Legacy at Atlanta:

A Welcome & Introduction to COV&R'99

Thee Smith

Religion Department, Emory University
 
 

Good morning! I'm Thee Smith, professor in the Religion Department here at Emory. It is my privilege to welcome you to Atlanta, to this eminent University, and to the eighth annual meeting of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion--COV&R '99. This symposium on Violence Reduction is being hosted by the faculty and staff of the Religion Department under the leadership of our chairperson and colleague in Islamic Studies, Richard Martin. But it also has the generous support of many other members of the University, beginning with our Provost Rebecca Chopp, and with the Dean of the College, Stephen Sanderson. Rebecca Chopp in particular supports our efforts as a colleague who has studied the work of Rene Girard and wanted very much to join us a participant and presenter. On behalf of Provost Chopp and Dean Sanderson, together with our President Bill Chace, I extend to you a warm welcome to Emory University!
 
 

All of us hope that in your travel to Atlanta, in your arrival on our campus, and in finding your way to this conference hall, you have already experienced some of our Southern hospitality. Please let us know how we can be even more welcoming and helpful during your time here.
 
 

There are others at the University who have also helped make this symposium a remarkable occasion, and you will find a list of them on the back of your conference brochure. But because no personal names are listed there, I will call out one name in particular -- Maggie Kulyk, my graduate student and my assistant in organizing this symposium. If you have not already met Ms. Kulyk you will soon discover why I regard her as our best resource during the last year of preparation. Please feel free to share with her over the course of three days anything you particularly appreciate about the organizational details of the symposium, in addition to the needs and concerns that we expect to arise.
 
 

But I also want you to know something you may not otherwise discover in the time we have together: Ms. Kulyk is a illuminating thinker on the application of Rene Girard's work to issues of ascetical suffering and self-sacrifice in Buddhist and in early Christian martyr texts. Her comparative work on the Bodhisattva and the martyr traditions is very promising for the interfaith dialogue that concerns many of us in COV&R. In the best of worlds some of us would get a chance to talk about such matters with Ms. Kulyk, in addition to the inevitable matters of conference logistics.
 
 

Now I turn to the rest of us in attendance here today. I thank all of you for your part in creating this extraordinary program. In addition to the conference presenters and speakers, you have also committed to address the issues that we will explore in the next three days. Your sheer presence is the first reward for all our labors. And now that you are here at last, we can look forward to the many more rewards that will come as our presenters and speakers honor us with the best fruits of their research and insights.

*******************************
 
 

Before I make some practical remarks about the program for today and tonight, as I will each morning, it is my privilege and responsibility first to set the symposium in its intellectual and social-historical context. This 8th international symposium on Violence Reduction represents the latest effort of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion to bridge the chasm that concerns so many of us in the academy today: the chasm between theory and practice. In this connection I refer you the COV&R purpose statement reprinted on the back of your conference brochure. One the one hand the object of COV&R is to explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model of the relationship between violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture. On the other hand, the statement continues, the Colloquium will be concerned with questions of both research and application, and scholars from various fields and diverse theoretical orientations will be encouraged to participate both in the conferences and the publications.
 
 

Thus the symposium that we begin here today continues the kind of inclusive approach to violence theory, and the application of theory, that has characterized COV&R since its inception at the beginning of the decade. The present symposium is distinctive, however, in broadening the interests of COV&R to include more theorists who link theory and practice, and also to include practitioners as well as scholars-- particularly practitioners whose applied research promises to inform and advance the conference hypothesis also found on the back of your brochure.
 
 

Let's review that hypothesis for a moment. It reads as follows:
 
 

A 'full spectrum' of violence reduction theory and practice already exists, ranging from primate studies to international affairs with much more in-between, and needing only to be correlated in order that new syntheses can emerge to propagate violence-free societies throughout the next millennium.
 
