Education for All, Balanced Budget or Not

[This lengthy entry — pared down from a much longer original — followed an evening of caroling by my father and his two siblings while home for the Christmas holiday. After meeting a young farmer among the carolers, my father went on to discuss his belief that all people should have access to the highest educational opportunities of which they’re capable. In this sentiment I see a foreshadowing of his eventual work in university administration and development. My father argues that, if our country is able to pay whatever the cost necessary to wage war, it can also pay the cost of offering the best educational opportunities to all its citizens, regardless of their economic circumstances.

As in the previous posting, my father states his opinion based on lessons learned during the Great Depression — i.e. the need for government spending to address pressing societal and economic needs, regardless of “such bogies of finance as the ‘balanced budget.'” Our country today faces many of the same challenges and, unfortunately, it seems that the no-taxes/cut-spending crowd is prevailing over those (most economists included) who warn that cutting back on stimulus spending too soon could stall, and possibly reverse, the halting economic growth we’ve begun to achieve. My father’s youthful idealism that America’s values were shifting to emphasize “social success” rather than “money success” has since been shown, repeatedly, to be wishful thinking.]

December 23, 1942 (Underhill, Vermont)

…At nine o’clock Kent and his wife arrived, and we proceeded to the main business of the evening. Most of the people who appeared to acknowledge our singing were old folks. They seemed genuinely pleased.

Kent is a young farmer, 23 years old. The local board had deferred him because he’s running one of the largest farms in the vicinity. There’s nothing deceptive in his nature. His face is pleasant, broad featured, Yankee; his body is big and strong, his hands massive. I suppose you’d call him raw-boned, a typical farm type. Bashfulness is a quality completely foreign to him. He was well-acquainted with me from the moment of shaking hands. Before I left him at midnight he had given me a frank appraisal of his fortunes and hopes…

I don’t envy Kent. He reminds me of Thoreau’s farmer who went through life carrying his farm on his back, a slave to his occupation. Kent isn’t degraded yet to this unhappy state, but the time may come. I just can’t see how he has much chance. His wife is a good kid, willing to work hard… he seems quite proud of her, partly because she’s an “out-of-state” girl, partly because she’s had an education…

…There is certainly a formidable barrier between the well-educated and the uneducated which can’t be melted down by simple appeals to humanitarianism. This doesn’t offer an excuse for snobbishness on the part of the well-educated. It does mean that the channels for communication between the two levels are considerably circumscribed. What a democratic state needs is an educational system which offers an opportunity for the maximum development of native talent (mental ability) in whatever economic level it appears. We should not be much concerned for the existence of these economic levels, so long as those at the bottom can earn enough to live without suffering. What we must avoid is the freezing of these levels. We know that exceptional minds appear at the bottom as well as at the top of the economic heap. The economic factors, however, have thus far been given far too much weight in determining what minds shall come to fruitful expression in the world. When genius is allowed to starve to death behind economic barriers, this is one of the most disastrous expenses that any society can shoulder. If the expenditure of money can build an educational system that will make such starvation or malformation of genius highly improbable, no sum will be too large to spend.

This was the point which was emphasized in that supplement to Fortune which I read in Burlington yesterday at the library. The National Economy, it was called. We have come traditionally to exalt money to a position where it becomes our master, instead of keeping it where it should be, in subjection as a slave to help us achieve social profits. We have too long been tyrannized into poverty and national weakness and unhappiness by such bogies of finance as the “balanced budget.” It’s taking a terrible war to break the delusion. We are finding out that we can spend just as much money as we need to preserve our national existence under the hammer blows of enemies who learned the same lesson several years before we did. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions our national debt runs into on the books, as long as we keep our national destiny in our own hands, – it doesn’t matter, if we apply the knowledge that we already have for the control of our financial system. This, of course, is the basic idea in the compensatory government spending theory of Keynes, Hansen, and their associates.

It is indeed, not only a new theory, but a new philosophy of economics, and marks the overall change from the last century’s focus on “money” success to this century’s focus on social success. It can’t be repeated too often that money is properly a tool, and not a tyrant, for men.

