By the end of the first month of camp, my view of life was being altered. I went back to the confident humanism so characteristic of the liberal academic circles in America I had recently quitted. As I looked around me during those early weeks, I felt convinced that man's ingenuity in dealing with difficult problems was unlimited, making irrelevant those so-called "deeper issues" of his spiritual life with which religion and philosophy pretended to deal.

Gradually, however, as I encountered more and more unexpected problems in my work in housing, I began to realize that this confident attitude toward things simply did not fit the realities of camp life. It was not that our material crises seemed any less urgent, or that our minds were any less capable of dealing with them. Rather, new sorts of problems kept arising that improved know-how could not resolve. For over and over what we can only call "moral" or "spiritual" difficulties continually cropped up. Crises occurred that involved not a breakdown in techniques, but a breakdown in character, showing the need for more moral integrity and self-sacrifice. The trouble with my new humanism, I found myself deciding, was not its confidence in human science and technology. It was rather its naïve and unrealistic faith in the rationality and goodness of the men who wielded these instruments. If the courage and ingenuity of man were evidenced in every facet of camp life, equally apparent was the intense difficulty all of us experienced in being fair-minded, not to say just or generous, under the hard pressure of our rough and trying existence.

But most important of all, what became increasingly plain was that these crises of the soul were not of such a character as to disturb merely the prim and the straight-laced in our midst. On a critical level equal to an outbreak of dysentery or a stoppage of our bread supply, these moral breakdowns were so serious that they threatened the very existence of our community. It became increasingly evident to me that unless these inward crises could be resolved, the entire microcosmic civilization which we had so painstakingly established to feed and care for us would not live much longer. I began to see that without moral health, a community is as helpless and lost as it is without material supplies and services.

This was the deepest lesson I learned from this experience. Since that time, both in studies and in observation generally, it has seemed to me to be a truth validated over and over in the life of every human society, great or small.

The first inkling I had of the approach of these crises of a deeper sort—caused by what we can only call the essential intractability of the human animal—came shortly after we on the Housing Committee had made the camp census. Shields and I knew that great sections of the camp were terribly overcrowded.

We also knew that our next task was to try to provide these people with more room. The difficulty, of course, was that nowhere in camp did anyone have any more space than he needed. Thus, if any extra space for our unfortunates was to be won at all, it had to be snatched from the person barely able to make himself comfortable and so, fair game. One or two brushes with the public had shown the difficulty of our task, and with both apprehension and excitement we began to talk about what we would do.

While we were pondering our first steps, a deputation of three single men appeared in the quarters office. When asked what they wanted, they replied a trifle aggressively, I thought: "Fair treatment from the Housing Committee."

Somewhat taken aback by this, I nevertheless said confidently, "Sure, and that's what you'll get! What's up, and how can we help you?"

"Our case is quite simple," said the elderly head of the group, an ex-soldier lamed by World War I and formerly the proprietor of a small bookshop in Tientsin. "We three," and he looked at the other two, a young American tobacco man and a British schoolmaster, "live in a dormitory room in Block 49. There are eleven men in our small room, and we have barely space to turn around, much less to stow our stuff in any comfort. Across the hall is a room exactly the same size—isn't it, chaps?"

The other two nodded in agreement. Apparently two of them had measured it while the third held its unsuspecting inmates in conversation.

"In that room there are only nine men—and in ours eleven.

Now we suggest that you rectify this obvious injustice by moving one of our men in with them. Surely that's fair enough, isn't it, chaps?" The other two mumbled in grim agreement.

I must admit I felt elated. Here at last was a perfectly clear-cut case. Surely the injustice in this situation was, if it ever was in life, clear and distinct: since the rooms were next to each other, anyone who could (like Descartes) count and measure could see the inequity involved.

The solution was so easy: if we did move one man, then each room would have ten persons. "Are not people rational and moral?" I asked myself. "Does this not mean—if it means anything—that the average man, when faced with a clear case of injustice which his mind can distinctly perceive, will at the least agree to rectify that injustice—even if he himself suffers from that rectification? And besides, isn't it true that people are more apt to share with each other when they are in some common difficulty, like on a raft at sea, than they are in the humdrum pursuits of normal life?" So I argued to myself as I confidently accompanied the delegates to Block 49.

Justice is, however, one thing in theory and another in actuality. In the realm of theory, justice brings with it few liabilities, but in life, being reasonable and fair may mean the loss of precious inches of living space!

When I entered the dorm and said that I was from the Housing Committee, at once I could feel the inmates becoming wary. Their suspicions, I noted, did not decrease when they saw the three-man deputation from the next room behind me. Then, when I began to talk about the problem that had brought me there, their hostility came out into the open. One rather hard British engineer summed up the sentiments of the men standing there sullenly silent: "Sure we're sorry for those chaps over there. But what has that got to do with us? We're plenty crowded here as it is, and their worries are their tough luck. Listen, old boy, we're not crowding up for you or for anyone!"