Wow! Let me repeat that: Wow! Now that was the word that I heard weeks ago when I asked for a response to the hypothesis from our esteemed COV&R President, Cesareo Bandera. If you know Cesareo you can easily imagine the tone of his Wow. Wow! he exclaimed with remarkable restraint, Isn't that a tiny bit over-optimistic? I must confess that so authoritative is Cesareo's opinion for me that my first reaction was an acute attack of the scholar's disease of 'censorea' or 'deletitis': the irresistible compulsion to censor or delete the very idea that you have spent years of your life developing. (As an aside, let me say here that one of the many things for which I'm grateful to Rene Girard foremost, and to my COV&R colleagues generally, is the tonic you provide me for daring to develop one's best thinking in the face of one's own internal censor. So, in the spirit of my COV&R mentors, Cesareo being one of them, I rallied.)
 
 

"The hypothesis is deliberately hyperbolic," I wrote back as you recall, Cesareo. "What I am after is a dynamic way to push COV&R members to consider the following possibility: that our pessimism on this matter is actually a covert form of our own enthrallment to the 'primitive sacred' as monolithic and impregnable or intractable." And then I concluded: "By having [some of the presenters] present a case 'for' the hypothesis, I hope that our COV&R perspective will be clarified through reexamination, and even through some dramatic if not entertaining contention and contestation of our perspectives." Then I asked Cesareo if I could include his comment in my remarks today, and he warmly wrote back encouraging me to proceed:
 
 

Dear Thee,

I have no problem with your using those words of mine. I am genuinely

interested in finding out what the basis could be for such "hyperbolic" optimism.

Regards,

Cesareo
 
 

Well, colleagues and other friends, here goes.

The basis for "such hyperbolic optimism" is praxial and activist, and not merely theoretical and logical. It is grounded in a pre-theoretical conviction that certain propositions of an existential nature can not be addressed by cognitive means alone. Rather, they must be tested by the cyclical process of theory followed by practice, and practice correcting that theory, and then that theory again being tested by practice, and so on and so forth. The conference hypothesis is posed as if the advent of violence-free societies within the next millennium is one of those sorts of things. An earlier example of such a proposition is the example of the abolition of European and American slavery in the nineteenth century, the likelihood of which could never have been determined on the basis of theory or cognitive processes alone. But for a more contemporary example consider what we would hear if Bishop Tutu were among us today. You know as well as I that he would offer South Africa as a case study in the praxis of human transformation. In that case, if our hypothesis had been formulated during the reign of apartheid as little as thirty years ago, it would have read something like this:
 
 

All the resources for a nonviolent transition to a democratic state already exist in South Africa, ranging from traditional religious and moral practices of civil disobedience and reconciliation, to strategies of statecraft requiring the most sophisticated skills of negotiation and compromise, with much more in-between, and these resources need only be deployed in a concerted way in order that a new South Africa can emerge to lead the world toward a non-racist, non-sexist, and inclusive society in the next century.
 
 

"Unbelievable" we would have said in 1960, and in 1970, and as recently as 1980. "Unbelievable" we might still say today, but much less automatically or compulsively, because we have before us a concrete instance of violence-free resources being deployed so far persuasively. Now what I am interested in here is not predicting the future of South Africa or of our species in the next millennium. Rather I am interested in our automatic and compulsive urge to preemptively deny prospective efficacy to such violence-free projects.
 
 

In that regard the hypothesis is itself an exercise in violence reduction -- in reducing our captivity to violence as theorists of violence. It is crafted precisely in such a way as to expose and challenge our own scholarly version of, or capitulation to, sacred violence. The content of our capitulation is precisely our conviction that violence is the perduring reality that humanity can never overcome in practice. Now such a view sacralizes violence because it construes it as the transcendent reality, in relation to which all other dimensions of reality must submit as though to a god.
 
 

Notice our visceral response when we are asked to entertain the prospect of violence-free societies in the next millennium or at any point in the distant future. With that response we pay tribute to the deified (and reified) power of violence in our history and in our present. Here I offer a phenomenological intuition: we theorists of violence have the same response as any devotee when told that his or her god is not an absolute reality. We too are not only incredulous but scandalized, if not outraged. For us too violence is as an ontological reality or the metaphysical ground of being; that primal reality which was, now is, and ever shall be.
 
