Mary Whiton Calkins

“ The one thing which unites the world to-day is the desire for the end of the Great War. The larger desire which animates many men is the passionate longing for an end of all war. But checking this desire, strangling this hope, are two widespread dogmas: the psychological dogma that man is inevitably a fighter and the ethical dogma that through war, and through war alone, he can rise to the supreme height of self-sacrifice. ”

“ We asked whether war is an inevitable expression of human instinct and whether anything less than war can move a man to supreme self-sacrifice. And we have found that the instincts lying at the heart of war can be converted to the uses of a strenuous and militant peace and that the instrument of their conversion is loyalty to the Great Society, a loyalty rooted in the deep-lying social instincts. ”

“ Fear is, therefore, absolutely incompatible with pugnacity since no animal can at one and the same time shrink back and make attack, feel afraid and feel angry. And yet it is plain matter of observation that fear incites to pugnacity, and in two ways. On the one hand, the fleeing animal, brought to bay, turns on its pursuers and the desperately frightened child suddenly attacks his tormenter and thus the instinct of fear suddenly gives way to anger. ”

“ The bold ideal of militant pacificism is, however, to preserve and even to strengthen the fighting instinct, with all these martial virtues which it inspires, but to direct it to radically new ends. The militant pacificist, in other words, expressly challenges the assumption that pugnacity can find moral expression only in the war of human being against human being. He believes that men should go on fighting but that they should attack no longer human lives but human ignorance, human injustice, and the great nature-evils. ”

“ This Greatest War will never be brought to victory until it enlists us all. And those who arm for this conflict must have eyes open to descry injustice and misery, minds trained to judge fairly, hearts pulsing with sympathy, and loyal spirits strong to fight to the finish. ”

“ In this crisis of conflicting needs—on the one hand the crying need of all nations for men of courage and self-sacrifice who will fight for the ends of justice and humanity, on the other hand, the dire need of nations desolated, blighted and impoverished, to be rid of war—the militant pacificist, in season and out of season, preaches his fighting gospel of a war against obdurate nature-evils, against floods and fires, famine and disease ”

“ And the whole gruesome record of war attests the urgency of the pacificist’s claim that pugnacity must be redirected toward inanimate instead of human objects. For the great lesson which history imprints on the mind of the candid reader is the tragic certainty that all wars gain their ultimate ends, whether great or petty, by the violation of personality, by the destruction of homes, by the paralysis of art and industry and letters. The irony of the terrible situation is precisely this: that even wars entered on from high motives must rouse greed, cupidity, and blind hatred ”

“ At their surface value these considerations seem to support the theory of those who disparage the war against war. For pugnacity has appeared in its true colors as a strong and widely diffused instinct, excited when any other instinct is hampered or thwarted. And those who assert the inevitableness of war assume that a man is the prey of his own instincts and helpless in the face of them; that they have a right of way and must ride rough shod over the paths of his life even when these intersect the ways of other lives. ”

“ The abolition of war requires nothing less than the divorce of pugnacity from the great egoistic instincts, fear and avarice, with which since the dawn of human history it has been most intimately affiliated. For fear and acquisitiveness are instincts so strong and so primitive that, reinforced by pugnacity, they lead almost inevitably to the attack on personality, on home and on society, which is war. Those who bewail war as inevitable reiterate their conviction that such a separation of pugnacity from fear and greed and physical aggressiveness is impossible. ”

“ And because pugnacity gives impetus and scope to heroic courage, therefore the fighting instinct will ever be glorified by men.
A more hesitating estimate will be placed on the very frequent coalition between pugnacity and the instinct of acquisitiveness, in its two forms, getting and hoarding. This is the instinct illustrated, at its extremes, by the squirrel who fills the hollows of the trees with nuts and by the financier who first makes and then prudently invests his money. Everybody knows that pugnacity is far more often excited by balked acquisitiveness than by thwarted daring. ”

“ There remains the insistent practical question: how, precisely, may we redirect pugnacity? How may we teach ourselves to make war no longer against the lives and homes of our fellow men but against their errors and ours, and against our common enemy, hostile Nature? ”

“ For only by disciplined obedience to their leaders, by the harmonious exercise of their powers and by the outpouring of their common toil, their time, their talents, their fortunes, their lives, if need be, can men successfully attack opposing nature-forces and entrenched human evil and victoriously fight for better customs, better laws, better men—in a word, for a regenerated and redeemed society. ”

“ And here, again, pugnacity is estimated not for itself but according to the moral value of the instinct which excites it and to which it lends its support. The individual or nation which fights gallantly for an object rightly gained and rightly held is known as a heroic defender; whereas the attack on property or rights possessed by other men is condemned as burglary or piracy.
Pugnacity, in the third place, is as all biologists know very often the outgrowth of fear. Fear, like pugnacity, is a primitive reaction in the face of danger. ”

“ War against human life will cease when these social instincts dominate pugnacity. But the New War, against Nature and against human greed and sloth and cruelty, will only then be fairly initiated. In this new war unjust nations, like unjust individuals, will be resisted but not destroyed. And the people for whom this new war is fought will be no longer the tribe, or state, or nation, but the great world-self, the universal community of sentient beings. ”

“ And on all sides are walls of privilege to be demolished, strongholds of public inefficiency and graft to be stormed, attacks on democracy to be repelled, insidious influences of sloth and luxury to be checked; and human rights to be defended against relentless industrial competition and selfish social content. ”

