Among the many pedagogical questions raised and given new significance
by the war, is that of the teaching about war and about peace. This is
a question of ideals, and of values and the teaching of history. There
are practical and superficial questions to be considered. There are
also more profound problems, since all our teaching of good and evil
is implicated. Shall we continue, in one moment, to assume that war is
the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the
greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of
pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is
really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly
it begins to disturb us, as unimportant. No one passing through the
experiences of the past four years can have wholly escaped this
dilemma, or can have kept himself entirely aloof from the doubts and
perplexities that must always be attached to religious and
philosophical problems of good and evil. These doubts and hesitations
are necessarily increased when we try to become consistent teachers
and wise counselors of the young.
It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the
arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and
evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The
writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong
militarists. They do not try to strike a balance between good and
evil, but war is either a great blessing upon mankind or the greatest
curse of the ages. In general they do not seek to base their
conclusions upon ultimate philosophical principles, but rather upon
moral or biological principles, or, again, upon preferences for the
activities of war or the arts of peace. How very different the good
and evil of war and peace may seem from different points of view is
well shown by the following excerpt from a daily newspaper:
A DEADLY PARALLEL
THIS IS THE WAY GERMANY TALKS | THIS IS WHAT THE
SCOUT
TO YOUNG BOYS OF SCOUT AGE | ORGANIZATION TEACHES
AMERICAN
| BOYS
|
| From the "Handbook
for Boys,"
| 17th edition, page
454.
|
"War is the noblest and | "The movement is one for
holiest expression of human | efficiency and patriotism. It
activity. For us, too, the | does not try to make soldiers
glad great hour of battle | of boy scouts, but to make
will strike. Still and deep | boys who will turn out as men
in the German heart must live | to be fine citizens, and who
the joy of battle and the | will if their country needs
longing for it. Let us | them make better soldiers for
ridicule to the utmost the | having been scouts.
No one
old women in breeches who | can be a good American unless
fear war and deplore it as | he is a good citizen, and
cruel and revolting. No; war | every boy ought to train
is beautiful. Its august | himself so that as a man he
sublimity elevates the human | will be able to do his full
heart beyond the earthly and | duty to the community. I want
the common. In the cloud | to see the boy scouts not
palace above sit the heroes, | merely utter fine sentiments,
Frederick the Great and | but act on them, not merely
Blucher and all the men of | sing 'My Country,
'Tis of
action--the Great Emperor, | Thee,' but act in a way that
Moltke, Roon, Bismarck are | will give them a country to
there as well, but not the | be proud of. No man is a good
old women who would take away | citizen unless he so acts as
our joy in war. When here on | to show that he actually uses
earth a battle is won by | the Ten Commandments, and
German arms and the faithful | translates the Golden Rule
dead ascend to Heaven, a | into his life conduct--and I
Potsdam lance corporal will | don't mean by this call the guard to the door | exceptional cases under
and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick | spectacular circumstances,
the Great), springing from | but I mean applying the Ten
his golden throne, will give | Commandments and the Golden
the command to present arms. | Rule in the ordinary affairs
That is the Heaven of Young | of everyday life. I hope the
Germany. | boy scouts will practice
| truth and square
dealing and
"Because only in war all the | courage and honesty, so that
virtues which militarism | when as young men they begin
regards highly are given a | taking a part not only in
chance to unfold, because | earning their own livelihood,
only in war the truly heroic | but in governing the comes into play, for the | community, they may be able
realization of which on earth | to show in practical fashion
militarism is above all | their insistence upon the
concerned; therefore, it | great truth that the eighth
seems to us who are filled | and ninth commandments are
with the spirit of militarism | directly related to everyday
that war is a holy thing, the | life, not only between men as
holiest on earth, and this | such in their private
high estimate of war in its | relations, but between men
turn makes an essential | and the government of which
ingredient of the military | they are a part.
Indeed, the
spirit. There is nothing that | boys, even while only boys,
trades-people complain of so | can have a very real effect
much as that we regard it as | upon the conduct of the
holy." | grown-up members of the
| community, for
decency and
| square dealing are
just as
| contagious as vice
and
| corruption."
The praise of war takes many forms, and invokes many fundamental
principles--ethical, æsthetic, biological, sociological.
From
Leibnitz' saying that perpetual peace is a motto fit only for a
graveyard to Moltke's that peace is only a dream and not even a
beautiful dream, there is a long list of defenses of war. This
philosophy of war is by no means peculiarly German, although German
writers seem to have been the most ardent apologists of war in recent
times. Treitschke, Schmitz (29), Scheler (77), Nusbaum (86), Arndt,
Steinmetz, Lasson, Engelbrecht, Schoonmaker, all sing the praises of
war as the most glorious work of man, or as performing for
civilization some noble good. Even Hegel said that wars invigorate
humanity just as the storm preserves the sea from putrescence.
But this praise of war, we say, is by no means exclusively German.
Thucydides thought war a noble school of heroism, the exercise ground
of the nations. To Mohammed and his Arabs war seemed not only in
itself a heroism, we are told, but a divine act. This belief in war as
divine is an idea that is very wide-spread among primitive peoples.
Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate
that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you
may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a
mockery. Redier says that the war has brought us all the noble joys so
necessary to stimulate mankind, and one no longer finds happiness,
therefore, in sleeping comfortably, but only in living bravely.
There is no lack, indeed, of recognition of the heroic motive in war.
Sometimes the argument appeals to religion, sometimes to art,
sometimes to morality. Sometimes the advocates of war are thinking of
war as the great adventure. War and the thought of war induce an
ecstasy, a glow of the feelings. War is thought of as an expression of
normal, healthy life, as making life more abundant and more beautiful.
War brings out fundamental virtues in the individual; it also destroys
the weaker and the meaner race and leaves the strong and the virtuous.
Struggle, they say, is the method of civilization.
Again, it is urged
that war is always just in its issues. Like the old ordeal which
always registered the decrees of heaven, war is the just arbiter of
fate. The saving of the world through bloodshed, the uniting of the
world through war, war as the great teacher of mankind, war as the
creator of great personalities--all these are persistent themes in the
literature of war. There is no place for the pacifist in the minds of
these apologists of the heroic order. The crises of war are historic
necessities; they come when it is time to release people from the
bondage of the past and to bring individualistic generations back to
the sense of duty and of loyalty to great causes. This is the belief
of many, even now.
On the other side we find the great variety of pacifistic minds. War
to the pacifists is wrong, unholy, morally sinful, biologically and
economically and in every other way evil. The conscientious objector's
point of view is very simple. War antagonizes some principle which is
religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no
justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any
price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to
commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of
this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds
of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask
them to go.
The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less
emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker
undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective.
He counts the
cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and
produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects
unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many,
among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in
which he calls war _dysgenic_. The psychologist tends to see in war a
reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original
savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say.
War lingers because of man's love of old institutions.
We cling to old
habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the æsthetic, because
of their antiquity and old associations. This is the explanation by
Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and
despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery.
MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.
Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer
senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational
desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil. The working man
and all the masses are likely to concur in this opinion.
When they
examine war they see that they themselves as they think are used in
the interest of the few, that they shed their blood for a glory in
which they do not share. They say, all men are brothers, and so why
should they kill one another. Men seem more real to them than do
boundaries of countries which they never see, and the interests of
wealth that is also invisible.
Such thought as this has behind it some of the most powerful minds, as
we know. It is Tolstoi's philosophy, and it is the argument of such
men as Novicow. The professional economist and the student of history
add their protests. They say that military peoples fade away, while
the peaceful live and prosper, that "the country whose military power
is irresistible is doomed." These are the words of Roberts. Some try
to demonstrate that nothing is gained economically by war; that all
the work of war is destructive, to every one engaged in it. It is
argued that the nation that is suited to live will prevail without
wars; and that without this inner superiority, war will avail nothing.
War is bad business, in the opinion of these economic thinkers. War is
like setting the dog on the customer at the door, the practical man in
England complained at the beginning of the present war.
