Ethical and religious problems of the war, fourteen addresses

Prefatory Note

The war in which Great Britain is now engaged has many aspects, and springs out of a long historical development. With its manifold antecedents the Addresses in this volume are not concerned, nor do they attempt to deal with the various problems, social, economic, industrial, international, which must more and more engage the thoughts of all who look forward to its close.

But this great tragedy involves many minds in grievous perplexity. Not only has it overthrown the hopes for the securer establishment of peace among the leading European nations which had been steadily growing since the first Hague Conference in 1899, ^ has shaken the fundamental convictions of the righteous order of the world, and the significance of the whole evolution of humanity upon this globe.

We have been placed in a position in which what appeared to the Government and the vast majority of the nation the only right thing to do, required the use of means in violent conflict with our ideals of peace and goodwill. Duty seemed entangled in a deep-seated ethical contradiction ; one law demanded action which trampled on the other. To vindicate the principles of international right it was necessary to sacrifice the conception of human brotherhood, and civilization and Christianity threatened to disappear in a sudden relapse into barbarism. In this dilemma the whole fabric of moral values is threatened. To help in restoring a firm hold upon them, without peremptorily dictating the forms which they vi Prefatory Note

shall take in application to existing political issues — a task of which only supreme knowledge and insight are capable — is one of the objects of this little book.

In the brief compass of a few pages it is possible only to suggest lines of thought, or sketch the course of an argument. The writers who have so kindly responded to the invitation to contribute, have chosen their own themes on the theoretic or the practical side. They have written in entire independence ; they profess no uniformity of view even on the main conceptions of philosophy or religion, any more than on the personalities and events which have produced the present strife. But they are united in believing that at the heart of this terrific struggle the moral and spiritual interpretation of life still stands supreme, and claims from us unfaltering loyalty. To establish its control over the jarring elements of national jealousies and ambitions is the task of the friends of humanity whether among the combatant or neutral nations. May the time soon come when their energies can be united, and their aim fulfilled.

J. E. C.

Oxford, June 5, 1916.

Contents

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The Ethical Problems of the War i

By Gilbert Murray

II

It might seem as though the commonly accepted doctrine of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest had decided this question in advance. It is true that the crude application of the theory of natural selection by some German writers has recently called forth vigorous protests on the part of biologists. We are reminded 1 that survival in the struggle for existence is achieved on the whole not by direct attack of species upon species, but by ' natural suitability to the organic and inorganic environment and capacity to adapt behaviour to circumstances.' But this fails to meet the difficulty in so far as it still leaves us with the blind forces of natural appetite as the dominating factor in evolution. To find the full answer we have to look deeper.

That ' struggle ' has a place and an important

1 e.g. by Prof. P. Chalmers Mitchell in Evolution and the War.

one there can at this time of day be no doubt at all. But to admit this is one thing ; to make struggle and death the all-inclusive or even the fundamental and main factor in the history of creation is another. The more we are coming to know of the conditions of life, both human and sub-human, the less reason there is seen to be for this conclusion. The beginning of the reaction against the all-sufficiency of struggle in accounting for the sub-human world may be dated from Huxley's celebrated Romanes Lecture. In the controversy that ensued two things emerged. It was pointed out that it takes all sorts to make a world. That there may be struggle, there must be combatants. If the sheep ate all the grass and the wolves all the sheep there would be first one large wolf, and then there would be nothing at all. This points to what Sir Leslie Stephen called a tacit alliance between all the creatures as something that somehow goes deeper than their internecine wars. Somewhere there must be a compensatory system that keeps the world in balance. As we come up the scale we begin to see how the place of the tacit alliance is taken by active co-operation between the members of the groups, making it possible for the weak things of the world, the sparrow on the house-top, the duck in the village pond — said to be the most widely distributed species that is known — to confound the mighty and to inherit the earth. Step by step moreover with the power of co-operation and mutual protection goes the power of intelligent adaptation of environment, whereby survival is secured and ' the balance of power ' in nature is maintained with a growing economy of life.

Human life is not only continuous with sub-human in containing from the first the elements of co-operation and adaptation of as well as to the environment, but has that in it which pledges it to the elimination of the method of struggle as wasteful alike in respect to the lower and the higher ends of life. If the view that ' man is a wolf to man ' is a libel on the wolf, it is much more of a libel upon man. Human society begins in the family where the factors of co-operation, constructive communication of life go infinitely deeper than rivalry, destruction, appropriation. Taking it even at its lowest, if we knew nothing of human life but the family, the motto would read far more appropriately ' man is a god to man.' It is true that if there were nothing but family human life would still be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' It is further true that in the process of expansion to tribe and nation, war and conquest have necessarily played a large part. But even here it is probable that peaceful inclusion and organization has played a far larger, and, however this may be, that the stability of tribal and political unions has rested far more on the sense of a common interest in a life of peaceful labour and mutual goodwill than on a mutual or a common fear.

What is thus brought home to us from considerations of what we may call the natural development of human society becomes clearer still when we consider the purposes which at a certain stage in that development men come to set before themselves as a conscious aim. I am aware that there are those who hold that the deeper motive of economic and political organization — of the elimination of war — within a nation or group is to be sought for not in any principle of good in human nature, or in the desire to improve life for its own sake, but in the necessity of strengthening the State for purposes of defence or aggression in a struggle which so far from being really mitigated has now reached a far acuter stage in becoming intertribal or international. But we only need to realize what such a view commits us to to see how untenable it is. Among other absurdities it commits us to holding that human nature can accept one principle and standard of action and feeling within the bounds of the nation and another beyond them. 'You may throw nature out with a fork, it will ever return,' holds of the better as of the worse element in it. You may draw men out in trenches by nations with orders to hate, to maim, and to kill — a common custom > a joke, a memory of home, will drive them into one another's arms in spite of you. Look at it as we may the sentence on mere force as the principle of progress has been passed in the recesses of the human mind and will. On the other hand, the end has been fixed by the ideal that forms the pulse of the activity of both in the fullness of their own development, a fullness only achievable by the method of peaceful expansion and inclusion.

What light does all this throw on the problem with which we started ? We may be far from the God of the Timaeus, whose essence is good, and still further from the loving Father of the Gospels, but there are one or two things which we can say in the light of it which at any rate may, if we so desire, be taken as a step towards them.

1. The things that hold creation together lie deeper than the things that divide and set part against part, the area covered by concord and co-operation is wider than the area covered by discord and rivalry.

2. In human life the principle we are speaking of works not merely as a natural affection. It works also as an ideal of perfection demanding that the world of human relations be so ordered that it shall as far as possible be a reflection of the fullness of human nature. ' The animals,' says Kant, * live according to law, man lives according to the idea of law.' What appears in them as an instinct, appears in man as a moral order which stands for everything he holds most precious : his home, his material possessions, his city and country, his art and science, and all spiritual powers and capacities.

3. Of this and of the laws as of the spirit of concord by which they are sustained we must say that they are no mere human creation for finite purposes of national power and self-assertion. Rather as Antigone says of them, 4 They are the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. Their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.'

4. What to popular theism including Kant's is a Divine law claiming submission from without may to a deeper view be the witness of the spirit to its own higher will.

' God is law, say the wise : O Soul, and lei us rejoice, For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet His voice.

Law is God, say some : no God at all, says the fool ; For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool ;

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man

cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this vision — were it not He ?'