Besides personal integrity, the deepest spiritual problem an internment camp encounters is that of "meaning." This word can signify many diverse things. There is the semantic and logical problem of the meaning of words, symbols, and propositions, with which recent philosophy has so much, concerned itself. There is also the existential problem of the meaning of life. Though the two are not unconnected, it was primarily the latter problem of meaning that we faced in camp. Like all of man's deeper spiritual problems, it determined in large part the way we felt and behaved day by day.

The phrase "meaning in life" seems to be vague, though interesting, when we first encounter it, and it strikes us as difficult to begin to think about it. To begin, let us take it to refer simply to a sense of worthful purpose in what we do and the life we lead. A man possesses a sense of "meaning" when he feels there is a vital connection between the goals he values and the activities and relationships in which he is involved.

Then what he does each day becomes a coherent means to ends he really prizes, his life and work accomplish something of value to him and so "make sense." Consequently his energies and powers are called forth in creative effort; he is vigorous, hard-working, and, in the good sense of that word, ambitious. In this sense, meaning in life is the spiritual fuel that drives the human machine. Without it we are indifferent and bored; there is no ambition to work, we are inspired by no concern or sense of significance, and our powers are unstirred and so lie idle. Without "meaning" we are undirected and a vulnerable prey to all manner of despair and anxiety, unable to stand firm against any new winds of adversity.

I had not thought much about the problem of meaning in this sense before I came to camp. It appeared so evident to a middle-class college boy that life had one: you went to college, played tennis, got a job, married, became a success, and presto—there was meaning! How could anyone "lose" a sense of meaning, or think life didn't have any? Is it not obvious that people's careers and families are meaningful? The only real questions are: what career and which girl? Provided that we make sensible choices and work moderately hard, meaning in life seemed to me to flow as naturally as growing older, and ambition to be as normal as the desire to eat well.

After camp was well underway, I came to see how much more complicated this problem is. Fairly soon it became evident that the work we were doing was not meaningful to a great number of people. The surprising consequence was that the normal quota of ambition, the inner incentive in men to use their powers in work, simply wasn't there. I am not referring here to the problem of temperamental laziness as in the case of Jacobson, but to the apparent lack of ambition on the part of normally industrious men.

I noticed this first when I was starting work as a helper on a kitchen shift. As I mentioned earlier, our boss, McDaniel, announced he was quitting to "take up an easier job in the carpenter's shop." Naturally I was interested in seeing that the new boss be an able, energetic man; without that, our food would be worthless.

On our shift there was another helper named Rumsey, a British businessman in his forties with a real flair for cooking and an unusual ability for getting along with other men. Hard working and intelligent, he would be the first to undertake any difficult task when the cook called for volunteers. He seemed an obvious choice. So I summoned up my courage and told him he ought to apply for the job of head cook. His answer set me thinking.

"Oh no, not me," he said. "Why should I take on a responsible job rather than the one I have? If you're the boss, all you get for your pains are complaints, squawks, and headaches from the diners and the men you boss when anything goes wrong. No thanks! I don't mind hard work and I like it in the kitchen. But I prefer a manual job any day where you don't have any responsibility and no one bothers you!"

What surprised me about Rumsey's refusal was that he would have responded very differently to the same proposal in the outside world. Had he been presented with the opportunity to move from salesman to district manager, from office worker to vice president—with all the new responsibilities, headaches, and enemies such a move might entail—he would have jumped at the chance. Such a move would have had real meaning in terms of everything he valued—financial reward, greater authority and power, and enhanced prestige. Its added increment of woes would have seemed minor compared with these obvious advantages.

This pattern repeated itself over and over during the last year and one-half of camp.

There were few enough prestige jobs, but if any could qualify as such, they were the posts of the nine committee chairmen, our ruling body. They corresponded roughly to a combination of government official and captain of industry—and were prized and coveted as such by every leader from China's colonial world when we first arrived. Surprisingly soon, however, the same men who had struggled for these positions lost their enthusiasm, and during the last year and one-half almost no one was interested in becoming important.

