war and the scholar

WAR AND THE SCHOLARAuthor(s): ALVIN JOHNSONSource: Social Research, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 1942), pp. 1-3Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40981830 .

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WAR AND THE SCHOLAR

BY ALVIN JOHNSON

Inter arma silent leges. Law itself must close its portals when gun answers gun and the skies rain destruction and our own people are dealing and meeting death in a thousand terrible forms. If the laws must be silent, what of scholarship? Who will listen to the still small voice of the scholar, in a world crashing to ruin? What wonder that in every faculty scholars are yearning to close their books and offer themselves for military service? I have listened to urgent appeals for advice from members of the New School faculty, new citizens and perhaps for that reason more ardent citizens - advice as to how they could actually get into the shooting war. Sadly I have had to say, an over-age man is not worth his rations for service at home, still less worth transport space for service abroad. Sadly, for the rule also applies to me.

There are indeed places in the public service: information, statistics, administration, where particularly qualified scholars may serve. These positions are few. How about the rest of us? Must we sit down and twiddle our thumbs? So it seems, when the first reports of action come in.

So it seems at first. But we have entered upon a long war. There will be time for second thoughts. And on second thought one fact rises up to challenge the scholar. It is possible to win a war and lose the peace. We won the last war and lost the peace. We shall win this war. For God's sake, let us be prepared to win the peace. Let us win a peace that will last. Our sons are paying with their lives because, when our plenipotentiaries met in 1918, with power to make a new world in which man might live in peace, they had not the knowledge upon which a wise settlement could be based. Let not our grandsons pay with their lives for the inadequate knowledge of the plenipotentiaries who, sooner or later, will dictate the terms under which Germany, Italy and



2 SOCIAL RESEARCH Japan may eventually be restored to the fellowship of civilized nations.

Consider the problem that will face our plenipotentiaries, when the time has come for them to dictate peace. Hitler, Goer- ing, Goebbels and company, the Fuehrers and the Gauleiters, the whole clustering crew of criminal adventurers, will be gone. They have destroyed every alternative possibility of orderly govern- mental organization. What shall be invented, that millions upon millions of ordinary Germans, no worse than God made them, may not be left to perish in disorder and famine? Mussolini will be moldering in his grave, with no soul to go marching on. His Black Hand will go with him; but what of the Italian people, an innocent and sun-loving forty millions, with no complicity in the criminal ambitions of the Fascists? Mussolini has extirpated their natural leaders; without leaders, in these days of great populations living only by organization, untold millions would have to die. What will our plenipotentiaries do about that? Japan, with its bogus Mikado, descended from the rising sun: the Mikado will not survive our victory. The yapping clique of militarists and navalists will not survive. But what of the seventy millions of plain Japanese, little aesthetic people, fundamentally content to build something beautiful on very little, capable of deep obedi- ence and, by the same token, of the bloodiest mob anarchy?

There is a tremendous problem facing the peace plenipotentiaries. They will mean well for the world, under their hands like a vast piece of plastic material. Will they know what to do?

They will know, if the scholar does his job. They will know the problems of temporary organization, suited to the temperament of a conquered people, still capable of growing into a permanent organization that may work honestly toward world peace. They will know the problems of the conquerors, with the colossal com- plications of shifting from an all-out war footing to an all-out peace footing. For be it understood, if peace must bring unem- ployment and misery to the millions of America, Britain and Russia, there will be no peace that can last.



WAR AND THE SCHOLAR 3 If the scholar does his job the plenipotentiaries will come to

their council knowing that there is no guilty nation but only guilty criminal gangs that have made of nations as innocent as our own the instruments of all conceivable villainies. The plenipotentiaries will know that the vast majority of the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, are merely poor devils like the rest of God's creatures, fighting blindly for the gift of life, capable of hating the hard-eyed exponents of criminal ambition, their own and ours, like the rest of us. If the plenipotentiaries of peace are equipped with the knowledge without which wisdom is a vain self-exercise, they will know how to temper stern justice with mercy.

The function of the scholar is clear. He will give what he can to the winning of the war. But his chief business is the winning of the peace. He will work indefatigably toward the understanding of the realities of human life, and the conditions under which human life may be led sweetly, richly, cooperatively. He will stand, unabashed, for the principle that the rules of civilization, wrought out on Sinai and the Areopagus, by Jesus and Socrates, by the Stoics and the Epicureans, are prior to the bomber and poison gas, and will survive beyond them. The scholar will wake up, as the shock of war becomes incorporated into the standard of living, and assert, humbly and boldly: I will persist in scholarship as usual. I offer myself for the winning of the war, so far as you can use me; but you can certainly use me for the winning of the peace.



war and the scholar

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