[...]

Where there had been excess weight before, there were lean shanks and flapping dewlaps now. Some who had been grossly overweight lost as much as 100 pounds. I myself, having weighed 170 pounds when I came in, dropped to 125. Few signs of dangerous ill health manifested themselves from this cause, although the number of fainting and low blood pressure cases began to mount alarmingly, threatening the ability of men over forty to do heavy labor.

Since the war, many more have experienced the ill effects of those three years of malnutrition in failing eyesight and various internal afflictions. As we were always slightly hungry, I suppose the one thing we all longed for most—next to our freedom—was more to eat.

There did come a time when this unremitting hunger of the last year and one-half was partially appeased for some of us. At the time the exchange of evacuated American internees had taken place at Goa, India, via the m/v Gripsholm in the fall of 1943, hundreds of American Red Cross parcels had been handed to the Japanese for delivery to those Americans still in prison in the Far East. Nine months later, in July, 1944, two hundred of these parcels arrived at Weihsien, addressed by covering letter to the two hundred Americans remaining in the camp.

None of the Americans will ever forget the day we first saw those parcels. We had heard that they were large and that their contents surpassed all belief. Still we were not prepared.

We were waiting in line outside the General Affairs office. Brown was at the head of the line—he was at the head of every line, whatever was being given out. We could hardly believe it when we saw him stagger out with what seemed to be a gigantic box in his arms. “Is that one parcel?” a still rather stout woman next to me called out. “In that case I’m ready to get fat all over again,” she cooed in sheer delight. All of us felt the same way when at last we, too, stared down at the immense boxful that was ours to eat. Happily we found ourselves barely able to take the box home to explore its magic contents.

These were indeed magnificent parcels. About three feet long, a foot wide, and eighteen inches high, they contained a seemingly inexhaustible supply of unbelievably wonderful things. In them was all that a hungry internee had longed for and had thought he would never see again.

Each parcel had four sections. Each section contained a pound of powdered milk, four packs of cigarettes, four tins of butter, three of Spam or Prem, one pound of cheese, chocolate, sugar, and odd cans of powdered coffee, jams, salmon, liver pate, and a one-pound package of dried prunes or raisins. After a diet made up largely of bread, low on meats and oils, and lacking in sweets of all sorts—in fact, without real taste—fifty pounds of this sort of rich, fat-laden, and tasteful food was manna from heaven.

Since that time I’ve heard many complaints from G.I.’s about the army canned food. But in our hungry camp, Spam, butter, Nescafe, and raisins seemed to us the last word in gustatory delight.

These packages, moreover, represented more than the mere pleasures of unfamiliar taste. As I looked down at this mass of stuff on my bed, and thought of it in terms of the new future it would bring me, I grasped the idea that this parcel meant, above all, security, safety from hunger for an amazingly long period of time. For as my friends and I found out, if a hungry man disciplined himself and ate only a little each day, his parcel could be stretched to supplement the daily diet for almost four months, and keep its owner from being really hungry.

To each of us, therefore, this parcel was real wealth, in a more basic sense than are most of the symbols of wealth in civilized life.

No amount of stocks or bonds, no Cadillacs or country estates, could possibly equal the actual wealth represented by this pile of food—for that food could prevent hunger for four months. A Red Cross parcel made its possessor an astoundingly rich man—as each of us knew the minute we looked up from that lovely pile on our bed into the hungry eyes of our dorm mates who had received none.

Accompanying this food was also a considerable complement of men’s clothing. Again, since this was consigned to the Americans, every American man was given one article of each type: an overcoat, a pair of shoes, heavy underwear, a flannel shirt, a sweater, a cap, socks, gloves, and a set of durable coveralls.

I shall never forget the Greek-American barber in the camp looking with some disgust at this pile of new clothes and saying with deep pathos: “Where de hell are de pants?” Why none had been included was the topic for some amusing theories among the British in our dorm, one of whom remarked, “Doesn’t anyone wear the pants in your country, old boy?”

Fortunately there was much more of this clothing—especially overcoats and coveralls—than there were American men. Therefore the rest was distributed to other nationals. This fact and the fact that almost without exception the Americans were most generous about giving their non-American friends food from their parcels, made the whole affair the source of a good deal of international good will, as well as of better-filled stomachs and better-warmed backs. British friends told me they thought there was hardly a person in camp who had not received something from these parcels. Obviously, they were impressed with American generosity.

