Ahimsa and Non-Aggression (Part 2)

In my last post I gave a little background on the Buddhist (and Hindu and Jain) virtue of ahimsa, or non-injury. The vast majority of “socially engaged” Buddhists are committed to the politics of non-violence and I suspect the majority are pacifists of one sort or another. (Though it should be noted that Buddhism on the whole is not a strict pacifist tradition.) And yet, many engaged Buddhists, especially in the West, assume that the statist Left (statist greens, social democrats, welfare-state liberals, state socialists) is both compatible with the commitment to ahimsa and expresses the greatest political compassion (karuna). (If you think “political compassion” is an oxymoron, you’re certainly on your way to becoming a libertarian!)

There is nothing about Buddhism in particular that makes people more likely to be statists—indeed, I suspect the reverse is closer to the truth. Rather engaged Buddhism reflects the overall statism of our society, and given that most Western converts to Buddhism come from the educated middle-class counterculture (from the Beats to the present) it isn’t surprising that socially engaged Buddhist politics and ethics looks a lot like post-60’s leftism in general. So it’s not that most lefty Buddhists are Stalinists or New Class Democratic Party apparatchiks. Rather, I suspect that they lack a coherent theory and critique of the state. (Indeed, as I’ve written about at length elsewhere, engaged Buddhism is badly in need of sophisticated social theory in general.) Engaged Buddhists are often astute at seeing other forms of oppression and environmental destruction, but often, it seems to me, miss the pervasive oppression of statism. As Mises reminds us in Human Action:

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation. And taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

If one is to be committed to ahimsa, one must learn to see the pervasive (if democratically directed) violence, coercion, and fraud that is the exercise of state power. The problem, then, is not that Buddhists are committed to aggression, but rather that much engaged Buddhist thinking fails to see one of the most important and pervasive forms of aggression: state power.

The subtitle of this blog is “where two philosophies of peace meet.” Yet I suspect that most engaged Buddhists would not think of libertarianism (of whatever flavor) as being a philosophy of peace. Hence I think it’s important to highlight the non-aggression principle in this context. According to the non-aggression principle it is morally wrong to initiate force or fraud against another person or persons. Thus libertarians are committed to abstaining from causing invasive harm to others. This makes them natural allies of Buddhists in many respects. But it would be wrong for libertarians to assume that the non-aggression principle by itself automatically yields standard libertarianism. The non-aggression principle goes a long way toward protecting people from the non-consensual imposition of bodily harm, but without a conception of rights both over oneself and over at least some kinds of worldly items (artifacts and natural resources) the principle will be very indeterminate. Buddhism can’t—and, I think, shouldn’t—try to settle these matters. But I think what can be said is that libertarianism in the broad sense (including libertarian socialists, mutualists, geoists, mainstreamers, and anarcho-capitalists) is consistent with both the letter (such as it is) and the spirit of Buddhism. Thus, perhaps the best we Buddhist libertarians can do is point out again and again that statist solutions are for the most part solutions based on aggression and injury, not ahimsa and karuna. (By the way mary Ruwart’s Healing Our World is good on this score and probably would be well received by many engaged Buddhists.)