The Duty of a Pacifist

WHEN the last war ended I said to myself, ‘Remember that, whatever happens in the world, nothing can be as bad as this was. Remember, then, that however bad the alternative may seem, you are always to prefer it to war.’

Now that war in Europe has come, and the breath of it is in our nostrils, I have bethought me of this vow made over twenty years ago, and wondered whether its injunction should still be observed. On the whole, nothing that has since happened — not even the excesses of the Fascist régimes, and they are admittedly worse than anything which I could have conceived to be possible when I made the vow — has induced me to gainsay it. In this war, as in the last, I am at heart a pacifist, and there arises, therefore, for me, as for many of us, the vexed question, What is the appropriate — or perhaps I should say the least inappropriate — rôle that a pacifist in wartime can play? There is no satisfactory answer to this question, but since it is one which is likely to agitate an increasing number of young men not only in the western European democracies, but also, it may be, in America, I offer in this article a contribution to its answer.

I

I think it is a good thing that there should be men who refuse in any circumstances to take part in the killing of their fellows at the orders of the State, or in assisting others to kill them. Such men are not only a credit to their race in the present; they are its hope for the future. For they are in very truth pioneers, pointing the way to a higher level of creed and code and conduct than our species has yet achieved. As such they belong to a familiar historical type.

History bears frequent witness to the posthumous ennoblement, by the children, of the men whom the fathers stoned and crucified. It is no new thing for the heterodoxies of the past to be enshrined in the Prayer Books of the present, and for the abominations of the present to become the accepted commonplaces of the future. It is, indeed, by precisely this process — a process whereby the outrageous insight of the gifted pioneer becomes in due course incorporated into the accepted outlook of the ordinary man — that evolution advances. Hence, I should regard the man who is prepared as a conscientious objector to war to suffer for his faith as the equivalent in the moral sphere of the genius in the æsthetic and the mystic in the religious; as being, that is to say, one of those endowed with special insight who are sent into the world to give conscious expression to life’s instinctive purpose, and to point the way to a new level of evolutionary development. Because they believe, they will in time be believed.

The very fact that such men are pioneers means that their way is not and can never be the way of most of us. Before the present war is over, those who refuse to obey the orders of the State may well be shot in this country as, during the last war, they were shot in other countries. The decision to follow a course which may end in martyrdom is not one which a man may recommend to his fellows; each must make it for himself. For my part, I cannot take it upon myself to give advice to another which might lead to his choosing the martyr’s way. Though I think it is a good and perhaps a necessary thing that there should be martyrs, I do not think that they should be many. Martyrdom is a vocation, and those who choose it without being called are apt to develop, not into martyrs, but into prigs.

Hence, the only duty that I would urge upon the pacifist in the next war is that of survival. This duty is, I suggest, enjoined upon him by two different sets of reasons, the first selfish, the second unselfish. To take the selfish first, war is, in his view, a form of madness. In wartime the world goes crazy. But why, he may well ask himself, should he participate in its lunacy? Still more, why should he suffer for it? For he is after all — assuming, as he must do, that his own view is correct — a sane man; and why, he may ask himself, should a sane man permit himself to be driven to his own destruction by a world of lunatics bent on theirs? Why should he even endanger his sanity by courting suffering and martyrdom? In all martyrdom there is an element of madness. When once the pacifist begins to suffer, to be harassed, bullied, imprisoned, or maltreated for his opinions, he will begin to lose the calmness of mind and the objectivity of outlook in which his sanity consists and upon which it depends. In particular, he will begin to suffer from the complex of persecution.

In wartime every man’s hand is against him. Thrust into a defensive position, he is faced continually with the necessity of arguing in defense of his opinions; the most friendly discussion is apt to end in a row, the most casual conversation to provoke him to testify to the faith that is in him. It is extremely difficult in these circumstances to avoid the feeling that one is being persecuted. It is also difficult to avoid a feeling of self-righteousness. The persecuted man and the self-righteous man adopt an overdetermined attitude to the opinions for holding which they are persecuted, in respect of which they feel self-righteous. Deprived of both impartiality and objectivity, they cease to be good guardians of those opinions.

