Quaker Peace Testimony

[content note: frank discussion of war and war crimes]

I.

I am both very good and very bad at the Quaker Peace Testimony.¹

I am very good at the Quaker Peace Testimony, in that I am naturally friendly and amiable, I have such a bad memory that every time I try to hold a grudge I forget, and I have so little aggressive instinct that whenever my boyfriend tries to wrestle me I let him pin me and then he says “why did you let me win?” and I say “you... seemed to want it very badly?”

I am very bad at the Quaker Peace Testimony, because I keep forgetting I’m a pacifist. I get part of the way through a conversation about Taiwan or Ukraine, and then I say “...wait, I’m not supposed to think the United States should fight wars under some circumstances, because I’m a pacifist. Uh. War is bad. I think we should stop doing war.”

For some reason, people tend to consider this bad behavior in arguments about foreign policy. I suspect several people of wanting to violate the Testimony of Peace about me specifically.

One of my best friends works for the Department of War. If I had a friend who was working for a tobacco company or sports gambling startup, I would argue with her and try to impress on her the evils of her actions. And I just wouldn’t have a friend who works for Tyson Foods, because I would break into tears whenever I thought about what she did all day at work. But I have never told my friend to quit his job and become a... I don’t even know. Some kind of non-war AI policy person.²

Unlike some other religious pacifists, Quakers believe it’s acceptable to use violence to defend yourself or others against an imminent threat. Your violence should be limited and proportionate, aimed at ending the altercation with the minimum harm to the attacker, but fundamentally you’re allowed to punch someone who’s trying to kill you.

And Quakers accept that a modern society needs police officers. My great-grandfather was a police officer who bragged that he strapped his gun to his hip every morning but had never drawn it on a human being. Although he was a good Irish Catholic and wouldn’t like to hear me say so, I think that in this way my great-grandfather was Quakerly. From a Quaker perspective, police officers should train in deescalation and nonviolent conflict resolution so that they rarely have to draw a gun, but when necessary they shouldn’t hesitate to use violence to keep everyone safe.

Some part of me says: okay, but the same logic should apply to war. Sometimes someone invades your country with intent to kill you and your fellow citizens. Sometimes someone tries to throw everyone of your race or religion or political affiliation into death camps. Sometimes someone does a coup against the democratically elected government, tortures dissidents, and causes famines through their economic mismanagement. When, with Nick Decker, I ask “When Must We Kill Them?”, I’m not sure the answer is “never.”

And—sometimes they’re not doing it against you. They’re doing it against the Jews in Nazi Germany, or the Uyghurs in China, or people with glasses in Cambodia. I’m not saying we must invade every time someone commits a genocide, just as a police officer might use her professional judgment to decide to nonviolently deescalate a situation instead of coming out guns blazing. But I can’t bring myself to oppose the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Pol Pot committed two separate genocides and neither of them is on the top five list of the worst things he did! And then Vietnam invaded and the killing stopped and—I am a terrible pacifist, but I can’t make myself say that the Vietnamese should have left the Cambodian people to die so that their hands would be pure.

The Quakers have, notably, only run a country that one time. It’s true that Pennsylvania didn’t fight any wars, but it also got to borrow the British army whenever the subject came up. Without the king’s patronage, Pennsylvania would no doubt have been invaded by marauding Puritans bent on forcing all Quakers to adhere to their view of Christianity. And indeed the Quakers eventually lost control of Pennsylvania when they could no longer have a peaceful relationship with local Native Americans. Ultimately, Quaker pacifism has never been tested against reality.

And yet I do think there is something valuable in the Peace Testimony.

II.

I wrote in a post about Maoism:

As I read Maoism: A Global History, I came to the conclusion that Maoism is a cognitohazard. Like, a straight-up, SCP-Foundation-style cognitohazard. If you think about Maoism too hard, you turn evil.

All the Maoist leaders are evil. I understand this; it’s an evil ideology. It is true that, early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, innumerable idealistic young Communists went around China teaching people to boil water and not to bind their daughters’ feet. But most of them were then purged and perhaps tortured or killed in one anti-rightist campaign or another, so I feel this is compatible with my diagnosis of Maoism-Induced Evil Syndrome.