By the beginning of the winter of 1944-1945, food from the parcels had long since vanished, and the cuts in our supplies were growing ever more drastic. Winter on the plains of North China is biting cold—such as one might expect in Detroit or Chicago. We were issued very little coal dust with which to heat our rooms. Morale in the camp was at its all-time low. The future stretched on as endless and dreary as the snow-covered flatlands beyond the barbed wire on the walls of the compound.

Then suddenly, without warning, one cold January day the most wonderful thing imaginable happened. Some internees who happened to be near the great front gate saw it swing open as usual. The familiar donkey carts that carried our supplies came plodding in through the snow. But what they saw in those carts, they found hard to believe. Piled high, box on box, were seemingly endless numbers of Red Cross parcels! Word spread swiftly around the camp. In a twinkling, a huge crowd had gathered. Everyone was laughing and crying at once. We all looked on in disbelief as cartload after cartload kept coming through the gate. In utter amazement, tears streaming down our faces, we counted fourteen of those carts, each one carrying well over a hundred parcels!

“Why, they’re the same parcels!” someone said. “See there’s the label—AMERICAN RED CROSS-but there are many, many more than before!” “I just heard from a committeeman that there’s no covering letter for these parcels, no indication as to who is to get them.”

“Then who are they for?”

This question, “Who is to get them?” ran like wildfire among us. Quite naturally, the first reactions had been generally that the Americans were in luck again. But, when more and more carts kept coming in the gate, notions as to who would be given them became confused. The Americans, counting the carts as they went by, began to speculate happily on this windfall.

“My God,” exclaimed one in a loud voice, “I figure there must be at least fifteen hundred parcels there—wow! Why, that’s seven to eight parcels for each American! I don’t even know where I’ll put all that stuff!”

But other thoughts were going through other minds as the significance of the quantity struck home: “Why, fifteen hundred is just about the number of people in the camp! Could it be that we British are going to get a parcel, too? Could they be for everybody this time?”

As this question swept through the assembled crowd—which, by now, was comprised of the entire camp—it collided head-on with the exultation of the Americans. Frowns replaced looks of amazed wonder; angry mutterings succeeded the early shouts of joy.

“Damn it, you limey,” one outraged Yankee voice cried out, “that’s American stuff, and you lousy spongers aren’t going to get a bit of it. Why doesn’t your Red Cross take care of you?”

The answer was a snort of disgust.

“Well, you Americans are a bunch of bloody buggers! You want everything for yourselves, don’t you? If it’s your property, no one else is to have a look in, is that the idea?”

And so it went. The parcels were piled up in a great heap in the church building awaiting word from some authority as to how all this wonderful wealth was to be distributed. A heavy guard was posted to watch over them. Every row of rooms and every dorm where Americans lived with other nationals began to stew in bitter disputes. In those where no Americans lived, there was general gloomy agreement that while Americans might be rich, they were certainly neither very human nor very trustworthy; for when the chips were down, they wanted to be sure they got theirs—and who cared about the other fellow.

Two days later the Japanese authorities posted a notice which seemed to settle the issue to everyone’s apparent satisfaction. The commandant, after stating that he was acting according to official instructions, proclaimed that the parcels were to be distributed to the entire camp the next day at 10 A.M. Every American was to receive one and one-half parcels; every other internee, one parcel. This ingenious distribution was possible because there were 1,550 parcels for a camp of 1,450 persons, 200 of whom were Americans.

I was elated. I regarded this as a master stroke of statesmanship in a touchy situation. It looked as though the whole camp would be well fed by this arrangement. At the same time, the super patriots among the Americans would be appeased because they were getting substantially more than did the “damn furriners.”

It is impossible to set down the joy and excitement that gripped the camp that night. It was as though everyone were living through every Christmas Eve of his lifetime all rolled into one.

What a heaven of goodies awaited each child with a parcel of his own! What blessed security was promised to every father and mother with three, possibly four, parcels for their family, enough surely to last through the spring, whatever might happen to our camp supplies! The dreary remnant of winter and the stark uncertainty of the days ahead seemed no longer impossible to contemplate as each internee savored the prospect of rich food and tried vainly to quiet his excited children who were already pleading to get in line for the great distribution.

