Rotary's
Seven Paths to Peace - Chapter 6, The Path of Sacrifice
He will strive always to promote peace
between nations and will be prepared to
make personal sacrifices for that ideal.
(From the Outline
of Policy in International Service.)
IN 1958 The Saturday Review published a one-page article in the form of a
contest announcement. In big and bold type the headline proclaimed:
WORLD-WIDE COMPETITION
$1,000,000,000,000
IN TAX-FREE PRIZES
Then the details followed:
YOU ARE ALREADY ENTERED
If your name begins with A, B, C,
etc., or with 竏・ ﾑ・ ﾎ・
etc., or if you
live in the U.S.A., Russia, France, etc., you are already entered in this
competition. Your children, and their children-to-be, are entered.
THE PRIZES -
The prizes, conservatively valued at $1,000,000,000,000, include the
following:
A five-mile thick layer of pure, non-radioactive air.
Cities consisting of buildings, not rubble.
Water reservoirs not contaminated with fall-out.
Farmlands capable of growing edible food.
Your home, car, TV set (and incidentally your life) -
and various extras, such as unlimited energy from the atom and perhaps
interplanetary travel.
Then, a bit later this bombshell:
How to Withdraw from the Competition: You Can’t EVER.
And, finally –
If You Want to Win: Help Find a
In the previous chapter it was pointed out that the path of justice leads
inevitably to the path of sacrifice. It must be apparent, first, that even to
speak of peace entails and element of sacrifice. At some time, and, for a few
people, the word peace has become tarnished with guilt by association - a mask
for subversion, tyranny, and aggression. Beware, they say, of those who cry
”peace, peace”when there is no peace.
Perhaps this bitter feeling only reflects in an extreme form the general
disappointment with the sequel to the second world war. So much had been taken
for granted. There had been an unconditional surrender. Now there was peace,
and folks could go about their business and enjoy themselves and leave the
diplomats to worry about “foreign affairs”・
Speaking to a Rotary club in England, an American ambassador put it this
way:
I went to the last war as many of you did, and I really believed we were
fighting a war to end wars, and that we were fighting for democracy, and that
our children would reap some of the benefit of the sacrifice made by our
generation…….. We did not really care enough in the intervening years. If we
cared enough, we did not do enough or get enough done. It is rarely in the
world’s history that men get a second chance; and we have got a second chance.
What thoughtful observer of international service could not echo these
sentiments and apply them to himself? They ring so true in this hour of
history.
The last war came close to destroying civilization. Hunger and humiliation,
social and economic disruption, the vacuum left by the defeated powers – all
combined to produce a time of trouble and tension. Those who thought of peace
as the end of a fairy tale where “they all lived happily ever after” were
cruelly deceived. The cartoons which represented peace as an angel or a bride
prepared the public mind for bitter disillusionment. On the contrary, peace
should have been portrayed as the bride in real life - as a working girl with a
tremendous job on her hands, compelled to “work at her marriage” as the
counselors say, if it were to be a success.
This concept of peace as a summons to work rather than a license for
personal irresponsibility is made quite explicit in the Outline of Policy with
its call for personal sacrifices. But perhaps it was never driven home more
poignantly than in the last public address of that valiant worker for
international
friendship, the late John Winant. Breaking into his prepared speech, he
asked his audience abruptly:
”Are you giving as much today for peace as you gave for this country in the
days of war?”
There was a pause before and after he spoke his own quiet answer:
”I am not.”
Anyone looking back over the years since the war might so examine himself.
In time of war, the urge to sacrifice is omnipresent, and personal efforts are
measured by those who “give the last full measure of devotion・” For purposes of destruction, the finest and most generous
in human nature is expended. To save his country from destruction, however, and
to secure peace, freedom, and the survival of all he holds dear, man is under
no such compulsion.
Does this make sense?