 

But here, let me acknowledge again, I am being hyperbolic for rhetorical effect. With more restraint, circumspection and care, let me introduce a crucial distinction--a corollary to the hypothesis as stated. I propose a distinction between violence as a fundamental phenomenon in human origins and cultural formation--such as we treat in the COV&R colloquium, and institutionalized violence as an empirical feature of all social reality and cultural systems. With that distinction I will now proceed to clarify the conference hypothesis. Let us qualify it here together now, to refer not to violence as fundamental or ontological, or to violence as a mystical force that is somehow implacable or intractable. Rather we have in view the phenomenal reality of violence as discrete practices that are willed and performed by the individuals and groups that we know and work with; practices that are therefore accessible, and can be differently willed and performed.

In this connection I am reminded of Paul Ricoeur, who spoke to us last year at the COV&R meeting in Paris. I would to apply to this discussion Ricoeur's critique of Heidegger; specifically Heidegger's ontological existentialism and fundamental hermeneutics. Ricoeur preferred a minimalist ontology in which, as he put it, "For the short route of the Analytic of Dasein [I substitute] the long route which begins by analyses of language." Also with respect to Husserl's perceptualist phenomenology, Ricoeur opposed a phenomenology of language and symbol that retained contact with the human sciences and their interpretive methods. By contrast, Ricoeur argued, Heidegger's "ontology of understanding" brings about such a "revolution" that "the question of truth is no longer the question of method." Accordingly, in a kind of manifesto for method Ricoeur argued that:
 
 

With Heidegger's radical manner of question, the problems that initiated our investigation not only remain unresolved but are lost from sight. . . . These problems are not properly considered in a fundamental hermeneutics, and this by design: this hermeneutic is intended not to resolve them but to dissolve them.
 
in contrast to the dissolution of the problems that prompted an investigation in the first place, Ricoeur pursued another strategy. He wanted, he said, to "continue to keep in contact with the disciplines which seek to practice interpretation in a methodical manner," and thus to "resist the temptation to separate truth, characteristic of understanding, from the method put into operation by disciplines which have sprung from exegesis." (Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations; Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974; pp. 10-11)
 
 

Now with that critique before us I turn back to our context here today as theorists of violence. Is it fair to suggest that most of us are ontologists of violence, that is, that we are enthralled or mystified by the view that all violence is of the fundamental or ontological kind? Is that too simple a judgment? In any case, it is hereby inferred that there is another order of violence that is deontological and empirical, as it were. It is that performed or practiced dimension of violence that our conference hypothesis gets at. And it is that order of violence that many of our conference sessions, workshops and practicums address by means of disciplines that treat violence as a system of discrete practices amenable to diagnosis and treatment. Finally, it is that dimension to which Gandhi refers in his aphorism that serves as a prophetic logos for our conference this week:
 
 

We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
 
***************************

With that Gandhian manifesto ringing in our ears, let us turn to our symposium program and the presentations indicated in your conference brochure. The program has been designed to display the spectrum of resources available for violence reduction today. Some of those resources are theoretical and some are applied or practical. Thus our symposium begins with theory and application regarding hominization, primate behavior, and pre-industrial tribal communities at one end-point or terminus of a hypothetical spectrum. We proceed next to a number of concurrent sessions that immediately extend the spectrum toward its other terminus: toward international war and global contexts of violence. In between those two extremes we will encounter many intermediate points of focus, involving youth violence, biblical and literary contexts of violence focusing on ethnicity and gender, and issues of conflict and justice ranging from workplace dynamics to issues of law and legislation, genocide and human rights violations.
 
 

In addition we are fortunate to have included in our spectrum both theological and religious studies perspectives and analyses. Some of those perspectives are drawn from the mimetic model of the relationship between religion and culture developed by Rene Girard, and representing the special interest of COV&R members among us. It is our hope that the symposium will provide a balance-of-discourse between COV&R's special interest and other diverse interests represented among us. My own ideal in fostering such a balance is that participants less familiar with the mimetic model will learn all they want to about it, while those of us more familiar will acquire new ways to further explore, criticize, and develop the mimetic model as I have already begun to do in these introductory remarks.
 
