A Sardonic Critique of the Atomic Bomb

[My father’s rather pessimistic worldview as well as his wit are in evidence in this journal entry about the atomic bomb. (His use of the first-person plural “we” to express his opinions is somewhat unusual for him, however.) Written about half-a-year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this essay characterizes the development and use of atomic bombs as “simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is.” Despite causing people to worry about humankind’s survival — and, perhaps driving them see a movie now rather than later given that “any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously” — my father has little doubt that the new weapons “should be an overwhelming success.”]

March 21, 1946 (location unknown)

This is the year when the world is absorbed with the power-play between the United States and Russia, and with the forthcoming atomic bomb test at Bikini lagoon. These events no doubt have an important bearing on the question of war and peace, and even of ultimate human survival on this planet. There used to be some conjecture, mainly in the Sunday supplements, about the remote possibility of our sun flaring up and baking us to a crisp, or of a collision between our little planet and some vast marauder from outer space. Another favorite theory had the sun cooling down after some millions of years until life should be extinguished on this planetary chunk of ice.

Since last summer these theories have been relegated to the category of harmless bagatelles, strictly for children. And even as we write it, we detect an odious patronizing note in our reference to the kids, not at all fair to them. For years they’ve been ardently supporting Buck Rogers, Superman, and company while we have smiled indulgently, or scoffed, perhaps. Now that our scientists have released atomic energy, we find that our kids have intuitively been forging down the right track, and left us behind in our ivory towers. But now that the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shattered our complacency, we’re still a little confused. It may indeed be true, as we have been warned by various authorities, that we are threatened with mass extinction unless we do something about it very soon. Fine, – we’re agreeable, but what are we supposed to do? After all, we have only the haziest conception of how the contraption works. We don’t even know what it looks like, and have to trust our newspapers and magazines for an account of what it does. We can offer one suggestion strictly from the layman’s point of view. If these A-bombs are the dangerous toys that our scientists claim, why don’t we just dispose of our present stocks in some out-of-the-way place, and then discontinue production from this time forward? To please those who are patriotically-minded, the disposal could take place on this coming Fourth of July.

But we are being facetious, and we admit it. In our exceedingly complex civilization, so simple a solution is utterly impracticable. Imagine every nation in the world promising never to fool around with atomic explosives, not even out of curiosity, and then keeping its promise. The results in technological unemployment alone are frightening to estimate. Thousands of scientists and technicians the world over would be thrown out of work. Of course, men of their ability and training might be enlisted in the struggle to produce the food, clothing, and shelter which alone can save a reported quarter of the population of the globe from untimely and uncomfortable death, but the difficulties of adjustment between two such divergent types of work are probably too great even to be considered. It must be somewhat discouraging to these men, however, to see how far the old natural scourges of famine, disease, and exposure are still outstripping the destructive power of their newest explosive.

We suspect that this atomic bomb is simply the latest in a long series of inventions and situations which man has used to make himself seem a bit more important than he actually is. Being too intelligent to enjoy life entirely on the low level of appreciation of the beasts and birds, he needs to dramatize his life by devising real or imaginary threats to his already troubled existence, – everything from an inscrutable and vengeful God to an excess-profits tax. He feels most alive when he is in danger; his senses are keyed up to an unusual awareness of this life which becomes suddenly so valuable when it appears that it may have to be cashed in tomorrow or the next day. You’ll think twice about putting off seeing “Life With Father” until nineteen forty-eight or nine when you realize that any day now an atomic bomb could conceivably close the show and your interest in it simultaneously.

Of course this is rather a risky game which man has been playing with himself. It has to be. If no one got  hurt or killed in these various experiments with predestination and mechanics, the farce would become too apparent, and people would lose interest. I imagine that this point might be demonstrated by the slackening of popular interest in religion since the terrors of hell fire and the imminence of divine intervention have been generally discounted. Throughout history those enterprises have enjoyed the greatest interest and support in which the members have most recklessly invoked their own death and destruction. By this criterion, the atomic bomb should be an overwhelming success.