We do have the knowledge and the mechanical means now to assure every inhabitant of our country, and ultimately the world, freedom from economic insecurity. While this cannot be considered as the highest aim of man’s activity, it is essential to any permanent progress of man in his spiritual sphere. It is very important that economic security always be recognized as a means to a better life, and not as an end in itself, or as a guarantee of that better life. For life can be “better” only in a moral sense, and science, including economics, which we are using as a means to that better life, is in itself amoral. The Nazis are demonstrating that it can very well be used as a means to a worse life.

We don’t debase ourselves or jeopardize our ideals by studying our science as avidly as do the Germans. In fact, we criminally betray ourselves to destruction if we do not seize upon science for all it can show us about the waging of war and the building of the new world order. The significant difference comes if we use science as a weapon on the side of Christian morality. Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr. makes this point clear in an interesting exposition of the science of geopolitics in the Dec. 21^st issue of Life. We don’t damn ourselves by using what knowledge we can discover to make ourselves powerful, if we use our power to give our ideals of Christian morality expression in the lower but nonetheless necessary, level of economic life. The name of [Halford J.] MacKinder’s book on geopolitics was Democratic Ideals and Reality. He brought it out in England in 1918. Our trouble was that we wrote out a peace in which democratic ideals continued to be abstracted from reality.

What excites me now is that today there are a lot of men who know that we must not repeat this disastrous experience. Keats it was who maintained that the ideal can’t be separated from the real. Democratic ideals are just so much hot air until they are expressed as relationships of men to men, and men to goods in the marketplace.

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Capitalism’s Failings and Socialism’s Promise

[This entry gives some insight into my father’s post-Great Depression hope for “collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism.” Using as a starting point a lecture by Harry M. Fife, a Middlebury professor of economics from 1925-1950, my father writes about the exposed shortcomings of private business and the emerging potential of “public business.” It’s impossible to read this entry and its phrases — “general fabric of irresponsibility,” “rapacious self-interest,” “great spree of speculation” — without drawing parallels to the financial-market and mortgage manipulations that sparked our recent deep recession. It seems that the “corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism” of the 20s, 30’s and 40’s had some staying power. So did the ability of politicians and ideologues to demonize terms and concepts such as “socialism” and “welfare.” How quaint that my father could write: “No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits.” And how sad that this sentiment is so at odds with the reality of our present-day world.]

December 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)

Fife gave a swell lecture this morning. He traced through the several phases of capitalism from the “putting-out” period down to the recent, and not yet extinct corporate-finance-banker-imperialistic capitalism. This last fits in as both cause and effect of the present woes of the world. But we are advancing into the period of collectivistic, or socialistic, capitalism. Please keep your thinking constructive, he said. Corporate organization is indispensable in our society. What we need to find out is how to keep the advantages of the corporation and get rid of its disadvantages.

Old Fife embodies the true spirit of our times better than any other prof that I have, not excepting Doc Cook. I’m going to ride high on that spirit not because I believe in following the crowd, but because I have no other choice, no other urge, but this. It seems to me that the moral issue is more clearly defined these days than it has been for a long time. Up until the depression of the 30’s there must have been room for a great deal of doubt in a young man’s mind if he asked himself just what his position in society should be. On the one hand there was the dominant business interest in private hands, apparently serving the community as well as anything available. On the other hand was the growing volume of public business, barely articulate, and yet containing dim possibilities of great future good in society. But a man would have had to be morally keen to have seen these possibilities, and courageous to invest his life work in bringing them to fruition.

This problem no long[er] exists. No man can find moral justification for getting into business for the sake of profits. This, indeed, must have always seemed narrow justification to some businessmen, even when it was thickly glossed over with the ideal theory of the self-regulatory, free competitive system, automatically assuring the greatest good to the greatest number. Many intelligent men who were hand and glove in the system must have sometimes wondered, nonetheless, if things were actually so fine as the theory suggested. A lot of people knew that things were actually very bad, but they were the people on the bottom, the working masses, and their voice didn’t count. In the land of “free enterprise” it was obviously their own fault that they stayed down; – they lacked the brains, or the ability, or something. It must have been possible for many men on the top to reason this way with perfect sincerity.

But this ground got shakier all the time, especially after the first World War. The moral compromise involved became more and more obvious to men in high positions, and [as] a result they began to lose faith in the system to which they were allied. They lost their integrity. Out of this general fabric of irresponsibility, the whole tendency of too rapacious self-interest which had been inherent in the system for a long time, though to a large degree rationalized out of sight, now came into its own. We embarked on the great spree of speculation, with all the bars down. It was an out-and-out case of dog eat dog, at least among the men of power and influence in our society who were to a large degree responsible for decent social order and justice. In that mad decade this class abdicated its position as the recognized leading class of the nation.

