Last week with an adventuresome air, or with the air of a meditating warrior, I explored some of the values which, if it were a question of putting one's life on the block, I would still say were primary values I felt compelled to stand by and defend. In looking for such values I ruled out the physical aspects of my standard of living, my property what there is of it, and my expectation of acquiring property. Perhaps these things are important to me in many ways-but if it were a question of giving my life for them . . . no, they are not that important. I tried to go farther into the center of the experiences in my own life which seem to be the sustaining source of my energy, or to constitute a summary configuration of the things which I might aspire to contain within myself. In describing what appeared to me in this center of experience I think I used such words as creativity, growth, freedom, communication. These are of course in themselves inadequate and insubstantial words, and I am aware of the responsibility of everyone who uses such words to define something of their content. I shall try to do so briefly.

The communication of person with person and race with race, I said last week, was an indispensable condition for the preservation of the values I find vital to myself. The value Freedom is contained precisely in my ability to engage in such communication. Let that ability be proscribed, I am cut off from the possibilities of creativity and growth in my own life. For my growth as a human animal is dependent upon the enlargement of my awareness in the experience of others, upon my understanding gained from the exchange of knowledge and experience in a coeval humanity with my fellowmen. Should I myself cut off, or permit to be cut off my own will to awareness and understanding, I have at once outlawed and deformed any principal of creativity which may express itself in me. Because the creative-whatever it may be that answers the compulsion to give form, to make, to compose an essence-whatever it may be it is a product of my awareness and understanding; it proceeds from an inward movement of my constitutive being which, as aforesaid, cannot be defined apart from my ability to grow. It is in these things, then, that my freedom is contained. Down here at this bed rock this is what freedom means to me, in my own experience. And in my experience this fundamental freedom is utterly dependent upon a physical circumstance, a reality which is both within myself and outside myself; namely, that I am present, and another is present, that we are able to speak, that we are able to bring our whole persons to a mutual presence in which the knowledge of ourselves, in each of us, is enlarged by the knowledge of the other.

Now I want to recognize, in parenthesis, that this is typically a juncture in meditation on human experience at which philosophers make the enormous leap from their own intention to a proposition of fact, creating all of the problems referred under the heading of epistemology. I want also to recognize that there are two aspects of will when we speak of the ability to communicate: one is the will operant in oneself, which obviously itself may forestall effective communication whatever happens on the outside-it is no easy matter to "communicate"; and the other aspect is that of the will, single or collective, operant in the world beyond one. With your indulgence for just a moment I will tidy up these philosophical matters. I am concerned here primarily with the will which is operant outside oneself in regard to communication; the will of organizations, governments, individuals in power, and so forth. I do not wish to imply in the slightest that this exterior will is more determinative than the inner ability and will to communicate. Were the world one peaceful meadow in which all mankind grazed gently side by side, the whole possibility of the communication of people would remain to be determined by the measure of their individual wills. Least of all do I want to encourage any inference that because of the frequency with which I use this word, communication, I feel that so far as I myself am concerned the problem is confined to what happens on the outside. That is so far from the case that it may perhaps be said my concern with growth and awareness arises from a hope that I may develop a capacity for communication which I do not possess. But even if I am severely defective in my own will and capacity, as I am indeed, there remains the physical circumstance, the other reality outside myself, which is equally requisite. If that other reality is obliterated, not only will I not grow, but it will not matter whether I grow, for there will be no world in which my growth can acquire meaning. I rise to the occasion, therefore, of any will operant outside myself which threatens to obliterate that other reality-that person, or those people.