Perhaps the extraordinary sacrifices of wartime are explained by the fact
that many people respond best in a crisis. The exceptional and abnormal call
forth the heroic in man. But is war the exception in human experience? History
suggests the opposite conclusion. Over the sum of years, the abnormal experience
has been the brief intervals of peace. Even the nineteenth century, which gave
birth to the illusion of peace as a normal condition, was filled with little
wars. In the twentieth, periods when the whole world was at peace can be
measured only in months, not in years.
People in earlier ages might reflect that war, after all, was the business
of a few knights or professional soldiers on isolated battlefields. During the
Wars of the Roses, for example, at the moment when a battle was about to begin,
the hue and cry of a hunt arose, and the armies withheld their attack while the
fox,
the hounds, and huntsmen streamed between them. Then they took up their own
grim pastime.
If war was ever in fact so gentlemanly in its conduct, its nature has been
utterly changed in modern times. War has become total, mobilizing entire
peoples and their resources, aiming at total destruction. None can count
himself immune. There is no place to hide. There are no more civilians.
Children will become “combatants,” the same as their elders.
Do not these circumstances demand a revised concept of war and peace? The
late Albert Einstein, the mathematical genius who fathered the atomic age,
projected the issue on the broadest scale and in the bluntest terms:
A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to
higher levels.
Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in
order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of
the world as we know it.
The tank is a defense against bullets but there is no defense in science
against the weapon which can destroy civilization.
Our defense is not in armaments nor in going underground.
Our defense is in law and order. In the light of new knowledge, the human
race must adapt its thinking.
There is no easy optimism in the mood of the Rotarian who strives to
promote peace, to halt and reverse the normal drift into war. He is
disillusioned with cheap panaceas. He is a realist. He knows that victory in
this struggle will not be won by subscribing to some pressure group or by
passing a resolution in
his club. The Rotarian must ask himself what personal sacrifices are
required of him and his fellow men if mankind is to survive and move to higher
levels.
Can anyone answer for him? Obviously, no, though he can be fortified and
inspired through consultation with other earnest men. Ultimately, the answer
must come from his own private conscience and be made manifest in his
individual action. Here, only a few forms of sacrifice will be suggested as
background for
deliberation and discussion.
First, and perhaps most obvious of all, is the kind that falls at present
on every taxpayer and burdens the economy of the entire world to the tune of
$120,000,000,000 a year. In the wealthiest country of the
world, “peace through strength” exacts a personal sacrifice from the
average taxpayer equivalent to a month’s salary. “Who desires peace, prepares
for war” was the justification of this policy in ancient
I am not for war, I am for peace. If you rub it in both at home and abroad
that you are ready for instant action with every unit of your strength in the
front line and intend to be first in and hit your enemy in the belly, and kick
him when he is down, and boil your prisoners in oil if you take any, and
torture his
women and children, then people will keep clear of you.
Will they? This ancient form of sacrifice which is still so fashionable has
not prevented wars. It has enhanced general insecurity, fomented an arms race
and, finally, brought the use of the great deterrents -yesterday the admiral’s
dreadnaughts, tomorrow the guided missiles with hydrogen war-heads. Never was
this policy more scathingly denounce than by the president of one country
which had adopted it:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending
money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its
scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is
this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two fine and
fully equipped hospitals.
And so on to the conclusion:
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world
has been taking. This is not a way of life at all in a true sense. Under the
cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
If in one fell swoop the plague of war could be eradicated, what could a
comparable amount of money, energy, and genius accomplish for mankind? The
thought taxes the imagination! Is it possible in the wildest dream to conceive
what $120,000 million a year could do, harnessed to policies of peace and
service? Now, it is as if humanity were struggling up the stairs of
civilization on one leg.
The path of sacrifice may indeed lead head-on into strongly entrenched
traditions; there are those - and in large numbers - who say that history
repeats itself, that today’s humanity is no better than its forebears.
