SUICIDAL, NOT SUBVERSIVE
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
Suicidal, Not Subversive By Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. DR. HINSHAW asks: "Am I subversive?" The answer is: Obviously not. A free society, like our own, requires a wide variety of beliefs and...
...I give that dubious honor to failure to obey conscience— the loss of integrity...
...In my judgment, his own performance betrays his case...
...and the effect of this— on souls less exalted than Dr...
...Schlesinger conceive that he would feel obligated to disobey such a law...
...I am glad, however, that the few sentences briefly summarizing part of my convictions on pacifism, with no attempt to buttress the conclusions, merited so much attention from my critic...
...But he does not have the right to misquote and distort as he does...
...Is he willing to let the state be his conscience...
...He is a member of the Board of Directors of Americans for Democratic Action...
...but the pacifist who, after lecturing us about the beauties of sacrifice, then comfortably promises us that we won't have to sacrifice after all— that non-resistance is the counsel of expediency as well as of principle— becomes intolerable...
...Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," writes Rein-hold Niebuhr, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...
...Newspapers decline Dr...
...Not spiritual pride, nor human slavery, nor envy, nor cruelty, nor murder, nor even gluttony...
...Schlesinger, though, that the draft does not have top priority in my ranking of sins...
...A free society, like our own, requires a wide variety of beliefs and convictions...
...This sentence is in the middle of a section intended to suggest the necessary limits of civil disobedience and to distinguish my position from anarchy and social disorder...
...Hinshaw's case for civil disobedience is based on a conviction that all men are as wise and virtuous as he is (or, one is compelled to add, as wise and virtuous as lie thinks he is...
...Nor would substituting any other individual for Dr...
...The worst part of Dr...
...If you respect a system of law, he suggests, you therefore ascribe infallibility to each and every law enacted under that system...
...if these things horrify Dr...
...Actually my article was on civil disobedience, not on pacifism...
...This is the main thesis of my original statement and Dr...
...When Dr...
...we accept the ones we have because they constitute the framework which assures us the chance to make them better...
...If obedience to law were to become a matter of fielder's choice, there would no longer be any means of restraining the brutalities of power...
...The author of many articles in most of the leading magazines of the country, Schlesinger has also written several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Age of Jackson" and "The Vital Center...
...It is a little too much, in an age ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., historian at Harvard, has long been a leading spokesman for the Roosevelt' Truman - Acheson position in American foreign policy...
...Schlesinger in a position rather difficult to differentiate from arrogance when it is remembered that he must logically apply the same adjectives to Gandhi, to the present South African non-violent resisters, and to thousands of other people in our world, some of whom are as prominent and respectable as is Dr...
...Hinshaw transforms Thoreau's doctrine of civil disobedience into a vulgar Babbitry...
...What a degradation of Christianity...
...I made no such statements...
...That laws may be in error, even in our own nation, is readily admitted by Dr...
...Hinshaw's notion that the road to dictatorship lies through respect for law is profoundly unhistorical...
...In addition to these other social pressures, there must also be added legal sanctions, as I certainly inferred when I stated before that disobedience of law should be done openly with willingness to accept the penalty...
...Schle-singer that social order is necessary, but sociological and anthropological studies give abundant evidence that societies have many "means of restraining the brutalities of power" besides the legal sanctions about which Dr...
...Its most durable teaching, in my judgment, is its conception of man—this curiously fashioned creature, compounded of impulses, good, bad, and ambiguous, his preconceptions and judgments all fatally tainted with his own vanity and his own self-interest...
...But the men who would rather be martyrs are hardly a trustworthy guide for people who prefer survival to sainthood...
...The alternative is not, as Dr...
...Hinshaw would counsel us to disobey laws whenever we don't like them...
...Schlesinger, and who, obviously, do not consider pacifism a "program for national suicide...
...Dr...
...No army measures victory or defeat by the amount of suffering incurred...
...Let us consider for a moment what would happen to us and our free world if we all became Hin-shawites...
...But let him not tell us that we can eat our spiritual cake and have our physical safety too...
