Conscience Versus Conformity

Indignation has a Natural Rhythm, it boils up and over and is gone. And so protest movements have trouble keeping going. It is sometimes amazing how quickly the life can go out of them merely by a sudden switch of attention to something else. And one protest movement's gain is another's loss. The civil rights movement has already lost some of its momentum, because public interest switched to Vietnam. Will the indignation over Vietnam subside? There are many who hope so, and many who are willing to provide helpful distractions, new targets, real or illusory, for public concern.

At least one eminent liberal has represented the Vietnam demonstrations as a nuisance that hampers Senators like McGovern and Fulbright in doing what they are trying to do. Demonstrations, they think, should be limited to the civil rights movement. I've also heard it said recently that the demonstrations and petitions are becoming dull and useless, a sort of bad habit, monotonous. Unsuccessful, of course, they have been, so long as the war continues. But finding them tiresome is to apply wrong criteria. They are not entertainments, and they are not subject to aesthetic standards. They are political measures, and politics is tiresome.

I find in these arguments a warning not to be too easily discouraged. Was it to be expected that a war would stop because some of us have signed petitions, written articles, attended marches and meetings? Of course not. But that is no reason for assuming that such activities have no effect. The effect is cumulative, and the accumulation must be gigantic. More signatures, articles, speeches, marches, meetings, until the protest is successful.

McGeorge Bundy may choose to state that very few people disagree with him about Vietnam, and may imply that these few are all in places like Harvard, which Mr. Bundy at this point doesn't overvalue. But if these people are so few, why does so shrewd a public-relations man give them so much publicity? Why does he get them mentioned again and again in The New York Times by referring to them? Why did President Johnson keep on mentioning Robert Lowell after a certain incident a year or so ago in the social life at the White House? There are very few Lowells, even in Boston. There are very few poets, and of them very few are invited to the White House. My point is, then, not that the importance of Lowell was asserted by Lowell, but that it was taken for granted by Lyndon Johnson. And I mean political importance. I mean that--with all due credit to Mr. Lowell for the personal strength he showed--such protests don't get made when only one man feels that way, or even when only a few men feel that way.

To take a more distressing example: Two young Americans have burned themselves to death on account of this war. Two is a very small number, indeed. But those two young men were not lunatics. There can be disagreement on the moral content of their action, but all must agree that such deeds only happen in a certain climate of opinion and feeling, under a particular historical pressure. The very fact that young Americans have never acted this way before should awaken curiosity even in those who feel no sympathy. I am vastly understating the case in an effort to meet opponents halfway. I actually believe that the self-immolation of those boys bears witness to a perfectly enormous spiritual malaise, to a collective guilt comparable with that of the Germans.

Of course the peace movement is small. If it were not, there wouldn't be a war. We must make it bigger. At the same time, it is clear that people like Mr. Bundy have stressed the smallness of the protest for reasons of their own. It isn't as small as all (continued on page 204)Conscience(continued from page 150) that. Nor can we let it be assumed that everyone who hasn't yet stood up to be counted on the side of the protest movement can definitely and irrevocably be counted on Mr. Johnson's side. There are plenty of people who will not stand up and call themselves atheists who yet have no measurable belief in God. Around a small, aware protest movement of thousands, there may well exist a half-aware, half-protesting, certainly uneasy bloc of millions.

Those who protest--the protesting class of today: students, teachers, scientists, artists, et al.--are being told to make little of themselves. They are few and should get fewer. They are impractical and should remove themselves even further from practice. They have their heads in the clouds and should take their torsos and limbs up there to join them.

That we who protest should get this advice is quite in order. It would be strange if we didn't. But let us not use our self-doubt, which can be one of our virtues as intellectuals, as a weapon that strikes down our other virtues. The practical people, the nonintellectuals, have created the present situation in Vietnam. We couldn't have done any worse. In any case, when you have your head in the clouds these days, you are apt to bump into American bombers.

There is a more important point. A responsibility has devolved upon us. The fact that we are sensitive to these issues gives us the obligation to act on them. Recognizing that modern life is, among other things, a device for the killing of consciences, we have the obligation to do what the conscience we still claim to have dictates.

It is true that, unless we are absolute pacifists, we do countenance killing. I have sat with some members of my generation and been told by my friend Arthur Schlesinger that, as to the use of arms, we had no qualms about using them against Hitler, so why the hullabaloo about Vietnam? Actually, as I think back, I recall that we had, many of us, immense qualms about resorting to violence against Hitler. But who, pray, is the Hitler of today? Kosygin? Who believes that? Mao Tse-tung? Some do believe that: I wish they would provide solid evidence. At any rate, not Ho Chi Minh, who very likely could have had much more aid from either Russia or China than he has chosen to accept. In that sense, we may well owe it to him that we do not have a world war on our hands. Then, too, the Hitlerism in Vietnam seems to be all on the other side, that is, our side. Premier Ky is the only statesman in any country since 1945 to have declared Hitler his hero.

