HAROLD BRODKEY
599
ically shifted to the point that the reality of any argument to the end
point of violence defeats us whatever we do.
It would seem now that any violence at all defeats us.
In our pride and need as citizens and folk just trying to get along
and as separate egos, we use language as' an absolute, absolute in
itself and not only capable but actually representing actual truths–
the ones in real minutes. Since so much depends on speech it has be–
come a criminal act to forget that speech is a mode of argument .
Peace
must mean something in real moments. Any program toward it must
examine the real moments likely to occur in the progress of fighting
or working for that program. The British and the Romans, so far as
we can judge now, never took language as an absolute in their politi–
cal arguments, military planning, or in their major literature . But
we when we speak tend to treat everything as the early stages of the
development of a revealed truth, a final and exact truth, a religion,
not entirely rational but universal and unarguable.
• Wittgenstein argues that only biological facts of an historical
sort can be used for generalizations and overall formulations about
people and history. And ideal statements and statements of ideals are
not useful: they cannot be used as
premises
without the argument be–
ing nonsense from its inception .
Poor humankind.
It
is like children being told not to stuff beans
up their noses. False generalizations have been the fate of the century .
I say that disarmament - and an actual peace of any sort - can
exist now only
without
ideals, only without the use of
any
notion of
the ideal, and only with the recognition of the political inevitability
of
the
arguability
of everything.
And once that is agreed to, it can be agreed that nonviolence
is the only conceivable mode of
hopeful
argument. Nonviolence is
the only nondoomsday, nongenocidal argument. But is nonviolence
workable?
.
To be essentially a believer in nonviolence or a pacifist, in real
time , is to be part of a party of believers that has factions and wings.
The argument over the kinds and degrees of force to back up the
nonquietist elements among peacelovers is a serious one. The con–
nections between forces in a world culture, a world context make it
clear that our treatment of one another and of nearly everything-
