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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Lack of Leadership, and America’s “Rotten Core”

[Here, my father uses the racism faced by African-American contralto Marion Anderson and the story of a Japanese-American ill-served by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to conclude “there is something rotten at the core of our national life.” He suggests that the failure to live up to Christian-democratic ideals can be traced to the lack of real leadership in America, where even the President “can very rarely speak the whole truth, especially when it’s bitter, and most-needed, because this would be politically inexpedient.” How little things have changed, given our current world of hysteria over the building of Islamic mosques and the blatant racism evident in many of the “birther,” “secret Muslim” and “Kenyan anti-colonialist” attacks on our first black President.]

May 6, 1944 (Camp Shelly, Miss.)

While at [Jefferson Barracks], I had the opportunity to go into St. Louis one night and hear Marian Anderson sing. It was an experience I still remember with intense pleasure. Marian Anderson not only had a  beautiful voice; she was a very gracious lady. It makes me ashamed to remember that here is a whole section of our country where it would be practically impossible for this great artist to give a recital, and that out of this very state of Mississippi there is a man by the name of Bilbo who fiercely champions in the United States Senate the cause of “white supremacy.” [Note: Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democratic U.S. Senator from 1935-1947 and, earlier, a twice-elected Mississippi governor. He was an open member of the Ku Klux Klan.]

There seems to be plenty of the same kind of people in the North, and in the West, too. Just this week in LIFE I read of the sorry plight of a Japanese-American who was recently hounded out of a New Jersey town where he was sent by the WRA.

I believe that the soldiers who worry about these conditions on the home front form a very small minority. Most of the fellows don’t connect their parts in this war with the preservation of Christian-democratic ideals. The thoughtful letters from soldiers which appear in the magazines and newspapers are perhaps interpreted by some as a hopeful sign. But these letters represent but a few thousand out of millions.

Though I keep well-posted on the news, I know that I frequently let myself forget the disquieting events which are occurring throughout the country, or, if I think of them, it’s with a rather hopeless feeling of resignation. What can I do? Write a letter?

Actually, however, I’m not in a mood to allow myself the luxury of cynicism, and haven’t been since I came into the Army. I’ve learned that the progress of civilization is often at an indiscernible pace, but that as long as there are men and women who have the faith to work for the betterment of their society, there is still progress, even though it doesn’t make the daily headlines…

It seems that our schools, as a system, fail to teach us faith in, or even respect for, the ideals of democratic society. This failure, of course, is shared by our churches, our public leaders, and by our families themselves. Nowhere in the institutions of our society is there a profound conviction in the values on which these institutions are founded, or, if the conviction is there, it no longer characterizes the institutions. The continuing neglect of their fundamental values naturally reduces the effectiveness of the institutions. Instead of serving their valid purpose of invigorating and strengthening our society, they become centers of disintegration. Even in this very serious crisis of war, they cannot bring any real unity of faith and purpose to the American people.

The lament over the lack of an integrating faith, both religious and political, is an old one, but there is little evidence that it is being heeded constructively. By this I don’t mean to say that there aren’t many thousands of people who are doing all that they can, which is considerable. But it doesn’t seem to be enough. There’s something rotten at the core of our national life, and I think I have an inkling of what it is.

There are far too many leaders in America, and there is a corresponding lack of real leadership. There is no one person, no one institution, which can speak with authority to all the people, and speak the truth, – not even the President of the United States. He, it is true, can speak with considerable authority, especially in war-time, though Congress still has many ways to hamstring that authority. The President, however, can very rarely speak the whole truth, especially when it’s bitter, and most-needed, because this would be politically inexpedient.

The ministers, if they have the courage and the insight, can speak the truth until it hurts. But the ministers can no longer speak with authority. There is too much division in the Christian church itself, and too much disbelief among the people. The teachers can tell the truth about some things, and with considerable authority, but their influence is mainly limited in a person’s life to his few years of school, and even during these years is often counteracted by the student’s experience outside of school.

The writers are free to write what they please, but the people are free to read what pleases them, so that too many writers, who might do better, write simply to please.

Thus the American people as a whole never hear the truth about themselves and their duties and responsibilities spoken to them with authority. They grow up in an intellectual atmosphere of pleasant myths, romantic idealism, and easy optimism.

Where will all this end? I only know that the main serious conflicts in American society are apparently very much similar to those which have ended in dictatorships in many countries. And democratic process, as we practice it half-heartedly, and sometimes cynically, does not seem capable of resolving these conflicts.

When I look for a solution to the problem of leadership, I run into a dilemma. For inevitably I must try to conceive a government both more authoritative and more democratic than the one we have now, a government which can aggressively protect and promote its basic democratic philosophy, and at the same time give more real meaning to the democratic freedoms. 