Finally, yes, many of us were able to countenance war against Hitler, in that we saw an Allied victory as being in the interests of both the Allies and Germany itself. Is the present killing in Vietnam in the interests of Vietnam? Is it in the interests of the United States? Is it in the interests of some other states (I reject the phrase "the free world")? Some think it is. But evidently it is not clearly established that it is, since many "good Americans" think it isn't. A Buddhist leader has said that his country is oppressed by two forces, the Communists and the Americans. Europe--not to mention Asia--is full of people who cannot see any merit in the American policy. The number of Americans whose consciences are troubled is larger than Mr. Bundy cares to admit. These people can be wrong, but the point remains that there is no consensus, the issue remains at best doubtful, and so the question arises whether it is right to go on killing as if we were certain when we are at best doubtful, when the possibility exists that it is all a ghastly mistake, and that the mild-mannered men of Johnson's Cabinet may go down in history as no better than gangsters.

The overwhelming reasons needed to justify military action with today's military means are simply not on hand. And, again, I am understating my own view of the case to try to meet the opposition halfway. The actual truth, in my judgment, is that American methods in Vietnam are so outrageous that, like the methods of the Nazis, the conscience rejects them out of hand, without going into detail. The Vietnamese people should not be sacrificed in this way, even if one could believe they were being sacrificed in a good cause. The triumph of the cause would not be certain even in the event of a military victory. Meanwhile, America is committing certain murder on a gigantic scale, and threatening to commit it on an even wider scale if she doesn't get her own way. There is an old religious objection to this sort of thing that to me still speaks volumes. It is to the effect that you mustn't assume God needs that much help. It argues a lack of faith in Him to assume that His cause will fail unless methods are used that fly in the face of His commandments. In down-to-earth terms, if that is what our ideals require for their realization, let's decide not to have them realized--the ends have been defeated by the means.

Incidentally, it is because I believe the essential issue in Vietnam to be a simple one that I consider appeals to the (real enough) complexities of Far Eastern politics invalid; and, in fact, they always turn out to be a trick. "What Mr. Johnson is doing out there does look very bad, but people who know Vietnamese geography tell me . . . and experts on the history of Indonesia add . . . while Kremlinologists say . . ." In other words, if you will take on trust the expertise of the particular experts favored by Mr. Johnson, you will find (surprise!) that Mr. Johnson has been right all along.

If this trick does not stand revealed from the word go, it certainly reveals itself when we realize that expertise is not required of those who support this war--or, for that matter, any other. When did any college president complain that a member of his faculty had stepped outside the field of his competence, if all the faculty member did was justify some utterly unjustifiable aggressive act on the part of his country's Government? An unthinkable thought! And probably most thoughts really worth thinking are unthinkable among what are sometimes considered thinking people.

To which I would like to add that, my own ignorance of Vietnam, though extensive, is incomplete. I read what Mr. Johnson says, and surely he is an expert. And I have read a good many experts who consider his experts all wrong. If the Alsops are experts, so is Walter Lippmann; and thus it is, also, among the scholars. I am glad, indeed, that we have the Fulbrights and Lippmanns to answer the realists in their own language, just as I used to be glad to have sociologists explain why it wasn't necessary for Hitler to get rid of the Jews. Still, one didn't really need the experts in order to make the main decision. In the life of action, overcomplication, not oversimplification, is often the danger, and it is a special trap for intellectuals, who are paid to complicate.

Since everything is possible in this huge, many-sided and finally baffling universe, we who protest have to admit that the other side may be right, and therefore that somewhere along the line we may have slipped. Suppose that there is something that may fairly be called the Free World, and suppose it is, above all, important to defend it with arms against something that may fairly be called the Unfree World, and suppose that this defense, to be effective, has to be offensive to the degree that the politicians and soldiers deem "adequate." I can suppose all this. I can entertain the notion in my mind for moments, even minutes, but when I look around and see who adopts this standpoint, and what they do about it, I have no interest in helping. If some people want to die in such a cause, they can, but their deaths do not concern me more than the deaths they inflict on their brothers.

Let me be blunt. Who can look around the world of the mid-20th Century and get the impression that its true meaning has been correctly grasped by Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, and not by Pope John XXIII, Martin Buber and Martin Luther King? Yes, the 20th Century is Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Vietnam. These things the realists have done and will be delighted to do again in the name of the unusually high ideals that realists nowadays boast. But today there is something else in the air as well. It is the third and most neglected of the three notions of the French Revolution--fraternity.

The ecumenical spirit would be the theological term. It is the thing not to have missed about our time, I feel, or one may well have missed everything. In short, I am one of those who finally cannot believe that good is likely to result from all these experiments in aggression that are supposed to preserve us from aggression, from all these crimes to end crime and outrages to end outrage.

If we have to bet on a course of action, and I suppose we do, and I suppose this is actually what commitment means, then I am betting against all that and those who believe all that, and would wish to put my small weight behind the contrary kind of attempt. This is the attempt to make fraternity--some degree of fraternity, at any rate--real on this planet.