 

A final aspect of the symposium has to do with its practicums. I will ask you to render a kind of diagnostic contribution to the symposium by performing what your conference brochure sometimes calls "assessments." The term as printed in the brochure most often refers to workshops or practicums. But even the lectures, which are typically followed by the italicized word "discussion," can be assessed for their usefulness in meeting the terms of the conference hypothesis. The charge to the presenters in each case is in some way to display any of the resources available today for deconstructing violence and/or fostering violence-free societies. Your charge as participant observers of the lectures and workshops therefore, is to catalogue those resources and report your responses to us both during and after the conference, whether formally or informally.
 
 

[Whereas some of you have been assigned to perform these assessments formally, I will ask all of you to do so voluntarily by using the evaluation forms found in your packets and on the announcement tables outside in the foyer. Thank you for your contribution to this theory/practice effort.] CHK!
 
 

* * * * * *

And now I have a different exercise in justification to perform. As the organizer I feel compelled to "save the appearances" of a conference on violence reduction in Atlanta that does not include a presentation on the African American freedom movement in its "full spectrum" of practices. The symposium does not, therefore, present as full a spectrum as announced in the conference hypothesis. Such an omission is all the more conspicuous in this city. For Atlanta has become a kind of "pilgrimage" site for nonviolence adherents, as former Ambassador Andy Young has sometimes declared. With the King Center on the one hand and the Carter Center on the other, and with Bishop Tutu here this last year and next, Atlanta represents a kind of convergence of violence reduction theorists and practitioners. So where are these figures or their representatives this week?
 
 

Now one could easily answer that question in terms of practical challenges, ranging from my own limited organizational skills to the larger issue that the conference attempts to address: the split between theory and practice that particularly plagues our academic convocations and events. But these are prosaic and all-too-familiar challenges and problems. Instead of rehearsing them I would like to save the appearances here today in another, more creative way. I have the privilege of being one of the few native Atlantans among us, and on the basis of that status I hereby invite you to become fellow citizens with me in creating a new nonviolence 'legacy at Atlanta.'

For Atlanta itself needs a new legacy of nonviolence here in the South, where it has been called the 'murder capital' of the United States. And President Carter, Ambassador Young, and Bishop Tutu need to learn what it is that will occupy us here over the next three days, just as we have learned from them, so that they will be further 'resourced' for their ongoing efforts. In this regard I must confess, dear colleagues (if somewhat defensively), that we have not articulated or demonstrated the import of our theories of violence with sufficient clarity to make our work indispensable to such practitioners. I will mention only one example: our COV&R colleague Fred Smith, my African American brother who for many months co-organized this symposium with me, and who regrets that he could not be here because of compelling events involving reconciliation in South Africa. Fred Smith provides a good case study of our communicative challenges as theorists in violence studies. Fred completed his dissertation on mimetic theory here at Emory just two years ago, while working on the staff of the Carter Center Interfaith Health program. While he continues on staff at the Carter Center and while also teaching in our Candler School of Theology here, Fred and I attempted unsuccessfully to present the focus of our COV&R work in such a way that his Carter Center colleagues would see its import for their applied work.
 
 

Here I may state my own conviction as a member of COV&R: Our colloquium has developed a world-transformative theory of scapegoating, alongside a mimetic model of violence, in which we see conflict as rooted in our imitation of each other's desires on the one hand, and in the runaway acquisitiveness and rivalry that arises from such desire on the other. It is this impacted complexity of mimetic desire turned acquisitive and rivalrous that fuels scapegoating and that makes it so intractable. For scapegoating feeds on our species' abysmal desire to achieve unity externally and internally, in the only way we have discovered to be fail-safe: namely by targeting ourselves internally and targeting others externally.
 
 

This double-vectored operation of scapegoating renders us subject to malignant forces in our histories and in our psyches, because not only do we chronically target-out at others, we also chronically target-in at ourselves; each individual compulsively scapegoating and attacking parts of the psyche internal to her or him, and at the same time colluding in social structures and processes that scapegoat and attack people external to him or her. Again, what makes this complex so impacted and intractable is that it is fueled or powered by desires that are legitimately yearning or needful. Lest we forget--as we are so likely to do--it is a desire seeking unity and union with others but most often having no better resources that an imitation of the other's desire that in turn gives rise to acquisitiveness and rivalry.
 
