A Place in the Sun
I.WE JEWS, more than the rest of the world perhaps, can appreciate to the full the poignant weight of horror which has fallen upon the children of man in the present world-war. This is due, not alone to the time-old sensitiveness of perception in the Jewish Nation which makes it the living heart of the world, but also because the war finds the Jewish people not only inhabiting the zone of war but its sons are on practically every opposing firing-line. Jews therefore can feel fully the measure of crime and folly to which the world stands committed; and if the sense of duty in this hour would not compel them to utterance, necessity alone must make them cry out.
How could this great catastrophe have come about? The obvious official explanations suggest themselves: (a) The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent and his consort; (b) Mobilization and ultimatums of some of the powers involved.
We pause to consider these alleged causes of the cataclysm in the world as printed in the official pro- nunciamentos of the powers, and our mind refuses to accept them as sufficient,. They are not convincing. In the natural sequence of things the hiatus between a nation at peace and the same nation at war seems too tremendous to be bridged so easily. The enormity of the transformation is too great. Here, on the one hand, is a nation of well-disposed, well-intentioned people, full of the kindly amenities of life, suddenly, overnight, metamorphosized into unappeasable, blood- thirsting enemies!
Does the human race admit of such radical meto- morphoses? If so, then why are we so shocked by them? If not, then how comes this one about so easily?
In short, let us place ever so much insistence upon the political pretensions of nations, they will not seem sufficient causes of war unless we change our conception of the nature of human beings or rather of the motive-forces in human life. A frank analysis of the latter would tend to disclose the mingled fascination and horror of the onlookers of the war as compounded of the same specie of exaltation and shame of the participants.
The human race has emerged from struggle, from lesser struggle to greater struggle or, as it might be put, from the struggle of the sword to the struggle of mind and spirit—for the latter are a more powerful form of struggle in the same way as the force of electricity, though invisible, is more than the force of horse-power which is visible. In the course of its struggles the human race has fixed standards of struggle, standards for the individual and standards for national groups. The standards fixed for the national group are not as high as those for the individual. Moreover, when a standard of struggle has been attained among individuals, fear of the contumely of men and the penal statutes which are enacted to keep men to the highest common standard of struggle, prevents the individual or, at any rate, checks him to a degree from the danger of falling back to the old abyss from whence he emerged. But while the individual is thus com- oassed about by his sense of personal responsibility,
the national group has no standards of struggle to which it holds itself amenable, Neither law nor tradition has fixed the standard of struggle for the national group and there are no dangers compelling it to a permanent standard of struggle save only the temporary, shifting considerations of expediency or fear of this or that Power or Powers. Under these conditions, it is not only difficult but practically impossible for one isolated national group to consistently maintain a higher standard of struggle than the rest of the powers or even to hold permanently to any standard. Thus it is that nations to-day, in a moment of the darkness of fear or lust can slip back with such fatal ease into the morass of land-snatching in which they are still wallowing!
Some years ago, I endeavored, in precise language, though in a somewhat unusual form, to set forth the law of struggle, the eternal will to struggle, and indicated the really subordinate place of war in the infinite gamut of struggle—that is, that in our times, war was not the highest expression of struggle but a reversion to type, due, among other reasons, to a distorted, perverted notion in the world—#fostered partly through selfish interests, partly through ignorance—that war is the capstone of human endeavor, whereas it should be relegated to the junk of outworn forms of struggle, even though it has latterly been fitted up with some stray odds-and-ends and knick-knacks of science. Perhaps if the law of struggle and its true avenues of expression and increase had been given a,small part of the study devoted to armaments and tactics, the world to-day might not have witnessed the universal collapse of comity among nations, the inevitable bankruptcy of morals, the degradation of blood and darkness hovering over the general avalanche of retrogression which has swept down upon the world.
So much for the sub-conscious factors in the psychology of mankind which makes war in general possible to-day. But there are conscious factors which many claim must lead inevitably to the conflict of arms. It is these conscious factors or, to be more exact, conscious motives, which must be examined for the truth or fallacies which they may contain. In this connection, it would be well to bear in mind that mere hostility to armaments is meaningless unless we indorse the inevitable corollary that it is wrong to defend oneself or to be prepared to defend oneself against ag- ‚gression even when there is danger of aggression. What we must attack is that state of mind in ourselves as well as in others which believes that there are ends to be obtained—ends other than those of self-defense— which can only be obtained through the conflict of arms and which are worthy of being acquired through this means. I shall endeavor to show that, although the resort to arms for the purpose of self-preservation is justifiable, as a matter of fact, ıt is the lust for ends other than that of self-defense which makes the creation of national armaments necessary even for the purpose of self-defense!
II.
There are many who are of the opinon that the causes of the war are political and economic. Do these factors exhaust the motives of this world-fall? Let us see. Let us imagine the two principal belliger-