So the choice today is no problem. I am on the side that has stepped into the breach, – the New Deal side, the socialist side. And it’s a good side to be on, because it’s fresh and new, with an untainted, if short, history, and a tremendous future full of work. We’re not out for revenge, but as Fife says, our job is to build an economy for welfare, and not for money profits.

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Max Lerner Lectures on the War

[Although this journal entry consists primarily of my father’s summary of a lecture by Max Lerner, I decided to include it as it demonstrates my father’s skill as a reporter — a skill that eventually led him to Columbia Journalism School and, then, to the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Max Lerner was a writer and educator, who would go on, in 1949, to launch an influential column in the New York Post. As reported by my father, Lerner’s talk ranged from his growing optimism about the U.S.’s impact on the course of the war to his criticism that Jim Crow laws were negatively affecting America’s war efforts.]

December 2, 1942 (Middlebury College)

Max Lerner spoke here last night. In his introduction, Bob Rafuse spoke of him as one of the fighters in the front line of the battle of ideas. Lerner lived up to his characterization. I was not so much impressed with what he said as the way he said it. He spoke very clearly, in a pleasant voice, and knew just where he was every minute. He didn’t beat around the bush, but shot his ideas straight from the shoulder, so that there could be no doubt that he knew what he was talking about, and believed in it. “Name-calling can be a very good thing,” he said, “as long as you call the right people the right names.”

He began by saying that he felt better since the opening of [the] North African campaign than at anytime in the last decade. “Up until now we were worried as to whether the US would be able to gather itself for action in time. It is very late now, but it is in time. At long last I can see through the long dark tunnel to the clear air and sunshine ahead. We know now that we can win the war. But the tragic possibility is that we may not know what to do with the clear air and sunshine.”

“American business has handled production better than we had any reason to expect. But still there are too many men in high positions who are more interested in the plants with which they are connected than with the total war effort. Labor has still not been given the representation in the WPB [War Production Board] that it deserves, and that Donald Nelson [chairman of the WPB] promised to it some time ago.

“We are not making any apparent progress on our Negro problem. Industry refuses to hire black men. Baltimore imported 10,000 white laborers when there were that many negroes idle in the city. Jim Crow laws are still maintained in the Army. Henry Kaiser [whose Kaiser Shipyard built Liberty ships during the war] is a really great American businessman, but he is counteracted by too many men like the West Coast union leader who won’t admit negroes into his union.

“There are far too many of the men still in power who only a year ago were shouting that we could do business with Hitler, that we couldn’t get into a war against Fascism without becoming Fascist ourselves, that a European war was no concern of ours. Many of these men have just a month ago been returned to Congress, and have taken this as a mandate from the people to go right ahead with their program of opposition to the administration. These men are dangerous. They must be removed from power by intelligent voting on the part of American citizens.

“America has assembled a striking force stronger than Hitler’s, and done it without sacrificing the democratic liberties. A democracy can be strong, in peace as well as in war, and incomparably stronger than Fascism. Archibald MacLeish saw the true nature of our foe when he characterized it in The Fall of the City as an armored giant all empty inside. The sight of it is terrible only until you stand before it and fight.

“The military war is going well. Our real problem is in the diplomatic war and the idea war. This [François] Darlan deal can’t be stomached. It has shaken the faith of the French people in us, and can lose us many more lives in the long run than it may have saved us at present. Our State Department is showing an extremely dangerous tendency towards a Machiavellian diplomacy that puts the European powers to shame. Our victory must be morally sound all the way though, or it’s no victory at all. Apparently [Secretary of State Cordell] Hull, and possibly even FDR, regard the establishment of such Rightist regimes in Western Europe as a desirable counterpoise to the Leftist influence of Russia, which may well emerge from this war as the strongest European power. But such a policy can only lead to a perfect setup for another struggle.

“This, then, is the justification of our cause: To decide whether American democracy, and a world of democratic states, can exist and grow under the highly complicated conditions of our technical machine civilization.”

