Builders of a Brighter World

For a discussion of war aims, the Dunster House Forum was singularly unoptimistic in tone last night. Seven Faculty members used the topic as a jumping-off point for their analyses of war and its economic causes and consequences. The results were enlightening but hardly happy.

There seemed to be general agreement among the speakers and in the audience that war is the expansive effort of a capitalism seeking to compensate for its inherent contradictions. It was likewise common sentiment that a society in which war is a permanent or even a recurrent phenomenon does not have the approval of the Harvard Economics Department. All agreed that the post-war world ought to be one in which reorganization in the interests of permanent peace and justice will take place. Most viewed this as meaning an international order based on cooperative commonwealths of one sort or another.

Up to this point almost everything was harmony and light. But how do you go about realizing in practice this theoretical war aim? Here there was disagreement. One view held that it is fantastic and dangerous to seek to impose, upon any country, preconceived economic and political solutions--even the four freedoms of Franklin Roosevelt. Apparently the defeat of Hitler, the restoration of peace, and the creation of an international order are the proper first steps. Any internal economic or social changes will have to follow peace. Yet this view admittedly runs the risk of any Versailles; it does not prevent war's recurrence because it does not strike at its causes.

Accordingly another group argued that some more durable, which is to say more socialized, order is required. By eliminating the economic motivation of imperialism, we can eliminate war altogether. Yet this too is not feasible for the visible future, since--as its protagonists agreed--the party of socialism in England has surrendered its independent role, while the party of socialism in America just does not exist in any meaningful political way.

There were many fine and noble words said about our functions as moral social animals, and there were denunciations of those who would abdicate these functions. But in terms of the harsh test of "where do we go from here?", the meeting offered very few and very small potatoes to partisans of peace and progressivism. Apparently we are heading for war, an American imperialism cloaked in Luceful euphemisms, and a career of international political and economic frustration. This happy state will persist until the distant day when everyone becomes tired of it all. Which is not a very pretty nor a very proclaimable war aim.