In response, I argued with a good deal of passion the logic of this situation. I stressed as strongly as I could the sheer irrationality of nine men in one room and eleven in the other when both were the same size, and so the evident fairness of their taking in another man.

"That may be, friend. But let me tell you a thing or two. Fair or not fair, if you put one of them in here, we are merely heaving him out again. And if you come back here about this, we are heaving you out, tool"

Some of the others standing there wanted to be reasonable rather than emotional or threatening. So they argued the whole matter with me, expressing their doubts as to the wisdom of this particular course, or asking me, "Why do you pick on this particular dorm?"

In rebuttal, I found myself defending all the actions of the committee to date, explaining the present housing situation of the entire camp, and most of our future plans—and slowly realizing that these rational arguments were futile and would lead nowhere. Clearly the driving force behind the reaction of these men was not their intellectual doubts as to the justice of our proposal but, on the contrary, the intense desire to hang onto their space.

This desire was at the root of the matter. It determined not only their emotional reactions but, to my wide-eyed surprise, it seemed even to determine the way they approached the issue in their minds. Thus, to try as I did merely to move their minds by rational or moral persuasion was to leave quite unaffected the fundamental dynamic force in the situation, namely the fear that if another man came in, each of them would be that much the more crowded. I almost laughed aloud when a queer thought struck me: Why should a man wish to be reasonable or moral if he thereby lost precious space? Do men really value their own moral excellence more than they value their own comfort and security? I seemed to be staring suddenly into a new abyss of complexity and trouble in human affairs. If men really cared less about being "rational" and "good" than they did about their comfort, where did that leave my belief in men's basic goodness?

I came home that night confused and shaken. Everything that I had believed about "our sorts of people," about the ordinary civilized man, had said to me that his behavior would be fair and generous once he understood a situation. Most of our philosophers, educators, social scientists, and social psychologists had assumed this. For did not most of our modern culture hold that scientific knowledge and technical advance did lead to social progress? And did this not imply that the men who used this knowledge would be rational and just when they understood things clearly through organized inquiry?

But in Block 49 men understood—they understood fully. They understood that a "reform" meant their own loss, and so they fought that reform, whatever its rationality and justice, as if it were a plague, a poisonous thing. Self-interest seemed almost omnipotent next to the weak claims of logic and fair play.

Ironically, in this first and most logically clear of all our many cases, our committee, if justice were to be done, finally had to appeal to the least rational of all principles: the authority of force. We asked Mr. Izu to tell this recalcitrant dorm to take one more man, which they did readily enough—and we heard no more from Block 49.

Discouragingly enough, this was the consistent pattern of all the scores of cases with which we dealt in the following weeks. Only in one case in six months of quarters work did I manage to convince anyone that a change for the worse was the just and fair thing to do, and persuade them to do it.

A young boy of thirteen or so had been put by the Japanese in one 9-by-12 room with his mother and stepfather, a small trades-manlike couple in their middle forties. Crowding into such a small space would have been hard going for a family made up of any three persons, but in the case of these particular three, it was impossible. The two parents were temperamental and irritable in any event, and the intense pressures built up in this small room caused them to fight endlessly, driving all of them, and especially the boy and his stepfather, to mutual hatred and despair.

We had to get that boy out of there into some dorm where, in his presently vulnerable state, he would not be hurt overmuch. But where to send him? Most of the dorms were overcrowded, and their rather sullen atmosphere would surely have become even more hostile against an added inmate. Then I had an idea, and hurried around to one exceptionally crowded dorm. This dorm held an unusual group made up of missionary doctors, preachers, teachers, engineers, and architects who were in China to perform their diverse professional services for the various mission boards. When I explained to them the nature of the problem and its extreme urgency for the boy's future, they recognized its seriousness at once. One middle-aged architect for the Presbyterian Board, named Leighton, looking at the narrow spaces between the beds, queried, "I can see why you need to get that boy out of his room all right. But why do you ask us to do this? We are already more crowded than most dorms."

I decided that with these men only direct speaking would work. "Because," I said, "you are the only group of men who might care about this problem enough to be willing to squeeze up for the boy."

No more was said. Leighton, a wonderfully gentle man, assured me as I left the room that they would make the boy feel at home. They did, and the boy, and his parents, made out surprisingly well from then on.

Of the other cases that came before us, the reaction in every one was the same as in Block 49. Not only would people fail to see the fairness of any action which threatened their welfare; often they would refuse even to consider the issue. It seemed as if the person's entire being or self, mind and emotions alike, would resist and struggle against the loss of space. It was impossible to penetrate that resistance by logic, pleading, or argument. Something about the loss of space touched a "vital nerve." When that happened, objectivity and reasonableness seemed automatically to vanish.

