The Desirability of Preserving the Martial Virtues
Although there is increasing opposition to the display of the fighting emotions and instincts in war, nevertheless the admirable moral and physical qualities, claimed by the militarists to be the unique products of war, are too valuable to be lost. As McDougall[2] has indicated, when the life of ideas becomes richer, and the means we take to overcome obstructions to our efforts more refined and complex, the instinct to fight ceases to express itself in its crude natural manner, save when most intensely excited, and becomes rather a source of increased energy of action towards the end set by any other instinct; the energy of its impulses adds itself to and reënforces that of other impulses and so helps us to overcome our difficulties. In this lies its great value for civilized man. A man devoid of the pugnacious instinct would not only be incapable of anger, but would lack this great source of reserve energy which is called into play in most of us by any difficulty in our path.
Thus the very efficiency of a war against war, as well as struggle against other evils that beset civilized society, rests on the preservation and use of aggressive feeling and the instinct to attack. From this point of view the insistence by the militarists that we must accept human nature as we find it, and that the attempt to change it is foolish, seems a more justifiable attitude than that of the pacifists who belittle the fighting qualities and urge that changing them is a relatively simple process. We should not wish them changed. Even if in the war against war a means should be established of securing international justice, and if through coöperative action the decrees of justice were enforced, so that the occasions which would arouse belligerent emotions and instincts were much reduced, there would still remain the need of recognizing their elemental character and their possible usefulness to society. What is needed is not a suppression of these capacities to feel and act, but their diversion into other channels where they may have satisfactory expression.