I started to wonder if I’d made a horrible mistake somewhere between the third and fourth punch to the face. I had at least 50 pounds on Allan — maybe more — but he was a trained boxer, faster than me, and every jab or hook he threw seemed to land squarely on my cheek or chin or mouth. Allan landed another blow to my face and, as the onlookers cheered, the edges of my vision started to fade to black. I was working on an article about an underground boxing match hosted by a famous motorcycle club… things were not going particularly well. If I’m honest, fighting Allan was something that I’d felt skeptical about doing right up until the first bell rang, 1) because it’s not fun to get your ass kicked, and 2) because I became a pacifist a few years ago. I know that last part sounds a little weird, I’ll do my best to explain: I grew up with violence. Not actively, but in the passive, subtle way that most boys do. I watched movies and read comics and played video games that glorified and justified ridiculous acts of brutality. Hell, my bedroom was even covered in posters of the X-Men’s Wolverine, a tiny Canadian man with literal knives built into his hands. It didn’t end there. Violence was a part of the evangelical culture I was raised in, with violent language permeating sermons and Bible studies and prayers. Everything centered on striking down enemies and winning battles and breaking free of bondage and wrestling with temptation. My faith — at the time — was largely built on this graphic imagery. These ideas and themes all seeped into my subconscious in a variety of frightening ways. When I was mad at someone, I would fantasize about slapping them in the face, or kicking them in the teeth, or throwing them off a train. If a bully was giving me trouble at school, then I’d imagine hiding a roll of quarters in my fist and punching them in the jaw. Of course, fantasies like this aren’t uncommon — especially during those tense middle school years when everyone is trying desperately to define who they are — but why is that? Why is violence (real or imagined) normal? There’s a great speech by David Foster Wallace in which he tells the story of two young fish. One day they swim by an older fish and, in passing, the older fish says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on and eventually one turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?” The idea is that culture, or knowledge, or whatever you want to call it, can be invisible without perspective. For me, as a kid, violence was like water. It was everywhere, but I couldn’t really see it. At least not until I started watching Doctor Who.



If you’re not familiar, Doctor Who is a show produced by the BBC about an immortal time traveling alien. The first episode aired on November 23, 1963 and, being that the titular character is immortal, current episodes of the show follow that same continuity. The stories often feature cameos from characters introduced decades prior, making it the perfect show for obsessive nerds — which is a big reason why I avoided it for so long. In my mind, Doctor Who was a show for greasy, unbathed mouth-breathing virgins. I thought I was too cool for it until, of course, life kicked me in the balls. In 2011 — following a soul-crushing breakup and a year of uncontested shittery — I moved back to the same town where I went to college. If you’ve never had the experience of returning to the place you went to college, let me tell you, it is a dark and horrific endeavor. Lucky for me, I was able to move in with an old friend and her husband. I rented out their attic for $200 a month (I pay ten times that now for half the space) and spent long evenings in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what in the hell I was going to do with my life. Naturally, I watched a massive amount of Netflix and, for some reason, my queue would not stop suggesting Doctor Who. This was well into my nerd renaissance. I had already started playing Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. I considered that maybe I’d been wrong about Doctor Who, like I’d been wrong about so much else during those years. And so, somewhat reluctantly, I gave in to Netflix’s pressure. A few (*ahem*) days later, I found myself in the middle of season two of the revived series, watching an episode called “Army of Ghosts.” The Doctor, played at this point by David Tennant, was in some precarious situation with his companion, Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), and they had made some mistake that ensured their certain doom, and blah blah blah, you get the idea. Finally, the Doctor decides to confront a group of threatening men, and Rose says, “Doctor, they’ve got guns.” He replies, “And I haven’t. Which makes me the better person, don’t you think? They can shoot me dead, but the moral high-ground is mine.” I know, it sounds kind of silly, but for some reason that’s the line that worked on me. In any “normal” narrative, The Doctor would have kicked open the doors with a machine gun in each hand, yelling something emphatic like “Did somebody call a Doctor? Because you’re all about to need one!” as he mowed down the threatening men with an endless spray of bullets. But that’s not what he did. No, The Doctor simply talked to the men. He used his own cleverness to best his enemies, and he did so without violence. Somewhere in the dark corners of my mind, the light switch flipped on and, for the first time, I could see that violence was everywhere. It was the water I was swimming in.

When the show first aired in the 1960s, the writers and producers agreed to never create a monster for The Doctor to fight. In fact, the show’s most famous villains — the Daleks — were originally rejected. If you’re not familiar, the Daleks are a race of hate-fueled mutated squid aliens that pilot flying death tanks (it’s a British sci-fi show, so just go with it), which makes them the perfect antagonist to the Doctor’s non-violent tendencies. But it was the introduction of the Daleks that changed the course of Doctor Who forever — forcing the show to shift from a simple time-traveling, all-ages story a la The Magic School Bus, to a swashbuckling adventure with battles and war and, inevitably, death.



In fact, the tragedy of war became one of the main motivations for the Doctor in 2005, when the series was rebooted after a long hiatus. Showrunner Russell T. Davies created a backstory in which the Doctor was the last survivor of an off-screen war between the Daleks and the Time Lords (the alien race that the Doctor comes from). The war was ended only when our hero made the decision to completely eradicate both species, resulting in a massive double genocide. The event scars the Doctor — so much so that he no longer has the capacity to enact violence against another living creature. It’s what makes the show such an attractive argument for pacifism. The Doctor is a character who lives in a violent universe, and who himself has been the agent of great violence, but he chooses to defeat the bad guys by being clever. He embodies the idea that running away, or even surrendering, can be heroic. As I tore through every episode of Doctor Who, I began to reassess the way I saw both violence and pacifism. When I was growing up with violent comics and movies and TV, violence was often imagined as this one specific thing: bodily harm. If you’ve ever watched Doctor Who, then you know that the Doctor isn’t always confronted with immediate bodily harm or even threatened with physical violence. In watching the show — over the course of many, many episodes — I slowly formed the idea that pacifism goes deeper than the rejection of pure, physical violence. Because violence is about the removal of choice. If you’ll remember, this article opens with me getting my ass kicked in a boxing match. What can I say? I’m not a perfect pacifist. But I also don’t believe that consensual bloodshed qualifies as violence or, at least, as the antithesis of pacifism. Both Allan and I knew what we were doing when we stepped into the ring. We had full agency, weren’t coerced, and we accepted our actions. I punched him (once?) and he punched me (many, many times) and at the end of it, we hugged. It hurt, it was painful, but it wasn’t genuinely violent. I believe this broad definition of pacifism is present in the ideology of Doctor Who. Yes, there are times when The Doctor hurts people, but he never does so to the sacrifice of free will. He’s never vengeful, never spiteful, never cruel. Loose though the narrative may be, the Daleks always have the ability to choose. Even when the Doctor destroys them, he never takes away their agency. It should come as no surprise that the boxing match between myself and Allan ended after the first round. The referee asked me if I wanted to continue and I politely declined. Allan hugged me when the fight was over and everyone in the club gave me a pat on the back. The motorcycle club was like a different world to me, and I was an alien traveler there to explore it. I took part in the local customs and, when I left, I did so with a new sense of perspective. Also an aching jaw.