Pacifism Examined
The Case against Pacifism. By John Lewis. (Allen and TJnwin. ss.)
A C.RITIC.AL examination of the arguments for the pacifist position was long overdue, and Mr. Lewis is to be congratulated on having done a first-rate and much-needed job. An ex-member of the No More War Movement and the Fellowship of Recon- ciliation, he has disentangled the various strands of opinion which, during the troubled history of the post-war years, made .up what is called the pacifist movement, tracing the splits which each successive crisis induced—after Abyssinia, and again after Munich, a large number of former pacifists found themselves driven to form a united front with those who insisted that Fascist aggression must at all costs be stopped—and drawing attention to the increasingly strange bedfellows with which, it I may be pardoned the mixed metaphor, the pacifist was driven to share his platform. Thus in regard to many issues of immediate policy the pacifist in recent years has found himself allied with Lord 'Beaverbrook, the National Government and the British Union of Fascists. It contributes to the confusion that, as Mr.
Lewis very properly points out, there is not one united front, but two. There is what he calls the "uneasy unity of democrats and capitalists against Fascist aggression," and the unity of pacifists and democrats "against imperialist war." Taking the hint, the experienced reader will gather that Mr. Lewis's book reaches us from the far Left, and will not be surprised to come almost immediately upon the conclusion that "the real struggle is a class struggle ; the war between privilege and the common people. The final struggle will be internal and may issue in civil war."
After his historical introduction Mr. Lewis turns to philo- sophy, for it is as a philosophy of life that pacifism has been presented, and it is as such that Mr. Lewis criticises it. His treatment is exhaustive, ranging over such topics as pacifism as a religion, the relation between pacifism and Christianity, the particular brand of non-violence preached by Gandhi, the causes of war, and the ambiguous position and intentions of Russia. In regard to each of these issues he is at pains to state the pacifist case—to state it fairly and fully by long quotations from the books of its leading exponents—before setting to work to refute it. As one who has himself endeavoured to put forward that case, and who comes in, accordingly, for a considerable share of Mr. Lewis's censure, I hasten to acknowledge both the fair- ness and the formidableness of his criticism. As he rightly points out, there are two very different kinds of pacifism The first, that of the absolutist, is based upon faith. More technically, it consists of a series of deductions from a set of a priori principles intuitively perceived, as, for example, that violence is always wrong, that human life is always and everywhere sacred, that means always determine ends, and that bad means accordingly can only lead to bad ends. Of this position Mr. Lewis's criticism seems to me wholly convincing. War, he says, like everything else, must be judged by its results. The fact that war is horrible does not mean that it is never justified, any more than the fact that the dentist hurts you, knows that he is going to hurt you, and on occasion hurts you deliberately, means that the operations of dentistry are not beneficent. War, in fact, is neither good nor bad in itself, any more than teeth-drilling is good or bad ; whether it is justified depends entirely on its results. We must, then, take each case on merits and look to the results.
This brings us to the position of the utilitarian pacifist who, agreeing so far with Mr. Lewis, nevertheless contends that judged by the standard of human suffering, the results of going to war are always more disastrous than the results of keeping the peace ; at least, if they were not always more disastrous in the past, they have become so today owing to the comprehensive and impersonal destructiveness of modern war. But, says Mr. Lewis, if it can be shown that, under certain conditions, "war can succeed; that, in spite of the tragic cost, there may be in some cases a net gain . . . then utilitarian pacifism as a creed has failed to make good its claims."
It is this precisely that Mr. Lewis endeavours to show. If we may substitute for the words "net gain" the words "smaller loss " (for war assuredly always involves loss, even if it can be successfully maintained that, on a particular occasion the loss is less than would have been involved in clinging to peace and being overrun by a cruel enemy), then I think Mr. Lewis may be said to have established his point. That he would agree to my substitution, the eloquent passage in which he himself puts what amounts to the utilitarian pacifist case affords sufficient testi-
mony. "Civilisation," he says, "has increased our sensitive- ness to human pain and taught us pity. War is making us unlearn this lesson. Civilisation has also schooled us to restrain our more violent impulses. War, once again, throws off the pain- fully achieved discipline of centuries, and we revert to savagery." But the admission that Mr. Lewis has established his point is, as he rightly sees, one that a utilitarian pacifist can at any time make without abandoning his general position. For if, as Bertrand Russell points out, the utilitarian pacifist feels convinced in regard to any particular war that "it promotes human happiness and civilisation," then on his own premises he can feel it to be justified. It is precisely this conviction that many ex-pacifists- they are not, I insist, "ex-utilitarian pacifists "—entertain in re- gard to this war.
If I may venture a criticism, it is that Mr. Lewis does wrong to insist that pacifism has "now become a reactionary faith." Apart altogether from the question of whether on any particular issue the pacifist is right, he is surely not a man who takes a step backward, but a man who points the step forward. Im- practicable at the moment, pacifism must one day become the creed of all civilised men ; if it does not, civilisation will perish, as Mr. Lewis himself recognises, when he tells us that "it there is an alternative to war, we must find it without delay, for without some defence the overthrow of all that stands for progress and decency is inevitable."
It is this alternative that the pacifist is trying to find ; he may be wrong in thinking that he has found it in the present, but unless we are to despair of civilisation, we must admit that
in his creed lies the hope of the future. C. E. M. JoAD.
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