Abstract

In 1910, William James made his contribution to the "war against war" in his essay "The Moral Equivalent of War." "Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood," he argued. "It is a sort of sacrament." The warrior is truly a hero because he exemplifies hardiness, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. Some other cause and project will need to be found that can inspire these same qualities, if militarism is to be countered effectively. A "moral equivalent to war" is required. James employed this phrase earlier in his Gifford Lectures in defense of asceticism as an exemplar of hardiness. "Poverty indeed is the strenuous life," he wrote as he wondered whether a reconsideration of poverty as religious vocation might be a cultural counter to the love of wealth that dominated his generation and "may not be ’the transformation of military courage,’ and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of." James also saw a kind of ironic moral meliorism in asceticism. The monk does not ignore what is wrong in the world as the ultra-optimist might, but neither does the monk merely give in to these wrongs and accept them as necessary or natural. Asceticism "symbolizes... the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering." The problem with asceticism is its extremism and the "uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty."