In 1910, four years before the outbreak of what would be dubbed “The Great War”, and with war clouds already on the horizon, the American Philosopher William James delivered an essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War”, on how wars may be avoided. With appropriate allusions to incorporate institutions and inventions over the last century, his advice is still pertinent in an era characterised by violent and even genocidal wars.
He wrote: “History is a bath of blood. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us.” But although war is horrific, it is also beneficial. Wars promote political unity by uniting people against a common enemy, and wars promote the cultivation of virtue by inspiring people to perform noble and heroic deeds of self-sacrifice. “The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighbouring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples, a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.”
However, while today “the military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever…they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.” We have, then, a dichotomy between “hawks and doves” – “militarists and pacifists” – that must be bridged.
Because stressing the cruelties of war have no effect on militarists, pacifists must adopt an alternative strategy to end war. This strategy must cultivate all the virtues and benefits derived from war if it is to persuade militarists. In the words of William James, the pacifists must identify “a moral equivalent of war.”
While being no Marxist, James proposes that mankind’s propensity for violence and domination be shifted toward the injustices related to financial inequality. “There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, while others no more deserving never get any taste of this hard life at all, is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds.”
To remedy financial inequality, James advises governments to conscript youths to labour armies against Nature, rather than to military armies against other nations. “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, and to the frames of skyscrapers would our gilded youths be drafted off 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.”
Today, we see states spending trillions of dollars to fight wars, when they could have spent that money to develop their own countries, and even assist in the development of those with whom they have conflicts. Take, for instance, the war between Israel and the Palestinians. Could not a portion of the US$3.6B annual aid that the US give Israel have been diverted to develop the Palestinian lands? In the long run, as has been shown for instance in the US war against Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attack, the fundamental contradiction that led to the war must be addressed. A two-state solution with a developed Palestine is the moral equivalent of this present war.
