A Different Kind of Zeal

What Activists Can Learn from Missionaries

I was once told a story by a friend of the family that gave my worldview a powerful jolt.  We were all sitting around the dinner table, having a spirited conversation about religion.  My family, being from the city, held the standard view that all religions were flat-out bad and belong in the same bin of superstition and ignorance.  We thought that the hair-splitting differences between religions were all negligible and irrelevant; people were better off pushing away anything under the umbrella of “religion”.  But our friend-who was from a coastal village in South India-was of a different opinion.  He thought that our view came from a position of privilege, one that ignored the fact that not everyone had the luxury of choosing their communities.  We were dismissive of his seemingly obstinate argument until he told us the story of a Christian missionary in his village.  

A couple decades ago, when our friend was still a little boy holding his mother's hand in the village marketplace, there seemed to be some commotion a few stalls away.  There was a big crowd that had swiftly surrounded the action going on at the center.  The curious little boy slipped away from his mother’s grip as she was busy bargaining with the vegetable vendor and made his way through to the front of the crowd.  When he saw what was going on, he stepped back a little and hid behind one of the adults so that he couldn’t be seen.  Three men of different ages were kneeling down with their heads facing the ground.  Most of their clothes had been ripped off and one of them was weeping.  Another man, wearing bright white clothes, was screaming and swinging at them, sometimes kicking them down to the ground.  This man was the head of the village and he looked unbearably angry.

While this violence was taking place, there was a filthy stench in the air that gave this whole scene a horrid color in the mind of the little boy.  As he looked around for an explanation, he saw on the ground, a set of baskets infested with bugs and flies.  The boy would find out later in his life that the three men were Dalits, and their ‘crime’ was that they decided to take a shortcut through the marketplace with baskets of shit on their heads, at a time when the chief of the village was present.  

As the men on the ground were slapped and kicked and yelled at, the people around stared on with their hands covering the eyes of their children.  The boy looked into the chief’s eyes, trying to find the hearty old man who handed out chocolates that he once knew.  As he was settling into a state of utter confusion, the boy was startled by an abrupt change in the chief’s demeanor.  The raging madman suddenly, without a moment of transition, turned into a respected dignitary.  

“Why, hello Pastor! What a pleasant surprise!  Didn’t expect to see you here, haha…what’s that? Oh no, nothing to see here really, just a little misunderstanding.  Nothing of interest, I assure you” he said with his usual joviality.

The pastor from a local Protestant congregation had entered the scene, hands behind his back and a concerned look on his face.  The chief made some more comments, futilely attempting to distract the pastor from what he had done.  But before he could exacerbate the situation further, he turned around and hurried away.  All eyes were now on the pastor.

He inspected the scene with an expression of constrained shame and pity.  The men on the ground were now fatalistically silent, their eyes still looking down.  The pastor let out a deep sigh and walked towards them.  He knelt down and picked up one of the baskets, an act so extreme as to set off a chain of shocked inhalations and whispers in the crowd.   He stood back up and placed the basket on his head.  “Follow me” he said as walked on unrestrained by the crowd that had parted to make way for the pastor with the basket of shit on his head.  The three men got up with a renewed life in them, picked up the remaining baskets and followed the man, quietly disappearing into the distance.  The boy saw these men many times after that day.  They had all converted to Christianity and were regular churchgoers.  He saw them and their children go about their days in the village, unaffected by the cruel judgements of those around them.  They were peaceful and tranquil in their ways.

Although the immediate implications of this story on our debate over the dinner table faded away in my mind, it gave me a crucial insight into the nature of social change.  I used to be, like most high schoolers, a card-carrying leftist who thought that the only way one could bring about lasting and meaningful change in the world was by occupying the streets and shouting slogans.  But upon hearing the pastor's story, the idea of annoying people out of their opinions seemed more and more ridiculous.  Why would somebody agree with you or listen to your argument because you yelled at them to do so? Why would a person change their ways simply because you made life hard for them if they didn’t?  Force and the threat of trouble: weren’t these the tools of an authoritarian?

Activism has always been a loaded term in my lifetime.  You could only have the most extreme of reactions upon the term entering your ears.  Some people scoffed at it, dismissed those indulging in it as irritating and troublesome; activists were seen by these people as hooligans with nothing better to do.  The other reaction was that of being overcome with reverence.  Whether this was genuine or a symptom of being browbeaten was hard to tell.  This distinction was often willfully ignored by the activist class itself.  As long as they’re on our side, was their attitude.  There was always an understandable confusion among ordinary people as to how this loud minority was so successful in effectively intimidating entire countries.  What leverage did they have?