I make, also, a philosopher's leap, because I think that most will agree the values I have identified with freedom, the rock bottom values, are the primary conditions of human life which have been valued and pragmatically have proven valuable in the history of our particular animal. I think most will agree it is because of these values that freedom has been such an important word in our history. But prove I am no philosopher I must add that even if that is true, it is not essentially relevant to the problem here, which was a problem of putting my life on the block. My own, particular life. It is not the most important thing in the world, but if someone wants me to sacrifice it, I want to make certain I believe in what I am doing. World War III with its Korean prelude is a social fact of such enormous ramification that it calls into question every value and every concept of responsibility ever entertained by anyone. It is a situation of absolute crisis. It requires that I understand anew and answer anew the fundamental questions which determine whether society, an association of human animals for mutual wellbeing, is possible at all. If I believe other people have values like mine, I may be wrong; I would not put my life on the block to prove they should, certainly. But I am in this irreducible situation now: I myself am a social animal, at least I propose to be, and I confront an absolute crisis in societal history: I must decide once and for all on what terms I can meet with other men, to what extent participate with them, in what cause, to what end. People all over the world are being hurried beyond this decision to a destiny they have not chosen. I am one of the lucky. I have a little time to choose. If it means only that I have the opportunity to decide for which of alternative values I prefer to have my head blown off, I am still lucky, for people all over the world are having their heads blown off, but few for anything they consider important to themselves or their grandchildren.

It is from this perspective-that of the social animal who confronts an imperative to decide from the beginning again what it means to be a social animal-that I relate the values of communication, freedom, growth and creativity, as they affect myself, to the call for my allegiance and the sacrifice of my life which surrounds me everywhere. If I ran on four legs I would simply hightail it out of this place. But as it is, I have to stand and decide. I hope the philosophical details are sufficiently tidied up at this point to permit some decisions in immediate cases.

It is quite apparent that World War III as well as the Korean prelude, and the Oakland loyalty oath, and the government purges, are all alike incompatible with the values which I have identified as worth a mortal commitment. The causes of these disasters in the public life in which I must participate are varied and subtle, taken in the individual cases. There is today and there will be for some centuries to come an amplitude of discussion on the causes of the American-Russian war with its many side wars and tributary causes. What is notably lacking is discussion and especially decision on what oneself should do about it. If one is a radio commentator doubtless one will take occasion to comment on the Oakland loyalty oath. One will ridicule the utter asininity of such a thing and, perhaps, himself disappear in the smoke of his own irony. One will rail again the government purges, in the belief that his comments may affect "public opinion," for the better, naturally. But what about the disasters which, sooner or later, will take oneself up, the radio commentator's very self, with cyclonic violence? For the absolute crisis in society is not an academic affair; it is not an ideological crisis, nor a political nor economic crisis. Endless discussion of its causes in these terms will not touch upon the crisis. The crisis is that they are going to come and get you; they are going to cut you off, and then come and get you. You, personally. They are going to tell you what you must believe, what you must value and not value, and they are going to tell you that you must die for what they tell you, and that you yourself must abandon all other purpose than to hate and kill. What are you going to do about it?

I am speaking to myself, were there any question. This is my answer. I am going to oppose World War III, and the Oakland loyalty oath, and the government purges, at every place where they touch upon my life and provide a tangible opportunity to oppose them. Whether I speak against them is not important. What I do is important. I am going to refuse to fight the war. I am going to refuse to support it by making ammunition for it, or loading the ammunition on a boat for it, or helping sail the boat. These are definite and particular things which the American government in the near future is going to demand that I do. I am going to refuse. It is quite possible that I will never have a similar opportunity to oppose the Oakland Loyalty Oath-the analogy would require that I be an Oakland city employee. It may be that the government purges will never enter my life directly, so that I will lack the direct opportunity to oppose them in what I do. But with World War III I can't miss. No, there is not a ghost of a chance that I shall lack extensive opportunity in that matter. I am going to refuse.

But considerably in advance of any claim upon my talents as an artillery-man or bombardier-or, what is more likely, as a janitor in the ammunition warehouse-the American government is going to make a preliminary proposition. It will require of me that I go to an appointed place and register myself along with my mailing address, age, height, weight, et cetera, to facilitate the government's later disposition of skills in my war against the Russians. The government has always discouraged use of the word conscription, suggesting, as it does, unsavory comparisons. Selective Service, instead. Conscript is an ugly word. The government calls them inductees. But these appeals to my gentility are of no more aid than is the rather more amusing effort to explain the process as a "democratic" one. I am going to refuse to be conscripted, and I am going to refuse to register for conscription.

