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Title: The Psychology of Nations
A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Author: G.E. Partridge
Release Date: March 14, 2007 [EBook #20814]
Language: English
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* * * * *
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
NATIONS
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
BY
G.E. PARTRIDGE
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published, November, 1919
* * * * *
PREFACE
This book contains two closely related studies of the consciousness of
nations. It has been written during the closing months of the war and
in the days that have followed, and is completed while the Peace
Conference is still in session, holding in the balance, as many
believe, the fate of many hopes, and perhaps the whole future of the
world. We see focussed there in Paris all the motives that have ever
entered into human history and all the ideals that have influenced
human affairs. The question must have arisen in all minds in, some
form as to what the place of these motives and ideals and dramatic
moments is in the progress of the world. Is the world governed after
all by the laws of nature in all its progress? Do ideals and motives
govern the world, but only as these ideals and motives are themselves
produced according to biological or psychological principles? Or,
again, does progress depend upon historical moments, upon conscious
purposes which may divert the course of nature and in a real sense
create the future? It is with the whole problem of history that we are
confronted in these practical hours. At heart our problem is that of
the place of man in nature as a conscious factor of progress. This is
a problem, finally, of the philosophy of history, but it is rather in
a more concrete way and upon a different level that it is to be
considered here,--and somewhat incidentally to other more specific
questions. But this is the problem that is always before us, and the
one to which this study aims to make some contribution, however small.
The first part of the book is a study of the motives of war. It is an
analysis of the motives of war in the light of the general principles
of the development of society. We wish to see what the causes of past
wars have been, but we wish also to know what these motives are as
they may exist as forces in the present state of society. In such a
study, practical questions can never be far away. We can no longer
study war as an abstract psychological problem, since war has brought
us to a horrifying and humiliating situation. We have discovered that
our modern world, with all its boasted morality and civilization, is
actuated, at least in its relations among nations, by very unsocial
motives. We live in a world in which nations thus far have been for
the most part dominated by a theory of States as absolutely sovereign
and independent of one another. Now it becomes evident that a logical
consequence of that theory of States is absolute war. A prospect of a
future of absolute war in a world in which industrial advances have
placed in the hands of men such terrible forces of destruction, an
absolute warfare that can now be carried into the air and under the
sea is what makes any investigation of the motives of war now a very
practical problem.
If the urgency of our situation drives us to such studies and makes us
hasten to apply even an immature sociology and psychology, it ought
not to prejudice our minds and make us, for example, fall into the
error of wanting peace at any price--an ideal which, as a practical
national philosophy, might be even worse than a spirit of militarism.
What we need to know, finally, in order to avoid these errors which at
least we may imagine, is what, in the most fundamental way, progress
may be conceived to be. If we could discover that, and set our minds
to the task of making the social life progressive, we might be willing
to let wars take care of themselves, so to speak, without any radical
philosophy of good and evil. We ought at least to examine war fairly,
and to see what, in the waging of war, man has really desired. A study
of war ought to help us to decide whether we must accept our future,
with its possibility of wars, as a kind of fate, or whether we must
now begin, with a new idea of conscious evolution, to apply our
science and our philosophy and our practical wisdom seriously for the
first time to the work of creating history, and no longer be content
merely to live it.
As to the details of the study of war--we first of all consider the
origin and the biological aspects of war; then war as related to the
development, in the social life and in the life of the individual, of
the motive of power. The instincts that are most concerned in the
development of this motive of power are then considered, and also the
relations of war to the æsthetic impulses and to art. Nationalism,
national honor and patriotism are studied as causes of war. The
various "causes" that are brought forward as the principles fought for
are examined; also the philosophical influences, the moral and
religious motives and the institutional factors among the motives of
war. Finally the economic and political motives and the historical
causes are considered. The conclusion is reached that the motive of
power, as the fundamental principle of behavior at the higher levels,
is the principle of war, but that in so general a form it goes but a
little way toward being an explanation of war. We find the real causes
of war by tracing out the development of this motive of power as it
appears in what we call the "intoxication impulse," and in the idea of
national honor and in the political motives of war. It is in these
aspects of national life that we find the motives of war as they may
be considered as a practical problem. But we find no separate causes,
and we do not find a chain of causes that might be broken somewhere
and thus war be once for all eliminated. Wars are products of the
whole character of nations, so to speak, and it is national character
that must be considered in any practical study of war. It is by the
development of the character of nations in a natural process, or by
the education of national character, that war will be made to give
way to perpetual peace, if such a state ever comes, rather than by a
political readjustment or by legal enactments, however necessary as
beginnings or makeshifts these legal and political changes may be.
The second part of the book is a study of our present situation as an
educational problem, in which we have for the first time a problem of
educating national consciousness as a whole, or the individuals of a
nation with reference to a world-consciousness. The study has
reference especially to the conditions in our own country, but it also
has general significance. The war has brought many changes, and in
every phase of life we see new problems. These may seem at the moment
to be separate and detached conditions which must be dealt with, each
by itself, but this is not so; they are all aspects of fundamental
changes and new conditions, the main feature of which is the new
world-consciousness of which we speak. Whatever one's occupation, one
cannot remain unaffected by these changes, or escape entirely the
stress that the need of adjustment to new ideas and new conditions
compels. What we may think about the future--about what can be done
and what ought to be done, is in part, and perhaps largely, a matter
of temperament. At least we see men, presumably having access to the
same facts, drawing from them very different conclusions. Some are
keyed to high expectations; they look for revolutions, mutations, a
new era in politics and everywhere in the social life. For them, after
the war, the world is to be a new world. Fate will make a new deal.
Others appear to believe that after the flurry is over we shall settle
down to something very much like the old order. These are conservative
people, who neither desire nor expect great changes. Others take a
more moderate course. While improvement is their great word, they are
inclined to believe that the new order will grow step by step out of
the old, and that good will come out of the evil only in so far as we
strive to make it. We shall advance along the old lines of progress,
but faster, perhaps, and with life attuned to a higher note.
The writer of this book must confess that he belongs in a general way
to the third species of these prophets. There is a natural order of
progress, but the good must, we may suppose, also be worked for step
by step. The war will have placed in our hands no golden gift of a new
society; both the ways and the direction of progress must be sought
and determined by ideals. The point of view in regard to progress, at
least as a working hypothesis, becomes an educational one, in a broad
sense. Our future we must make. We shall not make it by politics. The
institutions with which politics deals are dangerous cards to play.
There is too much convention clinging to them, and they are too
closely related to all the supports of the social order. The
industrial system, the laws, the institutions of property and rights,
the form of government, we change at our own risk. Naturally many
radical minds look to the abrupt alteration of these fundamental
institutions for the cure of existing evils, and others look there
furtively for the signs of coming revolution, and the destruction of
all we have gained thus far by civilization. But at a different level,
where life is more plastic--in the lives of the young, and in the vast
unshaped forms of the common life everywhere, all this is different.
We do not expect abrupt changes here nor quick and visible results.
Experimentation is still possible and comparatively safe. There is no
one institution of this common and unformed life, not even the school
itself, that supports the existing structures, so that if we move it
in the wrong way, everything else will fall. When we see we are wrong,
there is still time to correct our mistakes.
Our task, then, is to see what the forces are that have brought us to
where we stand now, and to what influences they are to be subjected,
if they are to carry us onward and upward in our course. Precisely
what the changes in government or anywhere in the social order should
be is not the chief interest, from this point of view. The details of
the constitution of an international league, the practical adjustments
to be made in the fields of labor, and in the commerce of nations,
belong to a different order of problems. We wish rather to see what
the main currents of life, especially in our own national life, are,
and what in the most general way we are to think and do, if the
present generation is to make the most of its opportunities as a
factor in the work of conscious evolution.
The bibliography shows the main sources of the facts and the theories
that have been drawn upon in writing the book. Some of the chapters
have been read in a little different form as lectures before President
G. Stanley Hall's seminar at Clark University. More or less of
repetition, made necessary in order to make these papers, which were
read at considerable intervals, independent of one another, has been
allowed to remain. Perhaps in the printed form this reiteration will
help to emphasize the general psychological basis of the study.
CONTENTS
Preface v
PART I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MOTIVES OF WAR
CHAPTER
I ORIGINS AND BIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 3
II UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR,
AND THE INTOXICATION MOTIVE 17
III INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE,
MOTIVES OF COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT 38
IV AESTHETIC ELEMENTS IN THE MOODS AND IMPULSES OF WAR 70
V PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL HONOR 78
VI "CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR 97
VII PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES 110
VIII RELIGIOUS AND MORAL INFLUENCES 117
IX ECONOMIC FACTORS AND MOTIVES 128
X POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS 142
XI THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES 153
PART II
THE EDUCATIONAL FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONS
I EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE DAY 161
II INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL 168
III INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL _Continued_ 184
IV PEACE AND MILITARISM 197
V THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM 211
VI THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM _Continued_ 226
VII POLITICAL EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 242
VIII INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION 269
IX NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS 290
X RELIGION AND EDUCATION AFTER THE WAR 305
XI HUMANISM 309
XII AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN EDUCATION 315
XIII MOODS AND EDUCATION: A REVIEW 319
BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
INDEX 331
PART I
NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MOTIVES OF WAR
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONS
A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
CHAPTER I
ORIGINS AND BIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
The simplest possible interpretation of the causes of war that might
be offered is that war is a natural relation between original herds or
groups of men, inspired by the predatory instinct or by some other
instinct of the herd. To explain war, then, one need only refer to
this instinct as final, or at most account for the origin and genesis
of the instinct in question in the animal world. Some writers express
this very view, calling war an expression of an instinct or of several
instincts; others find different or more complex beginnings of war.
Nusbaum (86) says that both offense and defense are based upon an
_expansion impulse_. Nicolai (79) sees the beginning of war in
individual predatory acts, involving violence and the need of defense.
Again we find the migratory instinct, the instinct that has led groups
of men to move and thus to interfere with one another, regarded as the
cause of war, or as an important factor in the causes. Sometimes a
purely physiological or growth impulse is invoked, or vaguely the
inability of primitive groups to adapt themselves to conditions, or to
gain access to the necessities of life. Le Bon (42) speaks of the
hunger and the desire that led Germanic forces as ancient hordes to
turn themselves loose upon the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of the nature of the
impulses or instincts which actuated the conduct of men originally and
brought them into opposition, as groups, to one another, we do find at
least some suggestion of a working hypothesis in these simple
explanations of war. Granted the existence of groups formed by the
accident of birth and based upon the most primitive protective and
economic associations, and assuming the presence of the emotions of
anger and fear or any instinct which is expressed as an impulse or
habit of the group, we might say that the conditions and factors for
the beginning of warfare are all present. When groups have desires
that can best and most simply be satisfied by the exertion of force
upon other groups, something equivalent to war has begun.
If we take the group (as herd or pack) and the instinct as the
original factors or data of society, however, we probably simplify the
situation too much. The question arises whether the motives are not
more complex, even from the beginning, and whether both the tendencies
or impulses by which the group was formed or held together and the
motives behind aggressive conduct against other groups have not been
produced or developed in the course of social relations, rather than
have been brought up from animal life, or at any point introduced as
instincts. We notice at least that animals living in groups do not in
general become aggressive within the species. Possibly it was by some
peculiarity of man's social existence, or his superior endowment of
intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very
far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike
creature. Man does seem to be a creature of _feelings_ rather than of
instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be
characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts
than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never
was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was
not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live
in large groups at all. So he never acquired the mechanisms either for
aggression or defense that some creatures have. Apparently he
inherited neither the physical powers nor the warlike spirit nor the
aggressive and predatory instincts that would have been necessary to
make of him a natural fighting animal; but rather, perhaps, he has
acquired his warlike habits, so to speak, since arriving at man's
estate. Endowed with certain tendencies which express themselves with
considerable variability in the processes by which the functions of
sex and nutrition are carried out, man never acquired the definiteness
of character and conduct that some animals have. He learned more from
animals, it may be, than he inherited from them, and it is quite
likely that far back in his animal ancestry he had greater flexibility
or adaptability than other animals. The aggressive instinct, the herd
instinct, the predatory instinct, the social instinct, the migratory
instinct, may never have been carried very far in the stock from which
man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two
somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive
activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken
rise.
The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on
war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or
the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection--that
war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races,
the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be
examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in
connection with the present war. This biological theory or apology of
war appears in several forms, as applied to-day. They say that racial
stocks contend with one another for existence, and with this goes the
belief that nations fight for life, and that defeat in war tends
towards the extermination of nations. The Germans, we often hear, were
fighting for national existence, and the issue was to be a judgment
upon the fitness of their race to survive. This view is very often
expressed. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, for example, say
that the same aggressive motives prevail as always in warfare: nations
struggle for survival, and this struggle for survival must now and
again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight
for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts
have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder,
and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the
part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially
increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that
absolute hostility is a law of nature in the world.
These views contain at least two very doubtful assumptions. One is
that nations do actually fight for existence,--that warfare is thus
selective to the point of eliminating races. The other is that in
warlike conflicts the victors are the superior peoples, the better
fitted for survival. Confusion arises and the discussion is
complicated by the fact that conflicts of men as groups of individuals
within the same species are somewhat anomalous among biological forms
of struggle. Commonly, struggle takes place among individuals,
organisms having definite characteristics and but slightly variable
each from its own kind contending with one another, by direct
competition or through adaptation, in the first case individuals
striving to obtain actually the same objects. Or, again, species
having the same relations to one another that individuals have,
contend in a similar manner.
Primitive groups of men, however, are not so definite; they are not
biological entities in any such sense as individuals and species are.
They are not definitely brought into conflict with one another, in
general, as contending for the same objects, and it is difficult to
see how, in the beginning, at least, economic pressure has been a
factor at all in their relations. Whatever may have been the motive
that for the most part was at work in primitive warfare, it is not at
all evident that _superior_ groups had any survival value. The groups
that contended with one another presumably differed most conspicuously
in the size of the group, and this was determined largely by chance
conditions. Other differences must have been quite subordinate to
this, and have had little selective value. The conclusion is that the
struggle of these groups with one another is not essentially a
_biological_ phenomenon.
The fact is that peace rather than war, taking the history of the
human race as a whole, is the condition in which selection of the
fittest is most active, for it is the power of adaptation to the
conditions of stable life, which are fairly uniform for different
groups over wide areas, that tests vitality and survival values, so
far as these values are biological. It may be claimed that war is very
often, if not generally, a means of interrupting favorable selective
processes, the unfit tending to prevail temporarily by force of
numbers, or even because of qualities that antagonize biological
progress. Viewing war in its later aspects, we can see that it is
often when nations are failing in natural competition that they resort
to the expedient of war to compensate for this loss, although they do
not usually succeed thereby in improving their economic condition as
they hope, or increase their chance of survival, or even demonstrate
their survival value. It is notorious that nations that conquer tend
to spend their vitality in conquest and introduce various factors of
deterioration into their lives. The inference is that a much more
complex relation exists among groups than the biological hypothesis
allows. Survival value indeed, as applied to men in groups, is not a
very clear concept. There may be several different criteria of
survival value, not comparable in any quantitative way among
themselves.
Scheler (77) says that we cannot account for war as a purely
biological phenomenon. Its roots lie deep in organic life, but there
is no direct development or exclusive development from animal behavior
to human. War is peculiarly human. That, in a way, may be accepted as
the truth. Warfare as we know it among human groups, as conflict
within the species is due in some way to, or is made possible by, the
secondary differentiations within species which give to groups, so to
speak, a pseudo-specific character. And these differences depend
largely upon the conditions that enter into the formation of
groups,--upon desires, impulses and needs arising in the social life
rather than in instinct as such. These characteristic differences are
not variations having selective value, but are traits that merely
differentiate the groups as _historical entities_. These secondary
variations have not resulted in the elimination of those having
inferior qualities, but have shared the fortunes of the groups that
possessed them,--the fortunes both of war and of peace. _War, from
this point of view, belongs to history rather than to biology._ It
belongs to the realm of the particular rather than to the general in
human life. War has favored the survival of this or that group in a
particular place, but has probably not been instrumental in producing
any particular type of character in the world, either physical or
mental.
Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can
trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in
the production of war. There are significant extensions and also
restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of
man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient
intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does,
and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among
groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of
biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel
them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds
almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very
likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some
disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that
has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in
preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual
groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one
biologically superior type. _Man's work in the world is to make
history._ Even though war were a means of making a biologically
superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that
it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.
Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have
contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an
explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a
biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology
for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment
so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other
than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the
suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and
that there is very little fighting within species, for species have
usually been too busy fighting their external enemies. Mitchell (10)
says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence,
among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or
justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there
are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle
between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses
the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that
has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question
is involved in the present war as has been supposed. There is no
conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.
Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way)
we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the
actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups
containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these
small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human
society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these
groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated
there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men
as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of
smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that
warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what
extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now
represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these
problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their
interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.
The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war
arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an
allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some
modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive
reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive
peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak,
under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so
far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge
of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and
the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed
pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we
have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd
instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his
habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse.
His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large
game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the
beginning have been very different as regards motive and development
from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in
character and to have the same ends.
There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits
into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the
necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of
anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and
habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry.
These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the
group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these
objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social.
One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are
emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite
and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and
the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity
and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on
the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres
but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war
motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider. Certain
tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within
the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger.
Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire,
and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of
aggression that may have been phyletically established.
Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied
only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or
others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every
animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He
is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward
all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives,
therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general
state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict
within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear,
and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably
having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must
have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result
of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is
not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside
groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the
group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual
jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the
motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the
effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing
control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward
one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and
toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.
Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or
the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire
perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably
introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive
groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course
such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence,
the power of discriminating and of reacting to secondary likenesses
and differences, and especially the recognition of the nature of
death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an
enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into
the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original
principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive
aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment,
of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together. It is
practical, but at no stage can it be said to be _wholly_ practical.
Changes must have taken place in warfare as in other social reactions
as men passed through a number of stages from primitive wandering or a
relatively unstable life to a stable life, but the motives of conflict
cannot have been added to in any essential way. Through all the course
of history all the motives that originally made individuals of a group
or the groups as wholes antagonistic have remained, although the
mental processes have become generalized, fused and transformed. If
Gumplowicz is right we can still detect in any great society to-day
all the primitive individual and group animosities, tempered down and
held in check by laws and customs, but still existent and by no means
overcome and made innocuous.
These motives of warfare might best be traced out in four more or less
definite principles of conduct, or four purposes of war that appear
throughout primitive life. These are: 1) thievery, including wife
capture; 2) the fear motive; 3) cannibalism; 4) the display motive,
with the desire to intimidate and to display power (more or less
closely associated with the play motive, the love of hunting, gaming
and the dramatic motive).
Cannibalism, of course, is a special expression of the predatory
motive in general, or it is mainly that. Cannibalism was certainly
established early in primitive life, at least early enough to antedate
all religion, and although its origin and history are shrouded in
mystery, the motive was quite certainly practical. Evidently it was
widespread if not universal. Whether it was introduced as a result of
a failure of animal food, as some think, or has a still more simple
explanation as a part of the original impulse which led men at a
certain stage of their development to become hunters, cannot be
determined. We know, however, that the alien human being was to some
extent included under the same concepts as the animal enemy and prey,
and presumably some of the strongest motives that led men to attack
animals also included man as an object, since the alien group was
regarded as in some degree different in kind from the in-group. It
may have been in the great migrations when all the aggressive motives
were increased that cannibalism became fixed as a habit.
Cannibalism may well have been the primitive motive of warfare as
serious deadly combat, but all predatory habits must have contributed
to establishing a more or less habitual state of warfare among all
groups of men. The predatory raid, with the reaction of defense, when
carried on as a group activity in any form, is in fact war, so far as
attack and defense were serious and deadly, and intelligence and
weapons were sufficiently developed to make man a dangerous opponent.
This predatory motive, of course, extended to all desired objects, and
these objects must have included all objects that could most simply be
acquired by stealing. They included food, women, and all other
possessions. The custom of driving out young males from the group, by
the jealousy of the old males, and of preventing males from obtaining
females within the group must have been one of the earliest and one of
the strongest incentives to predatory warfare. At first all property
of the group, for so long as groups were wandering, was to some extent
common, and attack and defense must have been common. The objects of
predatory raids which produced group combat must have changed with the
social life. When habitation became fixed and property therefore more
individual, probably the predatory impulse itself became relatively a
less important factor in combat.
Two motives grow out of the practical motives of combat, which we may
assume to have been the original motives. These are both emotional
rather than instinctive. Fear and anger, that is to say, become more
or less detached motives for attack. Fear is increased with the
increase of intelligence up to a certain point at least--with the
increase of the capacity for understanding danger, and of the powers
of man to become dangerous. All the experience of combat engenders
anger and hatred, and these moods of hatred toward enemies are
cumulative, absorb all the detached motives and feelings of antagonism
between groups, preserve and give continuity to the memories of
conflict, and so produce among groups the fear and hate motive. The
feeling of fear arouses the motive of aggression, and the feeling of
anger; and these in turn generate more fear, until both the moods of
anger and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are
induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of
combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is
produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of
generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible
the formation of deep moods.
In another direction, also, the practical motives tend to be
superseded by more abstract and more subjective motives. Both in the
fear and anger reactions and in the motive that originates in the
sexual impulse--display of males, and combat with reference to
females--consciousness of prowess for its own sake, and the display of
it in order to intimidate the enemy, arise. Into this motive of war
there enter all the antagonisms that come from self-consciousness, the
whole force of the diathesis of developing sexuality, with its
jealousy and cruelty, and tendencies to perversion. The force of this
motive of prowess must at some period of development have become very
great. It extends out into a love of combat for its own sake,
reënforces other motives, and issues in the more abstract motives of
honor and power that we see playing such a great part in modern
warfare.
These primitive motives of war are not merely numerous. They fuse,
reënforce one another, and almost from the beginning, we must suppose,
create complex states of consciousness, and form moods. War very
early, we say, must contain all the motives that ever enter into it.
The predatory impulse, the love of deception, of conquest, the love of
combat for its own sake, the hunting impulse, the motive of power, of
fear and anger, the impulse of display and the more primitive sexual
motives, the motives of courage and jealousy, even a beginning of the
aesthetic motive, are all there. They become the warlike mood or
produce war, in the sense in which we now understand it, only when the
intelligence gives to the relations between groups definite intentions
and directions, and out of the many impulses that lead to combat, a
distinctive motive and mood are derived. So we may say with all
certainty that the making of war is not a mere perpetuation of some
alleged instinct of murder, surreptitiously retained by man in his
rise from an animal state, but it is quite as much a product of his
whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more
complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus
seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not
arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a
primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On
the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state.
Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities
both for coöperation and antagonism out of which war is created.
CHAPTER II
UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES, THE REVERSION THEORIES OF WAR, AND THE
INTOXICATION MOTIVE
There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in
the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of
which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described
as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to,
instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain
in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time,
with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl
man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases,
human character in the form of double personality, or liken
civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of
life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains
smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.
Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which
is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in
substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and
also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting
when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather
than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not
explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point
better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the
blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which
presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some
of these instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of
fighting.
Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations,
and says that the motives behind great national movements may be
beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The
Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since
there is a manifest inconsistency between what he really is and what
he thinks. What these instincts are, Le Bon does not specify;
presumably they may be either better or worse than the conscious
motives.
Trotter (82) and also Murray (90) consider war from a biological
standpoint, regarding it as a herd phenomenon. Trotter's view,
especially his interpretation of Germany, which we are not to consider
here, is original and important. War is a result of the action of a
_herd instinct_, a specific instinct which is peculiar in one respect,
in that it acts upon other instincts but has no definite motor
reactions of its own. War is the result of the action of the herd
instinct in man upon the old instinct of aggression. At least
aggressive war is. Men in all their social relations show the play of
these instincts; in war it is the old aggressive instinct, the old
passion of the pack, that dominates them; and it is the ancestral
herd-fears that overcome them in their panics. It is the herd instinct
that makes men in groups so highly sensitive to the leader, whose
relations to the herd or pack are always dependent upon their
recognizing him as one of the group; that is, as acting in accordance
with the desires of the herd.
It is by the union of the herd, Murray says, or through the herd
instinct, that suppressed unconscious impulses are given an
opportunity to operate; when the human herd is excited by any external
stimulus, the old types of reaction are brought into play. Curiously,
in such times, leadership may be assumed by eccentric and even
abnormal members of the group--by those who are governed by perverted
instincts; by men who are touched with the mania of suspicion, or who
even suffer from homicidal mania.
The essential point of these biological views is that, when the human
herd is subjected to any influences that tend to arouse the herd
instinct--that is, to unite the herd in any common emotion or action,
the old instinctive forms of response are likely to be brought to the
front. Whatever the stimulus, the tendency is for the herd to fixate
its attention upon some external object, which at once is reacted to
with deep emotion. Plainly, if this be true, if herd instinct does
throw human society from time to time and from various causes into
attitudes of defense and offense with the appropriate emotional
reactions, and if in such times leaders are likely to appear, having
exaggerated instinctive tendencies, there is always close at hand and
ready a mechanism by which war can be produced, war being precisely of
the type of mass action, under strong emotion, of a group closely
united under spectacular leadership, with attention cramped upon some
external object hated or feared.
Nicolai (79), who believes strongly that war is wholly useless,
compares it to the play we turn to when the actions performed in the
play are no longer in themselves practical. War is a great debauch,
perhaps now the last the race will experience. War is like wine: in it
nations renew their youth. It is not the war itself, but the mood it
produces that we crave, and this mood is longed for because in it old
and sacred feelings of patriotism are aroused, and these feelings are
themselves survivals, something romantic, archaic, no longer needed in
the present stage of social life.
Novicow (83) says something very similar to this. War is a survival,
like the classical languages, for example. Men begin to find beauty
and glory in these things only after the activities they represent are
useless. The principle of their survival is nothing more or less than
that of habit. It is habit that keeps war alive; wars are a concession
to our forebears, a following in the footsteps of a dead past.
We are presenting these views in a somewhat loose and illogical order,
but let us look at still a few more of them. Patrick thinks of war as
precisely a plunge into the primeval. War is a reaction, a regression,
but still it is something more than a mere slipping of the machinery
of life. It is _craved_; and it is craved because it offers relief
from the tension of modern life. It is not quite clear whether it is
because we are tired and want rest for our over-worked functions, or
are merely dull and need renewed life, but in any case, when the
desire has accumulated enough, back we fall into the primeval. Then
all the tensions and inhibitions of civilized society disappear.
Society, relieved of its cross-tensions, is resolved and organized
into an harmonious and freely acting whole, seeking a definite object.
Life is simplified, and becomes again primitive. Old and vigorous
movements take the place of the cramped thinking of our civilized
life. All that keeps us modern and evolved is relaxed.
Naturally the Freudians have their own explanation of war in terms of
subconscious wishes, repressed feelings and instincts. Freud (78)
himself says that war is a recrudescence (and a mastery over us) of a
more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as
we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and
are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these
primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we
thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at
least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have
been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an
outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call
civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old
impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been
transformed by civilization is less than we supposed. All society is
at heart barbaric. Judged by our unconscious wishes, we are a band of
murderers, for the primitive wish is to kill all who oppose our
self-interests, and war is precisely a reversion to the method of free
expression of our desires in action. Society and the authority of
government have suppressed these primitive reactions in the
individual, but instead of eliminating them altogether from human
nature (which, of course, no legislation can do in any case),
government and society as a whole have appropriated all these
primitive actions to their own use.
Jones (37), the Freudian, distinguishes two quite different groups of
causes of war: the conscious causes, all expressed in the feeling of
patriotism; and the unconscious causes, which grow out of the desire
to release certain original passions--the passions of cruelty,
destruction, loot and lust.
The central thought of all these views, it is plain, is that war
belongs to the past. It is a return to something that, in a
significant sense, is the natural man--is his instinctive and
unguarded self. It is also plainly implied in these views, here and
there, that modern man, by thus lapsing into war, is renewing his
stock of primitive nature. The modern man is in unstable equilibrium,
and whatever upsets that equilibrium sends him back through the ages.
MacCurdy (37), having Jones and Freud in mind, protests against these
views to this extent: he says that the present state of man, rather
than the past, is the natural state, and that at least in reverting to
the primitive state man becomes unnatural.
The question upon which our discussion of this aspect of war is going
to hinge is whether, or in what sense, the activities and the feelings
aroused in war are reversions. Wars, beyond a doubt, do involve to a
greater extent than peaceful life certain instinctive reactions. Wars
are so impulsive and so persistent that we must suppose very deep
motives to be engaged in war; and the fact that in all wars, and on
both sides of every war, the feelings and the reactions are
fundamentally the same, indicates that war is something less
differentiated than the peaceful life. But that war can be explained
in terms of instinct as such, or that war can be disposed of as a mere
recrudescence of old impulses and types of conduct buried beneath
civilization, is very much to be doubted. War, in the first place, in
its moods and passions, appears to be too complex, too synthetic a
process to be quite what this view would imply. It is too intimately
related to everything that occurs and exists in present day society.
It means too much, concretely and with reference to objects
specifically desired for the future. War is related to the past, but
to a great extent, it may be, wars represent and contain the present
and look toward the future. The distinctions and differences in the
interpretation of war thus implied, and the conflicting understanding
of facts about society and individual life cannot be very clear at
this point, but that there are involved fundamental problems of
psychology, and perhaps divergent ways of thinking of history and
society, and of such principles of philosophy at least as are
implicated in æsthetics, and finally of the practical questions that
are of most interest in these fields to-day, may begin to be evident.
There is one aspect of war, or one question about war, that seems to
suggest that its problems are more subtle and less simple than the
instinct-theories imply. War has been, and still is, the great story
of the world, the center of all that is dramatic and heroic in life.
Its mood--and that is the essential thing in it, whatever else war may
have been, and in spite of all its horrors--is _ecstatic_. War
produces, or is produced by, states of mind that affiliate it with all
the other ecstasies--of love, religion, intoxication, art. We may well
doubt whether any explanation of war can ever be satisfactory that
does not take this quality of it fully into account. One may say, of
course, that war is ecstatic just because it does satisfy instincts,
that the satisfaction of all instincts is pleasant, or that pleasure
_is_ the satisfaction of instincts. But there is more in the problem
than that. Love, the source of the other great romance of the world,
is not exhausted by calling it a gratification of the sexual instinct,
or a primitive tendency of all organic life. It is at the other end of
the process of development of it, so to speak, its place as a present
motive in life, that it is most significant, and it is by no means
explained by calling it a product of sexuality.
So with war. Made out of instincts, it may be, but it is not explained
as the sum of instinctive reactions. _That, at least, is our thesis._
It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it
holds a high place in art, that history--our selective way of reacting
upon human experience--is in a large measure the story of war, that
its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety;
it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems
of war, and also to the practical questions of its future.
Hirschfeld (98), in a short study of war, has enumerated and briefly
described some of the forms in which the ecstasy of war appears, or
some of the ecstasies that appear in war. He speaks of the ecstasy of
heroism, and the ecstatic sense that accompanies the taking part in
great events, the consciousness of making history. On a little lower
plane there is the excitement of adventure and of travel that gives
allurement to the idea of war in the mind of the soldier, and which
also glorifies the soldier; the sensation hunger; the _cupidus rerum
novarum_; the ecstasies of nature and freedom, suggested by the very
term "in the field." Add to these the ecstasies of battle and of
victory, the _Kampfsrausch_ and the _Siegestrunkenheit_, and the mood
of war in which acts unlawful for the individual become not only
lawful but highly honorable when done collectively. There is also in
the mood of war the social intoxication, the feeling on the part of
the individual of being a part of a body and the sense of being lost
in a greater whole. The lusts of conquest, and of looting, and of
combat, all contribute to this spirit of war. And finally, summing up
all the other ecstasies, the strong inner movement of the soul
expressing itself in strong external movements, and in the sense of
living and dying in the midst of vivid and real life.
Hirschfeld's analysis of the ecstasy of war discloses deep and
powerful motives in the individual mind and the social life. We can
find this ecstasy everywhere in the history of war, sometimes as a
national exaltation, sometimes as a more restricted phenomenon.
Villard (54), speaking of the first days of the war, says that in
Germany then one could see "the psychology of the crowd at its noblest
height." The exaltation of a people, whatever its content, or its
purpose, is an awe-inspiring spectacle. There can be no greater
display of the sources of human power. In this particular time of
exaltation we can see in action religious ecstasy, the cult of valor,
and the stirring of more fundamental and more primitive feelings. This
exaltation has its imaginative side. There is a dream of empire in it.
There is an exhibition of the forms of royalty, its display, its color
and its dramatic moments. There is the spirit of militarism and of
great adventure, the excitement of chance, of throwing all into the
hands of fate, the æsthetic and the play motives which are never
separated from the practical passions in times of great exaltation.