The importance of space to the well-being, nay the existence, of a person came as a surprise to me. I am sure it was partly because I had never lacked space before. I used to think about this situation a lot, especially after seeing mature people battling to maintain their small plots, or even, as in the case of the women's dorm, sneaking precious inches from their neighbors at night. Somehow each self needs a "place" in order to be a self, in order to feel on a deep level that it really exists. We are, apparently, rootless beings at bottom. Unless we can establish roots somewhere in a place where we are at home, which we possess to ourselves and where our things are, we feel that we float, that we are barely there at all. For to exist with no place is to fail to exist altogether.

Perhaps the greatest anxiety that dormitory life created was the feeling of not belonging anywhere, of existing so to speak in the free and faceless air. Everyone, having lost his "place" in his home and club porch in the treaty ports, and thrown into cramped quarters with insufficient room to establish himself, felt less than real until he had made some small corner of space his own.

Needless to say, this problem of space is confined neither to a camp nor to the problem of physical area. All of us need a space that is ours in every environment in which we exist, whether it is in the physical world, in the social world of family, friends, and community in which we identify ourselves as persons, or in the vocational world where we function professionally. In many cases, one of these levels of space can replace another level, so that a man can put up with having no physical space of his own if he has a creative and definite place among friends or in his work. But no man can bear rootlessness on all levels at once.

Thus lonely and isolated people in our dorms would cling to every inch of space as if it were the very foundation of their being—as indeed it was. They would lavish on it and its sacred dimensions the same fanatical love that a nation will lavish on the boundaries of its territory. And in the wider world, each of us, driven by this fear of never "being" at all, is eager to "make a place for himself" by almost any method available. And it is for that reason that we will defend our present status with all our ferocity if we should feel it threatened.

The clearest illustration of the relation of space to human intractability came with the problem of families of four in one room. Apparently when they housed the camp at the beginning, the Japanese treated the families with two children in two very different ways. They gave two rooms to the twenty-four families with two teen-aged children. But to the twenty or so families with smaller children they gave only one room. For the latter, therefore, life was intolerable. It meant that in a space only 9 by 12 feet—about the size of a dining room rug—two adults, used to a large house, had to live with their entire family. There they had to find room for two more bunks or beds for the children, and provide space for them to play during the long, wet, cold months of North China's winter—not to mention doing the extra cooking and washing that any mother must do for infants. As one of these mothers bitterly accused us in the. Housing Committee office shortly after the camp began: "By doing nothing, you are making us bear the main burden of the war!" We could only agree. Something had to be done.

When we began searching for extra space into which these crowded families might overflow, we naturally eyed the twenty-four families of four who had two rooms. Here, obviously, was the only real "Gold Coast" living in the camp, for in each of these twenty-four cases, two teen-agers shared one entire room. Clearly our best hope involved getting these teen-agers to squeeze up a little in some way in order that the embattled mothers of two infants might have a little more space. And as always, I was hopeful of not too difficult a time. When Shields and I looked over the list of twenty-four families with two rooms, I felt optimistic.

"They seem a good lot of folks," I said. "Look here, they are mostly either business or professional types. Here is Roberts the Tientsin doctor, Schmidt the missionary, Ramsbottom-Thomas and Robinson the Tsingtao lawyers. None of them is a troublemaker or uneducated. Why, they're all respectable middle-class citizens and as moral as they come; just the kind that would support any good cause in their communities at home. Come on, this won't be so bad. With a little persuasion, they'll understand the need and cooperate straight off. You'll see."

We did see. The moment we began to talk with the people on this list about ways of giving the crowded families more space, trouble erupted. No one on this roster of eminently reputable British and Americans would cooperate. Some slammed their doors in our faces; some received us only to argue it out. But one and all were balky.

Our days from then on were filled with endless conflicts. On a typical morning, two or three of the unhappy mothers, acting on the totally correct assumption that the "squeaky axle gets the grease," would storm into our office with the bitter query, "Why don't you men do something for us?"

Impelled by an instinct of self-protection as well as by our sense of justice, we would then return to our discussion with the families who had two rooms. "Why is this an issue for us?" they would ask. "We feel sorry for them, sure. But why do you bother us with this business? Good day!"

I remember coming back to the office on one such morning feeling very much beleaguered.

"My God," I said to myself, "their real argument is with each other—not with us. Gee, I'd like to see Mrs. Watts try to remain so aloof in her two rooms if Mrs. Wyndham-Smith got after her! I'll bet they'd soften up fast enough if they heard about the crowding, not from us, but straight from the other mothers themselves."

In the midst of these mutterings I stopped abruptly. An idea had at last dawned. Why not round up all forty-four families and bring them together to discuss the matter? This would relieve us of the onus of blame from each side. What was more important, out of the discussion might come some sort of real compromise or solution. On hearing the moans of the crowded, the other mothers might relent. When I told the idea to Shields, he thought it a capital notion. We asked the camp doctors to be present on the theory that if there were any arguments between the two groups as to which had more need of extra space, the doctors might be able to illuminate the issue with their informed and unbiased judgment.