As to war
being associated with intelligence and with virtue in nations, or as
to its ever producing either intellectual or moral qualities, many
would flatly deny that war ever has such a result. The opposite would
seem nearer the truth to them. Military nations are unintelligent
nations, and militarism is always brutalizing.
Such pacifism and the dream of universal peace are no new ideas in the
world. Like the philosophy of war pacifism has a long history. There
have been pacifists everywhere and presumably at all times, since
pacifism is quite as much a temperament as it is an idea or a
philosophy. Cramb tells us that all recent centuries have had their
doctrines of pacifism, each century having its own characteristic
variety. In the time of the Marlborough wars, there appeared the book
of Abbé de St. Pierre denouncing all wars. In the middle of the
nineteenth century there is the doctrine of the Manchester school,
maintaining that the peace of Europe must be secured not by religion,
but by the coöperation of the industrial forces of the continent.
Finally, says Cramb, we see the characteristic thought of the
twentieth century in the position that war is bad because it is
contrary to social well-being and is economically profitless, alike to
the victor and the vanquished. This is the pacifism of the socialist
who holds that the ties of common labor and economic state are
fundamental, and divisions into nationality are secondary and
unimportant; and that militarism belongs to the pernicious state of
society which perpetuates capitalism and privilege and to government
as a function of the favored classes.
This is certainly not the place to try to put order into this
conflicting mass of opinion about war and peace by working out the
principles of a philosophy of good and evil, since this would mean to
attack one of the most fundamental of all problems of philosophy. It
seems to be plain, however, that neither upon biological grounds nor
by ethical principles, nor by finding any consensus in the desires and
opinions of thinkers can we reach any hard and fast conclusions about
the good and evil of war. It is rather by a broad interpretation of
the world and of history and the nature of national consciousness, by
some genetic view of national life, that we are most likely to see our
way toward a practical view of the present good and evil of war. War
is a phase of the whole process of social development of nations. We
think of nations as living and growing, and of a world which is
gradually maturing. War obtains a natural explanation on sociological
and psychological principles, not as a disease, but as a natural
consequence and condition of the formation of nations, or of any type
of horde or group. In the course of the development of nations we see
psychological factors coming more and more to the front.
Desires which
are more or less consciously avowed become the motives of history. It
is in the play of these desires: their fixation, their generalization,
and transformation, the manner in which they become attached to
specific objects, that we seek the explanation of wars and of the
especial psychology of nations. Nations have lived secluded and
guarded lives, because of the nature of the desires which were most
fundamental in their lives, and the objects upon which these desires
have become directed. Now nations show some signs of emerging from
their seclusion, of abandoning their ambitions of empire, and leading
a more complex and more practical life.
In this progress we see the possibility of the final disappearance of
war. But we have no right to pervert either history or education in
the effort to eliminate war, or even to pass judgments upon war
prematurely or upon the basis of personal preferences, or the moods of
any moment. The whole world might, conceivably, be brought together
and be made to declare solemnly that there should be no more war.
Nations would thereby voluntarily relinquish their aggressive
thoughts, put aside the love they have for the heroic and take justice
and peace as their watchwords. And all this would seem ideal. But if
the elimination of war should mean that we have no longer anything for
which men are willing to die, if merely to escape from war we
voluntarily sacrifice good that more than counterbalances the evil we
overcome, we should say that peace had been bought at too high a
price. _Terrible as war is, it cannot be judged by itself alone._ We
have a right to look forward to a time when there shall be no more
war, just as everywhere it seems to be instinctive for us to try to
gain good without its attendant trouble and evil. In the meantime the
world had best busy itself, mainly, in our view, with creating those
things that are best, rather than in destroying those things that are
worst. Nations, like individuals, must lead bravely hazardous lives,
without too much thought of dangers. Peace as a sole program for the
making of history appears to be too narrow, and especially too
unproductive. Internationalism that is merely a combination of peoples
to prevent war is not very inspiring, especially since it is doubtful
whether it even leads to peace. A broad historical view that will
enable us just now to make good come out of the evil of war will be a
better organ of conscious evolution than a philosophy of peace can
possibly be.
