material resources will prove to be even more so, quite regardless
of the individual patriotism of their owners or workers. It is almost
purely a problem of diversion. Factories and mines and farms will
continue to turn out the same products and at an intensified rate, but
the government will be working to use their activity and concentrate
it as contributory to the war. The process which the piping times of
benevolent neutrality began will be pursued to its extreme end. All
this will be successful, however, precisely as it is made a matter of
centralized governmental organization and not of individual offerings
of good-will and enterprise. It will be coercion from above that will
do the trick rather than patriotism from below. Democratic contentment
may be shed over the land for a time through the appeal to individual
thoughtfulness in saving and in relinquishing profits. But all that is
really needed is the coöperation with government of the men who direct
the large financial and industrial enterprises. If their interest is
enlisted in diverting the mechanism of production into war-channels,
it makes not the least difference whether you or I want our activity
to count in aid of the war. Whatever we do will contribute toward its
successful organization, and toward the riveting of a semi-military
State-socialism on the country. As long as the effective managers,
the “big men” in the staple industries remained loyal, nobody need
care what the millions of little human cogs who had to earn their
living felt or thought. This is why the technical organization for
this American war goes on so much more rapidly than any corresponding
popular sentiment for its aims and purposes. Our war is teaching us
that patriotism is really a superfluous quality in war. The government
of a modern organized plutocracy does not have to ask whether the
people want to fight or understand what they are fighting for, but
only whether they will tolerate fighting. America does not coöperate
with the President’s designs. She rather feebly acquiesces. But that
feeble acquiescence is the all-important factor. We are learning that
war doesn’t need enthusiasm, doesn’t need conviction, doesn’t need
hope, to sustain it. Once maneuvered, it takes care of itself, provided
only that our industrial rulers see that the end of the war will
leave American capital in a strategic position for world-enterprise.
The American people might be much more indifferent to the war even
than they are and yet the results would not be materially different.
A majority of them might even be feebly or at least unconcertedly
hostile to the war, and yet it would go gaily on. That is why a popular
referendum seems so supremely irrelevant to people who are willing
to use war as an instrument in the working-out of national policy.
And that is why this war, with apathy rampant, is probably going to
act just as if every person in the country were filled with patriotic
ardor, and furnished with a completely assimilated map of the League to
Enforce Peace. If it doesn’t, the cause will not be the lack of popular
ardor, but the clumsiness of the government officials in organizing the
technique of the war. Our country in war, given efficiency at the top,
can do very well without our patriotism. The non-patriotic man need
feel no pangs of conscience about not helping the war. Patriotism fades
into the merest trivial sentimentality when it becomes, as so obviously
in a situation like this, so pragmatically impotent. As long as one
has to earn one’s living or buy tax-ridden goods, one is making one’s
contribution to war in a thousand indirect ways. The war, since it does
not need it, cannot fairly demand also the sacrifice of one’s spiritual
integrity.
III
The “liberals” who claim a realistic and pragmatic attitude in politics
have disappointed us in setting up and then clinging wistfully to
the belief that our war could get itself justified for an idealistic
flavor, or at least for a world-renovating social purpose, that
they had more or less denied to the other belligerents. If these
realists had had time in the hurry and scuffle of events to turn their
philosophy on themselves, they might have seen how thinly disguised a
rationalization this was of their emotional undertow. They wanted a
League of Nations. They had an unanalyzable feeling that this was a war
in which we had to be, and be in it we would. What more natural than
to join the two ideas and conceive our war as the decisive factor in
the attainment of the desired end! This gave them a good conscience
for willing American participation, although as good men they must
have loathed war and everything connected with it. The realist cannot
deny facts. Moreover, he must not only acknowledge them but he must
use them. Good or bad, they must be turned by his intelligence to some
constructive end. Working along with the materials which events give
him, he must get where and what he can, and bring something brighter
and better out of the chaos.
Now war is such an indefeasible and unescapable Real that the good
realist must accept it rather comprehensively. To keep out of it is
pure quietism, an acute moral failure to adjust. At the same time,
there is an inexorability about war. It is a little unbridled for the
realist’s rather nice sense of purposive social control. And nothing
is so disagreeable to the pragmatic mind as any kind of an absolute.
The realistic pragmatist could not recognize war as inexorable--though
to the common mind it would seem as near an absolute, coercive social
situation as it is possible to fall into. For the inexorable abolishes
choices, and it is the essence of the realist’s creed to have, in
every situation, alternatives before him. He gets out of his scrape
in this way: Let the inexorable roll in upon me, since it must. But
then, keeping firm my sense of control, I will somehow tame it and
turn it to my own creative purposes. Thus realism is justified of her
children, and the “liberal” is saved from the limbo of the wailing and
irreconcilable pacifists who could not make so easy an adjustment.