”Wars and rumors of wars” there will always be. One answer is that our
forebears were not attracted to the path of sacrifice, either; nor were they in
the posture of Atomic-Age man. The real answer, however, has been given by
another military man who states unequivocally that what mankind now requires is
“an attack on the institution of war itself” A Rotarian from South America has
put it this way:
In accord with the object of Rotary, we should look into the deeper causes
of war and of the diabolical motives that move men to kill each other; what
statism impels them to do, what they abhor, and which they recognize as abominable
and in contradiction of our ideal of service above self.. What is proposed is
in
no sense impossible nor calling for a superior intelligence, but an
absolute necessity. The time to act is now.
Another Rotarian has stated: “Ours is a man-sized task which must be
approached with the kind of genius and effort which went into the first atomic
bomb .. Civilization cannot support two or more armed camps forever on the
brink of nuclear catastrophe.” Peace by terror or deterrent force in which
belligerents threaten each other from week to week can lead only one place - to
nuclear war.
A hunter of big game in
The guide answered with a wry smile. “Men say they have hurried so fast
their bodies have run off and left their souls. Must wait for souls to catch
up.”
The breathless quest for power, wealth, influence and better technology has
taken men ……and nations… far into the jungle. Now, in this lag of culture and
law, they need to pause for their souls to catch up. Nations are like children
with guns in their hands. A child must be taught rules and laws; it
would be unthinkable to send a six-year-old to school with a loaded rifle -
but even a child understands why a policeman must carry a gun.
”It is impossible to imagine the heights to which may be carried, in a
thousand years, the power of man over matter,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. “Oh,
that moral science were in as fair a way to improvement, that men would cease
to be wolves to one another.”
This is a
gigantic arena for sacrifice - this imperative quest for a “break-through” in
social science to match the achievements of technology. What
matters it that men span the oceans at the speed of sound if, when they face
their neighbors, they have nothing to say? Into this vacuum comes the missile
or hydrogen war-head. Into this setting comes prejudice, ignorance,
superstition - and tyranny. Man’s
pressing problems now are in the domain of the spirit - the “inner space” of
human personality.
This new orientation toward the “inner man” demands the expenditure of
greater resources and competence in the search for the deeper meanings of life.
It means that research must be applied with equal vigor to man and machine - to
the spiritual and the material. It means creating a new climate of adventure
in human affairs to match the challenge of a rocket trip to outer space. It
means that the quest for ways to link man to man and nation to nation must
become as urgent as the quest to link earth with the moon.
Another area of sacrifice is the movement to get nations to put away their
guns and solve their differences as law-abiding men. The goal is to seek an
agreement between the arming nations to end the arms race - an undertaking far
easier to propose than to accomplish. Who will sacrifice what? And what
assurance can be given to disarming nations that other nations will fulfill
their agreements? This opens up the Pandora’s box of mutual inspection, the
ability to detect, and the right to curtail the power of those who do not
comply.
In a fable, the great beasts gather in the jungle to discuss disarmament.
”Let us show our common enemy, man,” said the lion, “how to live in peace
together. If we set an example, perhaps he will cease to hunt and slay us.”
”What do you propose?” inquired the bear.
The lion looked at the eagle. “Abolish wings,” he suggested.
The eagle looked at the bull. “Destroy horns,” he proposed.
The bull looked at the lion. “Get rid of teeth and claws,” he demanded.
There was silence for a moment. All were staring at the bear. “I advise the
elimination of all forms of defense,” he said quietly. “In this way, each of
you can have the security of my loving arms.”
Any program of disarmament involves sacrifices. If great powers agree to
disarm, they give up being great powers. No longer can they impress their views
on other nations by threat of force. If they want to make sure that other
nations are fulfilling their pledges, they, too, have to submit to measures of
control. For some people, these concessions of authority and prestige are a
deeply personal sacrifice. While other nations may welcome restraint of the
great powers, feeling that their own stature is increased by removal of the
threat of force, they may find that they have incurred increased
responsibilities thereby. They may have to renounce a cherished neutrality and
provide armed forces for the common defense. Disarmament may involve sacrifice
also for the peoples of lesser powers.