Such views as these give us at least some clews to the educational and
pedagogical problems of war and peace. We can distinguish between an
education which deals specifically with such problems, endeavoring to
treat them sharply and with finality, making clear moral decisions,
and an education which by enriching the mind and by educating all the
selective faculties leads to an appreciation of all great practical
and moral questions as aspects of the whole of history and of life.
Let us see what the specific teaching of peace may and may not
include. First of all we cannot, for educational purposes, judge
everything in the lives of nations by _moral_
principles. The ideal of
universal brotherhood and coöperation, of sacrifice and altruism,
cannot be realized in the present stage of history. On the other hand,
the stern picture of justice is one that fits into the present mood of
the world. Justice is the natural link between individualism and
altruism. A world determined upon seeing justice done, a world which,
without setting absolute values upon peace and war, does distinguish
between just and unjust wars, between the demands and the needs of
peoples, leans toward the moral life. It has little to say about
duties as yet, or comparatively little, but it has a strong conception
of rights. A deep enough interest in justice, by its own momentum,
introduces duties into the practical life. In time the world will
perhaps not be satisfied with seeing and recognizing justice, and
ensuring it in great crises; it will make justice as a matter of
course.
This idea of justice seems, on the whole, to be the best basis for the
teaching now of international morality. The teaching of pacifism,
enlarging upon the biological waste of war, trying to present the
realism of war in its worst light in order to overcome the warlike
spirit and to assist the doctrines of internationalism to take effect
upon the mind seems to be the wrong way of teaching peace. We seem to
be obligated to teach war as it is. We cannot conceal its heroic side
for fear of perpetuating war, and we must not conceal the brutality of
war for fear of destroying morale and the fighting spirit. And it is
to be much doubted whether it is _ever_ necessary to teach history
unfairly and one-sidedly in times either of war or of peace. We depend
upon larger effects and deeper judgments than can be produced by
selecting and distorting the facts. Nothing is meaner in national life
than dishonest history.
Education in the ideal of peace, which we may hope to be the state of
the world in the future, will be an adjustment of the mind to new and
practical modes of life rather than the establishing of a principle.
The educated attitude of mind which will best safeguard the peace of
the world must include an intelligent knowledge of all the agencies
proposed to aid in establishing this state of harmony toward which we
look forward. We must all know about arbitration, leagues of nations,
courts of honor, understand diplomacy better and the arguments for
disarmament, understand the economic and the industrial situation, the
possibilities of coöperation, reduction of the rights and privileges
of classes, democratic movements. The inculcation of such knowledge is
an education for peace. There is little that is abstruse in any of
these ideas, and the very young child is not too young to know
something of these wider aspects of the social life. All these may be
presented in a concrete form as a part of the work of conveying a
knowledge of current history.
We may think of various cures for war, and various efforts that might
be made educationally to prevent war. Peace might effectually be
cultivated by an educational propaganda. But after all it is not such
cures of war as this that we are most concerned about in the work of
education. We might even tend to establish in this way a peace which
would be detrimental to the higher interests of civilization. _A true
educational philosophy, at any rate, is not to be dislodged from its
purpose of keeping education constructive rather than inhibitory._
This institution of education must not be too much influenced by the
temporary moods of the day, by the present gloomy evidences of the
devastation of war. We must teach and prepare for an abundant life in
which there is glory and wide opportunity, and in which the motives of
power may be satisfied. Then peace can take care of itself. But this
abundant life must be a life of _activity_, not of mere patriotism and
subjective glorification and nationalistic interest.
Vanity, the low
order of enthusiasms, the glory of display, can no longer have a place
in this national life.
There appears to be a pedagogical lesson in the contrast between the
heroic and the moral view of teaching war and peace illustrated by the
German philosophy of war and the ideal of the Boy Scout organization.
Deducting something for literary exaggeration, we may say that
education cannot afford to neglect either of these attitudes, but must
indeed in some way combine them. The exaggeration consists on one side
in praising the specific act of war; but on the other side there is
plainly lacking something of the dramatic appeal which any ideal life
for the young must have. War is an evil, but the spirit that makes war
is by no means an evil. The philosophy of war proves its failure by
ignoring the moral ideal a