The vagaries of pregnancy being what they are, it now appears that America has successfully given birth to a fully-fleshed peace movement. Rallies like that of June 12 in New York City with over 700,000 in attendance are merely the outward sign of an inward melding that began with town meetings, prophetic and prophylactic articles in the New Yorker, congressional proposals, and brigades of words -- both morally sincere and politically opportunistic -- about the dangers of nuclear war. One can hope that this vital tide of popular and political sentiment stays on the flow. Regardless of its improprieties, pornography, and woolyheadedness, it is a movement that should be supported.
Yet the peace movement (if I can speak so generally of such a conglomeration of interests), for all its proclamatory good, has yet to answer some strong and fundamental philosophical questions: What exactly is the shape of the peace it strives to obtain? Does it wish to do away permanently with war? If so, how will it defuse the aggressive tendencies of our culture and politics? What will it put in war's place to restrain imperialistic powers like the Soviet Union? The questions could be multiplied, but the central query remains the same: what is peace and how can it be best maintained?
There exists an available Virgil through this metaphysical thicket: the philosopher William James. In his later writings, and most especially in his essay published in 1910, "The Moral Equivalent of War," he staked out very neatly the territory a pacifist has to travel in order not to end up abetting the devils of the world. The peace movement, and American society in general, would do well to pause and listen to his earnest cautions and considerations.
The thinking that prompted the writing of "The Moral Equivalent of War" sprang from a single powerful source: James' desire to secure American democracy against the poison of narrow-gauged thought and behavior. He perceived that the resilience of American democracy, the "civic genius" of the American people, flourished best when each individual was credited with personal responsibility for the social welfare of the country. This social consciousness required an exacting moral administration of the will, something which could only be done well through temperate debate and clear information. James thus committed himself to a "democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty."
But James also knew the frailty of such resolve, how easily people can be convinced to forego the necessary discipline of making choices. In an enterprise conjured for the national good, such as a war, politicians ("schemers" in James' words) and newspapers mobilize to distort and dismember accurate information; in its absence the bellicose intolerance that James believed lurked in all men fractures the patina of social civility. He had ample evidence of this process, such as Cleveland's orations during the Venezuela crisis and the Hearst journalism of the Spanish-American War. With this abdication of the democratic process, "every kind of diseased sensationalism and insincerity" comes to roost and intolerance blooms. In a letter to F.W.H. Myers in 1896, James warned that the "whole wisdom of governors should be to avoid the direct appeals" to man's belligerent impulses because "fighting mob-hysteria...can at any time undo peace habits of a hundred years."
The brutality of this one-sided thinking, this "curious auto-intoxication," corroded democratic thought and action. And any group was liable to its contamination. As he warned, "we are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause." And, he might have added, the method of fighting for it. "The Moral Equivalent of War" not only came from an intense affirmation of democracy and a hatred of narrow-mindedness, but also from a conviction that the most powerful way to make a case for the end of war and the establishment of peace was through reasoned analysis and proportioned argument. Emotional ballyhoo, even in the cause of peace, could only adulterate the moral intentions. Sincerity and rightness were no barricade against, and certainly no defense of, appeals to base and ranting emotions. How one obtained peace was as important as the peace one obtained.
"The Moral Equivalent of War," then, is James' reasoned approach to the cause of world peace. He begins by artfully divining the heart of the argument for war: "War is the strong life; it is life in extremis." The possibility for romantic death and virile patriotism gave war a prospect of toughness and glory that "a world of clerks and teachers, of co-educational and zo-ophily, of ‘consumer leagues' and ‘associated charities', of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed" could not possibly offer. And, equally important to James' point, war brought into play the martial virtues, such as fidelity, cohesiveness, contempt of softness, and obedience to command. These virtues worked to make men feel a part of some great enterprise and gave them a vision larger than their own single lives. The problem was that man had not been sufficiently creative to encourage these virtues in any way but war. War was not the only possible form of a life filled with zest and purpose.
So far, so good. Anyone involved in the peace movement today can agree with James' analysis that "‘peace' in military mouths today is a synonym for ‘war expected'" and raise two cheers for his efforts. Yet he was unsparingly harsh on the peace movement of his day for what he saw as their failure "to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents." He chastised them for unimaginatively failing to propose a "substitute for war's disciplinary function" and further took them to task for the weakness and insipidity of a utopian literature that "tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's bitter flavors."
Why this churlishness toward an apparent ally in his devout urge for "the reign of peace"? James patently did not believe that "peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe" unless nations "pacifically organized [to] preserve some of the elements of the old army-discipline." He chided the pacifists for their squeamish gentility in this regard. The only plans they had come up with for world order inevitably centered on a mild-mannered gradualist approach and a sense of shame about belonging to any collectivity that required strenuousness and ardent obedience. The peace of his day was, in his eyes, merely negative. Its members were primarily interested in subtracting the mechanics of war without substituting the means by which a person could, through struggle and achievement, make the world worth living in. Until they could see that the martial virtues, properly harnessed, were usable and necessary, the members of the peace movement were arguing beside the point. The gain of peace, the eradication of the war machine, would not solve the problems of the world, regardless of the peace movement's fervor in this matter.
