In spite of the teachings of history that wars have not grown fewer, and in spite of the militarist argument that war is a means of purging mankind of its sordid vices, and renewing instead the noblest virtues, the conclusion that the resort to arms is unavoidable and desirable is nowadays being strongly contested. The militarists show only part of the picture. No large acquaintance with the character of warfare is necessary to prove that when elemental anger, hate and fear prevail, civilized conventions are abandoned and the most savage instincts determine conduct. Homes are looted and burned, women and children are abominably treated, and many innocents are murdered outright or starved to death. No bland argument for the preservation of the manly virtues can palliate such barbarities. Even when fighting men are held within the rules, the devices for killing and injuring are now made so perfect by devilish ingenuity that by the pulling of a trigger one man can in a few seconds mow down scores of his fellow-creatures and send them writhing to agony or death. War has become too horrible; it is conducted on too stupendous a scale of carnage and expenditure; it destroys too many of the treasured achievements of the race; it interferes too greatly with consecrated efforts to benefit all mankind by discovery and invention; it involves too much suffering among peoples not directly concerned in the struggle; it is too vastly at variance with the methods of fair dealing that have been established between man and man; the human family has become too closely knit to allow some of its members to bring upon themselves and all the rest poverty and distress and a long heritage of bitter hatred and resolution to seek revenge.
All these reasons for hostility to war imply a thwarting of strong desires in men—desires for family happiness, devotion to beauty and to scholarship, passion for social justice, hopes of lessening poverty and disease. As was pointed out in the previous chapter, the feeling of hostility has no definite object to awaken it. It is roused when there is opposition to what we ardently wish to get. And because war brings conditions which frustrate many kinds of eagerly sought purposes, war has roused in men a hostility against itself. There is then a war against war, a willingness to fight against monstrous carnage and destruction, that grows in intensity with every war that is waged.
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.
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.