Freedom in One Lesson

58.

Leonard Read’s
Conscience on the Battlefield

Leonard Read was long at the forefront of libertarian belief in America. And because he believed that “war is liberty’s greatest enemy, and the deadly foe of economic progress,” Read thought about war as well, particularly in his 1951 pamphlet Conscience on the Battlefield (Read 1951), probably his most controversial essay. In our seemingly warlike time, his thoughts are worth recalling.

As Jacob Hornberger wrote, it is “one of the most profound and thought-provoking pieces on war that has ever been written” (Hornberger 1991). Written at the peak of the Korean War, “it focused on the moral responsibility of the individual citizen for the wrongful acts of his government—in this case, the moral responsibility of the individual soldier for participating in foreign wars waged by his government.”

Read sets the stage in his prologue:

My interest is the study of human energy, how to free it from restraints, and how to abolish coercion of man by man—in short, how to enlarge the area of individual liberty, economic and otherwise.

We, as a people, are bent on a contrary course from which there appears to be no possible return short of a willingness—indeed, an insistence—honestly to examine every tenet we now hold. An analysis of liberty that would, at this juncture, prove “popular,” would be useless. . . . Unless it is highly controversial, and challenging to a great number of persons, it cannot be consistent with the advancement of human freedom. For popular ideas and liberty are now not in accord. Indeed, they are at odds.

War [is] the most brutal of man’s activities, [so] anyone who even presumes an interest in economic affairs cannot let the subject of war, or the moral breakdown which underlies it, go untouched. To do so would be as absurd—indeed, as dishonest—as for a cleric to avoid the Commandment “Thou shalt not steal” simply because his parishioners had legalized and were practicing theft. . . .

War is liberty’s greatest enemy, and the deadly foe of economic progress. If war is evil there must be a way to avoid it; there must be a rationale, a type of thinking, patterns for living, that lead to peace. These ways cannot be simple or we would invoke them. They must be difficult to practice or we would employ them. They are not easily explained or we would know them.

To address these issues, Read, who experienced the terrors of war when he was a young man aboard the troopship Tuscania when it was sunk by a German submarine, asks himself, “ What would be my thoughts in a similar situation today?” So, Read imagines an uncomfortable internal dialogue about war between his older self ’s conscience and his younger self, taking place as he was “dying on a battlefield near the 38th Parallel in Korea,” because “such probing is the preface to understanding, and frankness is the prelude to intelligent discussion.”

What core indictment is the young Read concerned about being judged for? “ While in many respects you were an excellent person, the record shows that you killed many men . . . and were also responsible for the death of many women and children during this military campaign.”

The essay is then filled with “ buts” that the young Read puts forward in defense of his individual innocence in killing people, adeptly illustrating the many excuses all of us come up with to justify ourselves as innocent of blame. They include blaming American foreign policy rather than his own choices and the argument that the Korean War was a “just war.” The young Read argues, “I had no choice, I had to do what others called my duty. Otherwise, my friends and fellow-citizens would have dubbed me a traitor.” He also claims, “I did not know that I was doing a wrong” and that there must be different standards for governments than individuals.

However, the responses of the older Read’s conscience to the younger Read’s “ buts” are the centerpiece of the essay.

Did you kill these people as an act of self-defense? Were they threatening your life or your family? Were they on your shores, about to enslave you? . . .

. . . The judgment which now concerns you must be rendered on you as an individual. . . . Governments and such are simply phrases, mere abstractions, behind which persons often seek to hide their actions and their responsibilities. . . . To take a human life—at whatever age, or of any color—is to take a human life. You imply that you feel no personal responsibility for having killed these people. . . . Yet, they were destroyed. . . .

. . . You and others . . . surrendered your standing as individuals. By this drifting from personal action to mass action, a dilemma was created for you and for all members of the collective: the choice of shooting others or having others shoot you for forsaking them; to do as the others demanded, or to risk the collective’s penalty for non-conformance. . . .

Man . . . cannot escape an accountability for his part of any collective action of society in which he participates . . . some responsibility for its collective misdeeds, either by commission or omission. . . .

. . . If Conscience has any function, it must be as a guide to the avoidance of evil acts and their inevitable consequences. . . .

. . . Think in terms of who initiates violence. It is evil for any person or set of persons to initiate violence against another. But, if another initiates violence against you, and if he dies in the process of your protecting your life, does he not, in reality, suffer death at his own hand. . . . He initiates the action in which he is killed. He, not you, is the author of the equation that destroys him. . . .