Yet, always assuming that the pacifist is right, the very fact that he is singlehanded in their defense is a measure of the importance of the opinions he defends. When few hold the truth, the greater is their duty to the truth that they hold, and in saying this I pass from the selfish to the unselfish reasons for survival. Granted that the pacifist believes that his opinion is right, he cannot but wish his opinion to prevail. Grunted that he thinks war to be wrong, he cannot but wish it to be terminated at the earliest possible moment. And so he must be on hand to catch and exploit the inevitable mood of war-weariness, when it comes. He may even, subject always to the qualification that he must survive with powers of mind intact, seek to hasten its coming, presenting in season, but not out of season, the opinions which, flouted in the first phase of belligerent ferocity and panic fear, find a ready lodgment in the hearts of those who suffer or are weary. And, presuming for a moment that there are victors in this war and that his country is among them, he must be on hand to soften, so far as he can, the terms of peace, and to see that from the ruins of the next war there emerges machinery for the prevention of future wars. The present League might have evolved such machinery; it would have done so but for Versailles. But the desire to disable the conquered foe was too strong for the victors, and the devil’s crop was sown whose harvesting is now upon us. It is the pacifist’s duty to ensure that no similar desire shall be allowed to militate against the success of the next settlement, and, that he may perform his duty, he must first survive.

Finally, believing that his opinions are right, he must seek to ensure that the number of those who share them is as large as possible. It is his duty not to diminish that number by dying for the opinions he wishes to propagate. Thus I conceive it to be the business of the pacifist in the next war to preserve his life, his health, his sanity, his fairmindedness, and his poise by every method at his disposal, and, short of killing or assisting to kill his fellow men, to perform such services as the authorities may require of him.

Fear of the charge of priggishness makes me hesitate to add a further consideration, yet I find it difficult to refrain. There exists in human societies something which we call culture, something which it is very hard to define. For my present purpose, I should describe it as the deliberate maintenance, by a substantial proportion of the members of a community, of certain standards of value in living and thinking. In morals, culture expresses itself in tolerance and humanity, a tolerance which is prepared to allow freedom for opinions and habits which are repugnant to oneself, a humanity which refuses to believe that, if a man’s politics or morals are bad, they will be improved by subjecting him to gross physical pain. In thought, culture expresses itself in a skeptical habit of mind which, refusing to believe that the truth on most topics of human controversy is known, refuses also where the truth is unknown, to supply the place of knowledge by converting its conjectures into dogmas. Where the truth is unknown, the cultivated man will not account differences of opinion as a reason for making the world uncomfortable for anybody.

In spite of, or because of, his repudiation of dogma and certitude, the cultivated man is the guardian of tradition

and the preserver of knowledge. It is at once his duty and his pleasure to keep alive the knowledge of the past of the race, of its aspirations, its crusades, its glories, and its blunders, and of what great men have thought and said memorably about human life. In the sphere of art, culture expresses itself in the recognition — a recognition whose sensitiveness the cultivated man seeks constantly to make keener by practice — that there are certain standards of beauty; that, judged by these standards, some works are good and some bad; and that it is a man’s duty to discover and to love that which is good. In science and philosophy, the cultivated man sets a value upon mental adventure for its own sake, is willing to seek truth wherever it may be found and to follow a chain of reasoning wherever it may lead. He knows that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind save veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is.

Now in wartime the qualities of the educated man are derided and his virtues contemned, while the standards to which he pays tribute are in danger of being utterly submerged. That a man should lay claim to the possession of these qualities, that he should regard his life as being, in however imperfect a degree, an embodiment of these values, argues a degree of complacency which few would, I imagine, wish to have laid to their charge. It is enough that he should know the values, recognize the standards, and seek to cultivate the qualities. If he does these things, and in the degree to which he does them, I should be prepared to call him a cultivated man. Valuing the testament of thought and beauty which has come down to us from the past, he will regard it as a heritage of which he is a trustee with duty to transmit to the future. There is a real danger that in the present war the treasures of learning and culture which have been garnered by past ages may be destroyed, and that mankind may enter upon a new dark age. In the face of such a danger those who are conscious of their debt to the past may feel an obligation to repay it by constituting themselves the guardians of its culture; those who acknowledge the values of truth and beauty will seek to keep alive the recognition of truth, the appreciation of beauty, in a world which, as the war proceeds, grows increasingly intolerant of the first and hostile to the second. Now, that they may perform this office, they must first survive — and survive, so far as may be possible, with vision unclouded and standards unlowered by the savagery of the times.