Universal good will flooded the camp; enthusiasm for American generosity was expressed on every hand. Our morale and our sense of community had climbed swiftly from an all-time low to an all-time high. As Bruce, the sardonic Scotsman in our dorm, said, “I almost feel tonight that I might be able to love other people—and that for me, brother, is a very rare feeling indeed!”

The next morning, long before the appointed hour, the camp in festive mood lined up for the parcels. Then suddenly the bottom dropped out of everything. Just before ten, a guard strode past and hammered up an official-looking notice on the board.

Those at the head of the line crowded around at once to see what the announcement said. They came away looking black as thunder. I made my way up to the bulletin board, peering over the heads of the crowd to read the words. As I approached, an Englishman was turning away. “The bloody bastards!” I heard him say. “What the bloody hell am I going to tell my kids?” An awful heart-sinking prescience told me what the notice said—and I wasn’t wrong.

The notice contained one short but pregnant sentence:
DUE TO PROTESTS FROM THE AMERICAN COMMUNITY, THE PARCELS WILL NOT BE DISTRIBUTED TODAY AS ANNOUNCED.
THE COMMANDANT

When we tried to find out what had happened, we were told that seven young Americans had gone to see the commandant about the matter.

They had demanded that he produce his authorization to distribute American Red Cross parcels to internees who were not American citizens. Since there was no such proof, the seven insisted that these parcels be turned over at once to the American community, the rightful owners, for them to do with as they saw fit.

One may, I think, legitimately surmise that the Japanese official was caught completely off guard by this strong and reasoned appeal to what is a peculiarly Western sense of ownership. From his own cultural background he could conjure up no ready defense against it. The commandant had apparently acted solely on the basis of his own moral judgment in announcing the distribution to all internees, and had no higher authority with which to back up this judgment. In this case, surely, it would have been better for all concerned had he used some of the customary military inflexibility. Had he merely told the delegation to get out, the camp would have been spared much bitterness and the Americans much later humiliation. But he wavered, promising he would refer the whole question to the arbitration of Tokyo. Then he canceled the distribution.

Through the action of these seven men, the American community found itself in the unenviable position of preventing the distribution of life-giving parcels to their hungry fellows. Apparently we were content to let them go hungry so long as we got our seven and one-half parcels.

The inevitable result was that all the bitter arguments of the two days previous broke out more strongly than before. Men who, like the Englishman I overheard, had to explain to the expectant children that “the Americans had taken away Santa,” were not inclined to feel lightly about this. The Americans, finding themselves bitterly accused of a selfishness and greed which they had not explicitly encouraged, were not inclined to admit their own fault nor that of their countrymen, especially to enraged foreigners. With that pathetic but automatic defense mechanism almost every man develops with nationals of another country, Americans hotly defended whatever their countrymen had done long before they found out either what it was or what they themselves really thought about it.

There followed about ten days of delay, while we all waited for word from Tokyo. This hiatus provided the opportunity for all the hostility, jealousy, and national pride of 1,450 hungry, exasperated, and anxious people to accumulate and to boil over. Where there had been only arguments before, now there were fist fights. In one row, an American boy and a British boy got in a scuffle over the matter. When the fathers discovered this battle between erstwhile best friends, they at first chastised the youths. But when they learned what the fight was about, they themselves came to blows. Others had to step in and separate this pathetic but furious pair who had been neighbors and friends for a year and a half.

It was the same story all over. A community where everyone had long forgotten whether a man was American or British, white, Negro, Jew, Parsee, or Indian, had suddenly disintegrated into a brawling, bitterly divided collection of hostile national groups. Ironically, our wondrous Christmas gift had brought in its wake the exact opposite of peace on earth. The massive mounds of life-giving parcels lay inert in the center of the camp, while gusts of human conflict and ill will swirled turbulently around them.

For the first time, I felt fundamentally humiliated at being an American. The British in our dorm were too courteous to be openly nasty—they knew how most of our group there deplored this—but their silence spoke volumes.

The experience of the Red Cross parcels vividly revealed to me aspects of human communal life of which I had been formerly unaware. A day or so later as I was staring moodily at that heap of magnificent parcels, pondering the irony of our suddenly brawling society, I came to see that wealth is by no means an unmitigated blessing to its community. It does not, as may often be supposed, serve to feed and comfort those who are lucky enough to possess it, while leaving unaffected and unconcerned others in the community who are not so fortunate. Wealth is a dynamic force that can too easily become demonic—for if it does not do great good, it can do great harm.