When one looks at all the great movements in recent history, there emerges an obvious pattern.  Activism is really an endeavor of wielding the sword of righteousness.  People have, since time immemorial, been controlled and kept in line by those that claim moral superiority.  This is the root of religion as well. The man that came down the mountain with a list of dos and don’ts, the peacenik who was nailed to a cross, and the half-naked pacifist of India: these three men owe their place in history to the same notion of moral purity, ascribed to them by their followers.  

The weaponization of righteousness has historically been both a great strength and a horrible curse.  This conversation has been had plenty of times about religion, of course.  In the case of activism, we know that we would have never had the hallmark events of contemporary human history like the civil rights movement without the activists of the era.  We owe many of our rights and liberties to activism.  Yet, one need not look any further than the failed revolutions and communist dictatorships of the 20th century to understand the flipside of that coin.  

However, I think there is a more fundamental difference between the dynamics of righteousness in activism as opposed to that in its religious counterpart.  In the former, we can notice if we look closely at the examples, that the notion of moral superiority slowly begins to tighten its grip around the wielder himself.  It gradually ceases to be a weapon and instead becomes a parasite, inseparable from those that claim to possess it.  It becomes a burden on them and those they seek to change.  Let me give you an example to demonstrate this idea.

I happen to be an ethical vegan and have been one with few exceptions to this rule for many years.  My family and I decided on this unanimously one day, upon finding out about the horrors of animal agriculture, and that this would be considered the slavery of our times - only orders of magnitude worse.  Naturally, as a new vegan, I followed a set of social media handles that claimed to be loyal to this cause.  At first, I found them to be extremely dedicated and admirable.  They helped me get through the moments of temptation that a person trying to embrace this lifestyle could be expected to experience.  But, as I got deeper into their content, things started to feel a little off.  I found myself hesitating more and more to wholeheartedly agree with them.  

One post had a famous vegan activist talking about how there was a new threat that veganism was facing.  What could that be? I thought, zoning in on the video.  “The vegan movement is about social justice…” she said, “it is and has always been a bottom-up struggle, with ordinary people standing up for the voiceless…standing up for what is right.  But now, we have big corporations trying to hijack our movement for their profits.”  The comment section was up in arms, furiously in support of what she was saying.  I did a little bit of digging and realized what they were talking about - lab grown meat.  There was a new innovation in California that made it possible to grow meat without having to slaughter animals.  It was possible to culture the meat from just the cells of these animals.  I remember having goosebumps from reading about this new tech.  It was like something from utopian fiction.  What could possibly be the downside of this marvel? I thought.  This was one of the best real-life examples of getting to have the cake and eat it too - both literally and figuratively.  But, of course, I was naive.  I hadn't understood that the vegan activists had had a core element of their souls stolen from them by this invention.  Their righteous indignation had been invalidated overnight.  Their protest songs and rallies had been robbed of their meaning.  These people were no longer the saviors and the heroes that they had envisioned themselves as being. They had nowhere to go.  This is what their dependence on the feeling of being on the moral high ground had done to them: it had not only rattled their sense of self, but also their priorities.  The cause of animal welfare had taken a back seat, revealing their hunger for revolution and attachment to fantasies of a twisted utopia. This shift rendered them antagonistic to the only plausible solution to animal agriculture. 

Now, let’s look at a contrasting picture.  Think again, of the pastor in the village.  His zeal was of a different kind.  We have all encountered the religious missionary: a tireless smile with a seemingly infinite capacity to be patient with an opponent.  Nobody has ever met an offended missionary.  Their sense of righteousness is kept firmly under control, never allowed to build into hubris.  As deluded as his beliefs may be, the missionary’s ideals only ever lead him to endanger himself and his own pride, but never to look down upon another. In my view, the activists of our time should adopt the original kind of zeal - the missionary zeal.  Not only would this give them a bulletproof sense of self that is impenetrable by the words and actions of others, but it would also yield better societal results.  More people would be convinced of their messages.  Their opponents would be forced to take them seriously and treat them like adults.  The world stands to greatly benefit from tireless moral crusaders.  We need real activism that acts as a moral compass, that which constantly pushes us in the direction of progress and betterment.  The world would be a much better place with activists that work like the pastor in the village - people who don’t let their ideals get ahold of them.

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