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Reflections on Post-War Seattle, New Year’s 1946

[One more vignette of post-war Seattle, written on New Year’s 1946. As a 20-year resident of the city’s suburbs, I find many of my father’s observations of mid-1940s Seattle quite interesting (the aversion to umbrellas remains strong, but is no longer universal). It seems that the good citizens of Seattle were more than happy to make a profit off the returning troops, who for all their drinking and partying couldn’t — to my father’s mind — conquer the “loneliness of spirit” that they shared with most other Americans.]

January 1, 1946 (Seattle, WA)

Seattle is one of the northernmost of US cities, but, being within breezing distance of the Japanese current, its winters are not as severe as they are exasperating. It’s an unusual day when a little rain falls. On a usual day a lot of rain falls. No one really worries about getting wet, but accepts his daily soaking as a matter of course. I haven’t noticed an umbrella during ten days in Seattle.

Seattle, like most other American cities, is much less impressive as an old acquaintance than as a bustling stranger. As a port city, it sees more than its share of soldiers and sailors, and sees them only as short-time transients bent on having a good time. Entertainment is a booming business for Seattle people, and the boys in the service are never in any doubt that it is a business. They pay top prices for anything that’s offered to them, and most of what they get is second-rate, or worse. But the simple pressure of their numbers makes them powerless to protest, and most of them have enough money to give them a “what-the-hell” attitude. But among themselves they curse the city volubly.

No doubt the good people of Seattle do a little private cursing of the troops. The boys go into town to get drunk and look for girls. These are the things they’ve been dreaming about most avidly during the months overseas, and as they come plowing deep into Puget Sound on the ships, they begin to build Seattle up into the Mecca of their longings. The people of Seattle apparently don’t make much objection to the damage done their city’s morals by the uniformed pilgrims, but they probably grow quite weary of their streets reeling with drunken, brawling, flirting kids.

On First Avenue are the military trinket stores and the penny arcades. Most of the boys make a bee-line from the ships to the trinket stores to stock up on the stripes, patches, medals, buttons, theater ribbons, overseas “hershey bars,” caps, and hash marks which become the visible marks of glory. Then, after everything is sewed and pinned in place (often at the USO on Second Avenue), they launch off into the city to consume and conquer. Several hours and a good many dollars later they drift back to their ships and barracks to boast or bitch, according to their respective fortunes.

The only regular stage performance in Seattle is a dingy burlesque show at the Rivoli on First Avenue. (Sin, by the way, is arranged symbolically in Seattle. It parades in its rawest forms along First Avenue, which is the waterfront, becomes more refined on each succeeding avenue up the hill, and is sophisticated practically beyond recognition by the time one reaches Sixth Avenue.) The movie theatres, which carry such piquant names as the Blue Mouse and the Music Box, are mostly all owned by a Mr. John Hamrick. Mr. Hamrick had a very mediocre offering for the Christmas season. “The Stork Club,” featuring Betty Hutton and Barry Fitzgerald, was as good as anything going, and it was not good at all. But the theatres stay open all night, and draw the bulk of their late-evening patronage from boys on pass who have no other place to go.

There’s one thing about Seattle, and about any other American city, that most fellows can’t understand, because they’re products of the city way of life. They’ve learned to depend on the mechanical, commercialized dispensers of “pleasure,” which never really please. The human spirit has probably never before been more completely neglected than it is in America today. Even lovemaking has no significance beyond its physical thrills, and the most intimate moments are shared by fellows and girls after an evening’s, or even an hour’s, acquaintance. There is in almost every American a tremendous loneliness of spirit coupled with an ignorance of the means of spiritual fulfillment. Spending money is the most obvious opiate for his vast restlessness, and just now he has plenty of money. Probably during this New Year of 1946 Americans will spend more money to satisfy personal wants than ever before, and then come to the end of the year as dismally dissatisfied as ever.

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Service Member “Waywardness” in Post-War Seattle

[My father returned from Okinawa to the States in mid-December 1945 on the troop transport U.S.S. Mellette, arriving in Seattle just prior to Christmas. In this journal entry, he captures the post-war scene in Seattle, as idle servicemen kill time in the way that idle servicemen will do. My father’s discussion of this “waywardness” and his analysis of its roots includes one of my favorite lines from his journals to date: “The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture.” I think that description sums up the current American scene quite nicely as well!