What baffles me is why, all around the world, over a century of history, with ideologies ranging from boring liberal democracy to outright fascism, everyone who fought the Maoists is also evil. My notes on Maoism: A Global History contain phrases like “standard anti-Maoist torture/rape/war crimes/concentration camps.” From Chiang Kai-shek (the Number Three But We Try Harder of early twentieth century Chinese atrocities) to the mining companies brutally repressing the Adivasis today, a demon whispers in the ear of every anti-Maoist campaigner:

You’re in the clear as long as you vaguely think that Maoism is probably bad. Taking any specific actions about your belief that Maoism is bad is high-risk for turning evil. Once you’re assigned to the China bureau, it’s too late.

I don’t think Maoism being a cognitohazard is a weird historical coincidence but rather a deep truth.

Why does opposition to Maoism turn you evil? Why did Chiang Kai-shek massacre Communists? Why did the United States torture its own citizens in a failed attempt to reverse-engineer Chinese brainwashing that wasn’t real? Why did the Peruvian government execute peasants for speaking Quechua? Why did Suharto’s supporters butcher alleged Communists and drink their blood?

The second most justified war in world history³ is World War II. The Nazis killed six million Jews and as many as seven million other civilians. While exact numbers are uncertain, the Imperial Japanese may have actually beat the Nazis’ record. These are some of the worst governments in human history. If there’s any situation in which a good Quaker can countenance war, it’s this one.

The Allies bombed Dresden. An estimated 25,000 people died, nearly all civilians. Although Dresden is the most famous case—because its status as a military target was at best dubious—it wasn’t an isolated incident. Allied area bombing strategies deliberately targeted civilians (as did the Germans, to be sure).

The Bengali famine of 1943 killed between 800,000 and 3.8 million people. Although it’s controversial exactly what the British government could have known and should have done, as far as I know it’s undisputed that the famine was significantly worsened by British policies intended to maintain a stable food supply for soldiers.

And, of course, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing between 150,000 and 250,000 people, the vast majority of whom were civilians.

How just, how heroic, how splendid war is!

We have a tendency to think of just war as the normal case, and war crimes as a bizarre aberration done by monsters. In reality, the natural state of any army is to commit war crimes. Until the formation of the modern laws of war in the late nineteenth century, every army on every side of every war committed what we would think of as war crimes. As merely one example, in Europe up until the Napoleonic Wars, the socially accepted reward for taking a city was being able to steal whatever and rape and murder whoever you wanted. Today, after a great deal of moral progress and expansion of state capacity, we can produce armies that occasionally don’t commit war crimes. This is a fragile state, the product of a lot of good people doing an unimaginable amount of good work, and we should be grateful for it.

(although modern war crimes law still allows you to kill civilians if it’s proportionate to the military necessity)

Back when I used X, I saw multiple people on my X timeline—good people, people I like—explain that it’s okay for Israeli bombers to kill children, because if you don’t kill the families of Hamas fighters then Hamas will use them as human shields.⁴ I don’t have an object-level position on what stance on murdering the children of Hamas fighters minimizes the number of children murdered. It is possible that this logic is in fact correct.

But what I can’t imagine is typing that sentence and not finishing it with “which is why I’m a pacifist.”

I have an odd mental quirk, which is that whenever I read about large numbers of children dying, I involuntarily imagine it happening to my son Vasili. This is why I am so upset about cuts to PEPFAR and other crucial aid programs. I imagine that my son has HIV, and he was stabilized on antiretrovirals and was going to live to be an adult, and then suddenly the US government stopped providing funding for PEPFAR because Elon Musk read a Tweet about woke DEI operas, and now I have to bury my child in a four-foot coffin.

And so when I read a sentence like five children died in the bombing, what I imagine is staring at my son’s corpse in the wreckage.

People who post about how it’s okay for bombings to kill children feel very clear-eyed, very realistic. They can think about The Harsh Truths. They can accept The Nature of War.