...None of us is that good...
...Schlesinger leaves us to guess where he really stands...
...Hinshaw suggests, between "unquestioning and slavish obedience to law" and civil disobedience: it is between democracy—which holds law as an eternal subject for criticism and change—and anarchy...
...Nor do I. I doubt that Dr...
...I would shudder to think that America would ever reach a point where it would not tolerate the testimony of the Hinshaws...
...Hinshaw does not seem to understand what law in a democracy is all about...
...Instead, he concentrates his fire on the system by which free governments try to distribute the burdens of the common defense...
...Bad conduct would swiftly and^ automatically drive out good...
...Schlesinger has made me appear to say exactly the opposite of what I said in these words: "The principle of law I thus uphold by my disobedience of what I believe to be a bad law...
...His policies are no doubt virtuous, but they are certainly not wise...
...Hinshaw postulates a curiously niggling and eccentric God when he assumes that, with all the sins that bedevil man in the 20th Century and the fantasies which bedazzle him, God nonetheless regards non-cooperation with the draft as the top priority...
...One can admire a thoroughgoing pacifist who is prepared to bear the full consequence of his pacifism, even to the slave labor camp and the firing squad...
...Hinshaw seeks to deny this and presents what he calls a "practical" alternative to military defense, he must really forfeit his readers' esteem...
...The alternative is not between defense through military means and defense through non-resistance...
...True, I did not catalog and rank all the various sins in a dissertation on the immorality of mankind...
...Indeed, the inevitable consequence of his program would be to remove every physical barrier to Russian world dominion...
...If so, than I press upon him the whole import of my article-—the charge that such moral abdication and slavish obedience of the state means failure to respect true law and constitutes the foundation for totalitarianism, even as was the case in Germany...
...I am glad to assure Dr...
...A similar misinterpretation is this: "Dr...
...Schlesinger's statement that I counsel anarchy—disobedience of laws "whenever we don't like them...
...But Dr...
...I did not suppose such a course was necessary in order to single out a specific sin for discussion...
...It can provide startling insights into society and humanity...
...Throughout our history our moral sensitivity has been quickened and renewed by the lonely dissenter...
...Perhaps this is the only kind of pacifism with which he is familiar, but I, with many others, have rejected it for a more realistic approach...
...Hinshaw's article is its spiritual arrogance...
...If dictatorship ever comes to our country—if I may amend Dr...
...When he does this...
...Let him summon us to sacrifice and slavery: that is a noble, if idiotic, position...
...But, just as we must thank God that there are some Hinshaws in our land, so, in my judgment, we must thank God even harder that there aren't very many of them...
...I said, rather, that the road to dictatorship lies through "slavish, unquestioning obedience of the government," and I certainly cannot equate that with respect for law, even if Dr...
...The alternative is nor between good men and evil government...
...when survival trembles in the balance, to be expected to give reverent and earnest attention to a program for national suicide...
...Hinshaw—as I am certain they do —he does not mention them here...
...Hinshaw's articles, I would guess, not because they are disturbing, but—to put it bluntly—because they are boring...
...On the whole, we would be rather better off to enter vigorously into the processes of democracy and accept the results—not because the voice of the people is the voice of God, but because no better way than democracy has been thus far devised to maintain a tolerable amount of order and humanity and liberty for free men living together in society...
...Hinshaw is, of all things, the draft...
...Ill Christianity surely has not come to this...
...Hinshaw's observation— it will come because chaos and lawlessness drive our people from the insecurity of a free system to the false security of slavery...
...The only American orthodoxy is the right of all Americans to subject every act and every sentiment of our society to the testing of conscience...
...Now such arrogance has its value...
...Schlesinger has been reading too many Westerns (or too much Hobbes...
...Or is it possible that, like the Nazis, he would commit any crime against humanity because of being so commanded by his government...
...And what follows, too, is a conception of the role of society and, I believe, of the necessity of democracy...
...SCHLESINGER certainly has the right to disagree with me, even to term my position "idiotic," "boring," "ridiculous," and "foolish...