So we looked forward to the meeting with great expectancy: here would be the rational discussion so desperately needed if the injustice was to be corrected. As soon as the meeting began, however, irrationality took over. As chairman, I could not fail to realize that no discussion whatever was taking place. The two groups of parents sat glumly on opposite sides of the room, their jaws set, their arms crossed in irritation, and their eyes on the floor. They refused to speak to one another on this topic. As one said to me later, "We knew we couldn't change their stubborn minds on the issue, and we knew they were wrong—so why get into a fight about it?"

Representatives from each group rose and argued their respective cases. The other side, like a high school debating team, listened only for some clue to a flaw in their opponent's presentation. If we had hoped by this means to escape the common wrath—and resentment at us was the only theme on which everyone agreed—we were sadly mistaken. The families with crowded rooms continued to tell the committee that we were weaklings and fools to allow mere teen-agers to hang onto all that space. The others berated us for threatening their meager comfort.

By this time I was resigned to the fact that no resolution of the central question of the meeting—"Which sort of family, those with teen-agers or those with infants, needs the most space?"— would be forthcoming.

The arguments were long, intricate, and bitter. When they were ended, not one parent thought the other group had any case at all. Those with small children pointed to potties, to tantrums, to room needed for play, and to the space-consuming chores of washing and cooking for infants. They scoffed at the plight of the teen-agers, "They come home only to sleep," they said, "if they do that!" The others argued that the mere physical size of older children crowded a small room unbearably. They also maintained that teen-agers' maturity created real sexual difficulties, because of the crowding, both for the youngsters themselves and for their parents.

Finally, I asked the panel of three doctors if they might not give us some judgment on the merits of each side's case. To my astonished disappointment, these doctors, while undoubtedly lion-hearted as healers, turned out to be cowards politically. They refused to commit themselves, possibly fearing they would lose the respect of one half of the families, and wanting, as one explained to me later, to remain professionally aloof from the battle. (Apparently, like most of us, only when their own professional interests are directly threatened, is this profession—or at least its professional association—willing to give "professional opinions" in the political realm.) In any case, when both sides had "spoken their piece," they all went home agreeing on one point only—that the meeting had been a total waste of time.

We, however, of the Housing Committee were deeply impressed by the weight of argument on both sides: "After all this," I thought, "I don't know which group needs space the more!" And as I walked home that night, I felt depressed.

"Out of those forty-four families, everyone saw only the logic of his own case," I reflected. "If that is at all typical of human affairs, then what sort of reality is there to the concept of 'impartial reason'? For when it is needed most desperately, that is, when the stakes are high for both parties and they begin to be overwrought, then impartial reason is sadly conspicuous by its absence! Does it fly away every time it is needed, to return only when harmony reigns, when the conflict is over? If that is so, then surely reason is more a symptom or effect of social harmony than it is a cause—and if that is so, from whence can we expect social health to come?"

A week or so later, to our delight, we found that owing to the skillful work of the carpenters and engineers, two small dorms, which had hitherto been considered unsalvageable, could now be used for housing. Here was what looked like a heaven-sent solution. Why not form two supervised dorms, one for teen-aged boys and one for the girls? By so doing, we would provide the extra rooms needed to help the crowded families. Two goodhearted missionaries in the camp, both of whom happened to be immensely popular with the teen-agers, volunteered to "proctor" the dorms.

At last we seemed to have found a solution. To make matters even easier, the carpenters had just developed a kind of double-decker bunk which they could install in any room where the occupants requested them. Because of this development, we were able to provide the twenty-four families with an alternative to sending their kids to a dorm, namely, combining forces with another family also with teenagers, and thus save one room between them. But we had not counted on the old Adam. If the children went to a dorm, or even if they moved in with other teen-agers in one room, then the family as a whole was cutting its living space exactly in half. And that was no easy sacrifice for any group of harried humans to contemplate.

At this stage, three unforgettable cases occurred, all of them revealing what we might call variations on the common theme of intractability.

One had to do with a prominent American missionary family. The head of the house, although then middle-aged, was a handsome, intelligent, sophisticated Ivy League graduate. With graying hair, ruddy complexion, and clean-cut features, albeit now a little rotund, he cut a suave figure in gatherings of either business or religious leaders. His wife was a capable, respectable, motherly woman, wedded to innumerable social causes, a born hostess, at once elegant and gracious. They represented almost the model of the American professional couple: educated, liberal, kind-hearted, epitomizing good will and Christian concern. They had two sons, one sixteen and one thirteen, one or both of whom might, therefore, move into a dorm. Since one of the overcrowded families of four lived right next door, I knew these good people were by no means ignorant of the problem. When I knocked at their room, I expected a relatively easy time.