That was the main gist of his talk. He answered questions for an hour and half. The fine thing here was that he had his answers ready; he didn’t have to dig around for them, or retrench on what he had already said. He did say that Roosevelt has believed that it’s important to get things done without regard for the abstract principle, and that was disturbing. It’s what Emerson said about Napoleon.

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To Hell With Eternity

[In this, one of my father’s many entries dealing with his still-gelling thoughts about religion, he rejects the notion — and the appeal — of life after death.]

November 21, 1942 (Middlebury College)

I just killed a tiny spider, – crushed the life out of it with a snap of my finger. The thought came over me: Is there some power in the world greater than I which can as completely snuff out my life? And of course there is. The hand of society can just as unfeelingly snap down on me, and the chances of its doing so are greatly increased in a period of war like the present. I have no recourse; though conscious of my fate, I have not the power to oppose its coming. Nor has society, for that matter, the ultimate power, but serves only as the instrument which may direct my death in advance of the time when it would overtake me naturally.

Certainly it has ever been such a consideration as this which has led men to a belief in a beneficent power that stood on his side beyond death. If he could convince himself that death itself was but a passing mutation in a life that was eternally his, would not he have foiled the fate that otherwise seemed inescapable and all-powerful?

At this stage of the game, such reasoning doesn’t appeal to me. If you insist on calling it faith, I shall just as stoutly insist that I have no faith, at least, of that variety. The idea of life going on eternally is to me a repugnant idea, and one that takes the purpose out of the living that is surely now within my grasp. Today I am a man. I shall never have another chance to be a man. The elements of my body undoubtedly will continue in existence, but I shall cease to exist. This idea pleases me. Fear has no place in my thoughts of death. The only fear that I would keep alive is that I may fail to make as much of life here and now as is within my grasp. If I can do a good job now, according to the strictest measure that the morals of my society provide, I’m willing to say to hell with eternity.

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The Power of War

[In this excerpt, the final entry in my father’s first journal, a letter from a friend (Pablo Vyrros) sparks a reaction in which my father muses about the metamorphosis from “civilized man into a fighting savage.” He also expresses growing doubts about his personal life and his journaling objectives.]

November 18, 1942 (Middlebury College)

This afternoon another of those tremendous letters from Pablo. He’s found a new girl, – “no pledges, no vows, until after the war.” After the war, – we can’t escape it. We are putting by so much of life until after the war. If we postpone enough of it, probably it won’t be so hard to die. Here’s Pablo in the Army now about half a year. A few days ago one-third of his squadron leaves suddenly for the African front. And Pablo? Still in Texas and feeling lousy, cheated, emotionally unstrung, because he can’t be out there in the thick of the fighting, “to kill or be killed.”

That’s the power of war. You don’t go to battle because you’re patriotic, because you believe that you’re fighting for a better world. No! To hell with ideals! Go to war to fight, because the Army has made you a fighting man, and that’s your job. That’s what’s happened to Pablo. That can happen to me, in fact, is happening to me.

What, after all, can prevent the metamorphosis of a civilized man into a fighting savage? Religion, for one thing. But I have only a few ideas, no real emotional convictions. Then there’s love. I have Dottie. There’s my big chance. But even there I can sometimes feel the tie weakening. This week, for instance. I think we’re losing out. What’s the use? I’m asking myself. Even now we have no time for each other. The great work of growing together has come to an end.

I remember my cynicism of last year and am tempted back towards it. [Middlebury professor] Doc Cook’s impassioned talk on ideals and first causes left me cold today. Aimless flitting.

So this is the end of the first chapter of my Journal. I think that there is some development recorded here, but I am more than ever faced with the question, – Development for what? I don’t know the answer. 

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The Need to Continually Replenish the Democratic “Idea”

[In this second section of his 11/11/42 entry, my father expands on his initial discussion of the democratic faith (previous post) to examine the need to keep reviewing and replenishing the “idea” of democracy. He posits that the material benefits that accrued to Americans thanks to the success of their democracy lulled people into letting the vigorous idea of democracy wither and nearly die. Hitler, he says, was able to take advantage of this “sickness of America.”