But I am being clear-eyed and realistic, because the harsh truth, the nature of war, is that every Palestinian child who dies in a bombing is my son Vasili, and every Israeli child who dies in a terrorist attack is my son Vasili, and every child who died in the Holocaust or the rape of Nanking or Hiroshima or Dresden is my son Vasili, and Peruvian government soldiers raped my son Vasili, and my son Vasili ate dirt during the Great Leap Forward to try to keep his belly full, and the Red Guards slowly tortured my son Vasili to death because I’m a rightist, and Suharto’s soldiers skewered my son Vasili on their machetes because they heard somewhere I’m a Communist.

If generals and politicians and ordinary soldiers understood that the enemy’s children are as loved by their parents as their own children, play the way their own children play, misbehave the way their own children misbehave, in the modern era thanks to globalization probably collect Pokemon cards and watch Moana and read Dog-Man the same way their own children do—

Well. You’d never be able to fight a war, that way.

(”War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse... There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.”)

So at best, you reduce the enemy to numbers, resources and victory points in the world’s grandest board game. At worst, the enemy becomes orcs: Always Chaotic Evil monsters, with no loves or joys or feelings we ought to take into account, mooks whom heroes can slaughter endlessly and afterward throw a party because they made the world a better place.

War is a machine that makes people evil, and this is why. To fight a war, you have to lie to yourself. And if you are lying to yourself about orphaned children and mothers who bury their sons and the accidental slaughter of innocents, your natural tendency will be to lie to yourself about rape and torture and area bombing of civilians. You can’t clearly count the costs of your choices, because at best you have blinded yourself to evil, and at worst you have taught yourself to call evil good.

Sometimes you have to turn on the machine that makes people evil. Sometimes the machine is the only way to stop the Nazis. I don’t know that I can bring myself to be the kind of pacifist who says that there’s always a nonviolent solution.

But I want people to understand what turning the machine on means. I want them to understand that the machine isn’t brave and heroic and glorious, that it doesn’t turn boys into men. I write when children die in war, they are like your children—and I’m old enough that even an eighteen-year-old seems like a child to me—and I know people reading this are going to think it’s soft-hearted and sentimental and weak, that I’m being emotionally manipulative, that I’m tugging at your heartstrings rather than having a serious adult conversation about spheres of influence and realpolitik in a comfortable conference room that has been soundproofed so you can’t hear the screams.

But all I can say is that I’m telling the truth.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

III.

I wrote about war. But the Testimony of Peace isn’t just about war.

It is also about: Police brutality. The torture and imprisonment of dissidents. Terrorism. Assassinations. Genocide. Forced restraint and medication of neurodivergent people. Corporal punishment of children. Spousal abuse. Rape. Drug gangs. Racist violence. Acid attacks. Stupid impulsive murders. Riots. Coups. Slavery. Torture. Organized crime. Bioweapons research. Nuclear proliferation. Running reckless risks with AI because what if The Enemy gets it first. Hundreds of other atrocities I don’t have space to name. Hundreds of other atrocities I haven’t even heard of.

I don’t have it in me to write and edit a section for every piece of horrific violence humans are doing to each other. But that doesn’t mean that any of the violence I left out is less real or less important than war. The scale and extent of violence on this planet staggers me. (The scale and extent of suffering on this planet staggers me.)

Every single victim of violence is a person like you or like your friends or like your children. Every one of them matters as much as you do. Every one of them was once a baby, and someone held them and felt like their heart was walking around outside their body,⁵ and—that’s the truth, the story where they’re a number or an acceptable sacrifice is a lie, and—I don’t know what it would be like to live in the world and not lie to yourself about it, I don’t think I could bear it, but the truth is the truth whether or not I can bear it—

(I guess if I’m a Quaker I’m supposed to believe at least one guy did bear the truth, and we hung Him on a cross about it)

IV.

One of the earliest formulations of the Peace Testimony was George Fox’s famous statement that he “lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.” That is, George Fox not only didn’t personally fight in wars; he tried to live a life that would make war unnecessary.

My country hasn’t drafted anyone in over fifty years, and regardless as a person assigned female at birth I wouldn’t be called up. I vote for candidates that oppose war, as I vote for candidates that oppose factory farming and support global health aid. As an upper middle class white person, first read as female and then as a queer man, I have never been expected to prove my masculinity through violence. The option to get in a serious, violent fight has simply never been presented to me.

