and as far as we know, he didn’t show up to intervene at every single situation like this (in the same way that he didn’t heal every sick person).• If it sounds shocking to say that Jesus wouldn’t use violence to save your earthly life, the shock should wear off when you notice that this is really just a microcosmic rendition of the Problem of Evil (where God allows suffering for a variety of different reasons).
• So we don’t really have an example of Jesus using violence to stop violence.Jesus before Pilate facing charges of starting a rebellion (how topical)
• When questioned about his kingship by Pilate, Jesus responded, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”
• When Jesus was crucified, on his cross was written “King of the Jews” as a way to ironically mock the fact that many Jews were expecting a strong and powerful Messianic figure who would redeem them politically and militarily from Roman rule. Yet Jesus clearly did not display any kind of leaning towards organizing a political movement.
• Jesus’ anti-political disposition is further evidenced by when he said to “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.”Jesus Drives Out the Merchants from the Temple
• The Temple (central place of Jewish worship) was polluted by the presence of merchants ripping people off. Jesus flipped over the table and made a whip, driving the animals and people out of there.
• Whether actual “violence” (physical harm) was involved is unclear. But in any event, you could say Jesus imposed his will and revolted against the system here, rather than passively allowing the status quo to continue.
• Was this a case of “defending life”? Well, there didn’t seem to be any physical danger caused by the merchants, hence no life in jeopardy to defend.
• Yet one could make the case that there was a real spiritual danger, and Jesus’ rapid escalation signifies (relative to his pacifist attitude in the other situations above) his prioritization of spiritual matters over temporal ones.
• There may also be the message that physical escalation could be appropriate within in-group, “Kingdom of God” matters, but not in the context of broader society / “earthly kingdom” issues.
We could analyze more incidents, but unless I’m missing something, it seems to me that Jesus most certainly would not participate in any political revolution.
What should that mean for Christians or anyone who considers Jesus Christ a moral exemplar?
At the same time, omission doesn’t necessarily imply condemnation — there are many things Jesus didn’t do himself, but that doesn’t make those actions “forbidden” for others (the most obvious example being marriage).
In any event, the lesson from his life is that political matters, while important, should never take a higher place in one’s heart than spiritual maters.
Has there ever been a revolutionary who had these priorities properly ordered?
In sum, “Is it ever okay to start a revolution?” can be analyzed as such:
Acknowledge that every revolution introduces some inherent negative (i.e. there is always violence involved).
Since there is a big negative, the next step is to assess whether revolution promotes some greater positive (or elimination of a greater negative) that offsets the introduced negative.
As revolution entails replacing System of Government X with System of Government Y, the direct positive-negative comparison is already built-in. At what point is the existing system so bad that its continuity introduces more negatives than a revolution would?
We realize that something being “bad enough” invokes a threshold of sufficiency problem. Is there any objective way to determine where that threshold lies or is it entirely a matter of subjective judgment?
Appealing to the principle of self defense may be the closest path to reaching an objective answer. Yet any perception of “threat” is also plagued by subjectivity and individual risk aversion, leading us back to the same problem.
From a purely secular lens, there may be no way to overcome this subjectivity problem. For those who are religious, the search for an “objective” answer continues by way of implementing the tenets of the respective religion and studying the Leader’s way of life.
I told you how I believe Jesus Christ would respond, but how do you think other icons of world religions would respond? Muhammad? Krishna? Buddha?
As a follow up, you may have some opinion on what constitutes a “legitimate” threat and how such perceptions are influenced by social media, cultural narratives, upbringing, etc.
Let’s muse together,
Drago
