To assert that war is the central problem of our time is to go straight to the heart of the crisis of our civilization. For such an assertion implies two basic assumptions: (1) that, unless war is abolished, our civilization must perish in and through wars; and (2) that the obstacles to the abolishment of war are bound up with the fundamental political and economic institutions of our society. To declare war the greatest evil and its abolishment our chief task is, therefore, to formulate a revolutionary principle.
This has been clearly recognized by the consistent upholders of the present system. “A doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is an enemy to Fascism,” declared Mussolini in his statement on fascism in the Enciclopedia italiana.a The postulate of peace is the dividing line between two worlds today.
What, then, is the exact content of this postulate, and what precisely are the premises on which it is based?
Postulating peace, or, in common English, insisting on a peaceful world, is simply to assume that we could carry on today without the institution of war. But let war cease to be a paramount necessity of human existence, and it becomes the negation of humanity by humanity itself. Once it is not inescapable, it must be abolished at all costs; and no other task can claim priority over this one. This is the content of the postulate of peace. Its validity depends upon the truth or falsity of the premise, namely the assumption that the need for war as a condition of human society has passed away.
War was “destiny unshunnable, like death.”b To participate in it was the common lot, from which such only could contract out as were prepared to accept personal safety at the price of breaking away from the community. But neither the Old Testament nor the New, neither Greek nor Roman philosophy saw as much as a moral problem in the institution of war. The common people refused to regard it as a crime. The acceptance of the postulate of peace by the broad masses of the population is an entirely new development. It is the most significant change that has come to pass in the consciousness of modern man.
That war is no longer necessary by no means implies sharing in the delusion that war is an atavistic remnant, which has come down to us from the caveman and which our enlightened age has discarded at last. It is improbable that our cave-dwelling ancestors knew war; they had neither the reasons nor the means for carrying on such highly organized activities. The need, the instruments, and the capacity for waging war developed probably in mutual interdependence, once a certain level of civilization was reached. War is neither “as old as mankind,” nor will it “last as long as human beings do not change their nature.”c Dogmatic statements about the psychological nature of war are meaningless.
Human institutions, it should be recognized, are not explained as a rule by pointing to the psychological motives individuals may have for making use of the institution in question. The existence of courts of justice, for example, is not due to the motives for which individuals appeald to courts once these are in existence. And the need to decide on conflicts between members of the community without recourse to private warfare has nothing whatever to do with the motives of such conflicts in individual cases. These motives may be good or bad, permanent or transitory, conscious or unconscious, emotional or rational; the validity of the motive for establishing the law courts themselves bears no reference to these features.e The advantages (or disadvantages) to the individual that derive from the existence of the court are of an entirely different character from the advantages (or disadvantages) deriving from the existence of the court to the community and, incidentally, to the individual as a member of the community. In this capacity the individual reaps the benefit of internal peace, while in his capacity as a litigant he may be securing for himself (or having to suffer) the various advantages (or eventual disadvantages) inherent in his personal contact with the law.
Similar is the case of war. It is an institution the primary function of which is to decide on issues that arise from various territorial groupings and cannot otherwise be decided, and that cannot remain in abeyance without endangering the existence of the communities concerned. Such issues are chiefly – though not exclusively – territorial. States can exist only within definite boundaries; uncertainty about these reacts upon the state itself as fatefully as a permanent challenge to its sovereignty would: the state is inevitably thrown into anarchy. But, while a challenge to sovereignty is met by the action of the executive or, in the last resort, by civil war, doubts that arise with regard to the frontiers must be removed either peacefully, by agreement, or forcibly, by war. Failing peaceful agreement, war is unavoidable whenever the states in conflict owe no common allegiance to a higher sovereignty. The reasons for their quarrel may be good or bad, rational or irrational, material or ideal – this affects in no way the imperative need for a final decision, whenever there is a conflict. In certain typical cases – such as the migration of peoples, the rise of national states, the great movements of social emancipation – it cannot be reasonably be doubted that the very progress of mankind would have been impeded if, by some miraculous intervention of a super-historical authority, the motives for the dispute would have been ruled out as invalid. The close connection between civil and national wars in various periods of history should alone warn us away from lightly assuming that wars were always carried on for reasons that, in retrospect, cannot be recognized as valid.
“War exists because people wish it to exist” (Aldous Huxley).