Yet who would deny that such sacrifices are more than justified if they can
help to prevent the horror of a third world war? The question is rather: are
such sacrifices enough?
The answer is - no! In fact, the foregoing sacrifices become pure theory
unless they are predicated upon a deeper and more significant kind of sacrifice
- personal sacrifice. It is in the arena of individual, person-to-person
relationships that true sacrifice begins. And it must begin here - and it must
grow here, until the level of national leadership is raised and the vision of
statesmen becomes the reflection of enlightened public opinion. Woodrow Wilson
put it well: “The processes of liberty are that if I am your leader, you should
talk to me, not that if I am your leader I should talk to you. I must listen,
if I be true to the pledges of leadership, to the voices out of every hamlet,
from every sort and condition of men.”
Yet, the simple process of making one’s voice heard is a sacrifice - more
so in some places than in other, but there is bitter irony in the fact that in
the places where it is easiest and most expected, it is a sacrifice too great
to be endured. Why should I bother? Who cares what I think, anyway? I’m too
busy.
The politicians make all the decisions.
But the process of making one’s voice a reasonable sound, based on
knowledge, discussion, and insight is an even more challenging one. How much
easier it is to get an “expert” to speak to the Rotary club than to dig into
the facts and present the subject yourself? Granted a willingness to present it
yourself, how much easier to give a lecture - your own opinions and your
selection of facts - than to attempt to lead a spirited discussion in which a
barrage of opinions may be laid down at you.
An into-their-shoes conference, previously mentioned, may take much time
and study for several weeks on the part of the participants, but where one has
been held it has raised the level of understanding of world affairs to an
appreciable degree. If such study and debate were going on all around the
world, who can
estimate the values which could accrue? Yet, this illustrates that all such
enterprises entail personal sacrifice of the hardest kind - the kind which
steals from personal preoccupation with television-viewing, dancing lessons,
parties, theatre-going, painting the basement, or building a boat.
Pericles said: “We do not allow absorption in our own affairs to interfere
with participation in the city’s; we yield to none in independence of spirit
and complete self-reliance, but we regard him who holds aloof from public affairs
as useless.” And the Greeks had a word for the “useless” man, a “private”
citizen, idiotes, from which the English word “idiot” comes.
This leads to another kind of personal sacrifice: the realization that our
point of view may not be the right one, that the facts with which we are
surrounded may be tainted with propaganda, that our culture may have something
to learn from another culture. To many persons, this is the ultimate blow - the
blow to
personal and national pride. It is incredible to the superficial observer
that the principles he has embraced, that the way of life he has accepted, may
be almost unrecognizable in the next generation - that indeed its very base may
be swept away and society may possibly be the better for it.
This is a bitter dose to swallow, but such resiliency in the human spirit
may make the path of sacrifice much easier to follow. With all the achievements
of their civilization, the Greeks must have understood this well. For thousands
of years the trophy, or monument, has been the symbol of victory, and these
trophies have reflected in their structure and substance the natural
materials of the land. In
substance was wood, out of which the victor might form his trophy or
monument. But it was not permitted to be repaired! So, the victor always
understood that it would soon decay and rot away, even as he vanquished his foe
or as he erected his monument. The only permanent thing, he well knew, was
impermanence.
Such an attitude does not imply vacillation or lack of objectives. It is
not a peace-at-any-price doctrine, as the record of the Greeks demonstrates.
Such an attitude, however, creates perspective, and perspective is one of the
guideposts along the path of sacrifice.