II

How is such survival to be achieved? If the pacifist is to exist in a community at war, he must reconcile himself to the fact that, unless he is prepared to take heroic measures, he is by the very fact of his existence in some measure assisting the community and so, presumably, condoning its warlike actions.

Heroic measures would presumably include martyrdom deliberately sought, putting one’s head into a gas oven — a course at one time recommended by Professor Broad of Cambridge—and, most heroic of all, getting oneself arrested and then persistently breaking every prison rule it is possible to break, with the object of maximizing the number of wardens required to look after and punish one, and so withdrawing the largest possible number of men from active participation in military duties. But these heroic courses are, as I have already indicated, only for the chosen few. Unless he is prepared to take them, the pacifist must reconcile himself to the fact that by virtue of existing and working he cannot help rendering assistance to his community. For, to exist, he must purchase the necessaries of life, and help the wheels of industry to turn. In wartime the community’s economic life is one of the foundations of its military activity; hence by assisting the economic life of the country he is also assisting its military activity.

As has often been pointed out, no clear-cut line can be drawn between direct participation in military activities and activities which have no connection with fighting. If you yourself do not fight, the probability is that you will be setting free another man to fight for you. Even if you are not setting free another man to fight for you, you will find that you are setting free another man to perform work such that its performance sets free another man to fight for him, and so on. There is thus no clear-cut line between work which assists the carrying on of the war and work which does not. Short of heroic measures, you cannot contract out of the community to which you belong.

Nor is it only in wartime that this undesired assistance is given to the war machine. The pacifist gives it in peace every time he pays his income tax or pays his rent, and by paying his rent enables someone else to pay his income tax. Therefore, by merely performing his duties as a citizen, he is assisting the community to pursue a policy of which he disapproves. Now most pacifists do in fact pay their income tax; do, therefore, in fact assist in enabling the State to equip itself with the instruments of slaughtering their fellow men. In thus rejecting the heroic measures which the extreme logical implications of their faith would seem to demand, they have already opted against martyrdom. I would suggest that, having by implication made up their minds on this issue before war breaks out, they should in wartime act consistently with the course already adopted in peacetime.

Now, though it is not feasible to draw a clear-cut line of logical division between those activities which help a community at war and those which do not, there are nevertheless degrees of participation and assistance. There was popular among Greek philosophers a figure called the Sorites. One took a very large number and subtracted from it the number 1. The unit 1 is a very small number; if one subtracts a very small number from a very large number, one is left with a very large number. One repeats the operation indefinitely, and on each occasion, by the same reasoning, one is left with a very large number. As a result of the repeated subtractions, one is ultimately left with the number 1, and, according to the argument, therefore 1 is a very large number. Nevertheless, 1 is not a very large number.

By similar reasoning, since the disemboweling of an enemy soldier with a bayonet is an act of war, it follows, since the one activity shades into the other by a number of imperceptible gradations, that growing turnips is an act of war in precisely the same sense as disemboweling the enemy soldier is an act of war. But clearly it is not. That it is not, I think, may be seen from a consideration of the five categories to one or the other of which possible forms of employment may from this point of view be allocated.

There is, first, the category of fighting; that is to say, of trying to kill other human beings with all the resources that science has placed at the disposal of the killer. A second category is that in which one assists the fighter to fight without actively fighting oneself: one makes aeroplanes and munitions, drives lorries, makes uniforms. In a third category are the activities involved in repairing the ravages which result from fighting. This category includes the ambulance and medical services, the putting out of fires, the making and repairing of trenches, the patching up of fighting men so that they can fight again, and so on. In a fourth category is work which has no distinctive relation to war, since it must be done in peacetime no less than in war, but which is nevertheless necessary if war is to be carried on. Such work includes the growing and importing of food, the making of boots and clothes, the running of railways, the mining of coal. Fifthly, there are activities which have no distinctive relation to war and are not necessary if war is to be carried on; for example, the making of music, or of musical instruments, or the selling of jewelry.

