Conscience and Compulsion (1917)

John Dewey

 Those in contact with youth know that a considerable number have undergone a serious moral strain in the weeks since war was declared by the United States. Much larger numbers have had to make a moral adjustment which if not involving a tragedy of the inner life has been effected only with some awkward trampling of what has been cherished as the finer flowers of the soul. And how could it have been otherwise? I doubt if any propaganda has ever been carried on with greater persistence or with greater success- so far as affecting feelings was concerned-than that for peace during the decade prior to 1914. The times were so ripe that the movement hardly had to be pushed. Our remoteness from the immediate scene of international hatreds, the bad aftertaste from the Spanish-American War, the contentment generated by successful industrialism, the general humanitarianism of which political progressivism was as much a symptom as social settlements, the gradual substitution of calculating rationalism for the older romantic patriotism-all of these things and many more fell in with that general spirit of goodwill which is essential America, to create a sense of war as the supreme stupidity. War came. But there persisted the feeling that it was "over there" and that we at peace were the preservers of sanity in a world gone mad. Some of the phrases used in this sense by President Wilson gave great offense to our present allies, but they were the phrases which best expressed the average American feeling.

 At last we were in it ourselves. And is it strange that thou- I sands of young people who had taken the peace movement with moral seriousness found themselves upset? Already an attempt is making to befog the past. It is intimated that our antebellum I pacifism was a compound of sentimentality, cowardice and a degenerate materialism bred of excessive comfort. Nothing could be further from the truth. Current pacifism was identified with good business, philanthropy, morality and religion. Combine Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Bryan and you have as near the typical American as you are likely to find. Especially is it true that the churches took up the cause of peace as a great moral issue. Clergymen obliged to shun political issues because they were so closely linked with struggle for economic power gladly added peace to divorce and temperance as subjects which were safe and also "live." The American habit of discussing political questions in a moral vocabulary found full scope with peace and war. In our colleges the Y.M.C.A.'s were even more ardent promoters of peace sentiments than were intercollegiate socialist clubs

. We are not an over-agile people morally. No one has yet depicted the immense moral wrench involved in our passage from friendly neutrality to participation in war. I hardly believe the turnover could have been accomplished under a leadership less skilful than that of President Wilson, so far as he succeeded in creating the belief that just because the pacific moral impulse retained all its validity Germany must be defeated in order that it find full fruition. That was a bridge on which many a conscience crossed with no greater dexterity in balancing than conscience frequently finds necessary. But there were many who still had doubts, qualms, clouds of bewilderment. How could wrong so suddenly become right? Among the questioners were many whom we are wont to term idealistic, men and women who have the most difficulty in identifying the conventional and the popular with the right and good. And it is among these that there was enacted a genuine tragedy when the impulse to loyalty, to service, to unity came into conflict with their moral abhorrence of war, which they had learned to look upon as murder, and murder of a peculiarly stupid sort. Conscription did not originate the crisis in moral experience, but it brought it acutely to a focus.

 I can but think that such young people deserve something better than accusations, varying from pro-Germanism and the crime of Socialism to traitorous disloyalty, which the newspapers so readily "hurl" at them-to borrow their own language.  Nor does it quite cover the ground to urge that genuinely conscientious objectors be given that work, when they are drafted, which will put the least heavy load possible upon their consciences. The country ought to be great enough in spirit as it is great enough in men and in the variety of tasks to be performed to make this a matter of course. But it is to be feared that if local tribunals take their cue from current newspaper objurgations they will regard it as their duty to punish the objectors as dangerous malefactors instead of asking to what tasks they may most usefully be as-signed. It is not, however, the problem of practical administration that I raise, but the nature of the moral education which has been revealed in our American aversion to war and in the ways in which persons perplexed by the coercions of wartime have met their dilemmas. For at the very worst most of these young people appear to me victims of a moral innocency and an inexpertness which have been engendered by the moral training which they have undergone.

It is perhaps a penalty which we have paid for our unusual development of good nature and goodwill that our moral training emphasizes the emotions rather than intelligence, ideals rather than specific purposes, the nurture of personal motives rather than the creation of social agencies and environments. The tendency to dispose of war by bringing it under the commandment against murder, the belief that by not doing something, by keeping out of a declaration of war, our responsibilities could be met, a somewhat mushy belief in the existence of disembodied moral forces which require only an atmosphere of feelings to operate so as to bring about what is right, the denial of the efficacy of force, no matter how controlled, to modify disposition; in short, the inveterate habit of separating ends from means and then identifying morals with ends thus emasculated, such things as these are the source of much of the perplexity of conscience from which idealistic youth has suffered. The evangelical Protestant tradition has fostered the tendency to locate morals in personal feelings instead of in the control of social situations, and our legal tradition has bred the habit of attaching feelings to fixed rules and injunctions instead of to social conditions and consequences of action as these are revealed to the scrutiny of intelligence...

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