Anyone reading only this journal excerpt might infer from the mention of “spiritual destruction” that my father’s bleak view of affairs was driven by a Biblically based puritanism. As earlier posts have illustrated, however, my father was more interested in establishing a personal spirituality and faith model than in adopting any formal religion. The excerpt’s final paragraph, in which he speaks of men losing the capacity for an “inner life” expresses the true source of his dismay.]

December 27, 1945 (Seattle, WA)

The streets of Seattle in the winter are cold and wet, rain is almost always in the air, and soldiers and sailors are always in the streets. Most of them have no place to go, and nothing to do. They just walk up and down the streets in pairs or small groups, always chattering, never pausing to think, because what is there to think about? The war is over, and now, just like after a big game, they want to get home. But the stadium covers the world, and not everyone can leave at the same time. Those who have to wait are impatient, lonely, and rebellious. The days drag slowly at best, and liquor, girls, and gambling are the surest ways to kill time. The arm of military authority relaxes, the excitement and danger of battle are gone, and the GIs drift into a frenzy of dissipation which shocks the world. They rage and riot in Paris, they sow a bumper crop of babies in the arms of the late enemy in Germany, they supply and patronize the black market in Rome, they drink themselves to death in Japan. And beneath these various spectacular outbursts there is the steady tempo of gambling, drinking, and whoring which daily involves millions of America’s fine young men in uniform. There are exceptions, of course, but they are too few to alter the scene appreciably, and their number, I suspect, loses more to the great temptations than it gains in new recruits.

The American is no more inherently immoral than the men of any other race or nation, but more than all others in this unbalanced world he suffers from an excess of civilization and a paucity of culture. His amiable lack of principle and value is camouflaged behind such vague phrases as “traditional American idealism” and “the democratic spirit.” His ingenuity is genuine and sterile, for by it he only adds to the dazzle and comfort of a civilization which has already reduced him far down the road towards his spiritual destruction. He’s a barbarian who worships daily at the shrines of Flesh and Money and Self, and tolerates just as much religion of the true God as will salve his vestigial conscience and do no harm to his worldly pursuits.

If the boys in khaki and blue ever stop to question the wisdom of their waywardness, they content themselves with the explanation that they act as they do because they’re not at home. In other words, the determinants of their morality are external, – geographical limits and family relationships. I’ve found that most fellows are filled with stories of their families and work at home, but in ordinary conversation with their fellows, their proudest achievement is to outdo each other in stories of drunken binges and seductions. They live so much on the surface that they themselves lose sight of their capacity for an inner life, and from long neglect, no doubt, they gradually lose much of their original capacity.

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Dealing with the Bomb, and an Unstable Post-War World

[After observing the friendliness of Japanese prisoners of war and noting that “practically all the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other,” my father makes his first journal entry about the arrival of atomic bombs on the world scene. He isn’t too optimistic about the prospects for the U.S., or the world at large, to do a good job of managing this new destructive power. Nor does he expect a victorious U.S. to seriously address the inequities among nations in the post-war period, despite the emergence of a modern world that “is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states.”]

December 6, 1945 (Okinawa, Japan)

… All along the roads here on Okinawa, as we go rumbling along on our truck, we pass Okinawan men, women and kids, trudging along singly or in groups, most of them carrying bundles of junk they’ve picked up from the dumps. It just takes a wave of the hand and a smile to get a wave and a smile in return. Some of them even make the first gesture.

Up at the dump where we took our load of scrap field wire there were some Jap PWs unloading trucks, little wiry fellows, very inoffensive-looking, who work rapidly and efficiently. On the way back we passed a truck with a couple of PW’s in the back. As we drew alongside, one of them saluted me smartly and grinned. “You know, Siggie,” I said, “practically all of the people in this world like to be nice and get along with each other.”

“Sure, that’s right,” Siggie said. “They all like to be liked.”