The arrival of those parcels represented for our camp an accretion of sheer wealth almost of incomprehensible scope. It was as if, I thought, our small community had been whisked overnight from the living standard of a thirteenth-century village to that of modern affluent industrial society. Now we had food to keep us all from hunger through the spring.

And yet, the introduction of this wealth—the central factor in material progress—was in fact the occasion for an increase in bitterness and conflict such as we had never known before. Staring at those symbols of our material advance, I suddenly realized that Western culture’s dream of material progress as the answer to every ill was no more than a dream. Here was evidence before my eyes that wealth and progress can have demonic consequences if misused.

Had this food simply been used for the good of the whole community, it would have been an unmitigated blessing in the life of every one of us. But the moment it threatened to become the hoarded property of a select few, it became at once destructive rather than creative, dividing us from one another and destroying every vestige of communal unity and morale.

I realized that this was no mere matter of angry words and irate looks. It was just the kind of issue which men were willing to fight over. Seeing the guards now patrolling the streets, I was glad they were there. Had there been no Japanese guns guaranteeing order in the camp, we might easily have faced real civil strife. Thus might our community have destroyed itself over this issue.

I suddenly saw, as never so clearly before, the really dynamic factors in social conflict: how wealth compounded with greed and injustice leads inevitably to strife, and how such strife can threaten to kill the social organism. Correspondingly, it became evident that the only answer was not less wealth or material goods, but the development of moral character that might lead to sharing and so provide the sole foundation for social peace. It is the moral or immoral use of wealth, not its mere accumulation; it seemed to me, that determines whether it will play a creative or destructive role in any society. The American claim for all the parcels, and its devastating effects on our social fabric, had taught me at last the true significance of moral character in any human community, and I would never forget it.

In the world today, Western culture as a whole is learning that material progress and the wealth that it creates are no unmixed blessings. The present possession of security and goods in a world where the majority are hungry and insecure puts the Western world in much the same position as those Americans in the camp, hugging to themselves their seven and one-half parcels. If the material gains of modern Western society can be spread over the world with some evenness, this new wealth may create a fuller life for us all. But if we hoard it for ourselves alone, it will surely become a demonic possession creating bitterness and jealousy all around us, and ultimately threatening our very existence. Wealthy classes and wealthy nations are unmindful of the destructive effects of their wealth, isolated as they are by the comforts and perquisites of their possessions. Those outside the charmed circle of privilege, however, remember, and no lasting community can be formed in the midst of the bitter resentment that inequality and selfishness inevitably engender. Thus the creation of a viable community is as dependent on the moral ability and willingness to share what we have with our neighbor who is in want as it is on the technical ability to produce and accumulate wealth.

Should the democratic culture of the West go down before an alien Communist world, its demise can probably be traced more directly to its failure to learn and to enact this moral truth than to any other source. The forces now arrayed against this culture have been created precisely by this sort of resentment at the unwillingness of the predominantly white West to share its privileges.

Marxism itself is the direct result of the unwillingness of propertied classes of the past to share their economic privileges with the peasant and the working classes. It has a continuing potent appeal mainly because of this resentment. The openness of many former colonial peoples in Africa and Asia to a Communist influence, if not alliance, is likewise the clear effect of the past unwillingness of Western nations to share their political privileges with peoples then subject to Western imperialism. The resentment against the West on the part of the whole nonwhite world is mainly the consequence of the white man’s refusal to share his social privileges with men of another color. “Moral” actions undertaken solely to save one’s own skin can hardly claim to be fully moral. Nevertheless, it is demonstrably true that a desperate attempt to hang onto wealth and privilege can destroy the community in which all, rich and poor, may live, and so can bring the mansions of the wealthy toppling down about their ears.

Some of us in the American community were understandably troubled by the action of our countrymen that resulted in canceling the distribution of the parcels. As always, it was with optimism that we embarked upon our program of rectification. As I said to my bunkmate Stanley Morris, close friend and colleague in this program, “This can’t express the will of the American community. Surely the majority want the whole camp to get the damn parcels.”

So we got together with a number of others who felt the same way. We decided that each of us should talk with certain “representative” Americans to find out what our community’s sentiments really were. If it turned out that the American community did seem to favor the universal distribution of the parcels, then we would call a meeting and take a vote repudiating the action of the seven. Thus in effect we would guarantee the distribution as well as express a needed sense of solidarity with our “foreign” mates in the camp.