This mood of war differs, of course, at different times under
different circumstances. The French people certainly went into the
great war with no such exaltation. We should have to look elsewhere in
French history for the ecstatic war spirit, when the French are moved
by the motives of glory and prestige, or by the vanity and eroticism
which Reuthe thinks are the essential qualities of the spirit of
France. But taking history as a whole there is no lack of ecstasy in
the spirit of war. We find in this ecstasy exalted social feeling, joy
of overcoming the pain of death, the exultation of sacrifice, love of
display, feeling of tragedy, the ecstasy of exerting the utmost of
power, love of danger, the gambling motive, the love of battle, love
of all the dramatic elements of military life. These separate
ecstasies, taken all together, make up the exalted mood of war. They
represent war in its most significant moments.
In this mood of war instincts are exhibited, but they seem to be in
some way transformed, so that the whole has a meaning different from
the parts. The mood of war is not a mere effect, a reaction to events.
It is a longing--plastic and indefinite it may be--but looking toward
the future. It is a craving, not for the release of definite
instincts, but is rather a force or a desire which, however misguided
the expression of this mood or this energy may be, is the essence of
what individuals and society to-day _are_. We may find in this mood,
upon superficial examination, mere emotions, but in a final and deeper
analysis, we may suppose, its content and its meaning will be found to
be specific--purposes which constitute what is deepest and most
continuous in the individual and in society, but which at the same
time give to this mood its generality of direction and of form.
It is the war-mood, then, that must be explained, if we wish to
understand the motives and causes of war. And this war mood, so it
appears, is related to all the other great ecstasies--of art,
religion, intoxication, love. It is, of course, then, a psychological
problem, and one having many radiations and deep roots. The view that
we are going to take is that in the mood of war we have to do
essentially with what, relying upon previous studies of the principles
of art and of the motives that are at work in society that produce the
phenomena of intemperance we may call the _intoxication motive_. That
this intoxication motive is a plastic force, a mood containing desires
and impulses that may be satisfied in a variety of ways, since as a
sum of desires it is no longer specific and instinctive, is the main
implication of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness
of the purpose of the individual and of the spirit of society that
obscures the meaning of history and often makes individual lives so
enigmatical, and which also makes these purposes of individuals and
nations so persistent, sometimes so terribly forceful and insatiable.
As contrasted with instincts, the motive of intoxication we say, is
plastic, and its object--and this is one of its most significant
characteristics--is to produce exalted states of consciousness mainly
for their own sake. At least this experience of exaltation is the main
or central thing sought. It is a tendency to seek exalted states, but
at the same time, we should say, specific instincts gain some kind of
satisfaction, although not at all necessarily by the performance of
the external movements appropriate to them. They may obtain a certain
vicarious satisfaction. The mood gives conduct a general direction, it
provides a motive and the power, it is the source of interest and of
desire, but its objects may be indefinite and variable.
Some general aspects of the moods that we have to consider have
already come to light, and these may prove to be valuable clews to a
psychological analysis of their content. There is the ecstatic state,
and the craving to experience it, the love of excitement, the desire
to have a sense of reality, the impulse to seek an abundant life, the
love of power and of the feeling of power. These are all related, and
at least they have something in common, but it is the last mentioned,
the motive of power, that seems to be the most definite and to have
the clearest biological meaning and implications. Indeed this motive
of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the
æsthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy), appears to be
fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that
gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most
significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power
as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific
purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion
and also through history itself. Religion is based upon the desire to
exert and to feel power, and it is the manifest and indeed the
expressly acknowledged purpose of all primitive art, and is concealed
and implied in all later art. Art is practical, an effort to realize a
sense of power, to become a god (just as in his motive of play the
child desires more than anything else to realize himself as a man), to
influence people, or objects, or gods, to exert magic somewhere in the
world. In the feeling of power which the ecstatic state produces, the
belief in the power of art is established, and at the same time deep
and hidden impulses are exploited. On the feeling side, and indeed in
every way, this ought to explain how art, religion, and all states of
intoxication have a common element, if they are not primitively the
same.
A psychology of the war moods must undertake to trace the history of
the motive of power, considering its beginnings as the desire and
sense of satisfaction connected with the performance of definite
instinctive acts, and with their physiological results, with the
exertion of power and the production of effects upon objects. It is in
the performance of instinctive acts, in which superiority is inborn,
that animal and man obtain their original sense of power or
superiority. As capacities are differentiated and multiplied, the
experiences of achievement generate a mood and a more general impulse,
a desire to exert power for its own sake. The sensory or organic
elements tend to predominate in this generalized motive, simply
because the specific actions in which the sense of power is obtained
cannot so readily, or cannot at all, be generalized. Such an
organization of actions and states in consciousness demands nothing
new in principle, implies nothing different from that found on the
intellectual side when concepts are formed from concrete experiences.
The associative processes and the selective principles everywhere
present in mental action are all that are necessary to be assumed
here. We may take advantage, however, of the special investigations of
affective logic, and the like, as giving evidence in support of such
a conception of the formation of moods as is here being worked out. We
are likely to make the mistake of thinking the specific instincts and
the impulses and pleasure states that we find in human experiences,
such as ecstasy, as the whole of these experiences, and to overlook
the constant process of generalization that goes on in all the mental
activity of the individual. For example, we may think of various plays
which involve instinctive actions as being wholly explained by, or to
be made up of, these instinctive acts alone, whereas in most plays
that take the form of excitement, abandon or ecstasy, there are being
employed processes which are general in the sense of reënforcing all
the specific acts alike, and are yet specific in the sense that they
are themselves, or have been, practical: that is, they are in reality
processes that belong to the fundamental strata of consciousness--to
the nutritional and reproductive tendencies. Out of these tendencies
the more complex processes of which we speak are made, but they are no
mere repetition of old forms. That, at least, is the way these
ecstatic moods appear from our point of view.
It is precisely because ecstatic moods are presumably thus general and
composite, and involve fundamental instincts (but in such a way that
they are transformed, and no longer present in body, so to speak, but
are represented by their organic processes rather than appearing as
specific concatenated chains of motor events), with their purposes
changed and their whole meaning determined by the present states to
which they belong, that we should be inclined to say that to explain
any great and powerful movement in the lives of individuals or nations
as merely reversions is very inadequate and indeed wrong. They are
emotional forces that are at work, composite feelings and moods rather
than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the
present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the
individual. These forces are plastic, complex and organized, rather
than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but
incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.
If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of
war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a
craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the
subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive
so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or
displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the
manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most
significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in
great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective
or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child
in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels
himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars,
feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as
supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that
runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the
most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be
taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger
pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.
These moods which, slumbering, become the ecstasies of war are vague,
even secretive. They contain aggressive thoughts that are disavowed,
vanities that are concealed, fears that present a quiet front. But we
must not think that the war mood always intends war. Nations have
their subjective lives and inner history, and their vicarious
satisfactions. A nation in arms already feels itself victor by reason
of its sense of power. Otherwise few wars would be entered upon.
Dreams and talk of war may incite to war, but they may also satisfy
the desire and need of war. There is a certain narcissism in nations,
and this is due precisely to the fact that patriotism as a feeling and
impulse necessarily lacks in the group consciousness the mechanisms
for externalization, except indeed in war. War is an escape, for a
people, from a kind of subjectivism, from the evils of a self-love to
perhaps the greater evils of self-assertion.
Nations in war, and even in the thought of war realize their own
potentiality, take account of stock of their powers, and create an
ideal, romantic and dream world. They make castles-in-air, and these
castles-in-air always take the form of empires. War, precisely like
art, is at first more and then less practical, and sought for
practical purposes. More and more there is a craving for glory, for
prestige, for subjective satisfaction and symbols of power. Nations
take lands that they cannot use for any good purpose, inflict
indemnities that may ruin themselves rather than their enemies,
exploit economic relations that are dangerous to the nations' very
existence. It is power that they seek, and it is power they thus
create, but it is often different in form and in value from what the
conscious purpose holds. They are really seeking general and
subjective states in part for their own sake. Psychologically it is
all one and the same whether we realize this power by actually killing
an enemy, or believe we overpower him by the performance of some
mystic and ecstatic act, or in some more modern way become confident
in our own power and prestige. National life, in order to maintain its
integrity, must move upon a plane of intense feeling. It must have
objectives, but these objectives are not necessarily of value in
themselves. This is the delusion and enigma of history. Peoples enact
dramas in their own subjective lives, and these things they do have
reference to the desires for inner experiences. We may say that
nations, like individuals, crave for luxuries of the emotional life,
but to think of these experiences as merely static pleasure-states,
after the fashion of a certain conception of the emotions, would be
wholly to misunderstand this view which we have been trying to
present. These subjective states are full of meaning and of purpose.
They are not reactions, but rather, in so far as these collective
lives are normal and progressive, these moods and ecstasies are more
of the nature of crucibles in which old reactions and feelings are
fused, given new direction, new forms and in a certain way a new
nature. History is made in these moods of war. They are subjective
forces, but they are also objectively creative.
What is it that nations really desire? What is it, we might ask, that
an individual desires? On the side of experience it is an _abundant
life_, a life full of the feeling of power. This craving for an
abundant life is a craving for the satisfaction of many desires,
instinctive and acquired, but it is also a craving, in some sense, for
more desire. It is not merely to satisfy desires, but to realize more
life by creating more desires that experience is sought. That is the
philosophy of the life of the superior individual; it is also the
principle of the larger individual--the nation. The creation and the
satisfaction of desire are the motives of art. They are also the
motives of life.
In history, it is the intangible value, the unconscious purpose, the
desire to realize empires that are only in part material, the desire
for glory and prestige and opportunity that seem to be the guiding
motives. There is a general and plastic purpose beneath all the
special tendencies and desires directing interest toward specific
objects, and also sometimes making the objectives sought indefinite
and the purposes in seeking them seem mystical. It is the desire to be
a power in the world, or rather to have power over the world, and to
experience all the inner exaltation these desires inspire that appears
to be the creative force in history. These things, moreover, are not
the desires and impulses of the geniuses among nations alone; they
seem to be inherent in all national life.
Study of the _intoxication motive_ in the individual and as a social
phenomenon shows that it is not an expression of the need of
relaxation from strain, or a reversion, or something that occurs by a
mere release of primitive instincts. It occurs in the great periods of
history, and in the strong years of the life of the individual, rather
than in times of weakness. It is always a spirit of the times rather
than of some past reverted to. It may occur in times of disorder or of
repression, but it is an experience in which energy and power are
expressed. We see it most dominant when life is most abundant, when
there is also a craving to make life more abundant still, when there
is already power and more power is longed for. It is true, however,
that two opposite conditions may produce the strongest manifestations
of this intoxication motive. Something analogous to these conditions
we see in the lives of individuals, in the phenomena of intemperance,
which belong in general to the virile years. Social ecstasy is
produced in times when there is already a free expression of energy,
but also under conditions that cause pain, disorder and repression.
Under the latter conditions we think of it not as desire for relief
from strain but desire to be released from obstacles that impede the
expression of the growth force. If all this be true, we see war in a
somewhat different light from that in which it is ordinarily regarded.
It is not, in its typical forms, a reversion to barbarism, and it is
not a political mishap. It is rather a readjustment of tendencies or
forces and an expression and product of the living and progressive
forces of society--not necessarily a good or even a normal expression
of them, but an awakening and a realization of such desires as are
to-day at work in everything we do--forces which for the moment are
raised to a white heat, so to speak, in which purposes are for the
moment fused and it may be confused--but still an expression of what,
for better or for worse we _are_, not of what in some remote past time
we _were_. We cannot explain war or excuse ourselves for waging wars
by saying that we lapse for a time into barbarism, but on the other
hand the heroism we suddenly find in ourselves as nations or as
individuals, is not so different from that of ordinary life as we may
have supposed. We have perhaps no right to say that all war is thus to
be characterized. War is a very complex and a widely variable
phenomenon, but this is the explanation of that aspect of the motive
of history which in general produces war. War may have its
abnormalities, if we may speak of a worse in that which is already bad
enough. War may satisfy the desperate mind; it may, on occasion, be a
narcotic to cover up worse pain, or an evidence of decadence; or even
be what those who think of it as a reversion believe. But all these
aspects of war, if our view be sound, are the eccentricities rather
than the essence of war.
The conditions preceding our recent great war will doubtless in the
course of future historical and sociological research, be minutely
scrutinized, in the effort to find the causes of the war--factors
deeper than and different from the political and economic causes and
the personal intrigues that are now most emphasized. If we believe
that the war was made in Germany rather than elsewhere, we might look
there, especially for these psychological factors of war--for our
intoxication motives and unconscious impulses and our causes of
reversion, but we should probably not find anything different in kind
there from what we should discover in other great countries. Those who
have seen in modern industrialism dangers of coming disaster, or who
now look back upon it as a genuine cause of the war were probably not
mistaken. Industrialism has been producing rapidly, and in an intense
form, what we may call the mood of the city, and this mood of the city
contains all the conditions and all the emotions that tend to bring to
the surface the deep-lying motives of the social life that we are
trying to point out. There are both the joy of the abundant life, the
craving for new experiences, and the sense of reality, and also the
disorganization of interests and motives, the stress and fatigue and
monotony which prepare the mind for culmination in dramatic events.
There is, in a word, a deep stirring of all the forces that make for
progress and expansion, and also conditions that disorganize the
individual and the social life. Lamprecht (59) of all German writers
seems to have appreciated this. He has written before the war,
describing a condition in Germany which he says began in the seventies
of the preceding century--a change of German life in which there is a
great increase of the activities of the cities, with haste and
anxiety, unscrupulous individual energy, general nervous excitement, a
condition of neuro-muscular weakness (and he might have added as
another sign, over-stimulation of the mind by a great flood of morbid
literature).
In Lamprecht's opinion, this period of excitement, this strong tendency
to the enjoyment of excitation in general, is a form of socio-psychic
dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the
individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when
outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual,
in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward
pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something
transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This
state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the
individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of
the novel and the extraordinary, the suggestibility and the receptivity
of the masses, automatic action of the will and the emotions--all this
Lamprecht thinks will pass. It is a stage in the process of a new
formation. The very elements of dissociation are positively charged, so
to speak, and contain creative power. A new system of morals, a new
philosophy, new religion begin to emerge. There is a strong effort to
reach a new dominant.
This is Lamprecht's psychological interpretation of recent German
history. This view and the various aspects of the condition which
Lamprecht describes, the relation of the materialism, the pessimism
and the melancholy of such a time to the optimistic trends and the
deep forward movement need a closer study than we can here give it,
but may we not see in it the truth that such conditions as these are
prone to cause wars as a phase of the process of the inner adjustment
of national life? Wars occur as forms of expression of those impulses
which appear in the individual life in times of rapid growth and
relative dissociation as outbreaks of intemperance and passion--a
culmination, according to our view and terminology, of the
intoxication motive. Industrialism itself is perhaps but one
manifestation of deep impulses in the life of nations; it is at once
an intensification and a formalizing of life. Hence perhaps its
paradoxical appearance as an increase of both joy and distress. There
is nothing in it that is wholly satisfying.
Germany, says Lamprecht, was seeking, in this transition period, a new
dominant, a new religion and a new philosophy. But Germany, let us
help Lamprecht to say, since he does not himself draw this conclusion,
has failed to emerge upon the level of an exalted ecstasy, failed to
produce the philosophical, the moral and religious fruit of its new
impulses, _failed, in a word, to find its dominant on a high level_,
precisely as often the promising individual fails and has expressed
his truly great nature in low forms of activity. So Germany, and the
world, dominated by industrialism and all the desires and forces that
the rapid development of industrialism has brought into action, has
come to a culmination of its efforts in an outbreak unparalleled in
history. On the side of Germany we see a nation governed by a mood of
war in which the chief modes of thought and action represented are the
pseudo-mystical and religious longings for new empire, romantic love
of the past, militarism, and all the motives of the new industrialism
and the new science. The best motives of the old feudalism and the new
industrialism tried to unite, as we might say, into a new and very
great civilization--_and they failed_. What has happened is that the
material powers and the cynical moods of industrialism have combined
with the mystical elements and the superficial æstheticism of the old
feudalistic régime to create a philosophy of life, a temporary stage
it may be, in which force and fanaticism and the uncompromising ideals
of national honor and brute strength prevail over those of a wider
efficiency and a broader devotion which might have inspired a greater
and a better Germany. Convention and political motives have done the
rest.