We held elections for these nine key positions every six months. Repeatedly the men who held them announced their desire to step down. But there were practically no takers; the incumbent had to be persuaded to remain at his job. In each of the last three elections, with nine posts at stake each time, only one was contested. Ironically, what would have elicited all the energies and capacities of the able men among us in the outside world seemed to be only a burdensome responsibility here.

Matthew and I used to talk a good deal about this strange dampening of the fires of ambition. Certainly it showed, we agreed, that ambition is not what we usually think it is: a matter merely of temperament, as is one's energy and so one's capacity for laird work. Thus ambition is not to be understood as a kind of instinct which each of us possesses in varying degrees and which, like hunger or sex, will manifest itself with more or less constant force in whatever situation we find ourselves. Rather, even in energetic men, ambition varies with the meanings to which a man's life is devoted and with the relation of those meanings to the work he does. Ambition is called out only by strongly held values which a man feels are attainable through his efforts.

If, therefore, a difficult task seems to provide a man with no desired values, then his ambition for that task withers however prestigious it may seem to be. Without a sense of the significance of what they do, men become too indifferent to use their full powers, and they do merely what they have to do to keep going.

But why, we asked, had the significance of work vanished for us so completely here? In seeking answers to this question, we came closer than at any other time to understanding the real tone, the deepest emotional fiber of internment camp life, and through it a glimmer of comprehension of the world outside.

Why do men work hard? What goals call forth their ambitions and so their energies? For most of us the answer involves two interrelated concerns: our progress in our careers and our status in the community in which we live. In these two areas, most of our hopes and fears, our real values and so our deeper anxieties are concentrated.

When we are honest with ourselves, the questions that motivate the hard work of most of us run something like this: "How can I advance in my business (or professional) career, and so gain more economic security and professional prestige?" Or, for a woman, "How can we as a family, and I as its representative, gain in social relationships and prominence in our community, and so achieve greater social status and security?" To be sure, we do the many things we do partly for enjoyment, and partly because we feel we should. But mainly we are "ambitious" and therefore active because we value these rewards which our activities promise to bring us: greater security and greater social status.

The rewards or the "meanings" which most of us seek through our work and our communal activities are in large measure tied up with the particular careers we have chosen and the immediate social context of family and community in which we live. The result of this intimate connection between significance and local context is that when we are completely separated from that context, when both our careers and our social environment have vanished, we find ourselves suddenly empty, our life and work devoid of meaning, and our energies without incentive.*

* Often the move from a small town to a large city produces the same enervating and dispiriting effect. Without the familiar context of social approval and disapproval, where neighbors "rate" our work and progress, and give it objective value in our eyes, the significance of what we do vanishes. We are alone among strangers who neither know nor care whether we rise or fall in the world; our own sense of the meaningfulness of our work dissipates into the familiar urban feelings of emptiness and despair, or the all too common dependence upon the external and often vulgar symbols of material success: a flashy car, a large boat, or a mink coat.

Matt and I pondered this for some time before its full significance for our life at Weihsien dawned on me.

"That is the significance of this camp and of this problem of work," I said. "Those walls seal us off from the immediate meanings of our lives as effectively as they shut out the woods and fields! What we do here as cook or baker has absolutely no relevance to our lives in the world.

"Does Robinson get more legal clients because he is a good stoker? Can Jones climb any more rungs on the ladder in the Kailon Mining Company because he wields a meat knife? Will Gardner sell any less tobacco if his bread fails to rise tomorrow? No! The careers we all follow and so the purposes that motivate most of us are as far from us as the moon, and nothing we do here seems to matter.

"The same is true of our little 'social meanings.' Oh, sure, the elite do gather together for supper and bridge on the front patio—we do have our rather cramped social seasons. But the social hierarchy here has been so overturned that the successes and failures of social existence really couldn't matter less, and bear no relation to one's status outside. What would it mean to be president of a garden club here? This life, Matt, is an interim, a treading of water until normal life begins again. This is what provides our basic emotional tone. It is merely a waiting—a present without meaningful content. No wonder no one is energetic or gives much of a damn!"