Mrs. White greeted me, as I anticipated, with courtesy and graciousness. As I warmed to my subject, she expressed concern for the plight of these unfortunate people, and assured me that she and her husband were only too willing to do what they could to help solve this problem. Considerably encouraged, I unfolded our plan for a dorm for boys. I told her of the "fine Christian schoolteacher" who would proctor it, and how much I hoped they might agree to help us effect this resolution. At this point in our conversation, Mrs. White, if anything, grew even more polite. But she also grew more vague—I noticed a certain hesitancy. It became harder and harder to get back to the practical details. Finally I suggested that perhaps they would like to have time to think it over and that I would come back the next day for her answer.

"Why, thank you so much" she said with her soft smile, "This will give my husband and me a chance to think and pray about it tonight." On that encouraging note, I left.

When I returned the next day, she seemed both more definite and more sure of herself. I was mildly elated. Here at last, I thought, is someone who will take the lead, not in opposing us but in helping us. I listened eagerly as she began graciously to approach the subject.

"We have had our evening of thought and prayer about the problem you shared with us," she said, smiling at me, "and we have reached our decision. We cannot allow our young sons to go into the dorm."

"But they will be only fifty yards away, Mrs. White!" I exclaimed. "Surely you don't think anything will happen to them there under Eric Ridley's care!"

"Oh no, it's just that Paul is only sixteen and subject to so many influences right now. I don't want to say anything about those other boys, but you know how they are! And besides, the heating and drafts here are very unusual, and I know that, with the little he gets to eat, unless someone watches over him, he will always be getting colds and flu. And it is quite out of the question for Johnny at thirteen to leave us."

"Okay, fair enough"—though I was very disappointed—"Let's look at another alternative then. How about your youngest moving into this room with you, and Paul moving in with the two Jones boys in the next block?"

"Oh no. We talked about that, too, and have made up our minds. We believe in keeping a nice home for our boys to come to, and that would be impossible with three in one room. As we talked last night, all this became clearer and clearer: home and family are so important in a place like this. We decided that our first moral responsibility in the camp is to keep a real American home for our two boys."

I could see that in her gracious but determined way, she was feeling more comfortable now that she had found a clear moral principle to back her up. Brought up all her life in a "moral" atmosphere, which assumed that anyone fully human would be morally responsible and cooperative, she could not react to anything except in a morally responsible way—even when actually she was fiercely defending the interests of her own family against those of others in the community. And so I knew it would be hard to pierce this armor of righteousness. By now, I was somewhat nettled.

"Granted that home and family are important to everyone, Mrs. White," I retorted with some force. "How about the `real American home' of the couple next door to you, the ones living with two boys in their one room?"

At this reminder, Mrs. White's Christian concern overflowed. She flushed with indignation and pity. Then, as she nodded her head in complete agreement, she said, "I know—aren't those Japanese just too wicked for words?"

And so it went. I could see no possibility of sending Paul to the dorm. As I walked home, angry and disappointed, I thought to myself, "If the Whites won't cooperate with us, who on earth can we turn to? Isn't there any good will anywhere among us?" And then I almost had to laugh aloud.

A picture of our theological discussion groups in Peking came to my mind. I remembered how the Rev. Mr. White, an extremely "liberal" minister theologically, had maintained with some fervor that the older theological doctrines of the Fall and of an inherent selfishness in mankind were "so much tommyrot" and that "the moral good will of ordinary people, if only mobilized and directed by the gospel, would lead us without any use of force to justice at home and peace in the world."

The second case could hardly have been more different. A prominent British businessman from Tientsin, Pickering was tall, nervous, and cadaverous looking. He possessed a wide reputation for a fierce temper. One felt that he would not be too much worried about finding moral grounds for whatever course of action he chose to take.

When I knocked at the door and told him that I was from the Housing Committee, his normal air of hospitable courtesy vanished at once. Pushing on to take up my business with him, I explained that some new dorms were being formed. His daughter, age nineteen, would be able to go into one, and his son, age fifteen, into the other. At that point he quite lost his control and ordered me off "his property."

"Your committee has no authority whatsoever over my home and its arrangements," he rumbled. "It cannot take one inch from me. I refuse to discuss this matter with you further. The problems of the overcrowded masses are not my problems. Good day, sir."

With that he slammed the door. I persisted, however, shouting against the closed door that it might be hard for him to show the British title to his room in the camp and that our committee did have some official jurisdiction in these matters, after all. At that remark, he opened the door again just far enough to threaten quite seriously to sue me after the war for deliberate persecution.

At this I must admit my own temper cooled and I laughed. I asked him what court he thought might have jurisdiction over this case of a British subject against an American citizen in a Japanese camp on the Chinese mainland? But he was too furious to debate this interesting legal question, and slammed the door shut for good.

The third case was the most interesting of the three. It concerned this time an American missionary family named Schmidt, who had two teen-age daughters. The father was a fairly pious sort who seemed to equate Christian love with a ready smile and a gush of friendliness. He could never allow himself to get angry, to curse or threaten us, as we had come to expect from the more forthright businessmen. When presented with our alternatives, therefore, all he would do was to smile unhappily, apparently thinking that all he as a Christian could do was be tolerant of the fact that we had put him in so difficult a position as to force him to refuse. But he still managed quite effectively to argue, stall, and balk.