Not all of them, of course. A lot of people are like those Canadians I was just reading about in TIME who want to get all the Jap “rats” out of Canada, even though they may have been born there. For one reason or another, people are taught to hate certain groups of other people who happen to differ from them in color, religion, race, occupation, or social standing. But who promotes these hatreds, and why? Well, it looks like one group pitting itself against another; until a whole mythology of grievances and prejudices is built up to justify the often inhumane measures which each group practices to protect its own special interests, and finally there evolves a false morality based almost solely on power. And though this development is nothing new in human society, the new technology which produces the modern implements of power has brought us to the critical points where the largest groups, or nations, are capable of annihilating each other.

Critical people generally, and TIME magazine notably, in my limited reading of recent weeks, have been pointing up the revolutionary terror which the atomic bomb has let loose in the world. They also take the average people to task for failing to wake up and do something about it. Do what? Keep it an American secret? We sense that would be fine, if it were possible, but the troublesome fact arises that the secret is really no secret at all. Russia, we are told, will be able to produce atomic bombs in two to five years.

Well, then, how about releasing everything we know to an international commission, and leave it to the commission to control atomic research for the good of the world? To some people that makes a good deal of sense, and probably a good many people who don’t believe such beneficent control possible wish that it were. And still other people see the bomb simply as the culmination of man’s age-old, ironic lust for power, – ironic in the sense that he has been feverishly searching for the instrument which will assure his own destruction. And now he’s found it. So what the hell?

I confess that at the present time I’m pretty much of a mind with this third group. And though I recognize that such an attitude must be considered cynical by people who don’t share it, I don’t consider myself cynical for holding it. I like people, and I don’t normally enjoy seeing them get hurt. I can’t derive any satisfaction from seeing the German and Japanese people suffering the starvation and misery now which they so recently imposed upon other peoples. There was a time when I believed that somehow the common suffering of this war would lead men of all nations to put into practice what is almost universally admitted in theory, – that the modern world is too small to exist as a group of jealous and sovereign states. It may be too early to be disillusioned, but then, too, it may have been too late to hope.

My aunt Eva has for several years been trying to sell me on the Bahai group, which is but one of many groups propagating the old Christian faith in the brotherhood of man and its practical realization on earth. With the faith I am in complete accord, but of its realization I remain unconvinced. Human organization, which is always as much against something as it is for something, inevitably seems to corrupt no matter how noble its original purpose. The only true brotherhood of man occurs in the earliest years of infancy. As soon as I begin to talk and understand, I’m an American, and Hans is a German. “My country, right or wrong” expresses an attitude which honest and just people may often deplore, but which only the rarest of martyrs can ever deny. Even when one’s country is flagrantly wrong, treason remains a crime universally abhorred. But millions of men can be made to look upon murder as a virtue when the victim is an enemy of one’s country. The appeal to patriotism almost always drowns out the voice of conscience. Many Americans can feel perfectly righteous about insisting on raising their own already comfortable standard of living while millions of Europeans and Asiatics are facing a winter of freezing and starvation. Yet they would be unspeakably indignant and bitter if the scales were suddenly shifted to the opposite extreme. They can’t see how they are doing any wrong now, but if they had to change places, they would certainly feel that they were being wronged.

The funny thing is that though I understand all this, I don’t intend to do much of anything about it. I, too, look forward to enjoying the comforts of American life, even though I can’t partake of whatever further pleasure there may be in the feeling of self-righteousness.

The old cry of “Let’s set our own house in order first” will soon regain sufficient strength to kill our present feeble and fumbling attempts to set in order a world house in which our own country is but one of the rooms. We’ll go ahead with a lavish job of redecorating our own room, and then won’t we be surprised when it’s ruined by the rest of the house falling in on it!

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The Holocaust and Circumstances of Birth

[My father had no illusions about his own fallibility, and he was too intelligent to think he was innately superior to America’s war-time enemies. As he notes here, only the circumstance of his birth in the United States may have separated him from the Germans engaged in the terrible malevolence of the Holocaust. Knowing this, my father also understood the burden of responsibility he carried to promote the compassionate and inclusive philosophy into which he had been born and raised.]

