Moral Equivalents and Other Bugle Calls

By Stefan Kanfer

Not everyone knew the author, but the phrase was familiar: "the moral equivalent of war." It was quoted without attribution by President Jimmy Carter last week in an attempt to mobilize the nation against the squandering of energy. But the words were first uttered in 1910 by Philosopher William James, who had something else in mind.

The American pragmatist hated war but nonetheless nourished a great admiration for the military virtues: hardihood, collective fervor, discipline. If these could be diverted from the battlefield, he reasoned, the nation could harness the spirit and energy usually evoked only by local conflict or foreign adventure and be the richer for it. He called for, instead of military service, a "conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature."

The italics were his. Like his 19th century compatriots, James perceived Nature as a capital villain equipped with an arsenal of droughts and floods, hurricanes and plagues. What better use of the national zeal than to tame these forces for the commonweal?

The carnage of World War I seemed to annihilate such noble proposals. Values reversed themselves: the military virtues, it appeared, could only be found in the military; war seemed the only way to rally the nation.

Yet the James ideal would not die. During Britain's General Strike of 1926, chaos beckoned; instead the populace cooperated, and the nation was actually strengthened by the imminence of peacetime catastrophe. In the '30s Depression, the moral equivalent of war was articulated and taken literally by the Roosevelt Administration. Men of military age marched with shovels instead of rifles in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

World War II could not entirely extinguish the old Jamesian values. John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps was an attempt to conscript the young without uniforms or weaponry; during the debates of the space race, Aerospace Executive James McDonnell called the race to the planets "a creative substitute for war." On the war-ravaged Continent, Jean Monnet had a less visionary plan: the Common Market. As he saw it, the interdependence of French and German technology and resources would substitute economic values for military rivalries, altering the context in which Europe's traditional tribalism had functioned for so long with such frequently hideous results. With some help from the Soviet menace, that part of Monnet's grand design has worked pretty well. But his further aim of creating a politically united Europe remains a vision.

In the '60s America, war no longer served to create unity but to sever it. It was the home-grown calamity of a blackout that welded a populace; the oil embargo served not to weaken national resolve, but to bolster it --although that resolve ebbed when the gas pumps flowed. In these cases, moral equivalency worked because the crises were perceived as serious but not desperate (the embargo) or desperate but not serious (the blackout). Americans could wryly agree with Historian D.W. Brogan's citation of the contrast between democratic government and the nondemocratic, which "is like a splendid ship, with all its sails set; it moves majestically on, then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is like a raft. It never sinks, but damn it, your feet are always in the water."

Hot water this time. The energy crisis, like the Depression, is serious and desperate (though not immediately desperate). It will not be cured with the good-humored

resignation of people aiding one another through a darkened city, or by cursing the imbroglio of the Middle East.

As usual, people see in it their favorite causes or villains.

For example, the new anti-growth puritans, enemies of enlarging G.N.P., also use the present situation to reinforce their arguments (though without a sensible rate of growth, the American society is marked for a stagnation in which the poor and disfranchised are given no exit). Can differing visions--not to mention the ordinary, everyday desire to get along--be pulled together into a joint resolve under that Jamesian phrase?

The label of War Substitute will not quite adhere to the energy crisis. Millions would agree with Scholar Irving Kristol, who acknowledges that the problem of finite energy is real enough. "I think it's reasonable to ask democratic people for self-sacrifice for limited periods of time for a clearly defined purpose," he says, "but I see no sense in it for an indefinite period." Yet an indefinite period of self-discipline is what Americans face. Perhaps the President should have chosen a more appropriate metaphor; the current crisis is more like an open-ended siege than a war with an expected end. Barring some technological miracle, that siege will persist beyond this generation and its survivors. It must be borne a bit at a time until Americans revise the way they live. Contrary to William James' phrase, today it is not Nature that needs to be subdued, and perhaps not even Human Nature. There is a very real desire, shared by mankind the world over, for a common cause, even a common destiny. But what is required to provoke enlistments today is not as simple as war. Carter's program is so complicated in part because the paradoxical balance of free enterprise and federal supervision, of expansion and conservation, must be maintained in the present America. The President might have been more accurate--if less inspiring--with the words of Novelist Henry James, William's brother: "It's a complex fate being an American." Stefan Kanfer

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