(II) Certain biologists, of whom Sir Arthur Keith is the most eminent, consider that war acts as ‘nature’s pruning hook,’ ensuring the survival of the fittest among civilized individuals and nations. This is obviously nonsensical. War tends to eliminate the young and strong and to spare the unhealthy. Nor is there any reason for supposing that people with traditions of violence and a good technique of war-making are superior to other peoples. The most valuable human beings are not necessarily the most war-like. Nor as a matter of historical fact is it always the most war-like who survive. We can sum up by saying that, so far as individuals are concerned, war selects dysgenically; so far as nations and peoples are concerned it selects purely at random, sometimes ensuring the domination and survival of the more war-like peoples, sometimes, on the contrary, ensuring their destruction and the survival of the unwarlike.
(III) There exist at the present time certain primitive human societies, such as that of the Eskimos, in which war is unknown and even unthinkable. All civilized societies, however, are war-like. The question arises whether the correlation between war and civilization is necessary and unavoidable. The evidence of archaeology seems to point to the conclusion that war made its appearance at a particular moment in the history of early civilization. There is reason to suppose that the rise of war was correlated with an abrupt change in the mode of human consciousness. This change, as Dr. J. D. Unwin suggests,[9] may itself have been correlated with increased sexual continence on the part of the ruling classes of the war-like societies. The archaeological symptom of this change is the almost sudden appearance of royal palaces and elaborate funerary monuments. The rise of war appears to be connected with the rise of self-conscious leaders, preoccupied with the ideas of personal domination and personal survival after death. Even to-day, when economic considerations are supposed to be supreme, ideas of ‘glory’ and ‘immortal fame’ still ferment in the minds of the dictators and generals, and play an important part in the causation of war.
(IV) The various civilizations of the world have adopted fundamentally different attitudes towards war. Compare the Chinese and Indian attitudes towards war with the European. Europeans have always worshipped the military hero and, since the rise of Christianity, the martyr. Not so the Chinese. The ideal human being, according to Confucian standards, is the just, reasonable, humane and cultivated man, living at peace in an ordered and harmonious society. Confucianism, to quote Max Weber, ‘prefers a wise prudence to mere physical courage and declares that an untimely sacrifice of life is unfitting for a wise man.’ Our European admiration for military heroism and martyrdom has tended to make men believe that a good death is more important than a good life, and that a long course of folly and crime can be cancelled out by a single act of physical courage. The mysticism of Lao Tsu (or whoever was the author of the Tao Teh Ching) confirms and completes the rationalism of Confucius. The Tao is an eternal cosmic principle that is, at the same time, the inmost root of the individual’s being. Those who would live in harmony with Tao must refrain from assertiveness, self-importance and aggressiveness, must cultivate humility, and return good for evil.
Since the time of Confucius and Lao Tsu, Chinese ideals have been essentially pacifistic. European poets have glorified war; European theologians have found justifications for religious persecution and nationalistic aggression. This has not been so in China. Chinese philosophers and Chinese poets have almost all been anti-militarists. The soldier was regarded as an inferior being, not to be put on the same level with the scholar or administrator. It is one of the tragedies of history that the Westernization of China should have meant the progressive militarization of a culture which, for nearly three thousand years, has consistently preached the pacifist ideal. Conscription was imposed on large numbers of Chinese in 1936, and the soldier is now held up for admiration.
Comic, but significant, is the following quotation from the New York Times of June 17th, 1937: ‘Sin Wan Pao, Shanghai’s leading Chinese language newspaper, advised Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to-day to follow the examples of General Yang Sen . . . war lord and commander of the Twentieth Army in Szechwan Province. The general has twenty-seven wives. “Only 40 years old, General Yang has a child for every year of his life,” the newspaper said. “General Yang has established complete military training for his offspring. It begins when a young Yang reaches the age of 7, with strict treatment by the time the child is 14. The family has an exclusive military camp. When visitors come, the Yang children hold a military reception and march past the guests in strict review order.” ’ One laughs; but the unfortunate truth is that General Yang and the forty little Yangs in their strict review order are grotesquely symptomatic of the new, worse, Western spirit of a China that has turned its back on the wisdom of Confucius and Lao Tsu and gone whoring after European militarism. Japanese aggression is bound to intensify this new militaristic spirit in China. Within a couple of generations from now, it is quite possible that China will be an aggressive imperialist power.
Indian pacifism finds its completest expression in the teaching of Buddha. Buddhism, like Hinduism, teaches ahimsa, or harmlessness towards all living beings. It forbids even laymen to have anything to do with the manufacture and sale of arms, with the making of poisons and intoxicants, with soldiering or the slaughter of animals. Alone of all the great world religions, Buddhism made its way without persecution, censorship or inquisition. In all these respects its record is enormously superior to that of Christianity, which made its way among people wedded to militarism and which was able to justify the bloodthirsty tendencies of its adherents by an appeal to the savage Bronze-Age literature of the Old Testament. For Buddhists, anger is always and unconditionally disgraceful. For Christians, brought up to identify Jehovah with God, there is such a thing as ‘righteous indignation.’ Thanks to this possibility of indignation being righteous, Christians have always felt themselves justified in making war and committing the most hideous atrocities.
The fact that it should have been possible for the three principal civilizations of the world to adopt three distinct philosophic attitudes towards war is encouraging; for it proves that there is nothing ‘natural’ about our present situation in relation to war. The existence of war and of our political and theological justifications of war is no more ‘natural’ than were the sanguinary manifestations of sexual jealousy, so common in Europe up to the beginning of last century and now of such rare occurrence. To murder one’s unfaithful wife, or the lover of one’s sister or mother, was something that used to be ‘done.’ Being socially correct, it was regarded as inevitable, a manifestation of unchanging ‘human nature.’ Such murders are no longer fashionable among the best people, therefore no longer seem to us ‘natural.’ The malleability of human nature is such that there is no reason why, if we so desire and set to work in the right way, we should not rid ourselves of war as we have freed ourselves from the weary necessity of committing a crime passionnel every time a wife, mistress or female relative gets herself seduced. War is not a law of nature, nor even a law of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist; and we know, as a matter of historical fact, that the intensity of that wish has varied from absolute zero to a frenzied maximum. The wish for war in the contemporary world is widespread and of high intensity. But our wills are to some extent free; we can wish otherwise than we actually do. It is enormously difficult for us to change our wishes in this matter; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible. We must be grateful for even the smallest crumbs of comfort.
II. Causes of War
War exists because people wish it to exist. They wish it to exist for a variety of reasons.
(I) Many people like war because they find their peace-time occupations either positively humiliating and frustrating, or just negatively boring. In their studies on suicide Durkheim and, more recently, Halbwachs have shown that the suicide rate among non-combatants tends to fall during war-time to about two-thirds of its normal figure. This decline must be put down to the following causes: to the simplification of life during war-time (it is in complex and highly developed societies that the suicide rate is highest); to the intensification of nationalist sentiment to a point where most individuals are living in a state of chronic enthusiasm; to the fact that life during war-time takes on significance and purposefulness, so that even the most intrinsically boring job is ennobled as ‘war-work’; to the artificial prosperity induced, at any rate for a time, by the expansion of war industries; to the increased sexual freedom which is always claimed by societies, all or some of whose members live under the menace of sudden death. Add to this the fact that life in war-time is (or at least was in previous wars) extremely interesting, at least during the first years of the war. Rumour runs riot, and the papers are crammed every morning with the most thrilling news. To the influence of the press