"Yes," Matt replied, "coming here is not unlike death: you can't bring your career or your social eminence with you. They were left at the gate or rotting in the go downs, the offices, and the clubs of Tientsin and Tsingtao."

And pondering this whole matter further, I went on. "At first I thought that the only groups who left their vocations outside were the teachers and missionaries whose skills were apparently useless for our present life. I envied those men who could use their professional training so creatively while mine was of no practical value. I had to learn to cook! But you know, in a much deeper sense, though the technical skills of their trade carried over, the basic purposes that motivated many of them did not. And by golly, a trained man whose sole purpose in life was to succeed is more stranded, more useless to our community, than many of our simpler missionary friends who have had to learn a new trade. Those believers—figuring the Lord has something for them to do even here—may well be loaded with motivation that gets them to work and keeps them at it!"

On another evening Matthew suggested an interesting idea about the relation of meaning to morals or to self-control.

"You know, when people exist listlessly with no real goals of career or social prestige, it's a lot harder for them to be responsible. As we have found, it's tough to resist stealing when your family is hungry; it demands a stubborn integrity of quite a rare kind. And what does a man lose here if he's caught stealing? No one takes seriously what happens in camp or will remember it later.

"In ordinary life, on the contrary, a man really loses if he runs afoul of the law. There most of us are honest, not so much, perhaps, because of an inner integrity as because flagrant dishonesty or the breath of a scandal would hurt our careers—and that we really don't want! The determination to be socially respectable and possibly prominent is not one of mankind's most noble motivations. But as a social control, it may be the most effective. Here, where all work is a pointless series of chores to be done because they have to be done, what sort of driving personal purpose can overrule the yearning for food and comfort?"

"Yes," I said, thinking back to some ancient arguments on this theme between the Aristotelians and the Stoics, "for most average people, a sense of creative significance and strength of character both require a meaningful social context. The objective social or historical conditions of meaning and of virtue are as important as the subjective—a man's love of what he does. For only if he can find a creative role in some community—be it his local community, or the wider society of scientists, writers, or artists—can a man be a creative person inside. The fate that pushed us into Weihsien has wounded both our inner ambition and our virtue. It is not easy to be a complete man in a meaningless environment."

Similar conversations went on regularly. We were puzzled, among other things, by the problem of incentive. It was obvious that no great number of people would work for the sheer joy of it or merely for the sake of their brothers' welfare. Is the problem of meaning resolved then by the familiar capitalist solution: reward a man with money and the problem of the meaning of his work is resolved?

Some sort of economic reward appears essential for work, it seemed to us, since work was basically an economic activity designed to answer economic needs. But we also surmised that monetary reward alone would not begin to resolve the problem of the meaning of work as it had revealed itself to us there. That which motivates a man's work usually motivates his total life. As we say with more accuracy than we know, "A man throws himself into his work."

Work is not merely an economic reality, producing only material results and running only on material fuel. Its motivations lie in the most central meanings of a man's life, be they self-centered, trivial, or profound. If men work only for their own material profit and are motivated by no further goals, their only interest will be self-interest. Our experience had shown overwhelmingly that a society based on self-interest alone was, as St. Augustine pointed out long ago, a self-destructive society.

But a simple monetary reward posed a further problem; it was not reward enough. Not only does this reward tend to make a man selfish; even more, it tends to make him bored. The experience of an American culture which has achieved prosperity shows all too clearly that lives whose work has been motivated by the desire for money or success alone become progressively empty and meaningless.

Having achieved the comfortable home in the suburbs, two cars, an air conditioner, and a drawer full of Hathaway shirts, these wealthy members of society then embark on an unending quest for something more which will give their lives interest, passion, and exhilaration. Some may try to find this lost glow in the magic of the bottle, others in the excitement of the neighbor's bed; others in an endless round of social affairs and a seasonal shuttling to and from fashionable resorts; still others in the more advanced competition for success and power. Indeed, the really talented and well-to-do man or woman can combine all of these diversions in one life. These efforts reveal one common factor: the frantic attempt to escape from a pointless boredom when what one does has no important or significant meaning, when one's life is caught up in no great passion or concern. An increasingly affluent society, without concomitant spiritual growth, can only look forward to the wider spread of the same problem, not to its amelioration.

