Contesting Flabby Pacifism

Imagine William James–now older and, it’ll turn out, just four years before death–delivering a public lecture at Stanford in which he’s telling fellow pacifists that their position isn’t philosophically defensible. In 1906, the feeling of war–with a long build-up to hostilities that will become WWI and the Boer War (1899-1901) not long past–is in the air. The smell of blood, the itch of urgency: it’s all there.

James doesn’t pander. Technological war, as we see in The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, is as costly as it is deadly, the consequences terrifying. Nobody denies this.

But then, he says, you can’t replace the glory of war with the bourgeois ethos of commerce. A pleasure economy won’t do; we’ll all be a bunch of Eloi–soft, frail, and none too smart. Nor can you deny the feeling of camaraderie experienced by brothers forged in battle.

Therefore, he says, while war itself is repugnant, the manliness made by war–“the martial type of character”–is laudable.

Did his thesis shock his audience? “The martial type of character can be bred without war.” Good–how? For him, it’s to be effected through a conscription of young men in a public works campaign “against Nature.” In his words:

If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population, to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

There are, of course, a few problems with his proposal. First, it’s not obvious that industry can replace the arena of war. For example, where the fear of death looms large in a warrior’s life, it figures not at all when one is building a road (under ordinary conditions). The analogy, then, fails to hold. Second, it’s equally questionable to insist that we can take a civic ideal–a public works project undertaken for the common good–while implying that the necessary virtues are martial ones. Wouldn’t see scores of Benjamin Franklins–thrifty and industrious–next to precious few Marcus Aureliuses? Third and most obviously, nature is not something that should be turned into a recalcitrant enemy whom one should conquer. However nature is grasped, the nearly indomitable, barely subduable wilderness is an unwise conception.

An Alternative Proposal

I believe that James brought us very close to the solution to our existential problem: how do we cultivate martial virtues like hardihood without resorting to barbarous wars?

The struggle must be taken within. The fear of death, the ache of finitude, the grasping (or gasping) at limits all beckon. The mind then becomes the site in which ego tendencies are fought and ultimately vanquished. In other words, James is right to maintain that there needs to be an equivalent to war, but that equivalent, I submit, is a rugged form of spirituality. Courage, strength, honesty, rigor, a reckoning with pain: these virtues and more get tested again and again as the mind rages, flails, parries, and ultimately submits.

The mind, which begins as a battlefield, ends as a garden.