May 6, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Last week TIME printed pictures and reports from several of the German concentration camps captured by the Americans. This week there was additional evidence, about Dachau; LIFE printed pages of the horror, – human bodies, broken, burned, beaten, starved, – piles of bodies so vast and horrible that the sense of individual tragedy is blurred, and the mind fails to comprehend the meaning, if there is any meaning, to such utter bestiality. Then this afternoon it came over me, while I saw these scenes repeated on the theatre screen, how slender a thread of chance had prevented me from being one of those beasts, or one of those victims. We are all men, and partake of the same nature, and ultimately know the same capabilities, even of degradation. Had I been born in Germany, and been educated a German, and caught up in the Nazi madness at the age of eleven or twelve, I could have been one of those German boys who burned the despised swine in the warehouse, and machine-gunned those few who broke loose and fled. I know there is cruelty in me, and more than once I have exulted in it. But what is important is that I’ve had the chance to learn a way of life which can keep in check the brute in me, if never wholly eradicate it. Very well I know that it isn’t the only way of life, or a perfect way of life. But by its principles men are, at least, strongly influenced to live peaceably together, to respect the rights which all men share alike in a common humanity. This morning I finished the philosopher Spinoza’s pure exposition of those principles, and knew that they were in harmony with the ideas of man and society which I have learned to love. If I falter now in my fight to keep those ideas living among men, after I’ve seen so clearly what men can become when these ideas die in them, or are never born, the fault will lie with no one but me.

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War’s Brutality, and Americans’ Smug Self Image

 [Often in his journal entries about World War II, my father exhibited an empathy for our German and Japanese enemies — especially the civilians in each country who he understood weren’t all that different from America’s citizens. His ability to see the world clearly, and to avoid being swept up in the sloganeering and mob-think of the moment, was a trait he exhibited throughout his life. Thus his later dismay at the Bush Administration’s fear mongering and demonizing, which it used in its successful post-9/11 efforts to push our country into the unnecessary and misguided Iraq war.]

April 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The war with Japan has been waged with relentless ferocity from the very beginning. Every battle has been one of annihilation; the fact that the battlefields have been isolated islands may explain this. Whichever side happens to be losing has no hope of escape and has been convinced that death is a better choice than capture by the enemy. We have now broken deep within Japan’s defenses, and are plastering the home islands daily with our big bombers. Thus it happens that the Japs are catching the hell they hoped to pour on us. Fair enough, we say. They asked for it, and now we’re giving it to them. But sometimes I wonder at the feelings this brutal conflict stirs in us. We read of the flattening of whole square miles of Japanese cities with considerable satisfaction, – Serves them right! the dirty bastards! Yet in those ruins there must be the mangled bodies of thousands of ordinary Japanese people, inoffensive, hard-working people, proud of their country, no doubt, as we are proud of our country. This is obviously the same ruthlessness bombing of civilian populations which we damned when the Germans did it all over Europe, and the Japs in China. War, after all, moves ahead by destruction, and the more destruction the better. But in smugly believing that the Jap people somehow morally deserve their agony, which was an inhuman crime when the British and the Chinese were suffering it, simply highlights the easy habits of self-deception by which nations can allow themselves to condone war in the first place. War is convenient in that it allows us to direct all our fury against an enemy for faults which in peacetime we sometimes have the candor to see exist in ourselves. Now that we’re coming head on against the problems of peace, which demand the constructive qualities we’ve assumed we possess in unusual degree, as opposed to our enemies, we’ll find just how far our assurance was justified.

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Knowledge versus Wisdom, and Faith in the Crosshairs

[In this long and “heavy” journal entry, my father starts by discussing the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, but then moves into an assessment of religion as a particular — and at-risk — form of wisdom. His attribution of the 1940s information explosion to the availability of high-speed printing and cheap paper seems incredibly quaint when viewed from our Internet-powered age of instant access to almost any “fact,” scholarly paper or book. If anything, however, the adage he cites “that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it,” seems more on target today than ever.