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Conflicted Sentiments about Participating in the “Great War”

[My father’s perspectives about the war effort, about religion, about democracy and about politics continually mutated and evolved, so it would be a mistake to associate any point-in-time journal entry as a definitive statement about his life-long views. In this entry, he comes across as somewhat depressed and cynical — certainly with regard to a famous fighter pilot of the time, Eddie Rickenbacker, and his story of being saved from starvation by a seagull. In October 1942, Rickenbacker was a passenger on a B-17 which ran out of fuel and ditched in the open water of the Central Pacific.  On the eighth day adrift in a raft with the plane’s crew, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker’s head, he captured it, and it served both as a small meal for the survivors and as fishing bait. After 24 days adrift, the men were all rescued, and the seagull became a heaven-sent symbol for Rickenbacker, confirming his strong Christian faith. At the end of this entry, my father’s skill in prognostication proves a bit shaky; contrary to his closing statement, he never did marry Jeanne, despite their shared doubts about God.]

January 22, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

… And when they ask me Were you in the Great War, I shall answer Yes little children I was in the Great War. And when they ask Were you brave, I shall say No I was not brave at all and I thought the Great War was a hell of a way to be wasting my time, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Besides, I figured a substantial service record might help me later in a political way, even though I would know that it didn’t mean a damn thing. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever even get into politics, but it was one of those things that could happen.

But weren’t you proud to be fighting for the American Way of Life and democracy? No, I was a lot of things, but I wasn’t proud. I was ashamed when I met Negro boys, and knew I was worrying about if they thought I held something against them on account of their color, and I was angry when I heard Southern boys talk about Negroes as if they were animals. I was disgusted when I heard the radio announcers plugging War Bonds “to keep the materials of war moving to the front lines.” I was perplexed when I saw the railroadmen and the steelworkers threaten strikes, and Congress refuse to tax adequately, refuse to support subsidies, and the President refuse to forget the Fourth Term and politics. I was hopeful when Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill didn’t fail at Teheran, but I was apprehensive when the Polish border question festered and wouldn’t heal. I was disappointed when the little, insignificant men continued to stay in power in the Republican party. I was happy when letters came from my friends and from home. And I was lonely for the life at Middlebury, and for girls, – always lonely for girls. Yes, I was a lot of things in the Great War, but I wasn’t proud.

And they won’t ask me this, but some of them will wonder why I didn’t find religion in the Great War. Men are supposed to find God in times like war. Eddie Rickenbacker did, and God saved him from death in the Pacific wastes. (Of course, there were a lot of other fellows He didn’t save from the wastes of the Pacific, but they naturally couldn’t come back to stir up a fuss with their side of the story.) Eddie had the floor all to himself, and boy! did he get to feeling wonderful and full of loving kindness. He even went so far as to say that the Russians were fine people.

But I kept on thinking Eddie Rickenbacker sounded kind of silly, and I could almost scream whenever I heard about that goddam seagull.

Once in a while I’d say Well for christsakes I may as well make a stab at it, but nothing ever came of my momentary intentions, except maybe I’d go to Sunday chapel and get mad at different things the chaplain said.

When a letter came from Jeanne in which she said that she couldn’t see why a God was necessary, and wasn’t I surprised and shocked, I wrote back that I was surprised and delighted, and to myself I said that settled it, I’d marry Jeanne. (I’d already figured I’d marry her, anyway, but that settled it.)

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Nazi Philosophy of Destruction versus Christian Morality

[The Nazi strategy of destroying towns and villages while retreating has my father contemplating the importance of Christian morality — and its emphasis on creativity — as a countervailing force. Although my father didn’t adhere to some of Christianity’s core faith beliefs and symbols, he recognized the importance to the war effort of the moral system that these beliefs promoted.]

October 8, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

The shape of the Nazi scheme for the great withdrawal to the Fatherland begins to appear in the utter destruction they are leaving behind them in Russia and Italy. They will not return to the places they’re leaving now, and they know it. So they will attempt to stamp death indelibly upon all the places they have occupied, – to drag all of Europe down into hell, as Hitler has already threatened. We have heard for months of the rape of Russia, of the systematic destruction of all that represents civilization. There are no military objectives for the Germans. Just this morning we read that in Naples hundreds of tons of high explosive, planted in the basement of the post office, exploded yesterday, killing hundreds of people.

This is the way it will be all across Europe as the Nazis retreat. Towns will be completely blotted out, and great cities reduced to rubbish. The terror in Europe will grow more intense, as the advances of the Allied armies will come to mean not liberation, but torture and death. People will not dare to stay in their own homes, for fear that they will blow up. Water supplies will be polluted; there will be no food.

From our point of view this is senseless, and utterly criminal, but to the Nazi mind it probably appears as the supreme logic of their philosophy. For it would seem that that inner drive, which in most civilized human beings has been turned to creative ends, has been perverted in the Nazi mentality to a terrible force of destruction. It is possible that a Nazi commander surveys the ruins of a pillaged city with the same triumphant elation that Michelangelo feels as he stands before his completed David.

