“Self-interest seemed almost omnipotent”

One of the simple joys in life is pulling an old book off the shelf and rediscovering why it once meant so much. Such was the case recently when I picked up Shantung Com­pound, Langdon Gilkey’s account of the two years he spent in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II. First published more than 50 years ago, Gilkey’s stirring chronicle of the difficulty of building human community in anxious times serves as a manual for comprehending human behavior in any era.

As soon as Japanese authorities herded nearly 2,000 mostly European and American strangers into a former Presbyterian mission compound, it became evident that overcoming material deprivation was the prisoners’ biggest hurdle. Unsanitary conditions, inadequate food and water supplies, lack of medical care, and general overcrowding all contributed to the chaos of sudden imprisonment. From among this menagerie of strangers, leaders would have to emerge and form a civilization from scratch.

Gilkey soon realized, however, that a community requires more than the work of locating basic necessities, arranging structures of authority, and deploying human ingenuity to solve technical problems. Moral health is also essential, a health that can easily disappear when selfish behavior becomes the norm.