Bergson says that in the war spirit of Germany one sees matter arrayed
against spirit. One can see some truth in this, but spirit and matter
are not two armies pitted against one another. In Germany, as we may
believe elsewhere, the spiritual in the sense of creative forces in
the subconscious life of nations does try to organize the practical
life, with its routine and convention, into an onward moving progress,
in which, necessarily, exalted moods (if energies are to get
themselves expressed at all) must prevail, and must be full of
possibilities, both of great good and of great evil. Life in its
collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental
craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly,
but progress, as history seems to show us--if reason and psychology do
not--can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must
break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are
continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old
instincts which are continually upsetting civilized life, but the
desires they produce and the mechanism of their operation seem to be
different from what our customary psychology and interpretation of
history imply. Just as these moods make the child play and be wholly
unpractical when one might suppose he could be useful, and the
individual, as man, live a certain life of adventure rather than in
security and routine, so this spirit or mood that dominates nations
makes them imperialistic, and causes them to crave those things which
lead toward war, if they do not crave war itself, when we might think
they ought to be most concerned about the economic welfare of the
world as a whole.
Whether this spirit of nations be an evil to be overcome, and to
suppress, or an untamed force to direct to right objects, or a good
that by some logic of events which we do not understand works out the
right course of history, we do not know. But here, of course, we come
to problems, which, if they are problems at all in any real sense, are
philosophical and ultimate.
CHAPTER III
INSTINCTS IN WAR: FEAR, HATE, THE AGGRESSIVE IMPULSE, MOTIVES OF
COMBAT AND DESTRUCTION, THE SOCIAL INSTINCT
We have found that the essential, and we might say, primary
psychological datum of war is a war-mood, that the central motive of
this war-mood is a general impulse which we called the intoxication
motive, and that this intoxication motive, considered generically, and
in regard to its specific meaning is a craving for power and for the
experience of exerting and feeling power. The war-mood is not a mere
collection of instincts; it is a new product, in which instincts and
emotions have a place. There are several reasons, practical and
theoretical, for regarding it as a highly important problem to
discover what the actual content of this war-mood is. This mood, being
one of the greatest of all powers of good and evil, and one most in
need to-day of education and re-direction, it may be, it will probably
be controlled, if ever, upon the basis of a knowledge of what it means
as a whole, and of what its elements are which appear in the form of
fused, transformed, truncated, generalized and aborted instincts and
feelings.
_Primitive Tendencies_
First of all, the highly complex emotions, moods and impulses we find
in the social consciousness as expressed in the moods of war, do
contain and revert to instincts and feelings that are part of the
primitive equipment of organic life, and are usually identified as
nutritional and reproductive tendencies. The part played in war by
the migratory impulse, the predatory impulse and the like indicates
the connection of the war-moods with the nutritional tendencies; and
the display elements found already in primitive warfare and, as we
have already inferred, in all forms of ecstasy contain factors that
are at bottom sexual. We no longer eat our enemies, and we do not
bring home their heads to our women or practice wife stealing, but it
is easy to observe the remnants of these old feelings and instincts in
war. Trophy hunting continues, and we may suppose that even the moods
of primitive cannibalism have not entirely been lost. The ready
habituation of soldiers to some of the scenes of the recent war seems
to suggest a lingering trace of this motive, while the looting impulse
which plays such a part in war, and some aspects of the destructive
impulses and the like that are displayed, are, with a high degree of
probability, closely related to instincts that were once specifically
practical and belong to the fundamental nutritional motives. Nor is it
a mere euphemism, perhaps, when we speak of the greed of nations, nor
solely analogical when we compare the ambitions of peoples with
certain adolescent phenomena in the life of the individual. Plainly
the social consciousness, as a collective mood, does not command the
specific reactions connected with sexuality and nutrition, but we may
observe the presence of these instinctive reactions in two phases of
war. We see them in the tendencies of various individuals, who under
the excitements of the war moods are controlled more or less
specifically by instinctive reactions. We see also fragments of
instinctive reactions and primitive feeling woven into the total
states of social consciousness. The hunger motive may, and probably
does, supply some of the elements of the fear and the aggressive moods
of war; just as the sex motive provides some of the elements of anger
and hatred, and some of the qualities of combat itself.
_The Aggressive Instinct_
A natural, but somewhat naïve explanation of war is that it is a
survival of the aggressive instinct that man has brought up with him
from animal life, in which he originated, and that very early in his
career was directed toward his fellow men. This aggressive instinct as
expressed in the modern spirit of war does not need, on this view, to
be thought of as something reverted to. It is still active throughout
the social life. Both the purposes and the methods of it remain. We
have referred to one aspect of this before, and to the objection that
can be made that the ancestry of man does not show us such an
aggressive instinct. The nearest relatives of man are mainly social
rather than aggressive in their habits. Even the habits of hunting
other animals and eating animal food appear to have been acquired
during man's career as man, and he never has had the aggressive temper
that some creatures have had. Man has acquired a very effectual and
very complex adjustment to his environment by piecing together, so to
speak, fragments of his original conduct, and developing mechanisms
that have been produced in the race as a means of satisfying
fundamental needs. Modes of reaction produced originally for one
purpose have apparently been utilized by other motives. Of course the
more specific animal instincts are not wholly lacking, but it is also
true that man through his social life has produced habits that
resemble or are substitutes for primitive instincts. The love of
combat, especially as it is shown in play indicates the presence of
instinctive roots, but it does not show the existence of a definite
instinct of aggression. This play is in part an off-shoot of the
reproductive motive. These fighting plays of children are in part
sexual plays, and we see them clearly in their true light in some of
the higher mammals most closely related to man.
One aspect of the aggressive habit of man has been too much neglected.
It is highly probable that aggression in man has been far more closely
related to the emotion of fear than to any assumed predatory instinct.
It is a question whether the predatory habit of man, ending in
cannibalism and the hunting of animals for food, did not originate in
the time of the long battle man must have had with animals in which
the animals themselves for the most part played the part of
aggressors. It was not for nothing, at any rate, that our animal
ancestors took to the trees, and it is certain that the fear element
in human nature is very strong and very deeply ingrained. We see
throughout animal life fear expressed by aggressive movements, by the
show of anger, as well as by flight. This is seen especially clearly
in the birds. With all their equipment for the defensive strategy of
flight they express fear instinctively by attacking, and this is
apparently not a result merely of the habit of defending the young.
The great carnivora also attack from fear, and seem normally never to
attack such animals as they do not hunt for prey unless they are
frightened. The charge of the rhinoceros and other great ungulates is
probably always a fear reaction. They appear to have no other
aggressive impulses, certainly none connected with the nutritional
motives since they are herbivorous in habit.
The fear motive is probably much deeper in human nature, both in the
lower and the higher social reactions than is commonly supposed, the
concealment of fear being precisely a part of the strategy of defense.
Fear has created more history than it is usually given credit for. The
aggressive motive alone, in all probability, would never have made
history such a story of battles as it has been. Nations usually
attribute more aggressive intentions and motives to their neighbors
than their neighbors possess, and war is certainly often precipitated
by an accumulation of mutual distrust and suspicion. Nations are
always watching one another for the least signs of aggression on the
part of their supposed enemies, an attitude which of course is
inspired only by apprehension.
Moods of fear and pessimism we say are deeply implanted in the
consciousness of man, and we must interpret both his optimism, and all
its expressions in philosophy and in religion, and also his aggressive
behavior as in large part the result of a conscious or an unconscious
effort to overcome his fear. The social consciousness is full of marks
of age-long dread and suspicion. Fear of fate, fear of losing identity
as a nation, fear of being overrun by an enemy, fear of internal
disruption, are strong motives in national life. Fear runs like a dark
thread through all the life of nations, and gives to it a quality of
mysticism, and a touch of sadness which is so characteristic of much
of the deepest patriotism of the world.
Fear is one of the most powerful motives of all aggressive warfare in
the world. We find it in every nation, even those which are naturally
most aggressive, and in them perhaps most of all. In the history and
in the war moods of Germany the fear motive is unmistakable. America
is not without it. Nations conceal their fears, presenting a bold
front to the foreigner; but beneath the display one can always detect
suspicion, dread and intense watchfulness. America has in the past
feared Germany, and America fears the Far East; we look furtively
toward Asia, the primeval home of all evils and pestilence, for
something that may arise and engulf us. Small countries fear; large
countries with their sense of distances, have their own characteristic
forms of apprehension. Fear is the motive of preventive wars. It makes
all nations desire to kill their enemies in the egg. It creates the
death wish toward all who thwart our interests or who may in the
future do so.
This fear motive runs through all history. Parsons says that men fight
not because they are warlike, but because they are fearful. Rohrbach
thinks that if Germany and England could each be sure the other would
not be aggressive there would be no war between them. It is this
aspect of the foreign as the unknown that especially plays upon the
motive of fear. This fear is like the child's dread of the dark; it is
not what is seen, but what is not seen that causes apprehension. It is
the stranger whose psychic nature we cannot penetrate, who causes
fear. In small countries having only land borders, this attitude of
suspicion and fear must become an integral part of the whole psychic
structure of the national consciousness. Fear becomes morbid; nations
have illusions and delusions based upon fear. There are reasons for
believing that all aggression contains a pessimistic motive, or
background, and that this pessimistic background is based upon the
emotion of fear. Countries that are most positively aggressive have
such a pessimistic strain. Pessimism is a shadow that lies across the
path of progress of modern Germany. This fear motive, the quality of
the animal that charges when at bay, is to be seen throughout all
German history. Germany's fear of Russia must certainly be blamed for
a great part of the pessimistic strain in the temperament of Germany,
and therefore as an important factor among the causes of the great
war. Every war appears to the people who conduct it as defensive,
precisely because every war is to some extent based upon fear, and
fear in national consciousness is a persistent sense of living by a
defensive strategy. It is existence that nations always think and talk
of fighting for; it is existence about which they have apprehensions.
Beneath all group life there is this sense of fear, since fear itself
was a large factor in creating that life. When people live together,
repress individual desires and participate in a common life we may
know that one of the strongest bonds of this social life is fear. The
need of defense is a more fundamental motive in national life than is
aggression. A "shudder runs through a nation about to go to battle."
The lusts of war are aroused later by the overcoming of fear.
Germany's inclination to preventive wars, her incessant plea of being
about to be attacked, can by no means be interpreted as pure
deception, or as an effort to make political capital. Germany's army
_was_ primarily for defense, because a defensive strategy is the only
strategy that Germany with her position and her temperament can adopt.
Germany's great army was Germany's compensation, in consciousness, for
the insignificance of her territory. It was for defense. It was also a
compensation for a feeling of inferiority, in Adler's sense.
Fanaticism, envy, depreciation of others, aggression, morbid and
excessive ambition were all fruits from the same stem. The gloom which
many have found in German life, and the pessimism in German
philosophy, we may explain in part by the experiences of Germany as
the scene of so many devastating wars. Upon the background of fear, in
our interpretation of aggressive motives, is erected German autocracy,
German ambition and the conception of the absolute State, which may be
interpreted as almost a specific fear reaction. It comes in time to
have other meanings, and like many instinctive reactions, it may be
put to uses for which it was not originally produced, but there is
fear concealed in the heart of it. How action can be both defensive
and strongly aggressive, then, is no mystery if we see that aggression
may be a fear reaction, that even the most ardent imperialism is based
in part upon fear, upon the consciousness at some time of being weak
and inferior.
Fear and suspicion cause aggressive wars even when the fear may be, in
all reason, groundless. There is no more dangerous individual in the
community than the one having delusions of persecution, for his mania
is naturally homicidal. So with nations. Fear is a treacherous and
deceptive passion. We may see this fear, if we choose to look for it,
even in the ecstatic mood of war and the spiritual exaltation of
Germany during the first few weeks or months of the war. This
exaltation was in part a reaction of fear--or a reaction from fear.
Germany was afraid, feared for her existence, and the exaltation was
in part a sense of taking a terrible plunge into the depths of fate.
Germany was afraid of Russia and afraid of England, and that fear had
to be overcome, because the presence of the fear itself was a matter
of life or death. But the exaltation did not merely succeed the fear.
It contained it. And why should Germany, even with all her
preparedness and her resources not be afraid? An inherited fear is not
so easily exorcised. Germany arrayed against all Russia and all the
British Empire, Germany no larger than our Texas experienced a state
of exaltation, overcoming fear. But it required something more than
courage to overcome the fear; and that other element was mysticism. To
the sense of throwing all into the hands of fate which, by all
physical signs must be adverse, was added, as a compensating element,
Germany's mystical belief in her security as a chosen nation. Fear, by
its intensity and depth may, like physical pain, become ecstatic and
thus be overcome.
_Hatred_
Hatred must be considered both as a cause of war, and as an element in
the war moods. Many authors have called hatred one of the deepest
roots of war. This hatred between nations even Freud says is
mysterious. But Pfister, referring to Adler's theory, says that war
must be understood precisely as we understand enmity among
individuals. A sense of inferiority is insulted, and thus aggressive
feelings are aroused. The nation, like the individual, is spurred on
to make good its claim to greatness. It is a feeling of jealousy based
upon a sense of inferiority that causes hatred. O'Ryan and Anderson
(5), military writers, say there are two causes of war: those based
upon an assumed necessity, and those based upon hatred. Nusbaum (86)
also finds two causes of war, the expansion impulse and the egoism of
species, which leads to long enmities.
History shows that we must accept hatred as an underlying cause of
war. The reaction of deep anger which may be aroused by a variety of
situations that arise among nations, especially when it is, so to
speak, an outbreak of a long continued hatred, is a proximate cause of
wars. Hatred, the reaction of anger prolonged into a mood, differs as
national or group emotion from the anger of the individual in part by
being subject strongly to group suggestion, and in part because in the
group consciousness there is only rarely a means of expression, on the
part of the individuals of the group, of the feelings of hatred.
Enemies are far away and inaccessible. Therefore hatred may become
deep and chronic.
Hatred between nations is usually based upon a long series of
reprisals and a history of invasions. These invasions are primarily
physical invasions, but later invasions in the sphere of invisible
values, offenses to honor and the like are added. These ideal values
come to be regarded as more vital than material values. Hatred between
groups becomes chronic and often seems to be groundless because the
values concerned have thus become intangible. The chronic moods of
hatred and dislike become explosive forces, ready to be excited to
action whenever any difference arises. Veblen (97) says wars never
occur except when questions of honor are involved, which is of course
equivalent to saying that the reaction of anger is always required as
an immediate cause of war. Veblen maintains also that emulation is
always involved in the patriotic spirit, that patriotism always
contains the idea of the defeat of an opponent, and is based upon
collective malevolence. The range of these occasions of crisis is so
great, and the feelings of hatred so persistent and volatile, that the
mechanism for the production of war is always present. These causes
range all the way from violation of property to offense to the most
abstract ideas of national etiquette. Violation of international law,
of moral principles, we see now, may have very far-reaching effects as
infringing the sphere of honor of nations not directly concerned,
since the prestige of all nations as participants in creating law and
becoming upholders of it is affected.
If hatred and its crises are causes of war, they do not fit into the
moods in which warfare is generally conducted. Hatred belongs to the
periods of peace and of strained relations, when the cause of war is
present, but the means of retaliation are not at hand or not in
action. The prevalence and persistence of hatred in war is a sign of
imperfect morale. Hatred cannot remain in the war mood of a nation
acting with full confidence in its powers. Hatred always implies
inferiority or impotent superiority. Dide (20) says that the spirit of
hatred does not fit into the soldier's life. It goes with the desire
for revenge and is strongest among those who stay at home and can do
nothing. Hatred is a phase of apprehension. Hatred is a product of the
fear that cannot be taken up into the optimistic moods, and thus be
transformed. It remains as a foreign body and an inhibition. It arises
when obstacles appear to be too great, when there are reverses, and
the enemy shows signs of being able to maintain a long and stubborn
resistance, or flaunts again the original cause of the disagreement.
Scheler (77) says that revenge, which is a form of hate, is not a
justifiable war motive. We should say also that it is not a normal war
mood, that it has no sustaining force, but causes a rapid expenditure
of energy which may be effectual in brief actions, but is even there
wasteful and interferes with judgment and efficiency. Morale based
upon hatred is insecure.
Hatred must have been a very early factor in the relations of groups
to one another, and presumably we should need to go back to animal
life and study antipathies there in order fully to understand the
nature of racial and national antagonisms, some of which may be based
upon physiological traits and primitive æsthetic qualities. The very
fact of the existence of groups, segregated and well bound together
for the purposes of offense and defense implies already a strong
contrast of feeling between that of individuals of the group toward
one another and that directed toward the outsider. This contrast
developed not merely as a reaction, but as a necessity, for groups in
the beginning must have had to contend against their own feeble social
cohesion, and existed only by reason of strong emotions of fear and
anger felt toward the stranger. Hatred toward all outside the group
must at one stage have been highly useful as a means of cementing the
bonds of the group and maintaining the necessary attitude of defense,
at a time when all outsiders were likely to be dangerous. Feelings of
friendliness toward strangers were dangerous to the life of the group,
and so hatred possessed survival value.