Later in the entry, my father explores the collision between intellectual speculation and inquiry and the institutionalized wisdom, or faith, of religion. This analysis is just one of the internal debates my father depicted in many of his early journal entries, as he sought to define and adopt a “personal faith” of his own.]

March 20, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

I think I remember it being said by someone who should know that the modern age has more knowledge and less wisdom than all others which have preceded it. There is a certain charm in the facility of this statement, and perhaps a certain amount of truth in it. At any rate, it needs considerable dissection into its roots before it can have much meaning.

The profession of scholarly research, with its offspring of popularized writing, has reached a proportion in our day sufficient to keep the book and magazine markets flooded with discussions, analyses, expositions, and criticisms of the details of life and thought in every culture which has preceded our own. Probably this phenomenon is due to the development of high-speed printing, combined with the mass production of cheap paper, but the cause doesn’t interest me as much as the effect.

This research ranges all the way through the mechanic trades and arts to the religious beliefs and practices of former civilizations, and while one individual will usually be interested only in a small segment of the whole span, these studies are easily available to almost anyone with the interest and the time to consult them, and this availability is common knowledge. People today live in a house in which the back door is perpetually wide open on all that has gone before, and there is no selectivity in displaying this vista of the past. People no longer look back through the carefully-oriented lens of myth and tradition, but through the clear, indiscriminate glass of historical fact. Though the many histories written from a nationalist bias must modify this analogy, it is not particularly such works which I have in mind here, but rather the objective studies of scholars in the myriad fields now open to research.

Apparently, then, there has been a vast and accelerating increase to common knowledge in our era. The popular quiz programs on the radio attest to a mania for the acquisition of diverse and often unrelated items of information. But whether wisdom has decreased in proportion to this increase in knowledge is another question, if we mean by wisdom the ability of a human mind to correlate the facts of experience and of history into meaningful patterns which may serve as a reasonably dependable guide to future action. When a certain pattern of wisdom comes to dominate a whole community, it may be called a religion, or, at least, an ethical system, if the ceremonial and supernatural accoutrements usually associated with a religion are lacking. We see that most communities in the past have, each in itself, been dominated by one special religion or ethical system, accepted without question by the majority of its members, and, furthermore, denying the right of all rival religions or ethics. Catholicism, for instance, held a practically exclusive grip on the peoples of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. It acted as a mold, determining the directional flow, within narrow bounds, of even the brilliant minds of the period. To all men it was both a discipline and a bond. It undoubtedly quickened the communal spirit, but it also bound society to the status quo by putting penalties on the speculative mind. The powerful predisposition to faith all but annihilated the habit of inquiry which had gained great strength in the classical civilizations. So if faith is equivalent to wisdom, the former faith-cultures have been wise far beyond our own, for faith and inquiry tend to exclude one another and ours is predominantly an inquiring culture, at least in those realms where faith has formerly held the upper hand; namely, in religion and ethics.

Even the Catholic church, which still adheres to the medieval insistence on the unity of faith, has many members who are beset with doubts. As for members of the Protestant sects, they have so long enjoyed the privilege of the individual interpretation of their faith that the discipline of communal faith has disintegrated in their churches to the vanishing point. There has probably never before in any civilization been so universal a disrespect for the exclusive claims to right which one faith makes over another. And no searching into religious faith, no reexamining of religious faith can hope to restore its former force in society, for the critical analysis of a faith is tantamount to an admission of its inadequacy under conditions of the present. If it filled the human need for faith, there would be no need to question or examine it. A living faith quite subconsciously determines the lines of intellectual development and material operation in the society of which it is the organic foundation; when a given faith must be submitted to objective study, it’s either dead or dying.

