Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism - war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. The Illiad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. War is the strong life it is life in extremis war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. ] The Moral Equivalent of War By William James Business and Economic Ethics - Course Topics and Materials.Plato’s Cave and the Protests - Sam McClelland.Open College Podcast and other audio Menu Toggle.From the Office of the Reproducer-General.Great Books - My Recommended Reading List.*Kaizen* interviews on entrepreneurship and ethics.Michael Newberry | Thoughts on Key Works of Art in History.
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