One evening a week or so later, our conversation took another turn. Matt said after a moment's thought, "Isn't this internment camp, though, quite atypical of the normal course of life where things do go on? Here ordinary goals—the struggle for money, for social development, prestige, and success—stopped dead at the gate."

I had been reading a good deal of history in my time off. Suddenly it struck me that in history's long view, our camp was not so atypical of life as we might think.

"No, I disagree. Situations like internment camps, though rare for most of us, are a part of life and far more prevalent than we in the West like to think. History, as we like to call it—though the ancients were more realistic and called it Fate or Fortuna—continually does strange things to those who live within it. Occasionally it shakes itself so violently that all the well-established structures and certainties of life, its securities, goals, and meanings, come tumbling down. Look at Germany in the Thirty Years' War, the South in the last century, and England and Europe now! A war, a revolution, a famine, a plague, a depression are the forms most commonly taken by these shattering historical events. Unhappily, they have been a regularly recurring aspect of man's existence, and there is no evidence that they are becoming less so. When these historical cataclysms come upon us, all the usual meanings of life plummet down.

"What is economic or social security when all is insecure? What is fame when the cheering crowds have taken to the hills? What is social prestige in a society which lives huddled in caves and subway stations?

"The people here could not bring their wealth, success, or prestige with them. We are not so atypical, for it often happens in the course of history that men cannot take their worldly values from one moment into the next moment. The great determining forces of history do destroy man's small edifices of security and meaning swiftly, as they once helped slowly to build them up.

"The devastation of the English colonial world, with all the values that supported most of those here in camp, illustrates this point. When such is their 'fate,' men are left with little reason for doing anything besides feeding their bodies—if their entire vitality and reason for being had derived from these things that fate snatched from them.

"How can a consistent and creative meaning run through the moments even of a chaotic time? Is a man really like Sisyphus of the legend, merely pushing the stone up the hill, only to have it roll back? Is he, as the ancients said, bound fast on the wheel that brings him up high, only to hurl him down again? Or is there a deeper meaning that makes use of even these fates for some hidden purpose? Golly, Matt, / don't know the answer, and I'm not sure there is one. But at least I now know what sort of problem the Jews and the Christians—yes, and the Stoics, too—are talking about when they speak of the Divine Providence which rules even the fates that push men around!"

Most internees found no particular significance in what they did there. They did their work because it had to be done; because there was no driving reason for not doing it. But there was one vivid meaning that kept every person spiritually alive: the hope for the end of the war.

Theologically speaking, we were an eschatological and apocalyptic society. The todays of our life were gray and lifeless: only the tomorrows were crystal bright. We knew little of a present Providence or meaning. But we all understood the hope that this dreary time would come to an end.

Like most men who wait impatiently for the millennium, we were forever rearranging our schedule of expectation. Two days after the war started, eight of us at Yenching recorded some guesses as to when victory would come. Like most of those in the early church waiting for the Second Coming, the vast majority of the guesses were eager, optimistic, and quite wrong. Five of us were sure the war would be over in six months, one said in one and one-half years, and only one guessed it would take more than two years' time to win! I remember looking at these guesses in my diary in October, 1944, almost three years later, and writing a large "Phooey" under the lot of them.

Still, however distant the Great Day seemed to become as the years wore on, its luster never dimmed. We lived literally by our faith in it. Then everything that made our present life grim would be removed, and every good that we so sorely missed would be returned. Above all, we would be free to do what we wanted, to go where we wished. No biblical prophets strained toward the day of salvation more eagerly than we did, waiting for the end of the war when all joys would begin anew and all tears would be dried. We did not know the time or the hour, but inwardly we were more than ready.

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