An alternative to military conscription
War against nature, not people.
In the-moral-equivalent-of-war, William James argues that we should conscript youth into hard civilian labor (mines, construction, fishing fleets) instead of military service. “Army enlisted against nature.” This way discipline and collective purpose are preserved “in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium.”
All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him.
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In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. […] Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built—unless, indeed,we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
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Why should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever?
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We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one’s life.
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Great indeed is fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.Universal labor obligation, fair distribution of socially necessary work, contribution to the collective …
Temporary rotation through the coal mines, then back to normal life (which under communism is increasingly “just” “leisure” 1).
He just doesn’t touch property relations or the free market, which makes this whole idea utopian.what role does discipline play in collective intelligence?
What work could look like as technology advances.
Everyone does periods2 of necessary work. Then you’re fully covered (house, health, education, food, …). Periods might be a few months in the year. Might be every few years… might be like conscription (e.g. after this necessary work doesn’t really exist anymore, but we do the conscription thingy for the social benefits – or maybe some “unpleasant” 3 jobs that humans have to do will never fully go away (care work).
The amount naturally shrinks as automation covers more.
Pair it with a revolution in our education system: learning and working should not be separate life phases
Jame's idea concretely
Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all— this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature, they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.
Link to original
Self-forgetfulness instead of self-seeking; Innovation unconstraint by commercial pressure … in civil technogy, without profit progress stagnates
Circular transclusion detected: library/the-moral-equivalent-of-war/the-moral-equivalent-of-war
Footnotes
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You can totally “do a startup”, independent research, whatever the fuck. Just that it won’t be for profit / have incentives to pump you full of corn syrup. But how willl I raise money for big projects??? Simple, as with the rest of the economy collective resources are democratically allocated. You convince the people on the free market of ideas! And better not fool them, because people have actual control over their tax dollars now. ↩
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Perhaps batched periods (x months a year, x years in your life), perhaps that’s not rlly efficient, perhaps it should be continual, with a ramp-on/off, perhaps you should have options for how you schedule it… ↩
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Unpleasant and unfullfilling under current working and living conditions and alienation. Also, interest is socially constructed – as James says, civic pride and shame can be cultivated to the same intensity as military pride and shame, given time and propaganda. ↩