PEACE AND MILITARISM

Among the many pedagogical questions raised and given new significance by the war, is that of the teaching about war and about peace. This is a question of ideals, and of values and the teaching of history. There are practical and superficial questions to be considered. There are also more profound problems, since all our teaching of good and evil is implicated. Shall we continue, in one moment, to assume that war is the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly it begins to disturb us, as unimportant. No one passing through the experiences of the past four years can have wholly escaped this dilemma, or can have kept himself entirely aloof from the doubts and perplexities that must always be attached to religious and philosophical problems of good and evil. These doubts and hesitations are necessarily increased when we try to become consistent teachers and wise counselors of the young.

It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong militarists. They do not try to strike a balance between good and evil, but war is either a great blessing upon mankind or the greatest curse of the ages. In general they do not seek to base their conclusions upon ultimate philosophical principles, but rather upon moral or biological principles, or, again, upon preferences for the activities of war or the arts of peace. How very different the good and evil of war and peace may seem from different points of view is well shown by the following excerpt from a daily newspaper:

A DEADLY PARALLEL
This Is the Way Germany Talks to Young Boys of Scout Age This Is What the Scout Organization Teaches American Boys
From the "Handbook for Boys,"
17th edition, page 454.

"War is the noblest and holiest expression of human activity. For us, too, the glad great hour of battle will strike. Still and deep in the German heart must live the joy of battle and the longing for it. Let us ridicule to the utmost the old women in breeches who fear war and deplore it as cruel and revolting. No; war is beautiful. Its august sublimity elevates the human heart beyond the earthly and the common. In the cloud palace above sit the heroes, Frederick the Great and Blucher and all the men of action—the Great Emperor, Moltke, Roon, Bismarck are there as well, but not the old women who would take away our joy in war. When here on earth a battle is won by German arms and the faithful dead ascend to Heaven, a Potsdam lance corporal will call the guard to the door and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick the Great), springing from his golden throne, will give the command to present arms. That is the Heaven of Young Germany.

"Because only in war all the virtues which militarism regards highly are given a chance to unfold, because only in war the truly heroic comes into play, for the realization of which on earth militarism is above all concerned; therefore, it seems to us who are filled with the spirit of militarism that war is a holy thing, the holiest on earth, and this high estimate of war in its turn makes an essential ingredient of the military spirit. There is nothing that trades-people complain of so much as that we regard it as holy."

"The movement is one for efficiency and patriotism. It does not try to make soldiers of boy scouts, but to make boys who will turn out as men to be fine citizens, and who will if their country needs them make better soldiers for having been scouts. No one can be a good American unless he is a good citizen, and every boy ought to train himself so that as a man he will be able to do his full duty to the community. I want to see the boy scouts not merely utter fine sentiments, but act on them, not merely sing 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee,' but act in a way that will give them a country to be proud of. No man is a good citizen unless he so acts as to show that he actually uses the Ten Commandments, and translates the Golden Rule into his life conduct—and I don't mean by this exceptional cases under spectacular circumstances, but I mean applying the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule in the ordinary affairs of everyday life. I hope the boy scouts will practice truth and square dealing and courage and honesty, so that when as young men they begin taking a part not only in earning their own livelihood, but in governing the community, they may be able to show in practical fashion their insistence upon the great truth that the eighth and ninth commandments are directly related to everyday life, not only between men as such in their private relations, but between men and the government of which they are a part. Indeed, the boys, even while only boys, can have a very real effect upon the conduct of the grown-up members of the community, for decency and square dealing are just as contagious as vice and corruption."

The praise of war takes many forms, and invokes many fundamental principles—ethical, æsthetic, biological, sociological. From Leibnitz' saying that perpetual peace is a motto fit only for a graveyard to Moltke's that peace is only a dream and not even a beautiful dream, there is a long list of defenses of war. This philosophy of war is by no means peculiarly German, although German writers seem to have been the most ardent apologists of war in recent times. Treitschke, Schmitz (29), Scheler (77), Nusbaum (86), Arndt, Steinmetz, Lasson, Engelbrecht, Schoonmaker, all sing the praises of war as the most glorious work of man, or as performing for civilization some noble good. Even Hegel said that wars invigorate humanity just as the storm preserves the sea from putrescence.

But this praise of war, we say, is by no means exclusively German. Thucydides thought war a noble school of heroism, the exercise ground of the nations. To Mohammed and his Arabs war seemed not only in itself a heroism, we are told, but a divine act. This belief in war as divine is an idea that is very wide-spread among primitive peoples. Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. Redier says that the war has brought us all the noble joys so necessary to stimulate mankind, and one no longer finds happiness, therefore, in sleeping comfortably, but only in living bravely.

There is no lack, indeed, of recognition of the heroic motive in war. Sometimes the argument appeals to religion, sometimes to art, sometimes to morality. Sometimes the advocates of war are thinking of war as the great adventure. War and the thought of war induce an ecstasy, a glow of the feelings. War is thought of as an expression of normal, healthy life, as making life more abundant and more beautiful. War brings out fundamental virtues in the individual; it also destroys the weaker and the meaner race and leaves the strong and the virtuous. Struggle, they say, is the method of civilization. Again, it is urged that war is always just in its issues. Like the old ordeal which always registered the decrees of heaven, war is the just arbiter of fate. The saving of the world through bloodshed, the uniting of the world through war, war as the great teacher of mankind, war as the creator of great personalities—all these are persistent themes in the literature of war. There is no place for the pacifist in the minds of these apologists of the heroic order. The crises of war are historic necessities; they come when it is time to release people from the bondage of the past and to bring individualistic generations back to the sense of duty and of loyalty to great causes. This is the belief of many, even now.

On the other side we find the great variety of pacifistic minds. War to the pacifists is wrong, unholy, morally sinful, biologically and economically and in every other way evil. The conscientious objector's point of view is very simple. War antagonizes some principle which is religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask them to go.

The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many, among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in which he calls war dysgenic. The psychologist tends to see in war a reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say. War lingers because of man's love of old institutions. We cling to old habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the æsthetic, because of their antiquity and old associations. This is the explanation by Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery. MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.

Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil. The working man and all the masses are likely to concur in this opinion. When they examine war they see that they themselves as they think are used in the interest of the few, that they shed their blood for a glory in which they do not share. They say, all men are brothers, and so why should they kill one another. Men seem more real to them than do boundaries of countries which they never see, and the interests of wealth that is also invisible.