 

Now there are antidotes to this pernicious entrapment. Over the millennia our species has discovered some few of them, and in recent centuries we have rediscovered and refined those few.
 
 

[example from AJC article and the interfaith delegation to Belgrade co-led by Joan Campbell and Jesse Jackson that returned from Yugoslavia with the release of the three U.S. soldiers; cf. Westerhoff conversation? cf. Kiran Bedi video: "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana?]
 
 

But what remains to be done is to clarify, synthesize, and propagate those types of resources as normative practices for human development and cultural formation. Such an achievement would provide the missing keys that practitioners like Carter and Young and Tutu need to perfect and fulfill their work. I see at least four domains in which such resources are already available, but awaiting clarification and synthesis for the sake of the human future. First, the domain of scholarly theories and scientific studies such as we will experience this week. Other institutes and institutions in this domain include the "United States Institute of Peace" in Washington, D.C., academic conflict resolution programs such as the one at George Mason University also in Washington, and the "Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution" here in Atlanta that includes Georgia State and Georgia Tech Universities. It also includes annual conferences of theorists and practitioners such as this COV&R meeting and the more well known National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution.
 
 

A second domain in which violence reduction resources are available is the area of normative practices. The norms for violence-free practices are codified or developed, promulgated and espoused, by such practice-oriented or activist organizations as the Carter Center here and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. More recently this domain has included what Charles Villa-Vicencio and other theorists and practitioners call "restorative justice." A related development is the mediation and "community conferencing" movements that T.J. Scheff also calls "therapeutic jurisprudence." Norms for violence-free practices are also made available in more community related areas such as domestic violence treatment programs--for example our own Men Stopping Violence program here in Atlanta. A final area closer to my own work as a practitioner is the whole area of workshop training and group facilitation, for example the "prejudice reduction" and "conflict resolution "workshops of the National Coalition Building Institute headquartered in Washington, D.C., and for which I served as the local chapter director here in Atlanta for several years.
 
 

A third domain of resources for violence reduction is the one that Atlanta is famous for because of the civil rights era and the Black student activist movement. This is the domain of strategic direct action, such practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr., Andy Young, Jesse Jackson, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Nonviolent strategic direct action has also, since the 1960s, been practiced in the United States by other ethnic minorities, women's movements, disability activists, gay rights advocates, and the anti-abortion movements. More recently the Einstein Institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts has specialized in this domain, promulgating new standards for such strategies as nonviolent sanctions, civilian-based deterrence, and post-military defense.
 
 

A fourth and final domain of resources for the propagation of violence-free societies in the future is the domain comprised by transformative and ritual communities. These need not be religious communities, although such communities are certainly the traditional loci for such transformations. These loci comprise the Christian eucharist as proclaimed to be the anti-scapegoating ritual par excellence, Jewish ethical and ritual traditions of tikkun olam or "repairing the world," Gandhi's explicitly spiritual and tacitly ritualized practices of ahimsa and satyagraha, Muslim and Sufi exemplification of the "greater jihad"--which is the jihad that one wages internally within oneself, the Buddhist model of the Bodhisattva who links his or her own liberation from a world of suffering to a self-sacrificial compassion for all sentient beings, and ethical humanists for whom all societies contain resources for achieving the highest ideals of human flourishing.
 
 

This last, fourth category includes only a few examples of the transformative and ritual domain of violence-reduction, and it is usefully described last because it will also close our conference on Saturday evening when we have planned an interfaith and "liturgical consummation" of our symposium. And now, please join me in the next three days in making this symposium a new contribution to Atlanta's legacy of nonviolent transformation
 
 

Before I turn to practical matters about today's program, let me thank you again for joining us and for your excellent attention to these introductory remarks. Thank you.
 
 
 

Return to the COV&R schedule