The paths of justice and sacrifice merge here, but a discussion of
attitudes which lead to sacrifice would be incomplete without another reference
to a foremost dilemma of this atomic age. Even though the threat of
annihilation were abolished, another problem emerges laden with potential
disaster. Misery and ignorance in the less developed lands provide a paradise
for the agitator, for the ambitious individual, or for the nation seeking to
gain power by fishing in troubled waters. Armed force cannot restrain the
insurgent, for sooner or later he becomes armed. Yet, national disarmament and
control of the great powers are of themselves no solution unless a new order
can be established to encourage the hopes and win the allegiance of
these emerging millions.
The crux of the matter here is: Who are these emerging millions? Ignorant
savages who should be let alone? Potential laborers in a regimented
technocracy? Soldiers marching in a bigger and more destructive army? Pawns in
the game of power politics? Or, useful and free men who should somehow be
helped to claim their rightful heritage of dignity, self-government, and
self-respect. Each man will answer this question in his own way, but he will
give his answer - even if it only is a decision not to answer at all.
The person drawn to the path of sacrifice will also take a fresh look at
the meaning of peace. He will reflect about, and discuss, this word, probing
for new meanings and new techniques. So long as the concept is negative and
defined as “the absence of war,” so long
as effort is limited to restraining
potential aggressors or curtailing the means of aggression, the results are
likely to be disillusioning and dangerous. Only by transforming the concept to
describe the positive and constructive task of creating order in the world can
the individual discover a path which will justify his personal sacrifice.
The illiterate wrestling with his alphabet is waging peace. The
agriculturist toiling to increase his yield, the men of science grappling with
disease or patiently organizing ways to lessen the burdens of human toil, the
businessman and the trade unionist raising standards of practice in their
crafts, the individual citizens championing the cause of human rights or giving
leadership in the development of international law - all these and many, many
more are heroes in the quest for peace. The paths of freedom, progress, and
justice, already commended to the Rotarian in the Outline of Policy, merge into
the path of sacrifice -personal sacrifice for peace. And peace must be waged!
If international relations remain the preoccupation of demagogues and
diplomats, the obstacles to peace may never be overcome. Peace must become the
personal goal of practical men of affairs who are accustomed to getting things
done. These men, if they will pause to consider the meaning of their lives,
have the
greatest stake of all in the issue. They have the most to lose in the
present drift toward world war and revolution and the most to gain from the
creation of a new order based on freedom, progress, and justice.
The path of sacrifice holds strong appeal for Rotarians. Truly, this is
“Service Above Self.” And thousands of Rotarians are responding. Much more
could be accomplished, however, through a deeper devotion to Rotary principles,
through a more diligent cultivation of Rotary contacts, and by more active and
informed leadership in their own communities. Is this too much to expect
from a “world fellowship of business and professional men united in the ideal
of service”?
A generation ago, the fate of man was projected as “a race between
education and catastrophe.” With every year, the pace has quickened. The call
for personal sacrifice grows more urgent. It comes from statesmen, scholars,
and divines of every party and persuasion, but a general, long exposed to the
scenes
of battle, has voiced the most categorical conviction:
Now that the fighting has temporarily abated, the outstanding impression
that emerges from the scene is the utter uselessness of the enormous sacrifice
in life and limb which has resulted. A nation has been gutted and we stand
today just where we stood before it all started.
This experience again emphasizes the utter futility of modern war, its
complete failure as an arbiter of international dissensions. We must finally
come to realize that war is outmoded as an instrument of policy, that it
provides no solution but international suicide.
While we must be prepared to meet the trial if war comes, we should gear
foreign and domestic policies toward the ultimate goal, the abolition of war from
the face of the earth. You cannot control war; you can only abolish it.
It must be obvious that the abolition of war is a severe summons to
sacrificial action. With a tenure so long in unrecorded tradition and in
recorded history, and with a glory so enshrined in legend and song, it will die
hard. But the trophies of a successful battle against this scourge of mankind
make it worth
the candle.
(to be continued - Chapter 7, The Path
of Loyalty)
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