The talks were fascinating, although shattering to the remaining shreds of my old liberal optimism. They revealed to me with stark clarity the subtlety and infinite depth of the human moral problem, and the strange behavior of which we are all capable when we are under pressure.

The first man I approached I had suspected would be tough. His name was Rickey Kolcheck. He was a hard, slightly pushy, defensive, sardonic, completely unsentimental small businessman from Chicago. Rickey had never been known to take the lead in any “good works” for the community, and he successfully managed to preserve the air of a cynical, humorous, “hard guy.” One never knows, however, what lies under such a Runyonesque surface, and Rickey was generally regarded by the worldly as a “good guy” because of his ready humor and tolerant ways. I had no idea what sort of response I would elicit, when I approached him on the subject of sharing the parcels with the camp as a whole.

le as that. It might be tough luck for the ones who’d brought no sandwiches, but that wasn’t his problem. Looking at me with his hard blue eyes, he said bluntly, “These parcels are mine because I’m an American, and I’m going to see I get every last one that’s coming to me. I’m sorry for these other guys, sure—but this stuff is ours. Why don’t their own governments take care of them? No lousy foreigner is going to get what belongs to me!”

As I listened to Rickey, I knew he spoke for many Americans, who had lived and worked next to these “foreigners” for two difficult years. For them any sense of a bond with their neighbors and so of any obligation to them vanished when the security of the self was at stake.

The next man I talked to would have found such a direct attack fairly crude. He was an American lawyer from Tientsin. He began by saying he liked to look at these things from the legal point of view.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” he remarked emphatically. “I’m not worried about the parcels—about how many I or the other Americans may get. I couldn’t care less. With me it’s the legal principle that counts.

“This is American property—simple, isn’t it? You can’t question that! You see, this property can only be administered by Americans and not by the enemy. We’ve got to make sure in this hellhole, whatever price we have to pay in popularity, that the rights of American property are preserved and respected. Come to think of it, we’ve also got to be faithful executors to the American Red Cross donors who sent these here for our use. But mind you, I speak as a professional lawyer. For myself, I don’t really care how many parcels I get.”

“Sure, sure,” I thought. I marveled at the ways by which we can fool ourselves. We don some professional or moral costume so as to hide even from ourselves our real desires and wants. Then we present to the world a façade of objectivity and rectitude instead of the self-concern we really feel. It was the Quarters Committee all over again. As in those cases, I found myself entangled with this man in endless legal arguments about property rights and their relation to the Red Cross, to the Geneva Convention, and to the principle of nationality. Yet I knew these arguments were meaningless because they did not deal with the real factors in the situation: hunger, anxiety and self-concern. Surely it was ironic that the Red Cross, established by the voluntary donations of countless good souls to feed the needy—whoever and wherever they might be—should have its magnificent gifts claimed entirely by a small group on the principle of the absolute right of property!

It was my next interlocutor, however, who presented the strangest posture so far. He was a kindly, elderly, conservative missionary named Grant. Grant had a Chinese wife and four small children about whom he was naturally much concerned. But surprisingly, he did not bring up this point as his main concern at all. Rather, it was the “moral” side of the issue that exercised him.

He said to me, “I always look at things, Gilkey, from the moral point of view.” Fascinated, I heard him out.

“You understand, of course, that I am not at all interested personally in the parcels, even for my family. I only want to be sure that there be a moral quality to the use we make of these fine American goods. Now as you are well aware, Gilkey, there is no virtue whatever in being forced to share. We Americans should be given the parcels, all right. Then each of us should be left to exercise his own moral judgment in deciding what to do with them. We will share, but not on order from the enemy, for then it would not be moral.”

Thinking of Rickey and my lawyer friend, I asked, “How many parcels do you really suppose the Americans will share with others?”

“Why,” said Grant with satisfaction, “I’m sure that most of them will give away at least two of their packages.”

At this answer I quickly phrased my rejoinder:
“That would mean that each non-American would get, on the most optimistic guess, less than one-fourth of a parcel instead of one parcel apiece. Would that be moral sharing when all of us are equally hungry and in need?”

Grant looked at me in bafflement. This was not at all what he meant by “moral.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said. “If the Japanese share it for us, no one is doing a good act, and so there’s no morality in it anywhere.”