This does raise some questions about what it means to live out the Peace Testimony. Does it mean anything at all to live peacefully if I’ve never had the opportunity to choose violence? What does it mean for me, in my social context, to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars?

Well, why do people fight wars?

In the modern era, we typically at least gesture at the idea that war is supposed to right some sort of injustice and leave even the other side better off. We want to free women and queer people from Islamic fundamentalism, or protect Southeast Asia from Communist famines and persecutions, or overthrow the aristocrats who eat caviar off silver plates while the peasants starve, or beat the Nazis. However, while this may be a controversial statement, I don’t think we should try to get rid of the impulse to help people, even faraway people that we’ve never met. So I’m going to set this to one side.

Why else do people fight wars? And why else do people become Nazis and Maoists and aristocrats and Islamic fundamentalists in the first place, thus necessitating other people trying to beat them?

Anger. The desire for revenge. Injured pride. A sense of honor. The thirst for glory. The lust for power. Liking to have nice things and not liking to think about how exactly the nice things got there. Wanting to be better and higher-status than other people. Hatred. Dehumanization of the enemy; the desire for the enemy to suffer. Bitterness. Xenophobia, racism, and aversion to the Other. Fear that if you don’t hurt them first they’re going to hurt you.

I have very little desire to do violence to anyone. But I do, often, practice the habits of mind that make people want to fight wars. I do it whenever I assume that voting for Trump means someone is a conspiracy theorist, anti-science, an authoritarian bootlicker, indifferent to the suffering of the global poor, or generally opposed to everything I think is good. I do it whenever I hear about political violence and my first response is “you shouldn’t try to assassinate people, but you have to admit they kind of deserved it...” I do it when I’m scared that someone might hurt me, so I try to get my friends to dislike them or stop hanging out with them, even if they haven’t actually done anything wrong. I do it when someone apologizes to me or turns out to have a sympathetic explanation for their behavior, and then I don’t want to forgive them because I was enjoying being mad. I do it whenever I fantasize about a person who hurt me experiencing the same pain I did, so that they would understand. I do it when I reflexively judge people as inferior because they’re different from me.

And at the same time I do—in my faltering way—attempt to live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars. I do it when I look for sympathetic explanations of the behavior of people I’m mad at. I do it when I try to understand the viewpoints of people I disagree with from their own perspective. I do it when I’m tolerant of life choices that seem incomprehensible to me. I do it when I take responsibility for what I’ve done wrong and try to make amends. I do it when I sincerely hope for nothing but good for people who have wronged me (even as I take steps to keep them from hurting other people). I do it when I try to mediate between people who are fighting, or calm down angry people, or point out when my friends are being unfair to people they don’t like. I do it when I write my yearly donations checks.

The Quaker insight, I think, is that the broadest societal forms of violence mirror the smallest interpersonal forms of violence. War is the same as political polarization is the same as the AI race is the same as social media cancel mobs is the same as gang violence is the same as abusive relationships. China and the United States are the Crips and the Bloods with nuclear weapons; a husband who beats his wife is a human-rights-violating government writ small. Of course a pacifist activist can hit her wife, or a woman can come home from a day of bombing refugees without raising a hand to her wife or kids. But the underlying impulses are similar.

Fortunately, we can endure some amount of the occasion of violence without violence itself. Severe political polarization doesn’t always result in political violence like assassinations; an attitude of anger and bitterness and entitlement towards your partner doesn’t always result in physical abuse. I can dehumanize people as much as I like without stabbing them, because my life has little opportunity for violence. Peace doesn’t require us to all be saints.

But, ultimately, a country goes to war because millions of individual people chose fear or anger or dehumanization over love and forgiveness and tolerance, or because millions of individual people decided war was honorable and noble and glorious, or because millions of individual people chose to maintain a system so unjust that millions of other individual people saw no way to right it but violence. To build lasting peace, we need to create a culture that valorizes peace as much as historical cultures valorize war, and the work begins inside each person’s heart.

V.

To be sure, “everyone should just cultivate personal virtue” is not a solution to the problem of war. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now. To solve these problems, we need to shift institutions and social norms.

But social norms and institutions are made of people, and can be changed by people.

