“The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one’s powers toward some great end.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
WHEN one reflects on personality traits that we consider valuable and desirable: courage, honesty, self-sacrifice, and discipline, one cannot escape the fact that these traits are often associated with conflict. The opposite is also true. Traits such as laziness, greed, and self-promotion are associated with the easy life, of accomplishments too easily gained. We have all seen the child screaming for a toy or piece of candy, rewarded for his bad behavior by getting what he demanded, then thinking, “What kind of person will he grow up to be?”
William James, the author of the opening quote, belonged to a group of men that included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who fought in the American Civil War and lived through the relative peace and prosperity of the Gilded Age. By the early twentieth century they lamented a nation of weaklings who devoted their time to soft living and selfish pursuits, people whom James referred to as “so much human blubber.” They despaired the loss of moral fiber, the decline of mental, emotional and spiritual toughness.
As they reflected on the war years, they winced at the horrors of war with its bloodshed and destruction. Yet, they could not deny that the war had brought out the best in many of the people who experienced it. Through the war, men and women learned the true meaning of courage, honor and self-sacrifice. The generation of the war were better people because they had collectively experienced the hardships. As James put it, they spent their lives on something that will outlast it.
James, Holmes and their contemporaries, such as H.G. Wells longed for what they called a moral equivalent of war, a way for people to learn the lessons that war taught without the pain and misery that it brought. How could a young person fully understand the meaning of self-sacrifice unless he or she gave themselves over to a cause much greater than their own personal comfort and prosperity? How would a person know what courage was unless they faced true danger? James and his fellows reached different conclusions to the question, Is there a moral equivalent of war?
James proposed unifying young people and directing their energies toward building a better world and conquering nature. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”
In the same vein, two decades later amid the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt asked, “Must we go on in many groping, disorganized, separate units to defeat or shall we move as one great team to victory? ”
Politics cannot be the battlefield on which we learn the great virtues. Judging by the character of politicians, there is nothing valuable to be learned there. Nor can sports be the symbolic battlefield. The stakes are not high enough. Where, then, can we find the moral equivalent of war?
BC Cook, PhD lived on Saipan and has taught history for twenty years. He travels the Pacific but currently resides on the mainland U.S.
