The Performance of Victory

The performance of a virtue—victory or strength or what have you—feels wrong to me and I think to many on the Left. I think many on the Left distrust strength and displays of strength, perhaps because it seems to run counter to values of pacifism, perhaps because it’s generally those with institutional power who perform strength against those with less privilege. And they distrust the display of strength because it feels like bluster. But I’m a martial artist too, which means that one of my tribes makes a distinction between peace and pacifism and sees strength and the ability to use it as a path to peace. I think there’s a truth there that is worth studying.

(Eighth in a series that starts here)

When the Allies won in WW II they weren’t just victorious, they performed victory. They occupied the land, took over and restructured the governments, put key leaders on trial. In the case of the Japanese Emperor renouncing his divinity, they told the population how to think. They imposed new values through the performance of those values. And the values, to a very large degree, stuck.

The story of WW II is so familiar to us it’s hard to appreciate how astounding this achievement was. Changing the values of a society is hardly ever successful, from the American South to South Africa, to the Mideast, to Russia. Yet at this one time it worked, and what worked was marching in, insensitive to the values and feelings of the “subjugated” people, running roughshod over their institutions, performing our own values with confidence—and in the end the people were not subjugated at all but set free from their own demons to find their own way.

I think it worked because the performance of values has an impact way beyond the mere communication of those values. In spiritual circles they say: dreams are how the unconscious mind speaks to the conscious; ritual is how the conscious mind speaks back. The performance of ritual taps into our spirit at a level is simply unavailable otherwise.

So for religion, and so everywhere. The rituals of democracy matter not just because they work, but because they are how we perform democracy for each other. We see democracy work, so we trust its workings.

Because the whole point of a performance is that it’s public. You can’t perform a virtue privately. There’s a great bit in The Virginian where the cowboy hero explains to his new wife that he has to go meet his arch-nemesis Trampas to protect his honor. Why? If someone called him a thief, he says, “…would I let him go on spreadin' such a thing of me? Don't I owe my own honesty something better than that? Would I sit down in a corner rubbin' my honesty and whisperin' to it, 'There! there! I know you ain't a thief?' What men say about my nature is not just merely an outside thing. For the fact that I let 'em keep on sayin' it is a proof I don't value my nature enough to shield it from their slander and give them their punishment.”

I think John Kerry would have done better had he read The Virginian before running for president.

This is why for so many people putting someone on trial in itself demonstrates their guilt. No matter how many times they’re told otherwise in civics class, the spectacle—ritual—of putting someone on trial speaks of guilt to the basement levels of the spirit. So it was critical to impeach Trump whatever the political cost, because impeachment itself performs his guilt and our outrage. Had we not, two-thirds of the country would have said, “Well, you yourselves clearly didn’t even believe he’d done anything wrong.”

This is a lesson we need to learn on the Left. If we’re unwilling to perform our virtues it’s not just that we appear weak. We are weak, at a fundamental level. It’s not just merely an outside thing.