context re MDMD Dixon's nonviolence

[Doug Millison]

Pynchon doesn't preach, of course, as Walter Wink does in the following
passage from _Naming the Powers_, but P does appear to play around with --
inverts, subverts, turns inside out -- some serious issues in this episode
where Dixon confronts the slave driver, resists his urge to kill,  somehow
becomes an "Instrument of God" in freeing these slaves.  Wink was among the
protesters at Selma, by the way; he knows what he's talking about not only
from his studies but from lived experience. I believe that he's also a
Quaker.

"Many people entered the civil rights movement because they were concerned
with justice for blacks, and in the course of involvement in nonviolent
direct action discovered an even greater change taking place in themselves.
[...] There is no more effective way of undergoing the spiritual discipline
of dying to one's ego than to position oneself directly in teh path of the
possibility of actual death -- say, on the tracks of a train loaded with
nuclear warheads or before the prow of a Trident sub. [...] It is easy
enough to set oneself against the visible evil of a Power. [...] Change is
possible, but only if the spirit as well as the forms of Power are touched.
and that spirit can only be spiritually discerned and spiritually
encountered. This is what made Martin Luther King, Jr. a figure of
world-historic proportions. With only the powerless at his side, he
formulated actions that would provoke and make visible the institutional
violence of racism. By absorbing that violence in their own bodies, they
exposed the legalized system as immoral, stripped it of legitimacy, and
forced unprecedented numbers of people to choose between their racism and
their Christianity. He resolutely refused to treat racism as a political
issue only; he insisted that it be seen also as amoral and spiritual
sickness. He did not attack the soul of America, but appealed to its most
profound depths. His confrontational tactics were attempts to address that
soul. He called a nation to repent, and significant numbers did. In the
process, the spirit of the nation itself began to change. His
assassination, and the abandonment of the moral basis of the struggle for
one of black power versus white power, allowed the worst elements of the
ugly racist spirit to reassert themselves, this time with blacks no longer
the vanguard of reconciliation and conversion, but openly espousing a
counterracism of their own. Those who continued to insist on loving the
enemy adn working interracially were buried under the flood of poisons no
unleashed from both sides. [...] Once the moral grounds of struggle had
been yielded, it was merely a matter of which side had more power. In a
contest of that sort, it did not require a Solomon to predict which side
would win. [...] That is why we must not engage the Powers without rigorous
exaqmination of our own inner evil, which we often project onto our
opponents. We must ask how we are like the very Power we oppose, and
attempt to open these parts of ourselves to divine transformation. We must
attempt to stop the spiral of violence both within ourselves and in our
tactics vis-a-vis the Powers. We must discern the spirituality that we
oppose and be careful not to grant it victory wthin ourselves."
--Walter Wink
_Naming the Powers:  The Language of Power in the New Testament_. The
Fortress Press, 1984