Thus the “liberals” who made our war their own preserved their
pragmatism. But events have shown how fearfully they imperilled their
intuition and how untameable an inexorable really is. For those of
us who knew a real inexorable when we saw one, and had learned from
watching war what follows the loosing of a war-technique, foresaw how
quickly aims and purposes would be forgotten, and how flimsy would be
any liberal control of events. It is only we now who can appreciate
_The New Republic_--the organ of applied pragmatic realism--when
it complains that the League of Peace (which we entered the war to
guarantee) is more remote than it was eight months ago; or that our
State Department has no diplomatic policy (though it was to realize
the high aims of the President’s speeches that the intellectuals
willed American participation); or that we are subordinating the
political management of the war to real or supposed military
advantages, (though militarism in the liberal mind had no justification
except as a tool for advanced social ends). If after all the idealism
and creative intelligence that were shed upon America’s taking up of
arms, our State Department has no policy, we are like brave passengers
who have set out for the Isles of the Blest only to find that the first
mate has gone insane and jumped overboard, the rudder has come loose
and dropped to the bottom of the sea, and the captain and pilot are
lying dead drunk under the wheel. The stokers and engineers, however,
are still merrily forcing the speed up to twenty knots an hour and the
passengers are presumably getting the pleasure of the ride.
IV
The penalty the realist pays for accepting war is to see disappear
one by one the justifications for accepting it. He must either become
a genuine Realpolitiker and brazen it through, or else he must feel
sorry for his intuition and regretful that he willed the war. But
so easy is forgetting and so slow the change of events that he is
more likely to ignore the collapse of his case. If he finds that his
government is relinquishing the crucial moves of that strategy for
which he was willing to use the technique of war, he is likely to move
easily to the ground that it will all come out in the end the same
anyway. He soon becomes satisfied with tacitly ratifying whatever
happens, or at least straining to find the grain of unplausible hope
that may be latent in the situation.
But what then is there really to choose between the realist who
accepts evil in order to manipulate it to a great end, but who
somehow unaccountably finds events turn sour on him, and the Utopian
pacifist who cannot stomach the evil and will have none of it? Both
are helpless, both are coerced. The Utopian, however, knows that he
is ineffective and that he is coerced, while the realist, evading
disillusionment, moves in a twilight zone of half-hearted criticism,
and hopings for the best, where he does not become a tacit fatalist.
The latter would be the manlier position, but then where would be his
realistic philosophy of intelligence and choice? Professor Dewey has
become impatient at the merely good and merely conscientious objectors
to war who do not attach their conscience and intelligence to forces
moving in another direction. But in wartime there are literally no
valid forces moving in another direction. War determines its own
end--victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that
deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization
to that end. All governments will act in this way, the most democratic
as well as the most autocratic. It is only “liberal” naïveté that
is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means
willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it. A good
many people still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and
antiseptic war. The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this
was an illusion, and because of the myriad hurts they knew war would do
the promise of democracy at home. For once the babes and sucklings seem
to have been wiser than the children of light.
V
If it is true that the war will go on anyway whether it is popular
or not or whether its purposes are clear, and if it is true that in
wartime constructive realism is an illusion, then the aloof man, the
man who will not obstruct the war but who cannot spiritually accept it,
has a clear case for himself. Our war presents no more extraordinary
phenomenon than the number of the more creative minds of the younger
generation who are still irreconcilable toward the great national
enterprise which the government has undertaken. The country is still
dotted with young men and women, in full possession of their minds,
faculties and virtue, who feel themselves profoundly alien to the work
which is going on around them. They must not be confused with the
disloyal or the pro-German. They have no grudge against the country,
but their patriotism has broken down in the emergency. They want
to see the carnage stopped and Europe decently constructed again.
They want a democratic peace. If the swift crushing of Germany will
bring that peace, they want to see Germany crushed. If the embargo
on neutrals will prove the decisive coup, they are willing to see
the neutrals taken ruthlessly by the throat. But they do not really
believe that peace will come by any of these means, or by any use of
our war-technique whatever. They are genuine pragmatists and they fear
any kind of an absolute, even when bearing gifts. They know that the
longer a war lasts the harder it is to make peace. They know that the
peace of exhaustion is a dastardly peace, leaving enfeebled the morale
of the defeated, and leaving invincible for years all the most greedy
and soulless elements in the conquerors. They feel that the greatest
obstacle to peace now is the lack of the powerful mediating neutral
which we might have been. They see that war has lost for us both the
mediation and the leadership, and is blackening us ever deeper with
the responsibility for having prolonged the dreadful tangle. They are
skeptical not only of the technique of war, but also of its professed
aims. The President’s idealism stops just short of the pitch that would
arouse their own. There is a middle-aged and belated taint about the
best ideals which publicist liberalism has been able to express. The
appeals to propagate political democracy leave these people cold in
a world which has become so disillusioned of democracy in the face of
universal economic servitude. Their ideals outshoot the government’s.
To them the real arena lies in the international class-struggle,
rather than in the competition of artificial national units. They
are watching to see what the Russian socialists are going to do for
the world, not what the timorous capitalistic American democracy may
be planning. They can feel no enthusiasm for a League of Nations,
which should solidify the old units and continue in disguise the old
theories of international relations. Indispensable, perhaps? But not
inspiring; not something to give one’s spiritual allegiance to. And yet
the best advice that American wisdom can offer to those who are out
of sympathy with the war is to turn one’s influence toward securing
that our war contribute toward this end. But why would not this League
turn out to be little more than a well-oiled machine for the use of
that enlightened imperialism toward which liberal American finance
is already whetting its tongue? And what is enlightened imperialism
as an international ideal as against the anarchistic communism of
the nations which the new Russia suggests in renouncing imperialist
intentions?
VI
Skeptical of the means and skeptical of the aims, this element of the
younger generation stands outside the war, and looks upon the conscript
army and all the other war-activities as troublesome interruptions on
its thought and idealism, interruptions which do not touch anywhere
a fiber of its soul. Some have been much more disturbed than others,
because of the determined challenge of both patriots and realists
to break in with the war-obsession which has filled for them their
sky. Patriots and realists can both be answered. They must not be
allowed to shake one’s inflexible determination not to be spiritually
implicated in the war. It is foolish to hope. Since the 30th of
July, 1914, nothing has happened in the arena of war-policy and
war-technique except for the complete and unmitigated worst. We are
tired of continued disillusionment, and of the betrayal of generous
anticipations. It is saner not to waste energy in hope within the
system of war-enterprise. One may accept dispassionately whatever
changes for good may happen from the war, but one will not allow one’s
imagination to connect them organically with war. It is better to
resist cheap consolations, and remain skeptical about any of the good
things so confidently promised us either through victory or the social
reorganization demanded by the war-technique. One keeps healthy in
wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that
something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of
values in which war has no part. Our skepticism can be made a shelter
behind which is built up a wider consciousness of the personal and
social and artistic ideals which American civilization needs to lead
the good life. We can be skeptical constructively, if, thrown back
on our inner resources from the world of war which is taken as the
overmastering reality, we search much more actively to clarify our
attitudes and express a richer significance in the American scene. We
do not feel the war to be very real, and we sense a singular air of
falsity about the emotions of the upper-classes toward everything
connected with war. This ostentatious shame, this groveling before
illusory Allied heroisms and nobilities, has shocked us. Minor
novelists and minor poets and minor publicists are still coming back
from driving ambulances in France to write books that nag us into an
appreciation of the “real meaning.” No one can object to the generous
emotions of service in a great cause or to the horror and pity at
colossal devastation and agony. But too many of these prophets are men
who have lived rather briskly among the cruelties and thinnesses of
American civilization and have shown no obvious horror and pity at the
exploitations and the arid quality of the life lived here around us.
Their moral sense had been deeply stirred by what they saw in France
and Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively unpracticed by deep
concern and reflection over the inadequacies of American democracy. Few
of them had used their vision to create literature impelling us toward
a more radiant American future. And that is why, in spite of their
vivid stirrings, they seem so unconvincing. Their idealism is too new
and bright to affect us, for it comes from men who never cared very
particularly about great creative American ideas. So these writers come
to us less like ardent youth, pouring its energy into the great causes,
than like youthful mouthpieces of their strident and belligerent
elders. They did not convert us, but rather drove us farther back into
the rightness of American isolation.