“ Now daring, morally controlled, is the virtue of courage; and so it comes about that the fighting-instinct, called into play by curiosity and daring, is closely associated with this heroic virtue of courage. In the thick of the fray, the fighters know no fear; they ignore danger; they hurl themselves against the bayonets of the enemy; they rush recklessly into the open swept by murderous shell-fire ”

“ And students of history attest the fact that even nations, though public opinion so largely exempts them from moral obligations in their international relations, do yet on rare occasions in circumstances which might well lead to war voluntarily and without compulsion treat each other with justice tempered by courage—yielding and exacting the fulfilment of international obligation. Thus, on the basis of actual experience we may assert the conviction that the fighting instinct of a virile people may be under the control of its social instincts. ”

“ In this conviction, the pacificist is evidently in line with the psychological teaching that an instinct may be modified and still cherished by being supplied with a new object. And in his effort to divert pugnacity from the ends of war, he is seeking to preserve for human use not merely lives—for which, as physical values, he claims no special exemption—but the great spiritual values, human love, human virtue, human toil. ”

“ The hopeless ideal of abolishing war should, therefore, make way for the intelligent purpose of replacing unjust, cruel, and dishonorable fighting by just, humane, and honorable warfare. To estimate properly the argument from the nature of instinct to the dogma of perpetual war it is necessary to study in some detail the instincts lying at the heart of war and, in particular, pugnacity. By instincts are meant feelings and bodily reactions reappearing in every generation, either born in individuals or else arising at a definite period of their lives as original endowments of their nature. ”

“ For this great war which shall liberate men from the blight of nature, and from the neglect and injustice of their fellows, the time is over-ripe. From the one side, the heroic bodily risks of physician, explorer, and engineer make their claim on men’s courage and devotion. ”

“ Pugnacity, in the first place, is sometimes excited when the instinct of curiosity is thwarted; as when a child shows anger if balked in his investigation of the contents of a wastebasket. Curiosity is an instinct common to animals and to human beings and so strong that hunters often appeal to it in decoying wild animals. ”

“ But every biologist recognizes gregariousness, approach in its social form, the basal instinct which crowds animals into herds and is manifested in the flight of birds in flocks, protectiveness, the instinctive attitude of parent to offspring, and imitation, the instinctive attitude toward leaders or parents, as primitive endowments of animal and of human selves. ”

“ The pointer whose instinct to kill is checked by his instinct to return to his master illustrates the modification of one instinct by subordination to another. And, similarly, the shyness of a little child may be wholly neutralized by the curiosity which drives him nearer with every puff of the red balloon which the strange person holds out to him. There is no reason to suppose that these practical, psychological methods, so constantly employed in the education of animals and human beings, are inapplicable in the self-discipline of nations. ”

“ Like all the instincts pugnacity has two aspects, the mental and the physical, and appears in the forms of anger and of combat. In both its forms, it is a very early, a very permanent and a tremendously powerful instinct. ”

“ And those who idealize war as the “sacrifice of individual motives to group motives” [1] insist that the only alternative to war is a selfish, cowardly and supine peace. But students of animal and human life know the power of the social instincts. ”

“ Pugnacity is always incited by opposition. Animals and men alike fight when they are thwarted or balked in the free play of any instinct, or (if we confine ourselves to human pugnacity) in the exercise of any volitional activity. It follows that pugnacity is excited in many specifically different ways and that it is affiliated now with one and now with another instinct. ”

“ Pugnacity, finally, may be excited in an altogether different way and may reinforce instincts of an entirely different character. Men and animals alike sometimes fight not through balked courage, or thwarted acquisitiveness, or in swift reaction against paralyzing fear but to protect or succor others, that is, because their social and sympathetic instincts are violated. ”

“ Such a study at once discloses the fact that the effort to modify an instinct in a purely negative way, by merely willing that it subside or change its direction, is utterly futile. By such a method the attention is simply turned full upon the instinct-to-be-modified with the inevitable result of stimulating it. The control of the instincts is, in truth, always positive and it takes two main forms. ”

“ For it can not too often be reiterated that liking and sympathy, as well as anger and acquisition, are instinctive impulses—impulses which may be transmuted into the virtues of generosity and justice. ”

“ The effort to crush the basal instincts betrays a very inadequate conception of the place of the instincts in human life. For they are the very springs of life and we should. impoverish ourselves if we checked their outpouring of life and energy. ”

“ Pugnacity is widely diffused among animals, and very early observed among children; and it persists, a strong instinct, throughout adult life. People differ, to be sure, in the degree of their combativeness; and one man’s pugnacious feelings and actions are far more readily excited than another’s. Yet every normal man is a potential and, at times, an actual fighter ”

“ And the world has need of these human qualities. We would not if we could blot out of the great book of human history the names of the warriors: David and Hector, Leonidas and Cesar, Richard of the Lion Heart and Henry of Navarre, Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, Drake and Farragut, Sir Philip Sidney and Rupert Brooke. ”

“ But we moderns, it is urged, with our scientific training—we, alas, know that we are very much lower than the angels and only a little higher than the beasts who must prey upon each other in the fierce struggle for survival on which depends the development of living beings. ”

“ It is one of the earliest and most compelling of the instincts—shown by all animals, early observed in babies, directed toward objects, animate or inanimate, of the most varied sorts, and manifesting itself in the sharply contrasted forms of flight and immobility. ”