What James proposed was a conscription of the country's youth for a term of service in an "army enlisted against Nature," similar to the Peace Corps or the Civilian Conservation Corps. The "energies and hardihoods" usually elicited by military service would now be informed by "the morals of civic honor." This army would work to smooth out the inequities in the existing social order that allowed too many people to be at the mercy of chance and poverty. In the process "our gilded youths [would] get the childishness knocked out of them, and come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." He was very clear that the martial values would be the "enduring cement" of this army and believed that we would get "toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary."
In this way he tried to reconcile the war-regime and the peace-regime by grafting the intentions of the latter onto the values of the former. And it is this peculiar hybrid that provides a test for the intentions and directions of today's peace movement. This movement, like peace movements of the past, is in part a negative movement: it seeks to do away with what it sees as impediments to peace. All well and good. But it has not in any real way substituted any vision beyond a call for the improvement of "social services," has offered no abiding articulation of its moral and political imperatives. It has not, for instance, addressed the rigor needed to maintain those services in terms of the political horsetrading that passes for process in American politics. It also hasn't, for all its moral appeals, formulated a philosophical buttressing for itself beyond the truism "peace is better than war." The peace movement must get metaphysical if it is to have the kind of nourishment that will sustain it beyond its purely subtractive efforts. James lays down a prickly gauntlet here: Will the peace movement be able, or even be motivated, to call for the style and reality of obligation and service that James described? If not, what does the movement to offer in its stead?
This last point can not be stressed too strongly: Can peace-loving Americans rise at all to the emulation of military virtues? Can they -- will they -- psychologically be able to dissociate these virtues from their military practice? I believe so if the people are educated to do so. But the peace movement to date has failed to educate its followers in the necessary duties of patriotism. If we scorn the television ads for the Armed Services, do we scorn the martial virtues or the physical restraints of service? If the latter, then there is little hope that any enterprise beyond pleasurable mass marches in Central Park can engage us. Our contentment to be free individuals renders us reluctant to give up a modicum of that freedom (which is often only a freedom of movement, not an independence of mind) to a collectivity that will further insure that freedom. In the calculus of many Americans, obligation, especially of the variety requested by the military and by James, is a subtraction of freedom, not an addition to its strength. If this be true, and much in our culture confirms this observation, the conviction that James calls for is unreachable and the moral energy of the peace movement is thus lessened.
A pertinent -- if sour grapes -- question may arise at this juncture: Do James' ideas in fact offer us anything useful? James was a self-proclaimed liberal, a member of a group he believed always to be in the minority because it was the temporizing intelligence of society. Even though he saw the fault of liberalism to be "its lack of speed and passion," and rued the fact that often a liberal's only audience was posterity, he unequivocally endorsed the "judicial and neutral attitude" of the liberal as a necessary counterbalance and antidote to the "red-blood" party, the party of "animal instinct, jingoism, fun, excitement, bigness." The lesson of "The Moral Equivalent of War" was offered from this liberal platform and was fired by an intense love of America, "for her youth, her greenness, her plasticity, innocence, good intentions, friends, everything." The force of James' intellect and patriotism alone suggests at least a cursory "yes" to the question.
More contemporary thought suggests a "yes" as well. Nothing in the last several decades has diluted the truth of what E.B. White said in two of his essays, "Sootfall and Fallout" (1956) and "Unity" (1960). In the former he states, in a paraphrase of Eisenhower, that, in relation to nuclear weapons, "‘Strong we shall stay free, provided we do not have to use our strength'." In the latter he makes the prescient statement that "I doubt...whether the tension created by the existence of arms is as great as the tension that would arise if there were no arms, or too few." Until the human race evolves to a higher and surer trustfulness, weapons, nuclear and otherwise, are our first cousins. They can not be wished away, nor should they be.
White also suggests that disarmament is a "mirage." Even if every weapons and soldier were scrapped, the world would not be disarmed "if the original reasons for holding arms were still present." The world is still essentially as James saw it, full of the "original reasons" of chaos, indifference, social inequity, starvation, and the challenge of survival, making it quite clear that great energies still need to be marshaled to soften the severities, both human and natural, of this only partly hospitable globe. The peace movement has yet to do much more than articulate the apocalypse. To be truly effective, that is, truly interested in preserving an ongoing historical effort to make the world a better place in which to live, the peace movement must give at least a courteous nod to both the analysis and the solution James offers. Otherwise it may become a movement of dilettantes, politically active but historically irrelevant, a movement dedicated to the maintenance of pleasure, not the obliteration of pain.
James' "The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life" ends with sober and heartening advice to people living in troubled times. Speaking about the tentativeness of any system of ethics, he warns that ethical people must bide their time and make what tacks are necessary to preserve their lives and integrity:
The ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on no essentially different level from the common man. "See, I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil; therefore choose life that thou and thy seed may live," -- when this challenge comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life....The solving word...is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
The peace movement is won or lost in the individual hearts of those who profess their beliefs and actions. It will be won if each person keeps his heart full of a love mixed with a gritty savvy about the imperfections of the world. It will be lost when the heart traces a party line with no thought for alternative patterns. James provides pencil, paper, and impulse for us to sketch out who we are and what compass point we follow in our perilous times.