With the saintliest sort of smile and the friendliest manner, he said, "You know, Gilkey, I write lots of sermons here. I am asked a good bit by the other missionaries to preach in our church services. It is for their sakes, and for that of the camp as a whole, that we need a little extra space in which I can have quiet to think out these sermons."

Reviewing these cases in my mind as I walked back, I felt that somehow I preferred the irascible Pickering. He hid behind no pretense of Christian virtue but went "all out" for his own interests. On the contrary, Schmidt would block with all his considerable force a move to help others which might hurt him. He would maintain in a righteous voice that he was "dissatisfied with the committee's attitude in this matter"—and then the next day with Christian concern and a wide smile ask you about the state of your soul.

In one way or another, all the other families shared this general reaction. Over and over we would call on them, argue with them, cajole them, and urge them to make up their minds before summer's heat overtook these crowded rooms. Finally we learned that two families—the Pickerings and another British family named St. George—had stated to the others that they were categorically refusing to have anything to do with the matter, and would never give up a room. "It is our home," they said. And that was that.

We knew that if these two families got away with their refusal, none of the others would ever agree to giving up space, and so all were delaying until the cases of the Pickerings and the St. Georges were settled.

Thus we on the committee had to tackle these families hard. The authority of our governing body to deal justly with camp life depended upon our success. So, for a second time we went to our Japanese boss of housing. We explained the whole situation and asked him how we could force these people to obey the injunction. Straightway he sent for them, asked them their side of the matter, thought their answers over carefully, and then ordered each of them to evacuate one of their two rooms. To our amazement, they meekly agreed. It seemed psychologically much easier for them to give in to enemy authority than to their own peers. But before they left the office, both men solemnly reiterated their promise to sue us after the war.

Once these two families were compelled to cooperate by Japanese order, the others quickly fell into line. We established a successful dorm for teen-age boys; and other families combined comfortably enough. Thus, the overcrowded families were able to expand somewhat so that the summer heat was not unbearable when it came.

The final solution to this, as to most of our other housing problems, came only when the evacuation of Catholics and Americans in August and September, 1943, reduced the total number in the camp from about 2,000 to 1,450. At that point, the first thing we did was to give to every family of four, two rooms apiece. We hardly deserved anyone's thanks for this, but the continuing complaint from those families that "for six whole months the committee had done nothing" seems a fitting word on which to close this episode.

Such experiences with ordinary human cussedness naturally stimulated me to do a good deal of thinking in such time as I had to myself. My ideas as to what people were like and as to what motivated their actions were undergoing a radical revision. People generally—and I knew I could not exclude myself— seemed to be much less rational and much more selfish than I had ever guessed, not at all the "nice folk" I had always thought them to be. They did not decide to do things because it would be reasonable and moral to act in that way; but because that course of action suited their self-interest. Afterward, they would find rational and moral reasons for what they had already determined to do.

Once I had seen this condition through these episodes, I wondered how I had ever missed it. "Even more," I asked myself, "why has our whole culture, especially its academic life, remained so determinedly unaware of what almost all the evidence clearly indicates?"

Surely our everyday life, founded on common sense and what we might call the "wisdom of the household budget," rather than on philosophical and academic principles, assumes the abiding self-interest of mankind. Do we not all recognize that most men have to be brought to court if a claim against them is to be made good? Do we not know that most people will vote the way their economic, social, or religious interests impel them? Do we not agree that no group or class ever relinquishes power or privileges simply because it is just and reasonable, but only because they have in one way or another been forced to do so? Do we not assume in democracy that every form of power must be checked by other forms of power if tyranny is to be avoided?

Men in business (especially its sales and advertising aspects), in politics, and in the law are perfectly cognizant of this self-interest of the public, and plan all their activities accordingly. Our mechanisms of government and of law—from the courts, through national defense, to the regulatory and legislative agencies— assume this self-interest in each of their provisions and powers. None of these social structures would make the slightest sense without this assumption. With our social institutions and habits based, therefore, on the assumption of the dominant self-interest and even of the selfishness of men in communal life, why was it, I pondered over and over, that our culture and so I myself, as one of its products, regarded man's rationality and morality with such fond optimism?

As I thought about this question, lying on my back staring at the ceiling in our dorm, I had to admit that there had been little in the ordinary social contacts of my past life to challenge such an optimistic estimate of mankind. In the upper-middle-class society to which I was accustomed, where everyone is comfortable and goods are plentiful, it is easy to gain the impression that people (at least in one's own group) are, on the whole, fair-minded and generous. In every home where I visited in a college community, in a suburb, or at the shore, I found the host glad to offer me a guest room and to share with me his cake. Why not? There was, in that social class, always an extra bedroom and plenty of flour, eggs, and sugar still in the cupboard.