Of course, institutions are very important. High-quality policing prevents violence, as does swift, certain, and fair punishment of violence. If people don’t have adequate tools to resolve conflicts nonviolently, they will resolve conflicts violently. Developing institutions that prevent violence is important work. But I’m most interested in the creation of social norms.

In The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes about dueling—the social norm that elite men ought to respond to certain kinds of insults through ritualized murder attempts.

Through most of the time it was practiced, dueling was illegal and considered sinful by religious authorities. But the laws were never enforced (it is difficult to enforce a law against something the lawmakers think you ought to do) and few men were willing to behave in a shameful and unmanly way for no other reason than that the omnipotent, omniscient Creator of the Universe demanded it. And even many men who dueled remarked that duels were stupid. People will do stupid things to preserve their honor.

Appiah persuasively argues that what ended dueling culture is that, rather than believing that refusing a duel showed you were cowardly and dishonorable and effeminate, people came to believe that dueling showed you were reckless and easily angered and, frankly, cringe. The change that ended dueling was a change in values—downstream of, for example, newspapers, which allowed the common people to more easily express their “duels are dumb and immature” takes.

Similarly, the American civil rights movement is one of the great successes of nonviolence. True, racism persists in America today, but “America is still racist! The civil rights movement wasn’t that important” is something you can only believe if you have no understanding of the scale of mid-twentieth-century American racism. It continues to be both legal and uncontroversial that white people and black people use the same water fountains and swimming pools and sit in the same parts of the bus. If a black woman were gang-raped by men who confessed to the rape to police, the perpetrators would at least be indicted, and her house wouldn’t be firebombed for daring to report the rape.

The nonviolent direct action of the American civil rights movement challenged norms. It drew attention to socially acceptable racist violence and asked: would you rather be on the side of the people who think black people and white people should be allowed to use the same parks, or on the side of the people attacking children with fire hoses and dogs? The shift in laws came from a shift in social norms. People—not all people, but enough people—decided that racist terrorism and state-sponsored, explicitly racist violence were unacceptable.

Not personally doing violence is only a small part of the Testimony of Peace. Far more important for most of my readers is creating norms of opposition to violence. You may not be called to do norm-shifting activism like the civil rights movement. But everyone can practice basic opposition to violence. Here are some examples that have come up in my own life:

• If someone tries to justify political assassination or talk about how cool or hot an assassin is, I try to say “that’s not okay. It’s never acceptable to kill people for disagreeing with you.”

• If someone tries to talk about war as glorious or heroic, I talk about how war crimes are the natural state of war, every death in war is a tragedy, and there is nothing honorable about killing people.

  • I try to remember I’m a pacifist eventually.

• I try not to criticize people for having more empathy or sympathy for someone or some group than I do; I do criticize people for criticizing others for having empathy and sympathy.

• When I notice someone being unfairly criticized, especially behind their backs, I try to speak up in their defense.

• I encourage my friends to be tolerant of others, to resolve their conflicts proactively, and to seek good things for everyone.

• I try to step in to make conversations about AI more good-faith, more respectful, more truth-seeking, less heated, and generally more likely to result in my friends and acquaintances cooperating with each other for the greater good rather than driving humanity extinct in an AI race.

  • Or at least not to make the problem worse myself.

  • Or at least to apologize when I make the problem worse myself.

• I encourage my friend who works for the Department of War to hold to his values about war crimes and to save money so that if necessary he can afford to be a whistleblower.

• Most of all, I strive to model peace through my own behavior.

I am still, to be clear, a pretty crappy pacifist.⁶ And I don’t think this kind of internal work work is the highest-value work for peace—my ability to influence people who are willing or able to do violence is extremely indirect. But my behavior is what I have control over. I can’t make anyone else live in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars, but I can always try my best to do so myself.

1. For reasons, the Quaker moral teachings are called “testimonies.”

2. I have friends who work on AI capabilities, and I feel the same discomfort.

3. The first is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

4. I am not mentioning defenses of Hamas purely because I have yet to encounter anyone I like defending Hamas killing civilians, and not because Hamas is known for their sterling adherence to international war crimes law.

5. or if they didn’t that is actually worse

6. The AI thing is the highest-stakes Testimony of Peace work I do, and relatedly I would give myself a B-.