...Schlesinger says I did, that respect for a system of law means to "ascribe infallibility to each and every law enacted under that system...
...Or would he, faced with a command that meant abandonment of decency and honor, at last gather courage to pit his conscience against the state...
...There is even room for those proud and thorny individuals who automatically assume, when conflict arises, that they are right and everyone else is wrong...
...On the contrary, I wrote, "Only when one knows that failure to obey the inward voice means sacrifice of integrity—man's most precious value—is there really justification for civil disobedience...
...Where another writer would have emphasized the fact that the uproar over the Ohio State incident caused a drastic modification in the Bevis rule, Dr...
...At least I admitted that I, as a pacifist, "may be tragically wrong in my opposition to the military policy of our country...
...A Final Word By Cecil E. Hinshaw DR...
...Schlesinger is willing to defend the expedience of atomic warfare on the ground that we won't have to suffer...
...Hinshaw improve the matter...
...Of course, non-violent resistance against evil means sacrifice, perhaps even death, as it did for Gandhi...
...Hinshaw barely mentions this and dwells almost pleasurably on the initial suppression...
...The one "unalterably evil" phenomenon specified by Dr...
...This, then, is scarcely a picture of "a ferocious world of warring mobs and armed bands...
...Hinshaw invokes religion a good deal, but it is a little hard to know what his conception of good and evil really is...
...If this all-this-and-heaven-too nonsense is not just the commercial which Dr...
...I certainly agree with Dr...
...Hinshaw has tacked on to his sermon, then it is a fatal flaw in his thinking...
...The objection of many Americans to the Hinshaw program is, not that it is subversive, but that it is foolish...
...Laws are only the existing rules of the game...
...His whole article, as I see it, is a series of false and foolish alternatives given emotional coherence by a certain relish in martyrdom...
...Hinshaw's—might well be catastrophic...
...He counts the cost only for himself...
...An example of this distortion is Dr...
...it is between holding off the Communists and surrendering to them...
...Freedom, after all, depends on social order, and social order on respect for law...
...The only reason that the Hinshaw program might not condemn us to internal chaos and tyranny is that the Russians might take us over first...
...II When he tells us that non-resistance offers "reasonable hope of defeating the evils of Communism" and adds that "this belief is supported by evidence I regard as irrefutable," he must take us for fools...
...If a law were, in his judgment, seriously in error, if he had tried in vain to remedy it through regular legislative and judicial channels, and if its consequences were such that obedience of it would grievously violate his conscience, can Dr...
...in our own land, the laws protect us from the tyranny of our fellow men far more than they, subject us to the tyranny of government...
...I did not at all suggest, as Dr...
...When he talks about "the cost of civil disobedience," Dr...
...Our liberties would vanish in a ferocious world of warring mobs and armed bands...
...Aristotle was far nearer right when he traced the cycle from anarchy to despotism...
...Schlesinger attributes to me the shallow pacifism that was part of a weak liberalism between the two World Wars...
...Schlesinger can...
...II I must also call my critic to task for his assertion that I comfortably promise "that we won't have to sacrifice after all," that we can "have our physical safety, too...
...I insist, instead, that respect for a system of law means precisely the opposite—the recognition of the fallibility of specific laws...
...It can offset the slack and easy complacency which dominates the rest of us...
...Nothing could be more ridiculous...
...I cannot leave the matter, however, without suggesting that his curt dismissal of pacifism as "idiotic" and "intolerable" places Dr...
...Hinshaw's notion that the road to dictatorship lies through respect for law is profoundly unhis-torical...
...Schlesinger is so concerned...
...The statement that I give top priority to the draft among the evils of our world puzzles me...
...Hinshaw characteristically does not count the cost for anyone else—the chaos, the sanguinary violence, the Communist slavery...
...What follows from this conception of man is a sense of humility and complexity— a sense that there are no simple solutions, no answers in the back of the book, not even the Bible...
...The first consequence would be the disintegration of our own freedom...
Vol. 17 • May 1953 • No. 5
