Mill’s ‘War is an ugly thing’: some topical thoughts
The United States Marine Corps have a recruiting office in Berkeley, California. The local anti-war totalitarians of Code Pink have been trying to shut it down. There’s excellent pictorial coverage of the confrontation (if it can be dignified with the term) at Zombietime. My own attention was attracted to all this when I was sent a link to a thoroughly admirable letter sent to the Berkeley Daily Planet by Captain Richard Lund, the Marine officer in charge of the recruitment office.
My attention was also attracted by a poster the recruiting office staff put up in their window, upon which was printed a quote from the English political philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Here it is, as represented on the recruiting office poster:
‘War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’
Looking around the internet, I find that this is a popular quote with those in the U.S. who define themselves as supporting the military, and understandably so. However, it is an inaccurate (in minor ways) and an incomplete quote. Here is the full passage from which this text comes:
‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice - is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.’
The passage comes from Mill’s essay The Contest in America, originally published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862. In this essay Mill condemns his own country for siding with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and harshly criticizes those who, to use his own words, ‘cry, Peace, peace’ without considering what ‘peace’ would mean. There are evils worse than war in a good cause: slavery is one such evil. The passage quoted above is not a defence of the waging of war in itself, but a demand that those responsible for taking a state to war should do so when the cause is just, but further, should only do so when the cause is just.
Mill’s words, when read carefully and in context, thus hardly constitute a manifesto for the uncritical support of the military; but a more powerful statement of the role of the armed forces in the cause of liberty and justice could hardly be wished for. Of course, what precisely constitutes ‘liberty and justice’ is open to debate - or at least it is for those of us living in freedom, thanks to the men and women in uniform whose sacrifices keep us in that happy state.
[Note: Mill’s The Contest in America is freely available in full via Google Book Search and Project Gutenberg. The passage quoted above comes from p. 31 of the Little, Brown edition made available by Google. Some of my own thoughts about John Stuart Mill can be found here.]