VII
There was something incredibly mean and plebeian about that abasement
into which the war-partisans tried to throw us all. When we were
urged to squander our emotion on a bedeviled Europe, our intuition
told us how much all rich and generous emotions were needed at home
to leaven American civilization. If we refused to export them it was
because we wanted to see them at work here. It is true that great
reaches of American prosperous life were not using generous emotions
for any purpose whatever. But the real antithesis was not between
being concerned about luxurious automobiles and being concerned about
the saving of France. America’s “benevolent neutrality” had been
saving the Allies for three years through the ordinary channels of
industry and trade. We could afford to export material goods and
credit far more than we could afford to export emotional capital.
The real antithesis was between interest in expensively exploiting
American material life and interest in creatively enhancing American
personal and artistic life. The fat and earthy American could be
blamed not for not palpitating more richly about France, but for not
palpitating more richly about America and her spiritual drouths. The
war will leave the country spiritually impoverished, because of the
draining away of sentiment into the channels of war. Creative and
constructive enterprises will suffer not only through the appalling
waste of financial capital in the work of annihilation, but also in the
loss of emotional capital in the conviction that war overshadows all
other realities. This is the poison of war that disturbs even creative
minds. Writers tell us that, after contact with the war, literature
seems an idle pastime, if not an offense, in a world of great deeds.
Perhaps literature that can be paled by war will not be missed. We
may feel vastly relieved at our salvation from so many feeble novels
and graceful verses that khaki-clad authors might have given us. But
this nobly-sounding sense of the futility of art in a world of war may
easily infect conscientious minds. And it is against this infection
that we must fight.
VIII
The conservation of American promise is the present task for this
generation of malcontents and aloof men and women. If America has
lost its political isolation, it is all the more obligated to retain
its spiritual integrity. This does not mean any smug retreat from
the world, with a belief that the truth is in us and can only be
contaminated by contact. It means that the promise of American life is
not yet achieved, perhaps not even seen, and that, until it is, there
is nothing for us but stern and intensive cultivation of our garden.
Our insulation will not be against any great creative ideas or forms
that Europe brings. It will be a turning within in order that we may
have something to give without. The old American ideas which are still
expected to bring life to the world seem stale and archaic. It is
grotesque to try to carry democracy to Russia. It is absurd to try to
contribute to the world’s store of great moving ideas until we have a
culture to give. It is absurd for us to think of ourselves as blessing
the world with anything unless we hold it much more self-consciously
and significantly than we hold anything now. Mere negative freedom will
not do as a twentieth-century principle. American ideas must be dynamic
or we are presumptuous in offering them to the world.
IX
The war--or American promise: one must choose. One cannot be interested
in both. For the effect of the war will be to impoverish American
promise. It cannot advance it, however liberals may choose to identify
American promise with a league of nations to enforce peace. Americans
who desire to cultivate the promises of American life need not lift
a finger to obstruct the war, but they cannot conscientiously accept
it. However intimately a part of their country they may feel in its
creative enterprises toward a better life, they cannot feel themselves
a part of it in its futile and self-mutilating enterprise of war.
We can be apathetic with a good conscience, for we have other values
and ideals for America. Our country will not suffer for our lack of
patriotism as long as it has that of our industrial masters. Meanwhile,
those who have turned their thinking into war-channels have abdicated
their leadership for this younger generation. They have put themselves
in a limbo of interests that are not the concerns which worry us about
American life and make us feverish and discontented.
Let us compel the war to break in on us, if it must, not go hospitably
to meet it. Let us force it perceptibly to batter in our spiritual
walls. This attitude need not be a fatuous hiding in the sand, denying
realities. When we are broken in on, we can yield to the inexorable.
Those who are conscripted will have been broken in on. If they do not
want to be martyrs, they will have to be victims. They are entitled
to whatever alleviations are possible in an inexorable world. But
the others can certainly resist the attitude that blackens the whole
conscious sky with war. They can resist the poison which makes art
and all the desires for more impassioned living seem idle and even
shameful. For many of us, resentment against the war has meant a
vivider consciousness of what we are seeking in American life.
This search has been threatened by two classes who have wanted to
deflect idealism to the war,--the patriots and the realists. The
patriots have challenged us by identifying apathy with disloyalty. The
reply is that war-technique in this situation is a matter of national
mechanics rather than national ardor. The realists have challenged
us by insisting that the war is an instrument in the working-out of
beneficent national policy. Our skepticism points out to them how soon
their “mastery” becomes “drift,” tangled in the fatal drive toward
victory as its own end, how soon they become mere agents and expositors
of forces as they are. Patriots and realists disposed of, we can pursue
creative skepticism with honesty, and at least a hope that in the
recoil from war we may find the treasures we are looking for.
VI
TWILIGHT OF IDOLS
(October, 1917)
I