That there is a definite human need for faith is illustrated by the preoccupation of many of the best minds of our day with the formulation of a personal faith. First comes the feeling of estrangement from the traditional faiths of the past which are still artificially imposed on the majority of children at the same time that their secular schooling inculcates in them the rudimentary habits of inquiry and scientific skepticism, which, whatever their ultimate value, are consistent with the conditions of twentieth-century life. The average child, perhaps, comes to see the discrepancy between his imposed religious faith and his naturally-acquired habit of inquiry, but he pushes his discovery no further than the mediocre compromise which results in a dormant intellect and a sentimentalized faith. Those who are compelled to push on farther will almost inevitably run into a period of cynicism in which all values are questioned. Finally, the man whose creative impulses are thwarted by the sterility of cynicism, brings himself to the point of making a definite choice between scientific skepticism and traditional religious faith. It is now an exceptional case when the latter is not discarded in favor of the former. We are indeed a civilization between faiths, but not a civilization without faith, nor yet a civilization without wisdom. Widespread industrialization has long demanded a new faith, which has meant the spreading discredit and slow crumbling of the old faith, with all its giant reverberations in institutional life. Therein lies the high drama, both tragedy and comedy, of our times.

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Material Power Trumps Moral Power in America

[My father wrote with some regularity about the intoxicating and corrupting effect of material wealth and power. Often, as in the following entry, he contrasted the power of military might with the different — and fading — power of democratic ideals and morality. Sadly, is seems my father was correct in suggesting that it was an “anemic hope” that “men in the democratic nations may learn to make their material power serve the moral ends for which they claim to stand.”

America’s recent history of pre-emptive (and misguided) war, Presidentially sanctioned torture and the elevation of tax cuts over critical programs for the poor and uninsured indicates a moral compass gone seriously awry. The rhetoric of the Obama Presidential campaign pointed toward a more promising path, but the rhetoric proved no match for the self-interests, partisanship and cash-fueled agenda that characterizes our broken “democratic” system.]

March 16, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Our whole cultural climate today breeds in us inevitably a respect for power. Obviously in war it’s power that predominates above all other considerations, and the side with the greatest material power, applied to instruments of war, wins the victories. At least for the short run, moral considerations are lost in the shadow of mechanized power. I well remember a dread admiration I felt for the German war machine in the Spring of 1940 as it crashed into France, and rolled the Allied armies back onto the beach at Dunkirk. Though I could see the threat which these triumphs created for the very survival of the Western democracies, including my own country, not yet directly involved in the war, I could still not avoid a certain astonished delight in the then unbelievable audacity and power of the German armed forces.

Now we have seen five years of war since those days, and have had plenty of opportunity to marvel at the slow accretion of power by the Allies. Our only effective answer to the Nazi power has thus far been power of the same order, and on an even larger scale. We have not succeeded yet in putting anywhere near the same power behind our democratic philosophy. This is possibly because a different sort of power is needed, a power that is often atrophied in our development of material power. That is moral power. Though these two categories of power need not be mutually exclusive, they have thus far tended so to be. The only legitimate reason for continued faith in a democratic political philosophy, however, is the hope that men in the democratic nations may learn to make their material power serve the moral ends for which they claim to stand.

This usually seems to be a rather anemic hope. We are sponsoring a world organization in which material power alone will determine the ruling nations, and many of us, I believe, have passed from an acceptance of this situation as the practical inevitability to a condoning of it as the right, – the moral right, of the victors. This leads us to a condescending attitude towards the smaller nations, and the weakened nations, such as France. In our mind grows the conception of nations as power units of varying importance, and not as aggregations of individuals like ourselves, with much the same needs and aspirations.

Traditional American idealism is not dead, but it is considerably watered down by the skepticism of a large section of the American people. This is probably just as well, since our idealism has most often been used in the past as a mask for realistic financial operations which very largely contradicted the ideals in whose name they were made. Thus American democracy is suspect among the American people as well as among many peoples abroad. Perhaps this is the condition which will ultimately lead to its reaffirmation in practical foreign policy and trade.

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Jitterbugging While the World Burns

[My father often wrote of being lonely during his time in the Army, and found occasional solace at USO-sponsored dances. In this stream-of-consciousness entry, he moves from idyllic memories of New England to the scourge of war to the numbing effect of superficial social niceties.]