My father contends that all great ideas, democracy included, must be continually debated, mutated and improved. When he writes “The doctrine of consistency is the doctrine of death” it is hard not to think of present-day conservative dogma, including the judicial philosophy of “originalism.” Proponents of this approach seek to interpret and apply the U.S. Constitution in a way wholly dependent upon the (somehow divined) original intent of its writers. As my father suggested, better to think of the democracy defined by that Constitution — and of the Constitution itself — as a living idea that must evolve to reflect the needs and the realities of the world in which we live.

One note, also, on the “political incorrectness” of my father’s writing, in which, for example, he repeatedly refers to the ideas and achievements of “men.” Though jarring to today’s ears, his usage — and, I’m sure, his own perspective at the time — gives an accurate representation of former societal norms.]

November 11, 1942 (Middlebury College), con’t.

… Emerson doesn’t exaggerate the need for self-reliance. It is another thing from isolationism, from independence of other men in the material relationships of economic life. The society in which men live functions according to many ideas that certain men have conceived and applied. But ideas are not permanent in the sense that a concrete bridge is permanent. They live only by constant nourishment in the minds of men. Furthermore, they cannot be passed as entities from one mind to another. Each man must develop his own ideas for himself. If a healthy margin of the members of any society do not keep alive the common ideas by which their society functions, then it must deteriorate. And it will surely fall apart with widespread disaster if the deterioration is not stopped in time.

That has been, and still is, the sickness of America, and of all the democratic societies. The Ideas worked too well, in the sense that under them life became so pleasant that its material benefits came to be ends in themselves. The great ideas that were productive of these ends, and without which they could not be achieved, were allowed to stagnate. They did die out of the minds of men. Words were substituted for them, and people forgot that words are only the menial tools by which ideas are transmitted from man to man, and are not themselves ideas.

We were suffering from this death of ideas among us long before Hitler arose to take advantage of us. In fact, he was able to take advantage of us only because he challenged us with his ideas for a new society and found us wanting weapons to oppose him. That time is past. We are finding our weapons, and it is not too late. But the lesson we have learned must not be forgotten. When men lose ideas, they lose everything. They function automatically and blindly under dead forms, and are gradually suffocated. We came awfully close to suffocating. We haven’t really caught our breath yet, but in time we shall catch the second wind of new and living ideas of democracy and the world will see a stride that can’t be matched.

All that has life must change. Ideas are no exception to this rule. If they are kept alive, there will be constant additions and mutations in them. This is the work of the individual man. The doctrine of consistency is the doctrine of death. The dead mind is the consistent mind. The mind that lives accepts every challenge to it, and moves forward when the occasion demands by leaps and bounds, holding precedence of no account, and the opinions of other men no barrier. Emerson was right; he is right.

I do not rule out the past. The past is a storehouse of treasure for him who looks aright, for the man who searches through it to know the accomplishments of minds that have lived before him, to serve as the firm foundation for the accomplishments of the mind that lives in him. It would be foolish to make originality a barrier to profiting from the mistakes of others, – certainly no exhibition of the good Yankee trait of economy.

This is a new world, new every hour, every minute. I am a new man, and this is my world. “What is the purpose of living?” the cynics ask. Well, I have the purpose, and I was once a cynic. The purpose of living is to use the mind at its full capacity to keep alive the ideas which are the basis of the moral functioning of society, and to give new life to these ideas by applying them. 

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Democracy as a Political and Spiritual Base

 [The following is the first section of a long entry in which my father identifies democracy as his “base.” The catalyst for this essay was an Armistice Day talk delivered by Pierre de Lanux, a French writer and diplomat. My father suggests that each person needs to stuggle with and answer questions about democracy before becoming a true adherent to the democratic “faith.” The majority of Americans who have not “examined the foundations of their faith” represent a great danger to the country, he argues. This danger certainly hasn’t disappeared in modern-day America, where large numbers of people are swayed by superficial slogans and charismatic “leaders” (Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, etc.), and where anti-intellectualism has become a badge of honor. ]

November 11, 1942 (Middlebury College)

… Pierre de Lanux spoke in chapel this morning. He read a paper on the significance of this Armistice Day. The ideas weren’t new, but he gave them distinction with his French fire and charm. I wonder what was in his mind about France at the moment of his reading. Hope, perhaps. For the German armies are marching into the unoccupied territories, and that could mean the end of the humiliating armistice. It can mean that all Frenchman will be united again in their resistance to Hitler, and not painfully divided into the free French, and the traitors. It must have been hard on true Frenchmen to bear this shame of their country. France reduced in a few months of fighting from one of the great champions of liberty and democracy to a vassal of a barbarian state? It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t possible. Resistance has continued. The stories of uprising, and hostage-shooting have probably been only an indication to us outside of a common spirit of defiance within that country. I hope so. I hope that it is ever so wherever men have known freedom.