I now understood that beneath this surface harmony lay the reality I had just discovered. But only the ruthless competition in the offices of the business world, the bitter economic and political clashes of our wider community life—where the fundamental conflicts of career, race, class, or nation are waged—manifest to those of us who live in comfort the ugly specters of human hostility, self-interest, and prejudice. The ordinary social relations fostered in college or country club seemed continually to validate the modern liberal estimate of man as rational and moral, able to see what is right and willing to pursue it for the common good.

Certainly this is the way we all like to think of ourselves. Unless some crisis explodes in our family or in our secure communities, there is little on the polite surface of things to contradict this opinion. In this padded environment of friendliness, good cheer, and generosity, at least one thing seems as sure to everyone as it was to the liberal Rev. Mr. White: the old pessimism about a "fallen existence," about "original sin," or about a fundamental selfishness in man is either antiquated monastic gloom or the twisted view of modern novelists and playwrights. Are not most of our colleagues at the office, our acquaintances on the university faculty, or our friends in the country club "lovely people"? And do you mean to say that the generous people of good will who support our church are "sinners"?

The revelatory value of life at Weihsien camp, I decided, was that this false estimate, based on the surface pretensions of a secure society, was cut down to size. In an internment camp there is no more flour and sugar in the cupboard; there is no guest room with an extra bath. There is only the absolute minimum of everything. Each of us had barely enough food and space to make living possible and bearable. In such a situation, the virtues of fair-mindedness and generosity completely changed their complexion.

To be fair and rational required the sacrifice of some precious good needed for one's own existence. Hence here to be just or generous is by no means easy or natural. Rather, since they require self-sacrifice, these "virtues" tend to make one's own security and comfort more vulnerable, and this no man really wishes to do. In such circumstances no one feigns virtue any longer, and few aspire to it, for it hurts rather than pays to be good. Consequently, here virtue—as the wise men have always insisted—is rare indeed. The camp was an excellent place in which to observe the inner secrets of our own human selves — especially when there were no extras to fall back on and when the thin polish of easy morality and of just dealing was worn off.

Strangely enough, I still kept expecting the opposite. For one of the peculiar conceits of modern optimism, a conceit which I had fully shared, is the belief that in time of crisis the goodness of men comes forward. For some reason we think that when there is little food or space among a community of people, they will be more, rather than less, apt to share with one another than in the ordinary well-fed existence. Nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we "really are," we will all be good to each other. Nothing could be so totally in error.

What is unique about human existence "on the margin" is not that people's characters change for better or for worse, for they do not. It is that the importance and so the "emotional voltage" of every issue is increased greatly. Now much more vulnerable than before, we are more inclined to be aware of our own interests, more frightened if they are threatened, and thus much more determined to protect them. A marginal existence neither improves men nor makes them wicked; it places a premium on every action, and in doing so reveals the actual inward character that every man has always possessed.

To be sure, people at Weihsien did not continually snarl at each other, nor were they obviously brutal or continually selfish.

As a matter of fact, they remained surprisingly cheerful. We found that a sense of humor, incidentally, is the most pervasive and most welcome of men's better qualities. Good will did manifest itself in many features of our life. People showed a genuine consideration for others in many ways: helping their fellows to fix up their rooms with useful gadgets; making a stove for a person too old to do for himself; helping an invalid to make his coal bricks or to do his laundry; standing in line for one another. On this level, common trouble did bring out an admirable generosity.

When, however, the point at issue was not an hour's work but basic condition of life—such as the space a man lived in or the 'mount of food he had to eat—then this good will tended to recede and in most cases to disappear. This is why in our larger society the same people who, like many of my suburban hosts in college, appear to be extremely generous in their personal relations, can become intractable, prejudiced, and even vicious on the deep social issues of national security, economic privilege, housing restrictions, or racial justice. Here the basic conditions of life become involved, fundamental securities are threatened and we are all much more touchy and skittish than when merely an extra piece of pie, a church benevolence, or the donation of some of our time is at stake. For this reason among others, I am sure that Christian moralists ought to be as much concerned with the character of our social structures as with the problems of "personal goodness." In the realm of social structure, the fundamental conditions of men's lives are determined; here is precisely where we find it most intensely difficult to be just and generous.

As I was forced continually to notice, in any situation of tension and anxiety, when the being or security of the self is threatened, the mind simply ceases to be the objective instrument it pictures itself as. It does not weigh the rational arguments on both sides of an issue and coolly direct a submissive ego to adopt the "just and wise solution."

Such a picture of the mind of man is a myth of the academics, accustomed to dealing with theoretical problems in the study or the laboratory rather than existential problems of life as it is lived. In life, man is a total self, interested above all in his own well-being. His mind, like his emotions, is an instrument of that self, using its intelligence to defend his status when that is threatened and to increase his security when opportunity arises.