The main root of group antipathy is in all probability fear. Hatred is
an aspect of the aggressive defensive toward the stranger. Hatred is a
part of the aggressive reaction. As an expression of ferocity toward
all who are not known to be friendly, it belongs to the first line of
defense. Hatred is likely to be strong in the female because the
attitude of the female is universally defensive.
In the beginning, as MacCurdy (37) says, the contrasts between groups
were sharp, and these definitely separated groups must have felt
toward one another not only antagonism but a sense of being different
in kind. Intensity of feelings of opposition tends to magnify small
differences into specific differences. This sense of specific
difference is never lost, not even in the consciousness of enlightened
nations in regard to one another, and we may see it to-day displayed
as a mystic belief, on the part of many peoples, in their own
superiority. Nations are always outsiders to one another, and the
sense of strangeness perennially sustains defensive attitudes and
moods of hatred. The friendship of nations can never be very secure,
because the old idea of difference of kind is never quite abandoned.
Some degree of enmity seems always to be felt toward the foreigner;
that is, toward all who are not interested in the protective functions
of the group. MacCurdy thinks the intensity of suspicion and hatred of
peoples toward one another belongs to the pathological field, and that
one expression of this is the peculiarity of the mental processes by
which nations always justify their own cause in war. This, however, is
perhaps an exaggeration, since we can trace these states of mind in
all the history of the race.
How deep-seated the enmities and the sense of strangeness among
nations may be is seen in the fact that national groups living in
close proximity to one another tend to become less friendly rather
than to become affiliated. These feelings gradually produce conceptual
entities, which stand for the reality of the foreign. These concepts
are deposits, so to speak, from a great number of affective reactions,
and they always contain imaginative content based upon enmity and
suspicion. This underlying enmity between neighboring peoples is not
something rare in the world. All foreigners, even in the minds of the
most intelligent of peoples, are reconstructions, caricatures. These
feelings and attitudes are strong and deep and they prevent genuine
friendship among nations. We tend to think of all foreigners as in
some degree malicious, as designing, and lacking in the good qualities
and right habits which we ourselves possess.
Many authors have commented upon the entire inability of nations to
understand one another. There is a deep reason for this, which we have
already suggested. They do not wish to understand one another. It is a
part of the archaic system of defense to maintain an attitude of
distrust and misunderstanding and even fear. The fear of the enemy is
a protection--against invasion from without and disruption within.
Nations do not dare to relinquish their fear of one another, and we
see something of this voluntary cherishing of fear and enmity in the
present hesitation about entering into leagues on the part of many
nations. Nations really wish to hate one another, it would seem. Other
evidence of this we have observed in the cult of hate that has been
promulgated to keep up morale in the recent war. We see enmity
maintained when the differences among the peoples holding it are
superficial and must indeed be exaggerated and caricatured in order to
make them support feelings of dislike. Small differences in the
customs of closely related peoples are sufficient sometimes to
maintain intense antagonism. As Collier (68) says, it is precisely the
bad manners of a people that cause conflict. These bad manners are of
course manners that are _different from our own_.
Germany's outburst of hatred and its frequent exhibition during the
war and its promulgation as a cult and a religion appear to have
excited the interest of many writers on the war. As a chapter in the
psychology of war it has suggested new problems and points of view,
and it has also appealed to many as an interesting problem of national
psychology. If our explanation of hatred as especially related to fear
and to the sense of inferiority is correct Germany of all nations must
have been affected with a disorder of morale, or some perversion of
national consciousness.
The hatred of Germany for England is not the only example of
international enmity in the world, but its expression in the war has
made it peculiarly interesting. The grievance against England is first
of all that England is great and prosperous, and lives in comfort upon
the unearned fruits of empire, while the German has toiled hard
through the centuries and has caught nothing. England is hated because
in many ways she has stood squarely in the path of Germany's progress
and because in the history of European diplomacy, doors leading to
wider empire have been again and again slammed in Germany's face,
usually by the hand of England. Germany hates England, according to
German writers, because England, a kindred race, tried to betray
western civilization into the hands of barbarism. Germany hates
England because, to the German mind, England is hypocritical. The
Englishman criticizes in others precisely what he does himself;
Puritanical talk covers a sinful heart. Germany hates England because
in her sea-policy England has been high handed and arrogant. The
Germans often call England a robber nation, with the morals of a
burglar who, having enriched himself by his trade, and having retired
from business, now preaches honesty.
It is not merely the hatred of England on the part of Germany that is
of interest for a psychology of war but the fact that Germany has
taken her hate for England with a peculiar seriousness, believed it
unique, has been to the pains of justifying it morally, has covered it
with religious exaltation, made it a cult and even expressed it in a
formula, and made it an educational program. There are many German
writings justifying the hatred of England and encouraging hate as a
weapon of righteousness. Smith (47) (64) has given us the titles of
forty-four German publications in his own possession, having for
subject Germany's hatred of England, and says that there are
sixty-five more known to him. Some of these expressions of hatred are
extreme. There is, or was, a pastor in Hamburg who declared from his
pulpit that his people were doing God a service in hating England and
in taking every step possible to wipe so pestiferous a nation from the
face of the earth. Frau Reuter says that it is impossible now more
than ever to love our enemies, that England who professed love for
Germany and then betrayed her love must be hated. Stern, in his
studies of hate in children found that hate may be strong without any
clear content, in the minds of German children. That some of this
hatred of England is a direct effect of the teachings of Treitschke
can hardly be doubted, when we recall the great influence his
teachings have had, and the peculiar bitterness of that dramatic
personage for England, for England's pretentiousness, her middle class
satisfaction, her insular conceit.
The further details of the cult of hatred in Germany need not detain
us, since the purpose is only to suggest here the connection of hatred
with the national pessimism, the fear and the inferiority motive of
Germany. We see a similar attitude in Austria, where there is a
violent race hatred toward the Serbians, which Le Bon has regarded as
the motive from which Austria went to war. Ferrero comments upon the
fact that hatred is conspicuously absent in America, and says that the
greater hatred in Europe is due not only to the obvious result of
nations being crowded together, but also to the caste system which
limits the freedom of the individual and tends to engender deep
passions. Dide (20) says that in Germany preoccupation with the idea
of injustice is a cause of war, and Chapman (39) also remarks that
Germany had gone mad thinking of her wrongs. That jealousy and fear
are in general the substratum of national hatred is deeply impressed
upon one in studying the psychology of Germany. All the hate motive of
the late war might well be found in Germany's prayer "_Gott strafe
England._" Germany appealed to God to punish England, of course,
because Germany herself could not. Both the appeal and the hatred are
reactions of fear and a sense of impotence. Germany hated England
because England was secure behind her navy, upon her island, beyond
the reach of the war machine which is Germany's symbol of power and
the compensation for her sense of inferiority and weakness.
_The Instinct of Combat_
We may distinguish in the motives of war between the aggressive
tendency, which we have already discussed as a reaction of fear or of
anger, and a more specific instinct of combat as a possession of the
individual, less subject to suggestion, less closely related to the
phenomena of the herd. The aggressive reaction we associate, or some
writers do associate it, with the _predatory instinct_, practical in
its motive, having in part an economic basis. The love of combat which
appears especially as a play motive in the child and the youth is
expressed as a desire for conquest and in the pleasure of overcoming
an enemy.
Some see in war a recrudescence of the instinct of combat, and indeed
think of war as mainly such a return to primitive instinct. The life
of peace represses this motive too much, they think. Life is too
organized and coöperative and the individual craves release from it.
The general objections to such an interpretation of war we have
already stated. We think rather of certain specific movements as
avenues of approach to highly complex states of ecstasy, and of these
states of ecstasy as representing or containing the real craving for
war, so far as there is one. The war mood exploits these movements and
gives room for instincts to display themselves, and these instincts,
in their expression, are pleasure-toned because they are archaic and
have once been well organized and habitual forms of activity having
practical objects. But to say that men have a profound but concealed
desire to kill one another, that the fighting impulse remains intact
in some original animal form, is a travesty upon human nature. It is
precisely because in war killing is depersonalized, so to speak, that
it is a moral duty and is performed under conditions in which there is
a summation of many strong motives leading to the act that, as we see
it, men find joy in battle. The instinct of attack, or the hunting
instinct that is involved in this activity, can become pleasure-toned
only because of the presence of other motives, and because the object
is dehumanized for the time. Otherwise we should expect all soldiers,
once having their aggressive instincts aroused in battle, to become
dangerous to the community.
That there is, however, a residue of pure love of physical combat and
a survival of the instinctive movements of combat is shown in play,
although here too the motives are mixed. The desire to fight, to kill,
to hunt are still present but for the most part are sublimated in
adult life into desire for competition in general, love of danger, and
the hunting and gambling impulse. But we can here and there in human
conduct see certain roots of pure instincts having definite
coördinated reactions. These undoubtedly do play a part, but probably
a very small part in the present moods of war. So far as they remain
purely instinctive their place as a general motive of war seems
negligible. It is a question, in fact, whether even in the state of
savagery any pure instinct for killing ever played a considerable
part. There were already practical motives, motives of fear and anger,
and presumably also complex states of pleasure connected with beliefs,
customs and ceremonies as well as with battle, so that even then men
cannot be said to have acted upon anything like purely instinctive
impulses.
Numerous accounts have come from the scenes of the great war about men
who appear for a time to be dominated by irresistible instincts. Gibbs
(80) says there are some men in every army who like slaughter for its
own sake. They find an intoxication in it. They love the hunting
spirit of it all. We have the story of a French soldier of peaceable
disposition who appeared to experience an ecstasy of delight as he lay
concealed in a shell hole and was able to pick off many of the enemy.
This was not the exhilaration and abandon experienced by men while
making attack, when violent muscular exertion produces an
intoxication of mind, but a dominance of the mind by something which
seems very much like the hunting spirit, under circumstances in which,
we may suppose, the enemy had undergone some process of dehumanization
in the mind of the hunter. We may suppose also that there are
individuals in every army who have pathological impulses or
perversions, which show themselves in instinctive reactions of a
specific nature and in excess of the normal.
Both the Germans and the French are accused by French and German
writers respectively with being the real lovers of battle. German
writers say that the Germans are peculiarly peace-loving and by nature
lacking in the battle spirit, but that the French love battle for its
own sake, and that this is shown clearly by their history. Others see
love of conflict, aggressiveness and cruelty in the German
disposition. Boutroux (13) wishes to place among the causes of the
great war the native brutality of the German disposition, a trait
existing from long ago, and now become a disciplined cruelty--a
_zuchtmaessige Grausamkeit_, regarded as right and meritorious. Many
think they find this love of fighting, bloodthirst and love of
destruction in the German soul. Many attribute pure aggressiveness of
a pronounced type or an exaggerated predatory instinct to the Germans.
Chapman (39) says that the war is a flaming forth of passions that
have covertly been burning in the soul of Germany for several decades.
He adds that with the Germans war is instinctive; there is no _casus
belli_ at all. War 'is for war's sake, and is a need of nature with
the German. Smith (64) declares that the German is innately brutal,
and as one proof of this he shows the statistics of brutal crimes in
Germany. He writes of the truculent aggressiveness of the Teutonic
race, of the hatred and love of destruction displayed by the robber
knights of the Middle Ages, and regards quarrelsome aggressiveness as
innate in German character. Dide (20) thinks that such aggressive
warfare as is practiced by the Germans always goes with a pessimistic
disposition. Thayer (58) connects bloodthirstiness with the paganism
of Germany, and says that bloodthirstiness crops out again and again
in German history. Nicolai (79) also refers to the craving for blood
in the German character, and says that it has been shown throughout
the history of the Germans. The old sacrifices which grew out of
cannibalism and are due to the persistence of the craving for blood
show an instinctive desire for slaughter, or at least a confirmed
habit of killing that dies hard. But in all these characterizations of
national temperament there is no clear distinction among various
motives of conduct. Anger and fear reactions, love of combat itself,
the motives of display are all intermingled.
There can of course be no precise way of estimating the place of a
pure instinct of combat among the causes of war, or in the war moods.
We have seen reason for believing that although these instincts remain
as fragments in the individual and especially are utilized in higher
processes of the social life, they are less influential in determining
motives and conduct than is sometimes believed. We cannot at least
explain war as a sudden release of these instincts. That primitive
passions for violence, as MacCurdy (37) maintains, reënforce the herd
antagonism, and in the midst of the apprehension at the threat of war,
give rise to a desire for war, may be true, but such primitive
passions are not all of the forces that are at work in causing modern
wars. To say that in the individual of modern society a savage still
lives is an exaggeration, and does not properly express what social
consciousness is or has done. The social life is not a balance in
which primitive instincts are held in leash by other instincts or
feelings, but a new product in which there is a synthesis of impulses
in which the original form of the impulses may be greatly transformed.
We live in composite situations to which there correspond composite
moods. Often motives which clearly reveal to analysis their
instinctive character have no tendency to express themselves in the
definite instinctive movements corresponding to this instinct-feeling,
having permanently become dissociated from the primitive reactions,
either by a process of generalization and fusion of states and
processes in the individual, or by the inheritance of structural
changes. There are, it is true, all degrees of amalgamation of old and
new elements or of transformation of old elements, but to think of
instincts as remaining intact and unchanged in modern life seems
wholly wrong.
After all man is no longer an animal, and even the distance between
man as a member of the present complex organized society and man as
primitive or savage is considerable. The difference is not entirely in
the associations themselves but in all that the associations have
done, or that they represent, in modifying instincts, which no longer
exist in their original form and distinctness. Man is a creature of
feeling, but not of instinct we say, and this distinction is important
in many ways. All analogies between animal and human life have an
element of danger in them. To explain human conduct in terms of herd
instincts--instincts of aggression and the like--is misleading, since
the instincts that are assumed do not exist as such, and perhaps never
did. The psychology of the crowd, and the psychology of war, cannot be
contained in the psychology of the herd, however attractive the
simplicity of these concepts may be. That primitive instincts may
remain as remnants, that the crowd shows some of the characteristics
of the herd and the pack cannot be denied, and that in the spirit of
war these fragments and traits play a certain part may well be
believed. But the synthetic and highly complex mood we call the war
spirit, and the causes of war, however archaic some of their elements
may be, are very different from any mere sum of instincts. There is no
specific craving for combat that we can call a cause of war, or that,
in our view, plays any considerable part in the causes of war--combat
as apart from practical motives and the complex moods into which, in
its modern form, it enters. Some writers appear to be deceived because
they assume that war is itself primitive, and do not see that in spite
of its conventions and its old forms, it is not far behind
civilization, not because civilization has made no progress, or is so
insecure, but because war, chaos though it be, in some respects
contains all our modern feelings. Kerr says that war is due to a
superfluity of animal force that must vent itself, but such
explanations of war seem certainly to be very far from the truth. That
theory is far from being adequate as an explanation of play. It is
much less so as an explanation of war. The other theory of play that
is most prevalent and which is offered as a theory of war--that play
and war are reversions to primitive instincts, is also insufficient.
War is neither an overflow of energy nor a reversion to primitive
states. Rather it is caused by and involves all the present and active
motives of man and all his essential human qualities.
_Social Instincts_
Whatever the specific causes of war may be, war is of course possible
only because there exists a mechanism or instinct or feeling, because
of which great groups of people act as a unit in the common interests
of all. We usually speak of this collective action as the result of
_social instincts_ or a general _social instinct_. It is the place of
this "instinct" in the causes and moods of war that we must consider.
War is a social phenomenon: it is a movement directed toward an
object, but the force that drives the movement is of course social.
Several writers, among them MacCurdy (37), Murray (90), and Trotter
(82), have dealt with this social aspect of war, and have interpreted
war as a herd reaction. All these theories are simple. Trotter
maintains that in man there are four instincts and no more:
self-preservative, reproductive nutritional, and herd instincts. The
peculiarity of the herd instinct is that it does not itself have
definite motor expression, but serves to intensify and direct the
other instincts. This herd instinct is a tendency, so to speak, which
can confer instinctive sanction upon any other part of the field of
action or belief. The herd instinct, for example, gives instinctive
quality to the social organization and social proclivities of three
different types of society, which appear as national characters. These
are the wolf, the sheep, and the bee types. The aggressive type of
social organization is represented by the Roman and now by the German
civilization. This is a declining type, but it was because moral
equality could not be tolerated in Germany that the rulers were
obliged to cause Germany to revert to the primitive aggressive form of
gregariousness. China would be a good example of Trotter's herd of the
sheep type, for here the defensive instinct seems to be the dominating
social reaction. War becomes, in such a herd, a great stimulus when,
and only when, it is a threat to the whole nation, and when,
therefore, the individual fears for the whole herd rather than for
himself.