I have not labored the question of war as the inimical foe of freedom, growth and creativity, because it would be redundant to do so. Very few disagree. Obviously if the whole person is marshalled to destroy, to despise, to fear, the thing specifically denied is communication, the isolation is total, the end is a mutual death in a void. I know that my neighbors are aware of this; they speak of the war, I imagine just as your neighbors do, with apathy and despair: it represents, inevitably, the denial of every hope and possibility for a fruitful and valuable way of life. So I presume we need not go into this assumption further. But as to conscription, it is not so clear. You may remember that back in 1940, when we were getting our first dose of it, it was widely mentioned that American citizens had always borne the responsibility to take up arms when their community was threatened. The Minute Men, and so forth. It was pointed out that every citizen has a responsibility deriving from his privileges, and that a normal society is one which invariably requires that the citizen shoulder responsibilities as the circumstances and stresses of the society call upon him. Taxation itself is a form of conscription, is it not? But I need not recall more of these arguments for any beyond the age of twenty.

There are actually two main lines of argument. One is that the community is threatened, that is to say, that the American way of life which means the comforts and conveniences of our civilization is threatened and that, as in the case of the Minute Men, every citizen has the responsibility to defend it, conscription being simply the most convenient way of organizing a defense. I have already dealt with this argument, of course, in explaining that my American way of life, my excellent plumbing system and the superabundance of food available to me at the grocery store, has a relative importance to me which does not extend to the sacrifice of my life or to any willingness on my part to take the life of another in its defense. The community is threatened, in reality, by war itself, by the cutting off of people from people, by the mechanism of mass annihilation in which all are conscripted to participate in their own destruction. So the Minute Man argument falls somewhat short.

The other argument is a more subtle and important one. It claims that whether or not I agree with the object of conscription, namely, the annihilation of every value which I conceive as having basic importance to myself and society in general, still this is no ground for my objecting to conscription per se. If I will go down and register myself along with all the other citizens it will turn out, perhaps, that the officials, noting my objections to the war, will call me a conscientious objector and absolve me of any responsibility to fight in the war. Surely the government has the right to register me, as much as it has the right to tax my income? And the American way of life is such that perhaps they will let me sit it out like the conscientious fellow I claim to be.

The trouble with this argument is that it entirely ignores the meaning and reality of modern conscription. Citizens have responsibilities, yes. The social contract obtains as long as a sufficient number can agree on the mutual end and the intermediate means. But modern conscription is not some puny question of whether the country has a right to tax for the construction of roads. It is a question whether any agency has the right to lay hands upon and to possess totally the whole of the existence of any person, for any end. When I permit that to be done to myself, or agree to its execution on another person, I permit or agree to the repudiation of the values which I have said I would stake my life on.

Modern conscription means total abdication from the responsibility of ethical choice. It means complete abandonment of any pretense of choice. It means, in the familiar language of the modern crisis, that the individual is reduced to a unit, a statistic, a tool. It forecloses every chance that may have existed previously for the communication of peoples. By dulling and then annihilating the individual will, it erects a stone wall beyond which the individual may not pass. If the right to perform this abortion upon human nature exists, then the right exists to deny and annihilate the values on which I have said I would stake my life. I deny that the right exists, and I deny conscription.

But even if I did not feel that way about the thing itself, I would refuse to register for conscription for another reason, so prominent and, it seems to me, self-evident, that it can be put in two or three sentences. Only conscription makes modern war possible, and only by refusing to be conscripted can people today do something about war. That happens to be something everyone in the United States can do about war, because everyone in the United States, sooner or later, will be sought out by the conscriptors. It is something I can do, and I am going to do it.