Pastor Harald’s Column: The Limits of Morality

When I was in seminary, I read an insightful book about the human condition by Langdon Gilkey, published in 1966. The book was titled Shantung Compound. According to Gilkey, the book is about “the life of a civilian internment camp in North China during the war against Japan…Because internment-camp life seems to reveal more clearly than does ordinary experience the anatomy of humanity’s common social and moral problems and the bases of human communal existence.”

Gilkey was a young American teacher and theologian at a Chinese university when World War II began. He and about 2,000 other men, women, and children—mostly Europeans, business professionals, academics, religious missionaries of all denominations, and monks—were imprisoned for more than two years by their Japanese captors, who provided only the bare minimum of food and coal and told the inmates to run the camp themselves.

In his review of the book, Richard Subber writes:

“Shantung Compound is Gilkey’s account of the endlessly frustrated attempts, by various camp leaders and elected committees and a few charismatic individuals, to enforce a fair allocation of the smallish rooms and dorm beds, to get everyone to do a fair share of work, to prevent stealing, to settle social disputes, to provide for the exceptional needs of the elderly, the frail, the young, the nursing mothers… The overwhelming truth is that, facing the prospective dangers and daily extremities of camp life, nearly all of the internees didn’t “rise to the occasion” to protect the weak and to cooperate rationally for their own good and the common good.

Instead, this is what nearly all of the internees—most of them white, educated, Western—tended to do most of the time: they conspicuously looked out for themselves and their families, declined to do more than a modicum of work, refused to give up some of their “equal” share of food and housing to needier fellow inmates, shied away from volunteer leadership, declined to share the contents of relief parcels sent by their “own” governments, stole food and supplies whenever possible, refused to punish the egregious wrongdoers among them, and rationalized most of their uncharitable, uncooperative, and uncivil behavior in complex variations of religious and humanist moralities…”

The guards themselves remained distant from the prisoners, allowing them a lot of autonomy, even permitting them to trade with villagers outside the camp. But their conditions were not extravagant—at times, even life-threatening. They were, in a strange way, in a protected environment and didn’t have to worry about the outside world, only about surviving in the compound with the tolerable few rations they were provided.

What Gilkey discovered was that this generally homogeneous group of people—facing unsanitary conditions, inadequate food and water, lack of medical care, and overcrowding—could have lived a relatively good communal life by working together. Sharing resources and contributing to the general work would have improved life in the camp. But their lack of moral health, revealed through self-centeredness, made conditions difficult for all.

Peter Marty writes about a situation in the camp in his October 23, 2019, article in The Christian Century. He writes:

“Things came to a head in January 1944 when a surprise shipment from the American Red Cross arrived at the camp. Prisoners watched in disbelief as 1,550 parcels of food and clothing—unimagined wealth to the eyes of the 1,450 hungry and exasperated camp residents—were unloaded. Some Americans quickly assumed that the arriving parcels constituted their own windfall. These parcels were, after all, from the American Red Cross. Self-interest on the part of a few devolved into contempt among all.”

A community where everyone had long forgotten about where they came from suddenly disintegrated into a collection of national groups who were angry, cruel, and fought against one another—not caring about the common good, only their own self-interest. This wonderful Christmas gift from the American Red Cross had turned into the opposite of peace on earth.

The hostility that lasted in the camp, with fighting over certain parcels of wealth and arguing about personal space, led Gilkey to conclude that humans aren’t nearly as moral as we’d like to think we are. Selfishness erodes our moral ability and willingness to share with others. Gilkey realized that regardless of how

creative, smart, or industrious we may be, if we can’t move beyond favoring only our own group or tribe, we are doomed to live lives of lesser quality. Gilkey notes that only by finding our personal security and meaning in the power and love of God can we overcome the sin of self-centeredness.

If you are looking for a good book to read in August, I would highly recommend Langdon Gilkey’s Shantung Compound.

Harald Bringsjord
Senior pastor at Good Shepherd