The third type is the bee type, well represented by England, although
still imperfectly. This is the type toward which the world as a whole
tends, but as yet there is no complete form of it. At present the
capacity for individual reactions to the same stimulus has far
outstripped the capacity for intercommunication. Intercommunication in
the biological sense has been allowed to run at haphazard. When once a
great gregarious unit of this type shall have been thoroughly
organized, and be subject to conscious direction as a whole, there
will appear in the world a new kind of social mechanism and a new
biological form. The interest in war will give way to a larger and
more dramatic field of interest and of conquest than the mere taking
and re-taking of land. But there is as yet no such society. Even in
times of a great war, there is an internal differentiation that cannot
be overcome, an individualism that creates antagonism, and a type of
leadership which is conservative and static rather than progressive.
If we may safely apply Trotter's generalization to the present
antagonism among groups (within nations, and also national groups) we
might say that the rapid differentiation of the human species has had
an effect of creating within the species _man_ a large number of types
of sub-specific value, and in this respect man differs greatly from
any other species. Differences recognized by groups of the same
species of animals are generally not sufficient to create antagonism
among the groups, but in the case of man these differences have had
precisely the effect of marking off groups with antagonistic
interests. The animal society dominated by a few instincts directed
for the most part toward external objects preserves a state of peace
within the species. Man by reason of his intelligence and his
capacities for specialization and the great number of his desires
tends to prey upon his own kind. This segregation is in part
artificial, becomes conventional and is subject to the effects of
leadership that tends to fixate artificial distinctions, but it is
also in part an effect of the exigencies of the wider life of man, of
his superiority of which variability of conduct is an essential
aspect. This differentiation is one of the conditions of a firmer
organization in the society of man than any animal society can attain,
but at the present time the two processes of differentiation and
organization are to some extent antagonistic to one another.
Trotter maintains that the tendency of nature is to increase and
maintain the homogeneity of the species, but we should say rather that
the whole process of differentiation and organization is upon a level
in which the biological processes that make for or against homogeneity
have but little effect. The task before man is social. It is not so
much a consciousness of his destiny as a species that man requires,
but of his work as an organized group. It is due to a rapid
differentiation and increase in man's desires that he has become a
species in which there is internal warfare. It must be by the control
of these desires in a conscious process of organization that he will
become, if ever, a well-ordered and homogeneous group. Trotter thinks
of such a change as a biological phenomenon, as being one of those
momentous steps which a very few times have been taken in the
development of organic life in the world.
We cannot discuss fully here these biological views, as they relate to
the future organization of the world. That the explanation of wars
within the human species this view affords is correct so far as it
goes one would admit. Men fight among themselves as animals do not,
because of their differences. We should prefer to think of these
differences, however, neither as a phase of biological differentiation
as structural change nor as functional adaptation by differentiation
of reactions to the same stimuli, but as the effect of the new
consciousness of desires that came with the rise of man from the
animal stage, and the conditions under which these desires could and
must be realized. It is the complexity of interests that has given to
man his antagonisms and his differences, and these secondary
differences have been utilized as a means of still further developing
the desires and satisfying them, or justifying their satisfaction. It
is man's intelligence and his capacity for being governed in his
conduct by many desires that teaches him to make war upon his own
kind, and the very same qualities make his associations firm and
lasting. _But just in this way the human group ceases to be a herd and
to be dominated by herd instincts._ To interpret war, therefore, as an
effect of social instinct or herd instinct upon the instincts of
aggression or of self-protection, or as the effect of aroused
instincts of aggression and self-protection exciting the herd
instinct, is unsatisfactory because it is too simple, and erroneously
undertakes to explain human life in terms of instinct and also carries
biological analogies too far. These views, if we understand them, seem
to have the characteristic faults of all purely biological sociology.
That, however, the "herd instinct," or the social feeling or the
cohesive force in groups, whatever it may be, is exceedingly strong
and persistent is shown by the recent war. We see a world highly
differentiated, and with wide associations which seemed to have become
permanent becoming at once a world in which the lines of cleavage are
based upon propinquity and political organization. All ties, except
national ties, were broken up. The nation, conscious of itself,
becomes a unit or personality, and the sense of personality of a
nation becomes greatly intensified in time of war. The individual
becomes unimportant, both in his own estimation and in the eye of the
law. It is the life of the nation as a whole that is felt to be
threatened and under this threat the group as a whole becomes an
object of devotion and solicitude. Nicolai (79) comments upon this
_Massengefuehl_ and says that, when not counterbalanced by higher
elements of social consciousness, it may be a low and dangerous
element in the consciousness of groups. Sumner (70) also speaks of the
extraordinary power of gregariousness, and says that when the movement
is upon a vast scale, the numbers engaged being very large, there is
always an exhilaration connected with the movement, and that if the
causes involved are believed to be deep and holy, the force of this
gregarious mood may become demoniacal.
There are two especially remarkable changes that take place in the
social life in war or in the act of going to war, and which represent
the social instinct or feeling at its highest point. These phenomena
are types of social reaction, but the question may be raised whether
they do not represent something more than reactions in the ordinary
sense. We see in times of war, first, a greatly increased
sensitiveness to leadership, a craving for devotion to a leader,
indeed, which is sometimes pathetic in its effort to transform really
commonplace men into religious objects. The leader as a concept and an
ideal is a product of the social mood itself, which does for him
precisely what romantic love does for its object, exerts a creative
effect upon him. The leader is magnified to heroic size and held up
before the enemy as a threat. It is plain to be seen that this
devotion to leader and imaginative treatment of him is in part a
defensive reaction. The individual hides behind this colossal figure,
and thus feels himself safe. But this protective impulse that creates
the invincible leader is not the only motive; at least it is probably
not the only one. The leader represents the ideals and the ambitions
of the people, and his prestige and the forms that surround him,
especially everything that is aesthetic or suggests the heroic,
symbolize the craving for power in a people. The strength and the
peculiar abandon and perversity, one may say, of the affections of a
nation toward the leader in time of war make the rise of such a leader
dreaded by the political powers in every country. Newspapers, in every
war, find some heroic figure whom they exploit as a coming dictator,
and changes of leadership in the field apparently sometimes have
reference to these popular currents. But a nation in love with its
leader is strong in defense, and readily becomes aggressive, and this
relation of mass to leader is of course one of the main foundations of
military morale.
The second universal social phenomenon of war is the greatly
intensified feeling of solidarity as shown in comradeship and united
feelings on the part of the people. This too is in part, and only in
part, a protective reaction. The individual becomes safe by becoming a
part of a whole which then alone seems to have real existence and true
value. The individual loses himself in the whole, but the whole group
also becomes absorbed and taken into the sphere of protection and
interest of the individual. The individual becomes highly sensitive to
everything that happens to the group, and peculiarly affected by the
social mood of comradeship. This spirit of comradeship becomes one of
the most conspicuous qualities of the social life in time of war.
Comradeship in arms is of course the highest point of this social
solidarity. The mass action, the close physical relationship,
subjection to the same narrow routine and the common experiences of
danger, induce social states that represent the most complete
expression of pure social feeling, and excite moods which, upon
occasion may reach the highest degree of ecstasy or intoxication and
lead to acts of the most exalted heroism.
These changes in the social life in time of war are striking and
fundamental. To explain them would mean to explain social feeling
itself. We may say that these phenomena of the social life are
precisely the _herd reactions_ the biological writers speak of, but to
do so would mean, from our point of view, to ignore some very
significant aspects of human social life. It would ignore first of all
the ecstatic quality of the higher social life, which is indeed the
essential quality of the social spirit of war. Instead of saying that
this intensity of feeling is merely a reflex of an instinctive
reaction, we should say that it is the expression of, and in part the
satisfaction of, desires that are fulfilled in the social experience
of war. The intense social life is craved, not as an instinctive
reaction, but as a complex state expressing explicit desires. The
craving for this social solidarity and ecstasy of social feeling is a
factor in the causes of war. What we experience socially in times of
peace is a society in which social feeling is narrow and provincial,
in which we are conscious of many antagonistic motives. This social
life fails to satisfy the desires which are seeking expression in the
social life. That war is in part a creation of the social impulse
seeking expression may be assumed from the nature of the social
feelings that are excited in war. That such social feeling is a
creation in the sense that it is desired, we see if in no other way in
the fact that social ecstasy is the most universal form of
satisfaction of all those impulses which fuse in the intoxication
impulse, where we recognize it as the craving for an abundant or real
life. Life is most real in its intensely dramatic social forms. Social
ecstasy is in part a conscious adaptation. It is something that is
desired and induced, and artificially cultivated in various ways,
especially by a variety of aesthetic social experiences, and in the
cults of intoxication. Alcohol has been used specifically throughout
the world and from the beginning at least of the historical period for
the purpose of creating social feeling. Patriotism is in part, we may
say, a cultivated, social emotion, and in the art of manners we see
the social life given forms which will increase its susceptibility to
suggestion, its persuasive force and its organized expression. Such
facts show us social emotion which is something more than the feeling
side of an instinctive reaction.
This is hardly the place to try to elucidate the fundamental
principles of the psychology of the social feelings or instincts, but
it may be helpful to suggest in outline certain divergences in the
theory of the social life that seem to be in point. We see on one side
many writers who tend to regard social phenomena as mainly the result
of instinct, as the expression either of a single instinct or of a
combination of several specific instinctive tendencies. Contrasted
with these views are the theories according to which social life is
something that is mainly created by reason, based, so to speak, upon
the observation that in union there is strength. Neither of these
views seems to be satisfactory. That social feeling is based upon
instinct is clear, but that it is also something created, synthetic,
and subjected to selective processes seems also evident. Precisely
what the instinctive basis of the social life is, perhaps one cannot
with any certainty determine, nor can we say how many specific
instincts enter into it. But that social feeling in its higher levels
is a very complex mood, in which, although there are several
instinctive reactions or feelings, there is to be discovered no social
instinct as such, is the conclusion which we reach.
_Social behavior is a development of all the fundamental tendencies of
the organism._ It has its roots both in the reproductive and the
nutritional motives. These fundamental tendencies have issued
phylogenetically in specific reactions that enter into the social life
at all its levels, and in the life of the individual these reactions,
expressing needs and desires, issue in highly complex moods, in which
fundamental feelings are present but do not constitute the whole of
the social moods. The individual does various specific things with
reference to his fellows which are of the nature of instinctive
reactions, but both in the phyletic development and the development in
the individual, elements that enter into the modern social life as
instincts have tended to lose their specific character, have become
general or merely organic, have been transformed and have to some
extent lost their original significance.
The motives of hunger, the reactions of the reproductive mechanisms,
reactions to visual impressions and to sounds, warmth reactions, the
huddling of fear, the influences of suggestion, susceptibility to all
the stimuli of the social object enter into social feelings, and
remain to some extent as instinctive reactions in the higher social
processes. But we do not seem to find any general social instinct, or
any specific herd instinct or any definite and broadly acting
protective and aggressive instincts. As compared with some other views
of the social feelings ours assumes in one way more and in another
less of instinct in the social life. There is more instinct in the
sense that more specific instinctive reactions are recognized in it,
but less in assuming that these reactions are derivatives of primitive
reactions of the organism, and also because they become transformed
and fused and lose their original forms. They have come from common
sources in organic life, we might say, and they meet again in the
general moods which they help to create.
_Conclusions_
It is an important point to observe that most if not all of the
specific instinctive reactions and feelings engendered in war, or
occurring as an incitement to war, are capable of inducing ecstatic
states. There are several of these movements and states, each of which
can become, so to speak, a foundation for the development of ecstasy.
Combat may and must do this, and probably war could never be carried
on at all unless danger and death had qualities which arouse ecstatic
moods. There is a joy in fighting, in killing, and in the tumult of
battle that becomes one of the most important of military assets, and
is one of the main elements of morale in the field. This capacity of
human nature to make over that which is intrinsically painful into the
pleasurable is one of the paradoxes of human life to be explained and
taken into account in the study of the psychology of war. Fear itself
may induce an ecstasy, both in the individual, as we know from many
reported cases from the late war, and as a social mood in which the
fear contributes a quality of intensity and ferocity to patriotism.
The gambling mood, which is in part a play with fear, is another
ecstatic reaction seen in war, and it is often the means of clearing
the way, so to speak, for free and uninhibited action.
Of course all the purely æsthetic elements in the social life have
this effect of arousing exalted moods, and indeed that is precisely
their function. All social impulses tend in this same direction, and
there is induced in all intense social states an intoxication mood. In
these social states, the reproductive motive is often clearly
discernible, but partly by common consent and convention, and partly
because of the composite and fused form of impulses in the social
mood, robbed of its specific reactions and converted into a new
product, regarded both as conduct and as feeling.
All religious states aroused in war tend to become ecstatic. Their
work is to overcome the sense of tragedy of war, and it is only by
becoming intense and voluminous, so to speak, that they can accomplish
their work at all. Either they must end in a mysticism which includes
or takes the form of exalted moods, or they must, as can be
accomplished in some temperaments, become dynamic states by inspiring
a fatalistic attitude, which is at bottom a sense of throwing oneself
unreservedly into the hands of fate.
We may best think of these complex war moods as the forces out of
which wars are made, and the spirit in which they are conducted, but
not as by their own initiative creating wars. These intoxication moods
or ecstasies are forces which contain desires that are general, we
say; they are mental processes that act as a means of greatly
increasing the volume of all social actions. When we analyze them we
find specific desires in them, and evidences of instinct and primitive
feeling, but they are not in themselves tendencies toward specific
reactions and in fact the motor tendencies they contain more or less
inhibit one another.
In general, these war moods of which we speak are _precipitated_ by
definite and incisive reactions of fear and anger. These emotions of
fear or anger seem to be the necessary positive stimuli to induce the
moods of war. Fear and anger, no one can maintain, are the sole causes
of war, and they are far from being the sole factors of the war moods,
but they are the usual precipitants of war.
Fear and anger as social emotions cannot sustain organized and
effectual social activity upon a large scale; we see them always, in
war, taken up, transformed, absorbed in moods which are at once more
practical, and more exalted and which, as complex processes, can be
sustained over long periods of time. But these primitive reactions of
anger and fear enter into the ecstatic moods, become associated with
or induce æsthetic and religious states of consciousness, gain moral
justification or religious exploitation, become aspects of directive
and dynamic moods and so give force and efficiency to morale and
strategy.
War appears as a breakdown of certain modes of volition. Certain types
of conflict are abandoned, and aggressive activities become more
simple and powerful, but war is no reversion to primitive instinct, or
to any number of instincts. The resulting states of mind are too
rational as means, and too exalted and ideal to be thus primitive. New
content is introduced into social consciousness and new purposes come
to light in these ecstasies, even though the consciously sought
objectives may be archaic and conventional and the mental states
traceable to more elementary states, and the conduct be similar in
purpose and type to the simpler forms of conduct we find in the animal
world What we are trying to impress here is the well known truth that
the whole of a thing is not necessarily contained in its parts. It is
the meaning of the war-mood as a whole, as a summation of many factors
of the mental life, and as a direction of social consciousness as a
whole that is its most important characteristic.
CHAPTER IV
AESTHETIC ELEMENTS IN THE MOODS AND IMPULSES OF WAR
That experiences and motives which belong to the field of the
aesthetic play an important part in war can hardly be doubted. The
whole history of war shows this, and even in the beginning war seems
to be an activity carried on in part for its own sake, and not
entirely for its practical results, and thus has qualities which later
are explicitly aesthetic. We cannot of course separate sharply the
aesthetic motive from everything else in studying so highly complex an
object as war, but that war does partake of the nature of what we call
the _beautiful_, and that the craving for the beautiful is a factor in
the causes of war seem to be certain. The relation of art to war is of
course no new theme. War has often been praised because of its
aesthetic nature, and its dramatic features. It is called a beautiful
adventure. It is reproduced in pictorial art, represented in music,
and thus glorified and adorned, showing at least that it can readily
be made to appear beautiful if it does not in itself possess beauty.
Those who think of war as related to play also connect it with art.
Nicolai (79), who condemns war, says that it is when war as an
instinctive action is no longer useful, but is performed for its own
sake that it becomes beautiful.
We cannot undertake to enumerate all the aesthetic qualities of war,
or to show all the relations of the aesthetic aspects to other motives
of war in detail, since to do so would mean to work out some of the
fundamental principles of aesthetics. We may begin, however, by saying
that war as a whole, as a movement in which there is complete
organization of social forces shows already the marks of aesthetic
experience and of art. As such a unification of interest in a strong
and uninhibited movement, as a coördinated expression of deep desires,
a multiplicity of action with a unity of purpose, so to speak, war is
aesthetic in form although to mention such very general qualities does
not go very far toward characterizing an object.