“Build thee more stately mansions,” someone says in the Bible. And so far as I can remember, the Bible is often stressing creation, even though metaphorically, as of the soul. Creation, and respect for those who create, for God, the supreme creator, are among the teachings of Christianity, and are in the foundation of the general morals of Christianity. If the Nazi terror is indeed the result of the deliberate destruction of Christian morals, that is reason enough for the preservation of these morals.

I have spent much time arguing with myself and with others over the technicalities of the Christian religion, – God, miracles, the true nature of Jesus. To me, these are matters of unimportance, because I believe that the moral system they are employed to inculcate is of major importance. But I guess I was wrong to argue, if for most people the moral system has meaning only through these symbols. And it is also true that a faith in the strength of these symbols is translated into a corresponding moral strength in the believers which otherwise might not be there.

So why continue arguing over nonessentials? The essentials themselves are being brutally challenged today, and my whole fight should be directed against the challengers. That bomb in Naples was not planted to kill men and women, but to kill beliefs and faith and morals and whatever else has been instrumental in the building of Western civilization. 

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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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Church versus Religion and Faith

[The following excerpt was part of the (long!) July 30, 1942 journal entry, which began with the journaling & WWII commentary that I published in the previous post. In this continuation of that day’s entry, my father shifts to a consideration of religion’s institutional failings. Like many of us, my father struggled throughout his life to reconcile his intellectual life with his faith (or lack thereof). If his commentary is to be believed, his disillusionment about the Christian church was shared by many of his contemporaries. As with many of my father’s observations, this early commentary could fit quite comfortably in our current world, where the interaction between religion and state affairs is pervasive and — more often than not — unfortunate.]

July 30, 1942 (Middlebury College), con’t.

… In spite of its claimed divinity, it would not be fair to criticize the church in the light of its own ideals, for it is administered by men, like any other institution. Yet the Christian church today seems to be like an old bitch with its teats gone dry and its suckling brood of denominations shriveling and dying at its belly. It lives on in its material forms, apparently as strong as ever; as a spiritual force it is in its death chokes. It has too long and too obviously followed its constituents, not led them, and all who have recognized its failure to lead have spurned it. This includes millions of young men and women in the world today, and if the power of the church is dead in them, it is dead as a power in the world.

No church can hand out religion to its members. It can inspire them to construct religion in themselves, by giving them a larger and truer picture of the world they live in than they can gain for themselves. It must win their confidence, that the picture it gives them is trustworthy and in accordance with the experience of other men. Then there is the basis for that social dynamism we call a common faith. The church is indeed the spiritual leader of its society, and is capable of bringing out the best that is in its members, for this best that is in them will everywhere win recognition and approval, and this is their religion. The church acts as the unifier of the religion in its individual members, by furnishing common standards and forms. As long as the men who administer this church have the intelligence and the will to keep the church abreast of the times, and the leader of the times, the people will not desert the church.

It is the church that deserts the people. Forms harden; standards become outmoded. However slow the process, there is a continual change going on in the world which the church must successfully represent to its members. The change is inevitable, and is inherent in the creative powers that exist in the mind of man: Hence the church must be alert to change, not balk change. It must willingly gather the change into itself, and interpret it to its members in its true light. This the Christian church, and probably every other organized church, has failed to do. Hence it is inaccurate to say that Christians are deserting the church. The church long ago deserted Christians.

Dogma is in the denial of change, and when dogma permeates the church, the church is doomed as a social and spiritual power, except it purge itself. A church must have a ritual, and when this ritual is rooted in the daily experience of its members, it is a beautiful means of common worship. But then daily experience changes, and ritual becomes rooted in dogma, its performance becomes hollow and without meaning. And when the church attempts to enforce its dogma as the rule of life, with actual life no longer admitting of such a rule, the church must be overthrown. The Reformation was the first such major explosion within the Christian church, and from this explosion and those that followed, it has never recovered. If the opportunity for recovery ever was in its grasp, it has now vanished and will not be met again.

There is no need here for criticism of the Christian Scriptures and myths. The very fact that they are widely criticized and ridiculed by millions now living in a supposedly Christian culture is criticism enough. The position of the various Christian denominations in this present war is but another chapter in their damnation. It is not pertinent to point out that the church has among its teachings the love of enemies, the abhorrence of war. During its long history, the church has led the way into war after war, justified them as it saw fit, and survived them with its spiritual power unimpaired. Witness the Crusades, which were the last of the successful holy wars, and which, of course, did contain some seeds of the church’s coming disruption. The important fact to note today is that the church is dragged to the support of this war. It is little more than a pawn of state.

This is my view of the church, and should explain why it wins no reverence and support from me. I am not without a religion. Religion lives in men independently of churches. In this individual manifestation it has the advantage that there is no obstacle but personal ignorance and prejudice to its being shaped continually anew to answer the needs which the impinging world imposes upon it, but it has this tremendous disadvantage, that it cannot any longer be a source of social and spiritual union among men. Its place today is taken today by such forces as nationalism, in which the moral level is typically lowered and warped.

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