Force and Ideas
EVERY sane person knows that it is a greater thing to build a city than to bombard it, to plough a field than to trample it, to serve mankind than to conquer it. And yet once the armies get loose, the terrific noise and shock of war make all that was valuable seem pale and dull and sentimental. Trenches and shrapnel, howitzers and forts, marching and charging and seizing—these seem real, these seem to be men's work. But subtle calculations in a laboratory, or the careful planning of streets and sanitation and schools, things which constitute the great peaceful adventure of democracy, seem to sink so much whimpering futility.
Who cares to paint a picture now, or to write any poetry but war poetry, or to search the meaning or language, or speculate about the constitution of matter? It seems like fiddling when Rome burns. Or to edit a magazine—to cover paper with ink, to care about hopes that have gone stale, to launch phrases that are lost in the uproar? What is the good now of thinking? What is a critic compared to a battalion of infantry? This, men say, is a time for action, any kind of action. So, without a murmur, the laboratories of Europe are commandeered as hospitals, a thousand half-finished experiments abandoned. There was more for the future of the world in those experiments than we dare to calculate. They are tossed aside. The best scholarship has turned press agent to the General Staff. The hope of labor is absorbed, the great plans built on the surplus of wealth are dropped, for the armies have to be financed. Merely to exist has become a problem, to live finely seems to many a derelict hope.
Yet the fact remains that the final argument against cannon is ideas. The thoughts of men which seem so feeble are the only weapons they have against overwhelming force. It was a brain that conceived the gun, it was brains that organized the armies, it was the triumph of physics and chemistry that made possible the dreadnought. Men organized this superb destruction; they created this force, thought it, dreamed it, planned it. It has got beyond their control. It has got into the service of hidden forces they do not understand. Men can master it only by clarifying their own will to end it, and making a civilization so thoroughly under their control that no machine can turn traitor to it. For while it takes as much skill to make a sword as a ploughshare, it takes a critical understanding of human values to prefer the ploughshare.
That is why civilization seems dull and war romantic to unimaginative people. It requires a trained intelligence to realize that the building of the Panama Canal by the American Army is perhaps the greatest victory an army has ever won. Yet the victories of peace are less renowned than those of war. For every hundred people who can feel the horrors of the battlefield, how many are there who feel the horror of the slum? For every hundred people who admire the organization of war, how many are there who recognize the wasteful helter-skelter of peace?
It is no wonder, then, that war, once started, sweeps everything before it, that it seizes all loyalties and subjugates all intelligence. War is the one activity that men really plan for passionately on a national scale, the only organization which is thoroughly conceived. Men prepare themselves for campaigns they may never wage, but for peace, even when they meet the most acute social crisis, they will not prepare themselves. They set their armies on a hair-trigger of preparation. They leave their diplomacy archaic. They have their troops ready to put down labor disputes; they will not think out the problems of labor. They turn men into military automata, stamp upon every personal feeling for what they call the national defence; they are too timid to discipline business. They spend years learning to make war; they do not learn to govern themselves. They ask men to die for their country; they think it is a stupid strain to give time to living for it.
Knowing this, we cannot abandon the labor of thought. However crude and weak it may be, it is the only force that can pierce the agglomerated passion and wrong-headedness of this disaster. We have learnt a lesson. We know how insecurely we have been living, how grudging, poor, mean, careless has been what we call civilization. We have not known how to forestall the great calamity. We have not known enough, we have not been trained enough, ready enough, nor radical enough to make our will effective. We have taken the ideas that were thrust upon us, we have believed that we were told to believe. We have got into habits of thought when unnecessary things seemed inevitable, in panic and haste we stumbled into what we did not want.
We shall not do better in the future by more stumbling and more panic. If our thought has been ineffective we shall not save ourselves by not thinking at all, for there is only one way to break the vicious circle of action, and that is by subjecting it endlessly to the most ruthless criticism of which we are capable. It is not enough to hate war and waste, to launch one unanalyzed passion against another, to make the world a vast debating ground in which tremendous accusations are directed against the Kaiser and the financiers, the diplomatists and the gun manufacturers. The guilt is wider and deeper that that. It comes home finally to all those who live carelessly, too lazy to think,