I was incredulous as I listened to this argument. I was hearing from the mouth of Grant a widely held but surely by now discredited view of morality. It was, namely, that moral action is to be understood as the means by which an individual becomes “good.” Thus human actions, however creative their consequences for the people around, that are not the results of the free acts of individuals—actions, for example, by a government cannot be “moral.” Who then becomes holier by means of them? Grant would ask. Correspondingly, actions at the expense of the well-being of one’s neighbors can be moral if the individual has done them freely and in order to be good.

To Grant, moral actions are to be conceived only in reference to the individual who performs them: good actions add to his virtue, bad ones detract from it. In such a view an act that is compelled by some authority, even if it results in good for all, has no moral implications whatsoever. No wonder, I thought, that men like Grant can never see any connection between the actions of government and the morality of that government’s citizens, and, no wonder they find it impossible to relate morality to the problems of politics! Such a theory of moral action as a means merely to personal holiness completely ignores the fact that moral action has to do primarily with the relations between persons in a community. Thus in reality moral actions are those in which the needs of the neighbor are given an equality with one’s own needs; immoral acts are those in which the neighbor is forgotten for the sake of the self. Moral action, then, certainly if it is to be called “Christian,” expresses in the outward form of an act a concern for the neighbor’s welfare, which concern is, if anything is, the substance of inner virtue.

In such a view all actions which help to feed the hungry neighbor are moral, even if the final instrument of that sharing is an impersonal arm of government. Thus, as I argued to Grant, efforts designed to bring about a universal sharing were moral, efforts to block such a sharing, immoral.

But Grant, for all his piety, would not listen. He did not really care how well the hunger of his neighbors was appeased, so long as the Americans were given a sporting chance to become “holy.” Further, his view of moral action was one which envisioned merits for the individual self, established by credit in some heavenly bank account. It thus fitted in very well with the self-interest of each of us, as the Protestant reformers continually argued in their struggle with the medieval merit system. How ironic, then, that the rabid, if peaceable anti-Papist Grant should espouse this view!

The advantage of Grant’s view was that on its terms, “being moral” allowed us both to eat our cake and have it too. For as was plain from his argument, if I were good and shared two of my parcels with our British neighbors, I would not only gain moral credit (and also, incidentally, be humbly thanked by the British for my generosity) but even more, I would be able to keep five whole parcels for myself!

I could not help being reminded of similar arguments at home with regard to helping “the poor.” Is it not more moral to care for the needy solely through private acts of benevolence, so the reasoning went, rather than through impersonal law? And is it not more fun, too, since we can, by doing so, ease our consciences while retaining our wealth virtually untouched?

After a day of such heated discussions, I came back to my room struck with the intense difficulty that each of us has in being truly humane to our fellows, and the infinitely subtle ways in which we are able to avoid facing up to this difficulty. The pressures of self-interest in this case were, of course, immense. This was especially true in the case of those men and women responsible for hungry children.

When one is hungry, and when the threat of worse hunger to come nags continually at the subconscious, then even seven and one-half immense parcels hardly seem enough. We begin to picture to ourselves the dread time when even those seven will be gone. So the prospect of losing any one of them to our neighbors—of having only three or four instead of six or seven—creates as much anxiety of spirit as had been there before the parcels came.

In the possession of material goods, there is no such thing as satiety. One seems never able to accumulate enough to be a safeguard against the unpredictable future, and so the requirements of full security remain in principle unlimited. Thus, men who otherwise appeared quite normal and respectable were goaded by their insistent fears about the future into claiming all they could for themselves and their own. And concurrently, the needs of the neighbor receded into the dim background. Men in such a situation seemed hardly free to do the generous thing, but only free enough to act in their own self-interest.

As Brecht puts it in the Threepenny Opera:

For even saintly folk will act like sinners
Unless they have their customary dinners.

And his other observation:

What keeps a man alive? He lives on others,
And forgets that they were supposed to be his brothers.

This was the reality of all of us. Not many of us, however, can stand to admit that this is the truth about ourselves. Something in us, some strange desire to remain “moral,” is offended by this self-concern; refusing to acknowledge it, we become hypocritical.

These examples indicated that rarely does self-interest display itself frankly as selfishness. More often it hides behind the very moral idealism it is denying in action; a legal, moral, or even religious argument is likely to be given for what is at base a selfish action. And what is more, the moral disguise usually deceives even the self who has donned it. For no one is more surprised and outraged than that self when someone else questions the validity of his moral concern.

