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Title: A War Diary Author: Randolph Bourne Date: 1917 Language: en Topics: war, World War I Source: Retrieved on 16 November 2010 from http://fair-use.org/seven-arts/1917/09/a-war-diary Notes: from Seven Arts, September 1917
Time brings a better adjustment to the war. There had been so many times
when, to those who had energetically resisted its coming, it seemed the
last intolerable outrage. In one’s wilder moments one expected revolt
against the impressment of unwilling men and the suppression of
unorthodox opinion. One conceived the war as breaking down through a
kind of intellectual sabotage diffused through the country. But as one
talks to people outside the cities and away from ruling currents of
opinion, one finds the prevailing apathy shot everywhere with
acquiescence. The war is a bad business, which somehow got fastened on
us. They won’t want to go, but they’ve got to go. One decides that
nothing generally obstructive is going to happen and that it would make
little difference if it did. The kind of war which we are conducting is
an enterprise which the American government does not have to carry on
with the hearty cooperation of the American people but only with their
acquiescence. And that acquiescence seems sufficient to float an
indefinitely protracted war for vague or even largely uncomprehended and
unaccepted purposes. Our resources in men and materials are vast enough
to organize the war-technique without enlisting more than a fraction of
the people’s conscious energy. Many men will not like being sucked into
the actual fighting organism, but as the war goes on they will be sucked
in as individuals and they will yield. There is likely to be no element
in the country with the effective will to help them resist. They are not
likely to resist of themselves concertedly. They will be licked
grudgingly into military shape, and their lack of enthusiasm will in no
way unfit them for use in the hecatombs necessary for the military
decision upon which Allied political wisdom still apparently insists. It
is unlikely that enough men will be taken from the potentially revolting
classes seriously to embitter their spirit. Losses in the well-to-do
classes will be sustained by a sense of duty and of reputable sacrifice.
From the point of view of the worker, it will make little difference
whether his work contributes to annihilation overseas or to construction
at home. Temporarily, his condition is better if it contributes to the
former. We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we
should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily
levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private
enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely
to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem
generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to
use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count
serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular
mandate or understanding.
If human resources are fairly malleable into the war-technique, our
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 co-operation 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 co-operate 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 manoeuvred, 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.
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 tjat tjos 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 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, it 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
America’s 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.
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 be 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 hoping 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.
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 morals 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 shuold 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?
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
fibre 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 30^(th) 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 grovelling
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 has been deeply stirred by what they saw in France and
Belgium, but it was a moral sense relatively unpractised 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.
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 bedevilled 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 ofr 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 passtime, 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 noble 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.
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 ieas must be dynamic or we are
presumptuous in offering them to the world.
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 wit ha 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 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.