In its meaning as _tragedy_ war contains and exerts a strong aesthetic
appeal. With all its horrors, war fascinates the mind. As fate, death,
history it inspires awe, and creates a sense of the inevitableness of
events and of the play of transcendental and inexorable forces in
human life. When, under any influence, these feelings appear as an
accepting and willing of evil, we have the tragic movement as we find
it in art. The death _motif_ in war is the center of a variety of
states which are ecstatic and have aesthetic quality. The religion of
valor, the passion that is aroused by abandoning oneself to fate, the
absolute devotion of service are aesthetic in form as experience,
whatever else they may be. The relation of these motives to love and
to the reproductive impulses has often been noticed. Devotion and
death appear as beautiful; their representation in art is in part a
recognition of this fact; in part it is an effort to transform them
into the forms of the aesthetic. Art celebrates, but also creates,
this luxury of feeling, and war also in its own dramatic movement
transforms ugly and plain facts of life by including them in ecstatic
states, and surrounding them with glory.
The ideal of glorified death plays a large part in the spirit of war.
In war the fear of death is not only in great part stilled, but there
is a longing to tempt fate and also to experience death itself, and
this desire may become ecstatic. Here we see in effect one of the most
important functions of the aesthetic, which is to carry on a _drama of
the will_ in which something that is in itself painful becomes
pleasant and desired. The desire for war is to some extent a desire
for death, a longing for a form of euthanasia in which the individual
dies but in a sense lives--lives as glorified in death, and also in
the continuance of the life of the group and of the country into which
he has been absorbed. It is of course its relation to death that more
than anything else has made it necessary that war should appeal to
art, and take an aesthetic form, and without the aid of the aesthetic,
war could not maintain itself in the world. As a sheer fulfillment of
duty war could not survive. By the strength of its aesthetic appeal
war must control and overcome the instinct of self-preservation.
War appeals to the human mind as the great adventure of life. To the
healthy normal man this appeal, under certain circumstances, may be
compelling in its power. Man feels the call of adventure in his blood.
War may seem at times the natural expression of what is most real and
most essentially masculine in human nature. War is the essence of all
the dramatic and heroic story of the world. The past lives most
vividly in this theme of war, and the sense of remoteness in time
lends an aesthetic coloring to all the story of war, and is in part
its fascination. The dead heroes of to-day are glorified by linking
their names with the great heroes of the past.
To the glory of the individual, which is an aesthetic appeal, is added
the still stronger appeal of the ideal of national glory. The image
created in the mind which sustains the devotion of the individual is
also an aesthetic form. It is the idea of a nation transformed by
story, symbol and eloquence that is established. The dimness and
mysticism of the long ago, all dramatic scenes of the national life,
the forms of royalty are used in transforming reality into an ideal.
The consciousness of a nation is indeed an artist which creates an
ideal nation, glorifying and transforming the past, and painting a
vivid picture of the empire that is to be. No little part in the
German idea of the fatherland has been taken by the revived image of
the old German Empire, and the story of Charlemagne, the Ottonides,
the Hohenstaufen and the Hohenzollern which has been woven into the
life of the present and has become an aesthetic setting for the idea
of future greatness.
In the religion of valor, also, we may find aesthetic elements. Valor
represents in this cult the spirit of the superior man. It is an
aristocratic idea. Military life is full of this theme. The ideals of
_noblesse oblige_, honor, the spirit of sportsmanship, enter into it,
and all these concepts are in part aesthetic in nature. It is neither
as moral nor as practical ideas that they have so deeply influenced
society, but because of their appeal to the sense of the beautiful.
All this aspect of war and military life, both in its motives and in
its forms, is closely related to the pure beauty of art. The play
spirit also, which in some of its developments at least is aesthetic,
enters into the motives of war. War, we say, is the great adventure.
It is the realization of power. It is an expression of the love of the
sense of freedom. It is the great game, in which everything is staked.
The love of danger and the love of gambling with life that it contains
have roots that are also roots of various forms of art.
Another element, aesthetic in motive and form, obviously related to
the reproductive functions of the individual, is the display motive.
This motive of display is concerned especially with the idea of
courage. It is of course a deep desire of the male to display courage
before the female. This display motive must be the main motive of the
_uniform_ and all the other ornamental aspects of military life. Rank,
titles and decorations belong to the same movement. They are
indications of the advancement of the man in those essential qualities
of the soldier, the chief of which is courage. The aesthetic forms in
which courage is represented help to sustain it, and are an important
element in morale, and they also serve a purpose in creating or
adding to the allurement of the service and the fascination of war. It
is the craving for the display of courage, the desire of the man "to
show the stuff that is in him," that gives to war some of its most
persistent aesthetic forms, and these aesthetic forms help both to
make the display of courage effective and to create courage.
Among these aesthetic elements of war must be considered of course the
rhythms, the forms, all the concerted action, the marching (which may
be regarded as one of the forms of the dance), the parade, the
maneuvering and drill that enter into military life. Already in
primitive warfare these aesthetic forms begin to appear and indicate
clearly both their practical significance as means of affecting the
will, and their relations to the religious and to the reproductive
motives. The warrior tries to create in his person the appearance of
power, and also by the aesthetic forms he introduces into his warfare,
the feeling of power. He believes indeed that through these aesthetic
forms he actually creates or exerts power. This is the motive of the
war dance, which as an aesthetic form produces this ecstasy of the
feeling of power. This power is often conceived to be magical; the
women dancing at home are supposed to exert an influence upon the men
in the field or upon the enemy, and the savage believes that in his
own displays he actually overcomes the spirit of his enemy. Art is
here plainly serving a purpose. Display is a means of creating an
impression in the minds of the enemy. It also has the purpose of
creating an effect in the mind of the soldier himself. The art in
military life is, indeed, to give the impression of power to all who
must be affected by the exhibition of force.
All social life contains elements that appeal to the aesthetic sense,
and these aesthetic elements are by no means solely ornamental. The
universal development of etiquette and manners has reference to very
practical aspects of the social life. Their function is to influence
the will. The highly developed etiquette of military life is not
merely to facilitate the military functions, and it is no explanation
of the formalism of the military life to say that this is a sign of
its archaic nature. Formalism in this life is one of the means taken
to cover up all the details of militarism that are repugnant: the
hardship, the lack of freedom and the like. Etiquette acts
persuasively upon the will, it helps to make military life desired,
and to make men submissive under control of absolute leaders. All
formalism in social life, considered in one aspect of it, is a symbol
of the resignation of the will of the individual. As thus a symbol it
may either convey or mediate social feeling, and when social feeling
is absent the art of manners may become a substitute for this social
feeling, and in both these ways it is a means of giving to society
cohesion, order and form.
Such considerations as these help to explain the longing for war or
its equivalent which persists in the human heart. It helps us to
realize the truth of Cramb's (66) assertion that the whole history of
the world shows that man has lacked not only the power but the will to
end war and establish perpetual peace. There are still motives in the
mind of man that make him approve of war. War is perpetuated because
of its heroic form, as a form of experience in which the meaning of
life is felt to be exploited, in which life is transformed and
glorified, in which the tragedy of life, which in any case is
inevitable, becomes a tragedy which, because it bears the form of art,
is acceptable and even longed for. This is the allurement of war, its
persistent illusion, perhaps. The aesthetic forms of war take war out
of the field of reason, and on occasion make it transcend or pervert
reason. So we may understand why it is true that sometimes those who
but little understand why they are to die on the field of battle may
display the greatest courage and the greatest enthusiasm for war, and
we must not say that these causes are fatuous because they exist in
the realm of aesthetic values.
If we take war too realistically, with reference to its practical
motives, its mere killing and looting, which we may suspect are
related to the nutritional motive that we always find running through
human conduct, and leave out of account those aspects of war which
seem to belong mainly to the reproductive motive, to the enthusiasm
and intoxication and art of the world, we shall to that extent
misunderstand it. These motives cannot, of course, be separated
definitely from one another in analyzing conduct, but we cannot be
very wrong in differentiating phases of war which belong predominantly
to the reproductive motive. It is because, at least, all deep
tendencies of life are involved in war that it is so hard to eliminate
it from experience. If war were an instinctive reaction it might be
controlled by reason. If it were an atavism or a rudimentary organ
some social surgery or other might relieve us of it. But war is a
product of man's idealism, misdirected and impracticable idealism
though it may be, but still something very expressive of what man is.
It is this idealism of nations, leading them to the larger life, that
makes them cling to war, whether for good or for evil. It will avail
little to prove to the world that war is an evil, so long as war is
desired, or so long as something which war so readily yields is
desired. Statistics of eugenics and proofs that war ruins business
will not yet cure us of our habit of war, and not at all so long as
there is a vacancy in life which only the dramatic experiences of war
can fill. When war is abandoned, it will be given up probably not
because economists and sociologists vote against k, and we see that
peace is good, but by the consent of a world which, once for all, is
willing to renounce something that is dear to it and held to be good,
if for no other reason, because it symbolizes what life and reality
are. The world appears to have two minds about war, or at least it
does not hold consistently to any one attitude toward it. Beneath all
judgments about the evils of war, there is the allurement of these
aesthetic motives which must be reckoned with in any psychology of
war, or in any practical plan for eliminating war from the future
experience of the race.
CHAPTER V
PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL HONOR
Many authors find in patriotism or in national honor the chief or the
sole cause of war. Jones (37), the Freudian, for example, says that
patriotism is the sum of those causes of war which are conscious as
distinguished from the repressed motives. Nicolai (79) says that
patriotism and chauvinism would have no meaning and no interest
without reference to war, and that for the arts of peace one needs no
patriotism at all. Hoesch-Ernst (32), another German writer, says that
patriotism has made history a story of wars. It has developed the
highest virtues (and the worst vices), but it creates artificial
boundaries among peoples, and gives to every fighter the belief that
he is contending against brute force. Veblen (97) says that patriotism
is the only obstacle to peace among the nations. MacCurdy (37) speaks
of the paradox of human nature seen in the fact that the loyalty we
call patriotism, which may make a man a benefactor to the whole race,
may become a menace to mankind when it is narrowly focussed. Novicow
says that what shall be foreign is a purely conventional matter.
Another writer remarks that patriotism is the guise under which the
instincts of tiger and wolf run riot.
Several writers, Powers (75), and especially Veblen, place questions
of national honor among the main causes of war. Veblen would hold that
wars never occur unless the questions involved are first converted
into questions of national honor--and are then, but only then,
supported as moral issues. Other writers are to be found who make the
same claims for honor, saying that wars are always over questions of
national honor--honor always meaning here, let us observe, not moral
principle but prestige, dignity, analogous to what we call personal
pride in the individual.
Broadly speaking, we may say that such views of war base it upon the
fact that nations are individuals, having personality and
self-consciousness, and are moved by emotions such as dominate the
individual, although such analogies between individual and group are
never free from objection. But that the consciousness of the group as
an individual may be exceedingly intense, full of aggressiveness,
intolerance and pride, of great sensitiveness to all outside the
group, is, of course, obvious from the history of nations. Groups thus
endowed with a sense of solidarity and sensitiveness become highly
vitalized and persistent personalities which stalk through the pages
of history with tremendous power and tenacity of purpose. Nations thus
live intensely, and in their intense feelings and personal attributes
there are expressed purposes and ideals, conscious and unconscious,
analogous to those which make the individual also an historical
entity.
There seem to be two aspects of group personality that need to be
investigated in detail in any study of war, and which must be
distinguished from one another, as they may be by referring to the
primitive or central emotional quality which each has. These are
patriotism and the sense of honor, the former, for our purposes, to be
regarded as the sum of the affections a people has for that which is
its own; the second a sum of those feelings and attitudes, the
emotional root of which is _pride_. These feelings are the affective
basis of the idea of _nationalism_.
Patriotism, or love of country or feeling of loyalty toward country,
is a highly complex emotion or mood, and its object, an ideal
construction, is formed by a process of abstraction in which certain
qualities of home, environment, social objects selected by those
feelings are made over into a composite whole. Patriotism is
immediately connected with the fact that men, by some biological or
other necessity are formed into groups, in which the consciousness of
the individual in regard to the group and its members and its habitat
is different from the consciousness in regard to everything outside.
Patriotism is devotion to all that pertains to the group as a separate
unit, and its form and intensity are dependent upon what the group as
a unit does. The size and organization of the group to which the
patriotic feeling may go out may, it is obvious, differ widely.
There appear to be five more or less distinct and different factors in
patriotism; or, we might say, five or more objects of attachment, the
love of which all together constitutes patriotism. These objects are:
home, as physical country; the group as collection of individuals;
mores, the sum of the customs of a people; country as personality or
historical object, and its various symbols; leaders or organized
government or state, its conventions and representations.
The deepest of all strata in the very complex feeling of patriotism,
one which is concerned in every relation among nations, is the
devotion to, or habituation to--or we might say identity with--the
great complex of ideals, feelings, and the like which make up the
customs, folkways, mores or ethos of a group. The individual as a
conscious person is to such an extent created by these conscious
factors that we find that the reality sense is in part produced by
them. We have already referred to the belief on the part of many
peoples that they alone are real. Foreigners with different mores
probably always seem less real than our own people: they may even be
looked upon as automata, as not being moved by the feelings and
purposes that we ourselves have. The language of the foreigner, the
uneducated man is inclined to think of as having no meaning. Every
group has its own ways, and whatever else war may be, it is in every
case an argument for the superiority of the ways of the group. Each
group in war feels that its own most intimate possessions, its
morality and its genius are attacked. It guards these instinctively,
and a part of the purpose of aggression is the desire to make these
things prevail in the world, because they are felt to be the only
right, true and sensible ways. This preference for our own ways, and
participation in them, is the basic fact of nationality.
The feeling of patriotism is thus primarily an æsthetic appreciation
(or at least an immediate and intuitive one) of the totality of the
life of the group. Just as standards of normality and artistic form in
regard to the human person and its adornment vary from group to group,
and are produced in the consciousness of the group, so there is a
reaction of pleasure to, and attachment for, the whole of the life
that surrounds the individual. This appreciation is wider than moral
feeling, which indeed is in part based upon it, and is a sense of the
fitness of any act to belong to the whole of the conduct that promotes
the welfare of the group.
Patriotism is best known, or at least it is most celebrated, as an
attachment to the native land as _place_. This is the poet's
patriotism. It is, however, something more than a mere love of the
homeland as landscape, and we cannot, indeed, separate out any pure
love of physical country. The love of country seems to be an expansion
of the attachment to home, as the place in which the family relations
are experienced. The sense of place is the core of the love of home,
but it is supplemented and reënforced by the personal affections. The
attachment to place has also its biological roots, the sense of
familiarity of place being, of course, as the basis of orientation, a
deep element in consciousness. Fear of the unknown increases the
attachment to the known. The land as the source of livelihood is
loved, and there are also older elements in the love of the land as is
shown by myths and folklore. There is in it the idea of ownership but
also the idea of belonging to the land. So there is both the filial
and the parental attitude in patriotism. As fatherland or motherland
country is superior to and antecedent to us; as possession it is
something to hold and to transmit, to improve and to leave the impress
of our work upon. As historic land there is the idea of sacred soil,
of land which persists through all time. Ancestor worship enters; the
soil as the resting place of forefathers acquires not only a religious
meaning, but there is attached to it such feeling of an æsthetic
nature as is attached to everything that is full of tradition. The
protective attitude is prominent in this patriotic love of land. There
is in it the fear of invasion, a sense of the sacredness and
inviolability of the body of a country when it has once been
established as an historical entity. A study of the psychology of
invasion and of homesickness would no doubt throw further light upon
the still unknown aspects of the intricate moods of home love.
A third element in patriotism is social feeling. This is primitive,
but whether it is a herd consciousness or a radiation of the social
feelings connected with blood relationship and community of immediate
practical interests it is not especially important to decide in this
connection, except that the assumption of a specific herd instinct as
distinguished from social feeling or instinct appears to be
unnecessary. Loyalty of the individual to the group, which is
accompanied by or is based upon intensified or ecstatic feeling is one
of the strongest elements of patriotism. Social feeling as an
attachment to the widest group, the nation, is in general a latent
feeling or an undeveloped one. We see it becoming active and intense
only under circumstances in which the whole group is threatened or for
some other reason is compelled to act as a unit. The recent psychology
of the soldier shows us that absolute devotion to or absorption in the
whole may be produced automatically by the proper stimuli, and may be
controlled as the mechanism of morale, and that elementary sensations
enter into it. The wider social consciousness as devotion to the whole
group, the nation, is based upon such reactions, and can probably not
be fully, developed without them.
This transformation of the individual is something desired and sought
by the individual. It comes as a fulfillment of impulses that are
latent in the social life, and these impulses are tendencies to seek
exalted states of social feeling, rather than to perform specific
social functions. War is seized upon by the social consciousness, so
to speak, as an opportunity to extend itself and become more intense,
and indeed in war we see the social consciousness performing a work of
genius, overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and aversions.