It was a rare person indeed in our camp whose mind could rise beyond that involvement of the self in crucial issues to view them dispassionately. Rational behavior in communal action is primarily a moral and not an intellectual achievement, possible only to a person who is morally capable of self-sacrifice. In a real sense, I came to believe, moral selflessness is a prerequisite for the life of reason—not its consequence, as so many philosophers contend.

One of the queer things about the modern liberal academic culture is that the social scientist, when he considers man as the object of his study, adopts this "realistic" view. He assumes, as does the politician, the advertising man, the lawyer, and the policeman, that men are determined by social and economic forces which lure, compel, or elicit their self-interest, voting as their pocketbooks or their social position dictate. Here man's reason is by no means assumed to transcend his self-concern; for unless the rational powers of men were determined by their self- interest, human action in the aggregate could not be as regular and predictable as the "laws" of the social sciences presuppose.

When, however, the social scientist speaks of man's destiny, of the possibilities for man's life which his new knowledge can bring him, he looks to another side of man for his evidence. Here he expresses not what he has found out as an investigator, but what he hopes for and believes as a man. In the personal philosophy of the social scientist the model for man is provided not by other men as they act out their lives in the community, but by man as inquirer, "the man in the white coat" using the instruments of modern technology to discover the objective truth.

The social scientist is at this point taking himself—not the population in general—as his model of man. So, as with all of us, he gazes more sympathetically on this personal model than he does on the behavior of others. For man, as each of us sees him embodied in ourselves, and as the scientist surely sees him in himself, is a rational being. He is, therefore, here pictured as one unmoved by prejudice or emotion, concerned only with the discovery of the truth and with the welfare of the mankind he studies and seeks to direct. Such an objective, rational, and moral man would be, of course, a valid object of our hope and faith. In his hands widening scientific knowledge and technological advance promise us a bright future indeed.

This picture of man as directed only by reason and good will, and so able impartially to direct his own destiny into the unknown future, is, however, not only diametrically opposed to their own evidence—on the face of it, it passes all credence. It was precisely the picture I found getting in my way as I sought to comprehend my experience in camp. Like many a wise man before him, the white-gowned scientist and technologist has revealed very much to us about nature and about ourselves. But when he comes to tell us how we really behave in life, his own flattering image of himself has led him into a delusion—and the unschooled ward politician can tell us more of what man is than can be.

With the background of these thoughts about the academic culture that I had imbibed in college, I realized that technology had, for all its blessings to our camp life, now taken me in, too. At the outset, our very success at Weihsien in dealing with the material problems we faced had given me the wrong image. This was the image of man as technological inquirer, inventor, and so conqueror of natural difficulties. I was beginning to realize that a more helpful and accurate image of man was as an existing and competing self in a community of selves and, as such, exposed to the continual and difficult pressure of moral and political decisions for or against his own interest.

For Western society to form an image of man as basically inquirer and knower was almost inevitable during a period of great scientific advance. Present-day culture had been imbued with the thrill of recent empirical and technological discoveries, and fascinated with the conquest of space, time, weight, cold, heat, and disease that such discoveries make possible. Thus society could easily mistake these accomplishments for the solution to the deepest of human problems and man as "knower" for the crucial image with which to think with enlightenment about themselves and their destiny. With this image before it, such a culture could easily reach a belief in the perfectibility of man, that is, it could have faith in the rationality and objectivity with which he attacks social and political problems since he had demonstrated these virtues as scientist and engineer.

With our traditional religious faith already on the wane, moreover, the temptation was overwhelming to center our hopes about our destiny now solely on the human virtues that this image seemed to imply—and this image did imply vast hopes for man. Technological advance, let us note, spells "progress" only if men are in fact rational and good. A man motivated only by self-interest, a man subject to brutal or vicious prejudices and passions, one who can kill and maim with ease if his security is threatened, is no technologist in whom to have confidence. Scientific weapons in the hands of such a man may mean retardation if not extinction for the race. If man is viewed in this darker light, a new and deeper insecurity rather than progress seems to face man, as the literature from Brave New World through 1984 to Dr. Strangelove has so cogently indicated. Thus a realistic view of man tends to undermine the confidence a technological culture has in its own progress. Since we all want to believe in something, our secularized culture has tended to adopt an idealistic view of man as innately rational and good, as able to handle himself and his own history with the relative ease with which he dealt with nature. Consequently, the scientist rather than the politician, the knower rather than the moralist, has seemed to us to be the guarantor of security and peace, the harbinger of a better world.

As I learned in camp, this vision is a false dream: the things we long for—peace, prosperity, and a long life—depend to a far greater degree on the achievement of harmony and justice among men than they do on the latest inventions from our laboratories, valuable as the latter may be. That achievement of harmony and justice confronts us as a race, not with problems of technological know-how or scientific knowledge so much as with the problems of political and moral decisions. There is little comfort to be derived, however, from this undoubted truth; for the political and moral capacities of man are so much more ambiguous than are his intellectual endowments. As I asked in camp, and as many have asked elsewhere and at other times: If we can't believe in man as we once did, in what or whom can we believe?

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