Now pacifists will not, I imagine, wish to undertake work falling into categories one and two; it is unlikely that they will be allowed to continue to do work falling within category five. There remain categories three and four. Work in category three may — probably will — involve danger, and will, therefore, give comfort to those pacifists who are driven by an uneasy conscience to desire to subject themselves to the same risks as the fighting men. You cannot contract out of your community spiritually, they will tell you, any more than you can contract out of it physically. When war comes you will feel it intolerable that, because of your opinions, you should be in comparative safety while others are running the risks which, whether you agree with them or not, they believe themselves to be incurring on your behalf. The only way to make the situation tolerable is to see to it that your risk is not less than theirs. Those to whom this argument appeals will feel strongly impelled to take up work falling within category three.

But there are others to whom the argument does not appeal. They will wish to have as little to do with the mass lunacy and slaughter as may be, and they are apt to take seriously my injunction as to the importance of surviving with sanity unimpaired. For such as these, work falling within category four is indicated.

III

I may perhaps be forgiven if I end on a note of personal confession. In the last war, work falling within category four would have suited me well enough. I wanted to keep clear of the war as far as the war would let me, and my attitude was that of the conscientious objector who opted for alternative service. My feelings now are different. As one grows older, one becomes psychologically embedded in the community to which one belongs. While in thought one becomes more detached, — inevitably, since detachment is the outstanding sign of intellectual maturity, — in feeling one becomes more entangled. I cannot now cut psychologically adrift from my fellows with the ease that was possible to me as a young man. As they feel, hope, fear, and desire, so within limits must I.

When the war broke upon us, I was in the country trying my hand at amateur farming — an admirable category-four occupation. If I had felt then as I felt in 1914, I should have been content to stay where I was and to grow food. But, away from the centre of interest and activity in London, I was restless and miserable. In the country I felt isolated and marooned. I too, it seemed, wanted to be in the thick of things. It was rumored that work in government departments would be available for people in my position, and I applied like the rest. After all, I should have made a bad farmer, but, having had a civil service training, a reasonably effective civil servant. In a government department I shall do my best to assist in the efficient conduct of the war.

My feelings, I confess, surprised me. I comforted myself by reflecting that Naziism was, after all, a horrible thing; that, though this was not the way to deal with it, nevertheless this way had apparently been chosen; and that, short of actual fighting or munitions making, I should like to do what I could to help make this way effective. Not very heroic all this, you will say. I know that it is not. A man ought to have the courage of his logic, you will add. But my logic tells me that, once war comes, there is little or nothing that the pacifist as pacifist can do save wait for the turn of the tide and be there to take advantage of it.

A poor sort of zealot this, you will conclude, who thinks that war is never justified and always wrong, yet is prepared to take government work when war comes. But I am not a zealot ; I am, I hope, a reasonable, common-sensible sort of man. It is at any rate as a reasonable man that I have here tried to present some of the reasons for pacifism, seeking to appeal to the good sense rather than to the emotions of my readers. Now it is the part of a reasonable man never to be so sure of his opinions as to be prepared to sacrifice either himself or anybody else to his conviction of their rightness. He will bethink him always that he may be wrong and will remember that a cause is doubtfully served by its martyrs. There have been altogether too much enthusiasm and sacrifice and zealousness and heroism and martyrdom and dying (and killing) in the world. There are too much in the world to-day; a little less enthusiasm, a little more skepticism, a little more readiness to take thought, a little less eagerness to take action, and the world would be a happier and more comfortable place.

Finally, it is the part of a reasonable man, when two evils are presented to him, to choose the lesser. I do not wish to pretend that I am happy doing government work in wartime, but I am less unhappy than I should be if I were to stand aside from the community by cultivating a priggish complacency, or seeking to defy it by courting the endurances of martyrdom.