William James’ wars against war
Noted William James biographer Robert D. Richardson has a short post over at The Second Pass (where they’re doing a William James week in celebration of the centenary of his death) about James’ attempts to grapple with the problem of war. His most well-known confrontation with the matter is of course in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” but Richardson also points to another, earlier effort by James to propose an alternative to warmaking, one profoundly reminiscent of Gandhi:
James made two concrete proposals for how this might be done. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he reached back to Thoreau’s Walden and the idea, discussed in the first chapter of that classic, of voluntary poverty. (When Americans see that phrase, they see “poverty” written in boldface. We must train ourselves to see “voluntary,” meaning willed, written in caps and printed in red.)
“What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war,” James wrote in Varieties, “something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. . . . May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?”
By the time he wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James had dropped the idea of voluntary poverty or simplicity—the sort of thing advocated in Walden, and by Wendell Berry, and by the modern “freegans”—in favor of something very close to the modern idea of the Peace Corps. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”
One need look no further for resonance with James’ first proposal than Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, as he describes the requirement for Satyagraha, or non-violent resistance. While his life was one of very much the voluntary poverty James proposes, Gandhi emphasized spiritual renunciation more than material:
Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance.
He added elsewhere, on the significance of suffering in the struggle for justice:
He who has not the capacity of suffering cannot non-co-operate. He who has not learnt to sacrifice his property and even his family when necessary can never non-co-operate. … There lies the test of love, patience, and strength.
Both Gandhi and James recognized that the world without war would not be a world without hardship or suffering—nor would we want it to be.

In Micah White’s 



Today The Immanent Frame published
What I’ve learned most from my understanding of the Gandhian mode of conflict resolution is the importance of trying to understand another’s perspective. For Gandhi, this was the fun of conflict—and I do mean fun, because Gandhi loved conflict. He was a pacifist, but that doesn’t mean he was passive. Conflict, as Gandhi pointed out, is one time when you’re forced to see the world from another person’s point of view. Unless somebody challenges you forcefully, in a way that makes you stop and think, you’ll just go idly about your business. We all know that from our own relationships; it’s not until somebody comes at you from a different point of view, seemingly from left field, that you really begin to question yourself and look carefully at what you’re doing.
MJ: Niebuhr was probably my greatest single influence as a professor. I was literally his last student. My first year at Union was the last year he taught a seminar, and I was in it. The second year, there was a group of us who met in his apartment every Friday afternoon. Then, the third year, the other two had left Union, and I went up there on my own. One of the things that drew me to Niebuhr—though it was his ideas that drew me more than anything else—was that his family and my family came from the same German immigrant community in central Missouri.
As part of a series of articles on activism in the US, the Utne Reader has published a short
Since the
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