Sacrificing Culture For Peace

Indeed, my reading of history has forced it upon my consciousness that a people not only begins its history with violence, but continues it with violence. A healthy people is a growing people. You can no more restrict it to the limits of its past or confine it within a fixed area than you can keep an oak sapling in a flowerpot, or even in a greenhouse. The growing tree will not rest, unless you cripple it, until it has taken its full spread of fifty or a hundred feet. And so with a strong people. While it remains in health it has a high birthrate. Soon it requires more room, and, if it has the strength, it takes it. It makes war and pushes out its boundaries.

But the same excess energy that does this is at the same time pushing up great cathedrals, painting great pictures, pouring out great music and great literature. The expanded population and the widened frontiers, on the one hand, and cultural achievements, on the other, are over and over again seen to be concomitants. I do not say that one is the cause of the other. I say only that it seems they commonly go together, that you do not get the beautiful side without that other side, which strikes many of us as raw and even ugly. In short, both result from the occasional accumulation of excess energy in a people. If I am right in this, it means that any people that does differently has little worth. Any people that is able to restrain its energy does not have much; it is weak and sickly. It means, also, that any people that does not occasionally go to war is not going to do anything else either. It strikes me that it is with war as it is with water; if you would have the water that quenches thirst and cleanses all things, that drives power plants and forms the vast deep we love to look out upon under the soft light of a full moon, we must also be willing to accept blizzards, cloudbursts, occasional floods, and even tidal waves that sweep away the lives of thousands of men, women, and children. If we want the overflow of energy that alone is sufficient to create a great culture, then we must take the dark side that forms the reverse side of the picture, that goes with it and cannot be separated from it.

When put thus, and on the assumption that the light and the dark here are in fact bound together in the totality of actual life, surely the conclusion of any healthy man must be quick and certain; he will choose culture, even though it means the acceptance of violence and occasional war, rather than a peace that means a flabby manhood and the sacrifice of significance in a people’s existence. Let me have the proud and fiery glance, the towering conception, and the demonic will to do and to endure, even though now and then, or even often, it makes war, rather than the sleepiness and stupor of a people too soft, too tired, too timid, too something, to strike any sparks from the flint of life, or to gamble their existence on a single throw of the dice of Fate.

That is to say, it is the logic of this ultimate pacifist argument, that it would sacrifice culture for peace. For, mark you, no culture ever came out of human hodgepodge, out of populations, but only out of peoples, races, nations, differentiated units. The whole meaning of evolution is contained in this word “differentiation.” All the gains achieved through millennia of costly development are registered in differences—spiritual, mental, physical—by which one people is distinguished from another. It is because I fear that internationalism— certainly while we are under the domination of modern ideas—must tend toward a reversion to a human hodgepodge, a human stew or pudding, with all ingredients dumped in and mixed up together, that I strongly mistrust all efforts in that direction.

Internationalism or no internationalism, I know this: I want races and peoples and nations to remain races and peoples and nations, if anything even more sharply differentiated from one another than they are now. I want it for precisely the same reason that I want individuals to be ever more sharply differentiated into persons. The reason is, simply, that it is only in these distinguishing and character-giving differences, whether of individual or of nation or of race, that life can acquire and transmit any significance. I am glad, along with Robert Frost, to have the festive board, and to have many gather there as friends—the more the better, but I would have each one that comes, and whether man or people, to be something in and of himself or itself, and bring to the common store of cultural wealth some unique contribution. But when, for the sake of peace or any other high-sounding aim, men begin to melt down their distinctive shape and to merge and mix their distinctive color into shapes and colors that are acceptable to all, it means only one thing: they are losing the instincts by which alone they are able to maintain themselves in life, in vigor, and in beauty anywhere. Damn cosmopolitanism! Damn internationalism! These are our poison. It is as though you would try to undo aeons of evolution and would reduce roses, snapdragons, hollyhocks and Devil’s paintbrushes—to one flower, reminiscent of each but preserving the beauty and fragrance of none. These are the seductions by which our sickly idealists, for the sake of a peace that will forever escape them, would lead life away from the Earth—and off it. Better, I say, yes far better, is war, than this bloodthinning and sickening of life.

-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man