In the middle of the Second World War, a small group of British pacifists travelled to China to patch up the wounded. In a war in which by some estimates close to 80 million people died, or three per cent of the world’s population, a few dozen largely untrained and completely unarmed ambulance workers seem to be the dictionary definition of a futile gesture. Many of these young men and women in what was known as the China Convoy of the Friends Ambulance Unit seemed to feel exactly this way. Their letters and diaries from the time are full of commentary on the futility of pacifist commitments in a world hellbent on war. Hadley Laycock, for example, one of the few surgeons in the ambulance, noted in the Unit’s newsletter that ‘Anything we may do for suffering humanity in China seems like a very small drop on a very large bucket’¹. Whilst, David Morris, another member of the unit, wrote shortly after the end of the war that ‘the inadequacy of our effort’ as ambulance workers ‘was appalling’ (Morris, 1948: 86). Even the official history of the unit concludes that in ‘the welter of suffering amid the displaced and distressed millions… the efforts of a few voluntary workers over a year or two appeared puny and insignificant’ (Davies, 1947: 367). Such judgements seem to fit into a broader pattern of claims about pacifism, as ultimately naïve and useless in a world where violence is seen as inevitable or even necessarily. To stand firm in a commitment to peace would seem to be, at best, to be a waste, at so many levels. Futile would seem to be exactly the right word.

Yet, reflecting back on their experiences, many of the members of the Unit were far less harsh in their judgements. The official history of the Friends Ambulance Unit, for example, begins with a quote from Clement White, who died in China whilst working with the Unit: ‘the vastness of the need inevitably leads members to put emphasis on tangible results, on statistics of patients treated, operations performed, tons of drugs haled and delivered. But that does not blind them to the truth that what is done is less important than the spirit on which- the Spirit by which- it is done’ (Davies, 1947: vi). Other members expressed similar sentiments. Duncan Wood recalled in that ‘it is difficult to say that we saved a large number of lives, or how many we saved… in the end what is there to show for it in positive results? … I think if you ask… they would say ‘they were trying to help’. That is all one can say’². What can we make of this shift in tone? We might see it as the result of rose-tinted spectacles produced by the benefit of hindsight. We might also see it as the product at attempts at self-justification, responding to the question of why they did not fight in what is now widely seen as the ‘good war’. But we might also see it as telling us something about the relationship between means and ends.

A claim about futility is of course a judgement about means and ends. It is to argue that an action has no use, no utility, that it is not a means to any ends in particular, or is an inadequate means to a particular end. More generally, means-ends thinking does not have a good name, at least in some branches of the social sciences and philosophy. It is seen as too instrumental and calculating. And a great deal of time has been spent in trying to think through and beyond this dichotomy, either through action as pure means, action as pure ends, or a combination of the two, most recently perhaps in the concept of the ‘prefigurative’ (Arendt, 1998; Agamben, 1998; Boggs, 1977; Cooper, 2016; Dewey, 1939; Lambek, 2010; Venkatesan, 2015). In many ways, this is precisely what the pacifist ambulance workers of the Friends Ambulance Unit were trying to do; to show that living peacefully in the midst of war was not simply a statement of principle (an end), but also served as a practical model for a life without violence (a means). But the ethnographic and historical record also shows – not least the archival fragments left behind by the Friends Ambulance Unit – that the merger of means and ends is easier done in theory than in practice. Conflicting judgements about instrumental and ultimate value keep on rearing their head, and the two can be hard to reconcile.

We can begin to understand why and how means and ends are so hard to bring together if we pay attention to the ways in which they are always temporarily embedded. As John Dewey (1939) famously pointed out means and ends are not settled once and for all as static categories. Rather, over time, means can turn into ends, and ends can turn into means to other ends. Judgments about futility or utility always come with a temporal perspective. We cannot entirely know the use or uselessness of an activity in advance. The members of the Friends Ambulance Unit could not have predicted in advance that they would go on to found Oxfam and Amnesty International, amongst many other organisations. Pacifists ends, became means to new and alternative goals. Futility is therefore never given once and for all, and hindsight is powerful.

* The work for Tobias Kelly’s essay was funded by an ERC Horizon 2020 Consolidator Grant (648477 AnCon ERC-2014-CoG).

Endnotes

1. Hadley Laycock, China Convoy Newsletter 39, 9 January 1943, FAU. [↩]
2. Interview with Duncan Wood, no date, Imperial War Museum Sounds Archive [↩]

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