. . . As it is proper for you to protect your life against violence initiated by another, so is it proper for a number of you to protect yourselves against violence initiated against your number. But that is all. There is no extension of moral rights by reason of how numerous you are. . . .

Force! Coercion! Violence! Forever, it seems, people proposing force as a means to eliminate force! . . .

. . . Bad ideas . . . are not to be destroyed by killing the persons who voice them. . . . It’s the ideas that have to be considered. The route to better ideas is evolutionary and peaceful. . . . Better ideas are not shot into persons with guns. . . .

What you are saying is that . . . coercion, the essence of the dictator idea, produces better results than man in free action. . . . Isn’t it possible that the way to advance freedom is to behave like free men rather than like regimented men? . . .

There is strength only in that unity which results from like-mindedness. This originates with an individual’s actions being in unity with his conscience. . . . Its extension depends on the consciences of men being similar. The result is similarity in action—actions dictated by conscience instead of by Caesars. That is the kind of unity voluntary service produces. . . .

. . . There is enduring strength only in free men. When the truth of this is learned to the point of it’s becoming a profound faith, then—and then only—will mass murders be removed from the agenda of men. . . .

Involuntary service . . . is the restraint of men’s faculties by another, the denial of self-control . . . an idea that has no possible manner of being right. . . .

. . . You opened your ears and mind to . . . the fallacy that you could turn your responsibilities and problems over to government, to answers that declared you could take a part in evil and not be responsible for it. . . .

. . . The mob . . . is not subject to eternal damnation or Immortal Glory. It is but a name given to an arrangement which consists only of individuals. Can other than persons be responsible for acts, be the acts done alone or in association? . . .

Government . . . differs from the mob in that it is organized, legalized, formal force. . . . But . . . it, also, is but a name given to an arrangement which consists only of individuals. They—and they alone—are responsible for what they do collectively as government. They—and they alone—are subject to Judgment.

Most persons believe some form of government to be necessary as a means of achieving maximum liberty. They, therefore, surrender more or less of . . . their personal rights and responsibilities—to government. Unless they understand the nature of coercion—its power only to suppress, restrain, destroy—they place but little limitation on that portion of themselves which they surrender to this coercive agency. They surrender to government far more than the logical function of collective and equal protection of the life and property of all citizens. . . . Unless they comprehend coercion, many of them will use this medium of government to rob in the name of charity, plunder in the name of prosperity, and kill in the name of God.

. . . Another failure . . . is failure to grasp the idea that when the right to act on behalf of one’s self is delegated to another, this cannot reasonably be done without an acceptance of personal responsibility for the results of the delegated authority. . . . Let authority for your actions be transferred to government, a collective, without an exact accompaniment of your personal responsibility for that authority—without an equivalent transfer of that excellent discipline which controls your own actions—and, ipso facto, you will act without personal discipline as a result of the mistaken belief that there can be authority without responsibility. . . . This, I submit, is the illogical process . . . which leads you to kill another person without remorse or a feeling of guilt. You label the action by another name, “the government,” “the army”; so you thoughtlessly conclude that the responsibility is attached to another name also . . . not recognizing that the consequences of your actions are irrevocably yours, whether you personally conduct them or whether you employ government, a collective agency, to administer them?

Unless there is a strict awareness of the limitations that should guide delegated authority, and an equally keen realization that even a limited, delegated authority demands total personal responsibility, there will of necessity result a vast amount of evil action. . . .

. . . It is only when the agenda [items] of government are minor and incidental to the aggregate action of a people that the agenda can even be understood, let alone accepted personally as one’s own. If the agenda . . . extend(s) beyond the narrow confines of defending all citizens against violence and predacity initiated against them by others, the minds of most men will not be able to grasp what will be suffered in their names.

Leonard Read then gives a brief summary in the epilogue.

The collective! Government and its over-extension! The process of de-personalization! The method that divorces action from conscience! Action and conscience together tend to virtue—apart, action has no anchor! Action and conscience together lead to justice—apart, action becomes indiscriminate! Action and conscience together, and I would not kill— but divorce them, and I become a party to mass killing. Why did I not think of these ideas and their meaning?

Reading Conscience on the Battlefield, it is easy to see why it was so controversial. But I believe much of the controversy derived from the same sort of excusing “ buts” we all have a tendency to deploy to protest our innocence even when we are guilty. Leonard Read recognized the discomfort involved. Such wrestling motivated him to write about rather than ignore these issues. Similarly, despite any discomfort, wrestling with these core questions can benefit us as well in our warlike times.