For this reason, as I saw for the first time, idealistic intentions are not enough; nor is a man’s idealistic fervor the final yardstick of the quality of his character. We commit most of our serious sins against our neighbor—and these are the serious sins—for what we regard as a “moral principle.” Most of us, in spite of whatever harm we may be doing to others, have long since convinced ourselves that the cause for which we do what we do is just and right. Thus teaching high ideals to men will not in itself produce better men and women. It may merely provide the taught with new ways of justifying their devotion to their own security.

This truth is manifested in every political struggle for power and security in the wider world. Classes, nations, and races, like individuals, seldom either defend their own interests or grasp for their own advantage without first finding a legal or moral reason for doing so. Marx called this tendency “an ideology” and Freud a “rationalization.”

The experience of camp life, and the lessons of history generally, established to my satisfaction that men act generally in an “immoral” way when their interests are at stake. With equal force, however, they showed me that men remain at least moral enough to be hypocritical, to wish to seem good—even if it is beyond their capacities to attain it.

A day later we gathered once again in a friend’s room to pool our findings and to decide on our next move. I came feeling discouraged, for I had found few who agreed with our position. I was still hopeful that the others would come in with more favorable reports. When the others began to speak, however, it became clear that their experiences roughly paralleled my own.

On a wide variety of grounds, the majority of those interviewed favored supporting the protest of the seven men and keeping the parcels in American hands. Greatly disappointed and frustrated, therefore, we concluded we dared not take a vote. For the American community officially to indicate by vote its calloused unconcern for the other internees would merely have aggravated an already unhappy situation.

As we parted morosely that night, I thought to myself, “That certainly settles it. If ordinary men were as rational and good as they like to believe, we would have won that vote by a huge majority—but we didn’t dare even take the vote!”

Several days later, the final decision arrived from Tokyo. It was at once announced to the camp. Every internee was to get one parcel—”the one hundred extra parcels,” so the announcement said curtly, “previously assigned to the Americans, are to be sent to other camps.”

The irony of this was not lost on the gleeful camp: the demand by the Americans for seven and one-half parcels had effected in the end the loss to each of them of an extra half parcel! Thus, as Stan and I grimly agreed, even an enemy authority can mediate the divine justice in human affairs. The camp then settled down to enjoy their packages, and much of the bitterness was forgotten in the wonder of so many badly needed and wanted things.

The whole rather sordid story ended on a note of humor. In the later stages of the controversy, when the great mountain of goods had been gone over, it was discovered that among the piles of clothing and shoes that came along with the parcels were two hundred pairs of boots from the South African Red Cross. This was a needed reminder to many Americans that there were benevolent souls in Red Cross chapters outside the boundaries of the United States. To the delight of almost everyone, the two South Africans in our midst posted the following notice:

These conflicts—first over space and then over food—made me think a great deal more deeply about men and their life in community, and about the kinds of beings they really were.

Surely I had learned that men are neither so rational nor so moral as they like to think. Their minds and their ideals alike had too of ten shown themselves to me to be the instruments of their total self. And that self had manifested itself as consistently concerned about its own welfare, and thus hardly free to respect or be just to its neighbor, although it was “free” enough to find rational and moral reasons for what it did!

What then, I asked myself, is the cause of this unhappy situation? Why are we not what we want to be, or pretend even to ourselves to be? Could it be our lower instincts that cause the trouble? Is this, as we often popularly say, “the ape man in us”? Or, to put the same thought in more sophisticated language, is it an inheritance of animal instincts not yet brought under rational control? I was aware that the modern intellectual is apt to conceive of our problems in this way, and to believe that when we learn through scientific inquiry how to deal with these lower instincts, we shall have solved our most important dilemmas.

Our experience had shown me, however, that this depart-mentalizing of ourselves into a set of instincts, on the one hand, and an impartial inquiring and controlling mind, on the other, was far too simple a dualism to explain the actual complexity of human behavior. The selfishness that had shown itself so widely among the internees was by no means merely “instinctual.” Its roots lay in fears concerning the self’s security which only a self-conscious and intelligent being could experience. It would thus be more illuminating to classify the demand for seven and one-half parcels as a “human” rather than an “animal” reaction.