February 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

To write of the hills of home in such a way that the chance reader, whoever he is, and wherever he may be, will be transported by imagination to a land of verdant green, where the tall pines stand straight on the mountains, whispering the summer breeze through their boughs, and the white clouds billow silently above their tips. There in those hills is such a world as many millions of the world’s orphans have never dreamed of, a world that never heard a shell burst, and knows only the rifle crack of the hunter, a world where men walk upright and unafraid, and where children laugh in the sunshine. On the newsreel screens armies clash amid the fearful hell of war, and this is but the shadow of a far more awful substance which has already scarred and blackened half the world. My star points to those lands, and there in good time I must go, to see boys like myself spill each other’s blood and crunch their bones with the passionless steel weapons of modern civilization. There, in Germany, Burma, China, in the islands of the Pacific, in France and the Low Countries, yard by yard down the bloody boot of Italy, in Sicily, in Africa, and back across hundreds of miles of Russia lie the rotting corpses and bleaching bones of millions of people, soldiers and civilians, men and women and children, and these uncounted wasted lives are the ineradicable monument to a way of life in which human life became a commodity, – something to be traded [not] by the dozen and gross, but the thousand, and by the hundreds of thousands for the ambitions of a new race of mastermen. Mastermen, – can they even be called men? What strange horror has burned out of them that spirit which we had come to believe was the essence of humanity? What mechanic terror made them forget honor and justice and love?

Oh Europe, what monsters are bred in your blood-drenched soil! And now the poison virus of your militarism has infected the sleeping civilizations of the East, and is wakening them to a martial frenzy which may yet rush out of the Asiatic vastnesses to destroy forever the European war breeders.

On the floor the boy and girl dancers cavort and wriggle through their mad routine. The drums beat beat beat, and the saxophone blare splits the air. Shuffle shuffle shuffle, whirl and dip, beat beat beat, trombone moan. This is the dance, while the world is burning up.

If I were completely honest, my dear, I’d tell you that I’d never had a more wretched time in my life, but having somehow been schooled to the habits of social hypocrisy, I will smile at the right time, and try desperately hard to make enough clever remarks to keep the evening from appearing outwardly as sour as we both know it is underneath. Yes, I was lonely, and I hunted you down, and made a date, because I’ve let the dismal common talk of dismal common people blot out my sense.

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Discipline as the Essence of a Meaningful Life

[If nothing else, my father was a disciplined man, as evidenced by his journal writing itself, as well as by the prodigious reading, writing and scholarship practices that his journal entries reveal. In this brief entry, he contemplates “discipline” in two senses of the word — as a field or philosophy to which one dedicates himself, as well as the efforts and practices that one expends in pursuit of that cause. He ends with an interesting take on the role of the artist, working in the space between the disciplines of religion and science. (My father wrote this entry at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he had been transferred for additional infantry training.)]

January 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The compelling need in every man’s life is for a discipline. The best-integrated and most productive lives are those which are built around the sternest disciplines. I thought of this tonight while watching Jose Iturbi play the piano in “Music For Millions.” “There’s a man,” I said to myself, “who’s[sic] life means something to himself and to many other people. That’s because it’s a disciplined life concentrated towards a well-defined end. It doesn’t waste itself.”

In religion, it isn’t this particular creed or that certain dogma which really matters, and those who see nothing but the creed and dogma have not grasped the essence of their religion. That essence is discipline, as it is also the essence of art, and the essence of scholarship.

Every life observes some discipline, but in most lives these are disciplines of a low order, the animal regimen of feeding and sleeping and sex release. These can almost be called reflexes, the biological habits by which life has maintained itself since its mysterious appearance on earth.

The higher disciplines are those which employ the human mind, or call for a conscious refinement and orientation of the emotions. At a middle stage are such disciplines as those of the military man, or the skilled technological worker. Minds which can no longer respect religion for its truth must still admire its discipline in the many great men and women who are still among its adherents. The scientist, after all, is basically at one with the profoundly religious man in his devotion to a system of laws. There is something in certain areas of science, however, which excludes certain religious experience, and in religion, likewise, something which will not admit all of science. The great artist, it seems to me, stands between science and religion, and is capable of using experience from both in his own greatest discipline, the discipline of creation.

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