This, in a nutshell, is the psychological theory of war. But very few institutions exist because individuals wish them to exist. It is time to cease to discuss human institutions in terms of the pleasant or unpleasant moods commonly associated with the personal discharge of the social functions in question. Judicial systems do not exist on account of the grim humor often attributed to judges, but by virtue of the need of developed societies for some institutional provisions against the breaking of laws. Similarly, wars are neither caused by people who happen to be in a “warlike spirit” nor carried by soldiers owing to that spirit. Such a spirit is rather the result than the cause of war; the people directly affected by the fighting may be in a comparatively peaceful state of mind. Handbooks of military science hardly contain more than a passing reference to hate or greed. Neither in the period of dynastic wars nor in that of cabinet wars did hate have any appreciable influence upon the decision of the government to carry on the war against the one or the other of the eligible “enemies.” Even the USA went to war in 1917, mainly because it could remain neutral no longer without suffering grave damage as a sovereign state; as far as this goes, it mattered little whether the USA declared war on Great Britain (as it had done in similar circumstances in 1812) or on Germany (the alternative, in 1812, had been France). It was not hate that impelled the USA to go to war, although once peace was untenable, hate may have helped to decide who should be the enemy. War, in effect, is as little caused by hatred as the stock exchange is the outcome of the need for excitement, or the newspaper of that for litter. Wars as such are not concerned with the sentiments. If they could be waged without emotions, this might make them even more cruel; and that emotions have to be aroused today in order to wage war more effectively is rather an incidental result of modern mass democracy than of the nature of war.
It ought to be evident that no community can settle down and do its job as long as doubts about its boundaries blur the loyalty of the members of the community, drain the treasury of its income, and deprive the organized community itself of one of the attributes of sovereignty. That is why the arbitration of war was vital to the existence of human societies. Being so, it was sanctified.
The postulate of peace, simple as it seems, comports no less than a new foundation for politics. It stands for an act of faith that heralds the coming of a new age in the history of the race. The sudden emergence of the widespread conviction about the criminal nature of war is to be regarded as the intimation of the birth of a new and wider community, for which the overlordship of the sovereign states of the earth is claimed. The time has come when a power is to be set up over the nations and a sovereignty established that will achieve peacefully what war did in the past by violence: to arbitrate among the nations.
How is this to come to pass? It is at this point that the pacifist fallacy enters.
Pacifist policy is based on the erroneous belief that war had no vital functions in the past and that it can therefore be simply abolished. This is a fateful illusion, which, in case of a substantial success of the pacifist movement, is bound to arouse a reaction in which the pacifist movement itself would necessarily be destroyed. For, as long as the need for war has not passed away, a society that were rendered incapable of using this ultimate means of asserting its existence in a conflict would thereby be automatically deprived of one of the preconditions of its existence. No community could follow such a path to the end. The danger is that, if the pacifist movement had gained an important measure of success before it collapsed, its failure might engulf the cause of the postulate of peace as well. And almost necessarily so. For, if the forces of peace failed to realize the implications of the postulate for which they stand, then the postulate of peace might in effect become a means of paralyzing progress while condemning mankind to a futile search for peace in passivity, anarchy, and decay.
Yet the principle for which the pacifist stands is a true one. How, then, can that which appears as its consistent practical application inevitably lead to its refutation?
A similar dilemma faced the early protagonists of the principle of tolerance in this country.f The principle of religious tolerance was transferred from the realm of religious experience to the field of politics by that greatest of all Englishmen, Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan in him had developed into the independent; freedom of conscience was translated into tolerance. He set an example in modern history, perhaps in the history of the world, for a dictatorship that fought for the enforcement of liberty and enlightenment. His conflict with parliament was the struggle of a determined adherent of religious tolerance against a pseudo-representative body of religious intolerance. And yet what would the result of Cromwell's triumph over parliament have been, assuming an outcome was conceivable? In the long run, undoubtedly, the victory of Roman Catholic intolerance over his own tolerant Protestantism. For, if Cromwell and the army had had their way and England had embarked in the 1640s on that regime of religious tolerance that was to be, ultimately, the outcome of the Great Rebellion, the result could hardly have been anything other than the triumph of the counter-Reformation. This can easily be shown. The church and the state had not yet been disentangled. Thus religious tolerance on the part of the state would have resulted either in the immediate victory of an intolerant religion over the state or in chaos. For, unless the state had eliminated religious sanctions from its own legislation and religion had recognized the sovereignty of the national state, the separation of church and state would necessarily have led to disintegration, England would soon have fallen under the sway of the European counter-Reformation, and the cause of religious tolerance would have been buried for many generations. (Where institutional conditions could be shaped, as in New England, tolerance was accordingly introduced without endangering the community itself.) The triumph of an intolerant form of Catholicism was thus averted only owing to Cromwell's failure to force tolerance prematurely on the country. But, assuming that our analysis is correct, does it prove Cromwell's ideas false? Hardly; for the true reference of his religious experience lay in the prophetic recognition of a time when the state would allow freedom to all religions and religions would accept freely the sovereignty of the state – a state of affairs, however, that could be brought about only after manifold and far-reaching changes in the institutional structure of society. Cromwell's fate was that of a commanding officer in power; he had mistaken his prophetic vision for a political mandate.