Only the human mind could look far into the future and see that four or five large parcels would run out over several months’ time; then, noting that distant peril, decide that at least seven would be needed for its security. A merely instinctive or animal reaction would have required only a momentary satisfaction. It is above all our frightened human spirits which, when we become fully aware of present and future perils, move quickly to protect themselves against all the contingencies of life.

Man’s mind thus adds dimensions to his instinctive “will to live” that quite change its character. Here the will to live, because now conscious and intelligent, becomes the much more dynamic will to power and will to possess an infinity of goods. Men and animals both want to survive, and in both this might be called “instinctual.” But because he is made up of spirit as well as instinct, mind as well as organic drives, man is much more dangerous to his fellows in his efforts, and much more rapacious in his demands for goods. To call this behavior “instinct” is to minimize the relative innocence of our animal cousins, and to exonerate the spiritual, mental, and conscious elements in our nature which are even more deeply involved.

As I now saw it, therefore, man’s problem is not just a matter of enlightened minds and devoted wills controlling a rebellious instinctive nature. Rather man is to be seen as a totality, a unified being made of body and of instincts, of consciousness and subconscious, of intelligence and will, all in baffling and complex interaction. And it is that total psychological organism, that total existing self in its unity, which determines whether the “higher” powers of mind and of will are going to be used creatively or destructively.

Thus a man’s moral health or unhealth depends primarily on the fundamental character, direction, and loyalty of his self as a whole; of the “bent,” so to speak, of this deepest level of his being where his spiritual unity is achieved. But sadly enough, it seemed just as plain that this fundamental bent of the total self in all of us was inward, toward our own welfare. And so immersed were we in it that we hardly seemed able to see this in ourselves, much less extricate ourselves from this dilemma.

Having found these truths about human existence enacted before my eyes, I began to recall some of the theological ideas I had almost forgotten in the bustle and activity of camp life. Among the most relevant, it now seemed, was the old idea of original sin. When its relevancy was so striking in this new context, it seemed ironic that of all the ideas linked with Christian belief, this one should probably strike the average man as the most dubious. Of course, much of its traditional form now seems to us outdated. In all probability there was no such single pair of progenitors as the man Adam and his wife Eve; in any event, this is a matter for the biological and anthropological sciences to determine. Few of us wish to or can believe that their one act of disobedience brought about a fall for the whole race continued in us by inheritance. Blaming our troubles on an inheritance from Adam is as futile and evasive as blaming them on our evolutionary animal predecessors!

Yet, when one looks at the actual social behavior of people, this theological notion of a common, pervasive warping of our wills away from the good we wish to achieve is more descriptive of our actual experience of ourselves than is any other assessment of our situation. What the doctrine of sin has said about man’s present state seemed to fit the facts as I found them.

Certainly in camp everyone alike was involved in the problem; none was entirely righteous. “Good” people and “bad” people found it incredibly difficult, not to say impossible, to will the good; that is, to be objective in a situation of tension, and to be generous and fair to their neighbors. In all of us, moreover, some power within seemed to drive us to promote our own interests against those of our neighbors. We were not our “true selves,” the selves we wanted to be or liked to think we were. We were caught willingly and yet unwillingly in a self-love from which we could not seem to achieve our own release, for what was wrong was our will itself. Whenever we willed something, it was our own distorted will that did the willing, so that we could not will the good. Though quite free to will whatever we wanted to do in a given situation, we were not free to will to love others, because the will did not really want to. We were literally bound in our own sin.

This was, I knew, the way Christian thought had long viewed man’s predicament. It was also precisely what the facts of my experience seemed to substantiate.

When I saw this congruence between the Christian description and our actual experience of ourselves, I realized that it was just this situation which the idea of original sin had always sought to make partially clear. The reality to which the symbols of the “Fall” and of “Original Sin” point is not really the particular and dubious act of Adam. Rather it is this fundamental self-concern of the total self which, so to speak, lies below our particular thoughts and acts, molds them, directs them, and then betrays us into the actual misdeeds we all witness in our common life. The particular past act of Adam and Eve in the garden, and the Augustinian notion of an inherited corruption, were explanations or theories used by Christian thinkers to explain how this undeniable reality in human existence came about, how we got into the difficulty we are so clearly in.

And, as I ruefully concluded, the problem pointed to and described by these symbols is still very much evident in our ordinary experience, whatever modern knowledge may have done to the saga of Adam and his mistake.