Moral Substitutes for Warfare
“We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built.” Thus wrote William James[3] in proposing a “moral equivalent for war.” This, he suggested, should consist of such required service in the hard and difficult occupations as would take the childishness and superciliousness out of our youth and give them soberer ideas and healthier sympathies with their fellow-men. He conceived that by proper direction of its education a people should become as proud of the attainment by the nation of superiority in any ideal respect as it would be if the nation were victorious in war. “The martial type of character,” he declared, “can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforth is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.”
Similar ideas have been expressed by others.[4] It has been pointed out that the great war of mankind is that against pain, disease, poverty and sin; that the real heroes are not those who squander human strength and courage in fighting one another, but those who fight for man against these his eternal foes. War of man against man, in this view, becomes dissension in the ranks, permitting the common enemies to strike their most telling blows.
These moral considerations, however, are apart from the main intent of our discussion. Our earlier inquiry confirmed the belief that the fighting emotions are firmly rooted in our natures, and showed that these emotions are intimately associated with provisions for physical exertion. It is particularly in this aspect of the discussion of substitutes for war that these studies have significance.