I seem to grow vaporous, I know, but it is clear in my own mind what I mean. I could not say this a year ago, but now I know. I have found my base, and I shall not be shaken from it, though explore it more I must, and that thru the rest of my life. My base is democracy. Not a strange choice, you may say, for one who has grown up in a democratic country. But I who have made the choice do not look at it that way. A country is not democratic, strictly speaking. A country is a portion of the earth’s surface where people live. The characteristics we carelessly confer on a country are really those of its people, and not of all of its people, at that, and not of any two people in exact similarity.

There are a lot of people in this country who are not democratic. Those that openly profess themselves of different creeds are not so much to be feared. They are known; they may be fought on their own terms, and the fight, so it be conducted rationally, cannot fail but be salutary for all sides concerned. It is the great mass of people who have not examined the foundations of their faith that holds the great danger for America. If a man does not know where he stands, he may be easily induced to stand anywhere. If he passively accepts the proposal that he is a member of a democratic nation, that is not enough. He must ask himself, “Why democratic? How democratic?” If he finds the answers to these questions himself, then he is a trustworthy champion of democracy.

I am in the process now of asking myself “Why democratic? And how democratic?” I have not found all the answers. But I am on their trail, and I am conscious of the fact that I have taken my stand. When I say it is good that the people of France may again be united against Germany, the price that they must pay in physical suffering and death is not absent from my mind. But I know now that I am willing to pay that same price when the time comes, for it will preserve to me the serenity of mind and the purity of spirit which man must come to look upon as his most prized possessions if he is to be worthy his name.

I know that there are many people to whom these words will carry little meaning. Until so recently have I myself mistrusted them, in fact, that I am surprised with the confidence with which I use them now. But I am willing to accept this confidence as evidence of spiritual growth. And in explaining this last, I can say only that it is a consciousness of an integrity of myself with the rest of the world which I have not had before. The shapes are dim as yet, but they are appearing. Experience of day to day fits more and more into forms and patterns, and I am conscious of the process. I can’t claim that it is mystical, but it is certainly more than material. My attitude towards the creeds of particular sects is unchanged, and is only a reflection on this side of me of my basic individualistic bent, of my natural dislike for imitation. If I discover spiritual realities, and eventually shape them into a pattern that may properly be called a religion, it will be what I myself have found and discovered, not what someone else has handed to me ready made…

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Thoughts on Dying in War

[Although my father’s early journal entries generally depict a young man mature and articulate beyond his age (20 at this writing), they sometimes veer into the over-heated rhetoric of youth. The following excerpt is one such example. This excerpt also touches on the theme of “creative activity,” which is a recurring topic in my father’s writings during this period. He repeatedly identifies the process of ongoing creation as his own personal goal, as well as that of all civilized societies and successful institutions.]

September 27, 1942 (Middlebury College)

A Sunday of much wind and rain, finding me in a state of mild depression. I could go on in this mood long enough, and end up where I was a year ago. What plans do I have? Would I really enjoy being married to Dottie? To any woman? Will I ever have a chance to be married? Or will I be sucked into the monster machine for war to die a glorious death, to have my weak flesh spattered against metal. Is this the purpose and the destiny of all large social groups, or will the idealists some day see their dream of a peaceful world society fulfilled? Certain it is that individual men and women are as greedy and selfish as ever they were, and probably more so, now that they have lost the ability to provide the necessities of life for themselves. Can the pressure of social law and custom as successfully restrain the combative instincts in men as it now successfully goads them into destructive operation? Is it pointless to ask whether it is better to die in peace than in war, since we must die anyway? I don’t think that the question is pointless. It seems to me that most people would willingly sacrifice their lives in an act of creation, where they would balk at being decimated as mere engines of destruction. If a man has complete faith that his death on the battlefield will contribute ultimately to the building of a peaceful, creative world society, then he will presumably die gladly, without complaint. It may be that creative activity can never proceed without conflict in human society. 

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