There are other, graver reasons to be suspicious. If the first blow hasn't knocked all the wits out of the victim's head, he may realize that turning the other cheek amounts to manipulation of the offender's sense of guilt, not to speak of his karma. The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why you've been hit on your right cheek in the first place.) At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one's enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. "Look," the other cheek says, "what you are hitting is just flesh. It's not me. You can't crush my soul." The trouble, of course, with this kind of attitude is that the enemy may just accept the challenge.
Twenty years ago the following scene took place in one of the numerous prison yards of northern Russia. At seven o'clock in the morning the door of a cell was flung open and on its threshold stood a prison guard, who addressed its inmates: "Citizens! The collective of this prison's guards challenges you, the inmates, to socialist competition in chopping the lumber amassed in our yard." In those parts there is no central heating, and the local police, in a manner of speaking, tax all the nearby lumber companies for one- tenth of their produce. By the time I am describing, the prison yard looked like a veritable lumberyard: the piles were two to three stories high, dwarfing the one-storied quadrangle of the prison itself. The need for chopping was evident, although socialist competitions of this sort had happened before. "And what if I refuse to take part in this?" inquired one of the inmates. "Well, in that case no meals for you," replied the guard.
Then axes were issued to inmates, and the cutting
started. Both prisoners and guards worked in earnest, and by noon all of them, especially the always underfed prisoners, were exhausted. A break was announced and people sat down to eat: except the fellow who asked the question. He kept swinging his ax. Both prisoners and guards exchanged jokes about him, something about Jews being normally regarded as smart people whereas this man . . . and so forth. After the break they resumed the work, although in a somewhat more flagging manner. By four o'clock the guards quit, since for them it was the end of their shift; a bit later the inmates stopped too. The man's ax still kept swinging. Several times he was urged to stop, by both parties, but he paid no attention. It seemed as though he had acquired a certain rhythm he was unwilling to break; or was it a rhythm that possessed him?
To the others, he looked like an automaton. By five o'clock, by six o'clock, the ax was still going up and down. Both guards and inmates were now watching him keenly, and the sardonic expression on their faces gradually gave way first to one of bewilderment and then to one of terror. By seven-thirty the man stopped, staggered into his cell, and fell asleep. For the rest of his stay in that prison, no call for socialist competition between guards and inmates was issued again, although the wood kept piling up.
I suppose the fellow could do this—twelve hours of straight chopping—because at the time he was quite young. In fact, he was then twenty-four. Only a little older than you are. However, I think there could have been another reason for his behavior that day. It's quite possible that the young man—precisely because he was young—remembered the text of the Sermon on the Mount better than Tolstoy and
Gandhi did. Because the Son of Man was in the habit of speaking in triads, the young man could have recalled that the relevant verse doesn't stop at
but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also
but continues without either period or comma:
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
Quoted in full, these verses have in fact very little to do with nonviolent or passive resistance, with the principles of not responding in kind and re^raing good for evil. The meaning of these lines is anything but passive, for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one. The other cheek here sets in motion not the enemy's sense of guilt (which he is perfectly capable of quelling) but exposes his senses and faculties to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise: the way every form of mass production does.
Let me remind you that we are not talking here about a situation involving a fair fight. We are talking about situations where one finds oneself in a hopelessly inferior position from the very outset, where one has no chance of fighting back, where the odds are overwhelmingly against one. In other words, we arc talking about the very dark hoirs in one's life, when one's sense of moral superiority over the enemy offers no solace, when this enemy is too far gone to be shamed or made nostalgic for abandoned scruples, when one has at one's disposal only one's face, coat, cloak, and a pair of feet that are still capable of walking a mile or two.
In this situation there is very little room for tactical maneuver. So tirning the other cheek should be your conscious, cold, deliberate decision. Your chances of winning, however dismal they are, all depend on whether or not you know what you are doing. Thrusting forward your face with the cheek toward the enemy, you should know that this is just the beginning of your ordeal as well as that of the verse—and you should be able to see yourself through the entire sequence, through all three verses from the Sermon on the Mount. Otherwise, a line taken out of context will leave you crippled.
To base ethics on a faultily quoted verse is to invite doom, or else to end up becoming a mental bourgeois enjoying the ultimate comfort: that of his convictions. In either case (of which the latter with its membership in well-intentioned movements and nonprofit organizations is the least palatable) it results in yielding ground to Evil, in delaying the comprehension of its weaknesses. For Evil, may I remind you, is only human.
Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.