William James on war
Contemporary lessons for the Left?
In a famous 1906 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James argues that war, while absurd and irrational, ennobles and steels man’s character.
Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor – there isn’t a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn’t tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another.
The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military competition; but the strain is on them, being infinitely intenser in the latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is “degeneration.”
Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It’s profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!
On a world without war:
Where is the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one’s own or another’s? Where is the savage “yes” and “no,” the unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?
James argues for the conceptual separation of these martial virtues–this pursuit of human excellence that constitutes the “morality of war”–from the practice of war itself, and concludes that pacifists must endorse the concern about losing these virtues, and incorporate them into their program (which he associates at points with socialism). He argues that one begins to learn the martial virtues “when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him.” He calls for conscription into a domestic social welfare organization run like a traditional army.
To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
James’ article is profound in its own right, but it may teach us something about the current debate in America between social welfarists and free marketers. One often unspoken worry of those who oppose social welfare programs like universal healthcare seems to be that the free market, while lacking the battlefield’s gravity, fosters the individual exertion and competitive search for superiority and greatness that constitutes man’s natural and, indeed, moral state of being. To overstate the perspective only a little: European social welfare equates with the cloudy sunset of man’s retirement, while the American free market presents a sunny, unfettered arena of openness, vigor, and possibility. While maybe less than the idealized martial virtues, there is indeed something to be said for the free-market characteristics. The conception of an autonomous being, independent and responsible for herself, going out into the market to conquer her ambitions and realize her purposes, for better or for worse, contains dignity and power; I also think that social welfare that deemphasizes personal responsibility and limits economic mobility curtails this ideal and limits the development of these free market virtues. Of course, the free market breeds some nasty traits; most on the right believe individual virtue should come from various traditional institutions, not the market alone; and there are weighty arguments for egalitarianism and welfare. But those on the left might learn something from James by understanding and addressing their opponents’ concerns about how we ought to conceive of and develop individuals
-Jake
Related posts:
- GDP as welfare
- Conservatism as organic change
- Libertarianism
- Judt on social democracy
- Nordic self-respect
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