What, then, are the institutional changes that will make the postulate of peace actual reality?
If war is to be abolished, international order must take its place. But no international sovereignty is conceivable without a new international economic order to replace that which is passing away. This order, of which the international gold standard formed a part, with its free movements of capital and labor, of commodities and payments, can never come back again. But, unless the international division of labor is maintained in some form or other, a general fall in the standards of life is inevitable; and, even if such a fall can be avoided, a great increase in the standard of life will always be attainable in the future through the simple means of re-establishing the international division of labor. Whatever the immediate future may have in store for us, internationalism will remain an irresistible driving force of history.
Another fundamental feature of our period derives from the fact that a new international economic order must involve far-reaching economic readjustments, not so much between the haves and have-nots as between all the various countries of the globe – and in a great number of ways. Accordingly, the chief task of domestic politics will be to equip the nations with a social organization that can stand the gigantic strain of – in fact inseparable from – any major readjustments in the international economic field. In the last resort, it is the class structure of society that will prove to be an obstacle to international economic readjustment; for massive economic sacrifice can be borne willingly only by communities that are closely united in the service of transcending ideals. This is the abiding source of the forces that make the coming of socialism inevitable in our age.
The setting up of an international peace order cannot therefore be brought to fruition through a simple refusal to fight, but only through the actual achievement of the institutional basis of such an order. The first step toward achieving this end lies in the transformation of our capitalist nation-states into actual communities by means of bringing economic life under the control of the common people and of thereby abolishing the property cleavage in society.
Insofar as it is possible for us to reconstruct the meaning of the New Testament ethics in terms of institutional life, its tendency was undoubtedly both pacifist and communist. The practice of the early church reflected these tendencies, which implied the rejection of society as a set of permanent institutions.
Human consciousness itself had been reformed in the gospels through the discovery of the personal nature of human life and of the essential freedom of personality. Accordingly, a negative attitude toward institutional society was implicit in New Testament ethics. Neither institutions nor customs nor laws were the substance of social existence, but the community as a relationship among persons: an interpretation of the nature of institutional society that amounted to its rejection.
In terms of the modern world, the social philosophy of Jesus was anarchist. Its pacifism and communism were based on the denial of the inescapable nature of institutional society. Power, economic value, coercion were repudiated as evil. The discovery of the nature of personal life was thus linked with the refusal to accept the need for permanent forms of social existence.
In our epoch, human consciousness is being re-formed again. The recognition of the inescapable nature of society sets a limit to the imaginary freedom of an abstract personality. Power, economic value, coercion, are inevitable in a complex society; there is no means for the individual to escape the responsibilities of choosing between alternatives. He or she cannot contract out of society. But the freedom we appear to lose through this knowledge is illusory, while the freedom we gain through it is valid. Man reaches maturity in the recognition of his loss and in the certainty of ultimate attainment of freedom in and through society.
The truth about human life discovered by Jesus asserts itself today, in the recognition that, in our present society, man is in a condition of self-estrangement and that the socialist transformation is the only means of reclaiming personal life in a complex society.
Proverbially, the Wesleyan revival saved England from a revolution. Social pacifism – the rejection of class struggle in every sense of that phrase – was established as part of the Christian way of life. So far as the working class is concerned, modern pacifism merely meant extending the application of this harmonistic creed from home to foreign affairs. The responsibilities with which members of the ruling class itself were invested naturally prevented them from putting such doctrines into practice.
On the whole, nonconformity tended to foster an idealist philosophy, which persisted even after the religious concept originally associated with it had faded away and been replaced by secular ones. Thus, in spite of the decay of religious life, the world of ideals remained a separate world; ideals were simply divested of their supernatural setting and became attached to secular contents – the fateful gap that had opened up between ideality and actuality outlived the change. The ideal of social justice, under the name of righteousness, became separated from the institutions that could alone embody it. Similarly, after the war, the League of Nations as an ideal became separated in the minds of people from the League of Nations as an institution. It is in the religious history of the working-class movement in this country that we must seek an explanation of a development that has made pacifism into a chief obstacle to the fulfillment of peace.