William James on Poverty

When we bravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime (war) be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. What we need to discover in social realm is the moral equivalent of war; I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking... May not voluntarily accepted poverty be the strenuous life without the need of crushing weaker peoples? One wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be the transformation of military courage and the spiritual reforms which our time stands as most in need of. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with moneymaking street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not what we have, the right to casting away our life at any moment irresponsibly. In short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were clever scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and of doing manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes…our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our face; yet while we lived we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help us to set free our generation.