Under such circumstances, social feeling becomes strongly fortified
against many suggestions that tend to break it down. An intense
ferocity is directed toward any disloyal member of the group, a
fictitious character may be attributed to the enemy, and there is an
imaginative interpretation of all his acts in a manner favorable to
uniting the sentiment of the group. This does not appear to be merely
a defensive reaction or a result of fear, but an awareness of the
precarious condition of the social feeling itself, when it is widely
extended. In its moments of most extreme and fanatical intensity it is
likely to be most unstable. It has been said that the surest way to
break down social feeling is to make it include too much. The
conditions of war always create that danger. Patriotism is greatly
intensified, but it is in danger of collapse. The mild patriotism and
yet secure cohesion of peace is replaced by a social consciousness
increased in breadth and depth, but which is liable also to sudden
contraction. All nations when at war appear to be quite as much afraid
of themselves as they are of the enemy. It is in part this
susceptibility of social feeling to rapid and extreme variation that
makes patriotism so mysterious a force. It may be extended in a moment
to unite supposed incompatibles, or again apparently strongly cemented
groups may fall into disunion. This seems to be due to the fact that
social feeling is plastic and is subject to control and is a force
and not merely an instinctive reaction.
The fourth element of patriotism is devotion to leader, to government,
or to the idea of state. Devotion to leader must have been one of the
earliest forms of loyalty. The prestige of the leader is acquired as
the result of any action of the group under stimuli that produce
either fear or anger. Just as the necessity for strong action creates
the leader out of average humanity, so continuation of this necessity,
that is the whole historical movement of the life of the group such as
a nation continues to add elements of prestige to leadership. The
exaltation and typically to some extent the deification of the leader
is a natural consequence or aspect of the dramatic life of the group.
The leader becomes symbolic of the group, and of its purposes and
meaning, so that in devoting itself to a leader the people do more
than sustain an emotional relation to a superior person. They transfer
their own individual nature, so to speak, to the leader so that he
becomes the essence or the spirit of the people.
The dynasty is the connecting link between the leader as the object of
devotion of a people and the abstract idea of the state as an entity.
The prestige and all the supernaturalism contained in the ideas of
divine rights and divine descent that have become attached to the idea
of kings are transferred to the government, or extended to the
government or state. The illusion of superiority and remoteness is
kept up by various forms and ceremonials. Becoming an abstract form,
the organization or the office remaining while its personnel changes,
the state acquires the character of a religious object. It takes on
the character of the eternal, while still it retains all the
persuasive and suggestive qualities that belong to individuals. The
idea of state thus commands a very high degree of loyalty, and is in a
sense itself a product of the feeling of loyalty. Once established the
state becomes a medium through which patriotism may be subjected to
control and also be manipulated for political ends. It can be
extended, transferred, contracted according to what at any time may be
subsumed under the government that has thus come to be the central and
coordinating factor in the object of patriotism.
Another element of patriotism appears in the form of a deep reaction
of the mind of the individual, usually under the influence of social
stimuli that take the form of artistic or dramatic situations, to the
idea of country as a historical personage. This stimulus may be
symbolic--the flag or any other emblem signifying the life or the
spirit of a country; or it may be concrete, historic, a story, and
this story, which is the content of the idea of country, is in general
a narrative assuming a certain artistic form in which facts are
treated at least selectively, and usually imaginatively. This work of
portrayal of the life of a nation by its story is consciously or
unconsciously an appeal to the will; it is given artistic rather than
scientific form for this reason. Its purpose is to present a national
spirit, or ideal, or principle, and also to persuade the mind to
become loyal to this spirit of country.
All countries, as the object of the feeling of patriotism, tend to be
personified, and it is thus as a person that country commands the
deepest loyalty of the individual. Hence the personified
representation of country whenever the will of the individual is
appealed to most strongly. Redier (30), a French writer, illustrates
this very clearly when he pleads that the interest of the motherland
must be placed first. It is not for liberty, or for the civilization
of the world that the French are fighting, he says, but for France,
"that most saintly, animated and tragic of figures." It is by this
process of personification of country that the patriotism of the
individual becomes most complete. He thus becomes loyal to a living
reality representing an idea, a spirit. To defend the honor and the
integrity of this person, one is willing to sacrifice everything that
is individually possessed, in causes that can affect one materially
in no important way. The desire for personal identity and immortality
may be transferred to country as thus idealized, and the individual is
satisfied to lose himself that country may live. The common man
realizes in a simple and concrete way, in regard to country, the
Hegelian conception of state as the reality of mind in the world.
About this idea of country held by the truly patriotic mind, as we
find it expressed in history and in literature, there grows up a
religious sentiment, which protects from criticism the qualities of
the ideal personage. A certain pathos of country attaches itself to
all who as great individuals represent country, and to all its
portrayals and symbols. All these symbols acquire a high degree of
suggestive force because of the depth of sentiment and the richness of
the content of the ideas that have produced them.
Patriotism, then, is a very complex idea and feeling which we realize
as love of country--or, as we might better say, it is an animation by
the idea of a very complex object which is country. It is a profound
attachment, rooted in the most original and essential relations, and
appears to be natural and necessary to every normal mind. The
individual consciousness is complete only by including the
attachments, in narrower and broader relations, to precisely the
elements that enter into patriotism--to place, to the fundamental ways
and appreciations of the social surroundings, to persons, to
authority, to traditions. The composite effects of these attachments
may be greater or smaller, as determined by a totality of conditions,
but the foundations of patriotism, whatever its object, are deep in
consciousness.
The presence and persistence of patriotism in the world as a deep and
intense feeling raises questions that are of both theoretical and
practical importance. Here we are interested mainly in the relation of
patriotism to war. There is a widespread view that may be expressed
somewhat as follows. Patriotism and internationalism or
cosmopolitanism are two _opposites_. Patriotism delimits groups,
whether rightly or wrongly, and therefore produces antagonism in the
world, and either causes wars directly or maintains a continual threat
of wars. On the other hand there is cosmopolitanism, a very little too
much of which might destroy civilization by removing the inspiration
that country gives. Patriotism, standing for the integrity of historic
entities, makes the world a world of nations having separate and
conflicting wills. Thus we have a choice of evils--between a world of
ardent, quarrelsome, but efficient groups and a world in which the
chief motive of progress, the vital principle of national growth, is
left out.
What is the truth about this? What is the relation of patriotism to
war? Confusion and difference of views are likely to arise from a
failure to distinguish in the idea of nationalism as a whole, between
two very different emotions and purposes. Psychologically, patriotism
is a sum of affections. As such, it has a distinct character,
constitutes a mood, the possession of which may characterize an
individual, and dominance by which may be the main fact in life. As a
devotion to certain objects, this motive of patriotism enters into the
sphere of motives of war, but it does so mainly, in our view, as a
powerful and highly suggestible energy which becomes aggressive only
under the stimulus of threat to its objects. Patriotism is indeed
tolerant by nature, and one may well doubt whether a genuine love of
country is possible without a profound realization of the value of
other countries as objects of devotion, and of the validity of the
patriotism of every group. True patriotism must always be to some
extent devotion to patriotism itself as a progressive force in the
world, and it is, therefore, by the very fact of becoming intense and
pure, a motive of internationalism.
Such patriotism seems to be free from most of the delusions of
greatness that affect national consciousness. Its mood is optimistic
and its spirit tolerant and just. We should say that, instead of
causing wars, by any initiative of its own, it is itself caused by
wars. It grows in a medium of defensive attitudes. It may, of course,
play into the hands of all the aggressive motives of war; there are
always circumstances creating the illusion of danger, and it is
possible, even, that there would be little war if there were no
patriotism as love of country to support it. But on the other hand
patriotism itself does not seem to be a cause of war. We should say,
indeed, that patriotism, to the extent that it becomes intelligent and
is a devotion to an ideal of country, and so is not dominated and
influenced by other motives is a factor of peace in the world, and is
moral in its principles and its nature. This is not the place in which
to speak of internationalism as an ideal, but we may at least observe
how, conceivably, patriotism may be cultivated, be greatly deepened
and intensified, while at the same time and indeed because of this
deepening of patriotism all international causes are also served. Such
patriotism may leave us with the danger of wars, since it leaves us
with a world of individuals having wills and self-interests. But this
world, with such a danger of wars, would be better after all than a
certain kind of cosmopolitanism in a world such as, for example, might
be arranged by an unintelligent socialism.
_National Honor_
There is another aspect of nationalism, which is psychologically
distinct from patriotism as love of country, because primitively it is
based upon a different motive. Emotionally it is expressed finally as
national pride, as we use the word mainly with a derogatory
implication. Just as patriotic feeling is intensified and crystallized
by fear, and is in a sense an overcoming of fear, by devotion, so this
motive of pride rests upon a basis of jealousy and of hatred, and is
essentially a movement in which display is used to obtain prestige, to
overcome opposition and to defend consciousness against a sense of
inferiority. As a display motive it contains the feeling of anger,
and the impulses of combat, and its relation to the reproductive
motive is obvious. It is as an aspect of a deeply pessimistic strain
in national life, as a process in which an original and naïve sense of
reality and superiority, challenged and attacked and brought into the
field of opposition and criticism and thus negated by a feeling of
inferiority, that this motive becomes of special interest to the
psychology of nations and of war.
The roots of this pride and honor process we can find in the impulses
which lead groups to demonstrate power and prowess to one another, and
in the original feeling of reality which is accompanied by the belief
on the part of the group that its own ways are normal and right. We
might mention as significant the widespread belief on the part of very
primitive peoples that they alone are real people, or are the superior
people of the world. The Lapps, Sumner (70) says, regard themselves as
"men" as distinguished from all other peoples, a form of
self-consciousness which lingers in all such antitheses as Jew and
Gentile, Greek and barbarian, and the like. This basic idea of
difference in reality is not confined to a few peoples, but there is a
tendency for every group to divide the world into two parties: selves
and outsiders, and this feeling of difference readily develops into
the moods in which there is a mystic sense on the part of a people of
being the chosen people, and into those specific theories of
superiority that run through the history of most if not of all
nations. It belongs to the psychology of Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
Chinese, Japanese, and also to Americans as well as Germans; and we
learn that Russian books and newspapers sometimes discuss the
_civilizing mission of Russia_.
That the motives of display and pride have been peculiarly active in
Germany in the last few decades has been maintained by many writers.
German writers are inclined to believe that the motive for the "attack
upon Germany" was jealousy on the part of her enemies, that Germany
was supreme in everything and other countries could tolerate this no
longer. Germany has talked about her virtues, her rank, her coming
place in the world. Bergson says that Germany's energy comes from
pride. Some see the source of this alleged conceit of Germany and her
excessive self-consciousness in Germany's hard experiences--the recent
slavery, Germany's position as the battle ground of Europe, her late
arrival among the great nations. Germany still lacks, they say, the
quiet assurance that an old culture gives. Some call Germany morbid
and quarrelsome. Again we hear the pride of Germany called an
adolescent phenomenon, and they say that Germany is fighting not for
principle but to see who is superior. Bosanquet (91) thinks that the
lack of political liberty in Germany has had the effect of producing
self-consciousness, and a morbid interest in small distinctions of
title and rank, and that it is thwarted national ambition that has
expressed itself in such writers as Treitschke and Bernhardi. Bourdon
(67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the
political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that
Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open
window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of
the Germans, others think, is an indication that Germany takes
_herself_ too seriously.
But national vanity, we see, is certainly not confined to Germany. The
Germans at least think France is highly self-conscious, always
thinking of her dignity, glory, prestige and of revenge. Wundt (85)
feels much the same about the English. He says they always want to be
first in everything, and to dominate the earth. We know that the
Confederacy of the United States, at the outbreak of the Civil War,
appealed to the world on the ground that it had reached the most noble
civilization the world had ever seen. The Japanese (73), we have
heard, believe that they are of divine descent, and that they are
supreme in manliness, loyalty and virtue. Every nation presumably has
somewhere in the back of its mind a belief in its own supremacy in
something, and has a sense of being or having something that makes it
unique in the world.
We can now see in part how the idea of national honor arises out of
the pride of nations. Certain fundamental feelings issue in the form
of claims of superiority or supremacy, which may be either vague and
unclear or very definite and self-conscious. This claim to superiority
is precisely what we mean by national vanity. With this consciousness
there goes a knowledge that these claims are in general not recognized
by other nations, or that the prestige which the recognition of this
superiority presupposes is at least insecure. Since, of course, these
claims to supremacy cannot all be valid, there must be a great amount
of inferiority parading in the world as superiority, many fictitious
and presumably half-hearted assumptions that must not only be defended
against outsiders, but must also be _internally fortified_. The pride
and the conceit must be justified by the creation of a fictitious
past, and of an impossible future. The motive of these falsifications
on the part of race consciousness is clear. A nation is defending its
claim to superiority by first establishing the claim in its own mind.
These claims being really unfounded must be placed beyond criticism.
They must be given a religious form. But also external forms and
relations of an artificial nature must be established. Nations always
hide behind barriers of formality. They make displays to one another.
In this way the feeling and the appearance of superiority are kept up.
Everything external to the group and not participating in its illusion
of supremacy must be _kept_ external to it. The belief which the
nation itself assumes in regard to its virtue must be demanded from
all outsiders with whom the nation has relations of any kind. At least
the forms of the recognition of the claim must be insisted upon. This
is the principle of national honor. It is a defense of certain ideal
or fictitious values in which nations insist that others should
recognize these claims and values. National honor is an artifice for
defending a claim to superiority and concealing an actual inferiority,
and it relates to values which, in general, do not exist. Its work is
concerned with the maintenance of prestige.
These ideal values and the integrity of the appearance of supremacy,
are sustained by the assumption of the forms of empire or the
imperialistic attitude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the
forms which nations assume, and this dramatization of imperial form is
the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the
integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the
supremacy a nation assumes, becomes more important than even the
securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very
reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the
assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal.
To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal,
and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore,
there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must
present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is
their flag, the symbol of their place in the world and of their
military prowess and courage; their ambassadors, the representatives
of their dignity and the symbol of their pretended friendliness; their
display of royal forms, which is the sign of their prestige and their
imperial nature, about which they are most sensitive. Offenses to
these symbols of what a nation assumes itself to be and demands that
others should think it, tend to be _mortal_ offenses, because they
invade the sphere of what nations hold to be their reality. So the
relations of nations to one another must, as we say, always be formal.
Nations can allow no intimacy. Why they cannot one can readily see,
for it is not difficult to detect the fear, the jealousy, and the
inferiority motive behind all this assumption and display. Treitschke
shows us what national honor may mean when it is carried out into a
philosophy of state. Here is the idea of national self-consciousness
at its greatest height. The state must not tolerate equals, or at
least it must reduce the number of equals as much as possible. The
state must be absolutely independent. The state, furthermore, cannot
have too keen a sense of its dignity and position. A state must
declare war if its flag is insulted, however slight the circumstances
may be.
National honor, its codes and standards and its justification and
vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of
dueling and the idea of personal honor once so generally held by the
upper class, and still existent where the military spirit prevails,
that we ought to study the dueling code with reference to the
psychology of war. There are psychological features that appear to be
identical. The idea of personal honor is associated with a feeling of
superiority that must be defended. Any offense or affront to the
individual was a mortal offense. The superiority in question was first
of all superiority of ancestry; it was this that constituted the value
of the individual and set the standards that he must maintain. This
superiority was to be judged not so much by conduct as by an assertion
of it represented by certain external forms. The individual by his
manners declared himself a gentleman, and laid claim to forms and
considerations that must not be omitted in relations with him. The
virtues he defended so rigorously did not exist as a rule in
calculable or practical form, since they did nothing objective. They
might be ornamental or purely fictitious. They existed in the form of
claims, and the values assigned to them were arbitrary. The man
declared himself possessed of superiority, and was ready uniformly to
prove this claim by acts purporting to indicate willingness to die.
This code and belief belonged to a day when relations among
individuals were simple and, so to speak, external. They were
relations that were readily codified and made invariable, since they
had no essential practical content or function. Manners were
significant as substitutes for friendly relations, since the system
was lacking in moral and social sentiments. Manners were a means of
fitting together individuals who really belonged to no functioning
whole, except when, for example, they might be united in military
exploits. Everything was unitary and independent of everything else in
this society.
Now this code and this philosophy of life have declined precisely to
the extent that the conception of ideal human life has changed, from
that of something ornamental and personal to that of something useful
and moral. Life has become organized, and relations have become more
practical, so that the values of conduct may now be estimated, and one
no longer may maintain a claim to virtue based upon forms expressing
intangible or subjective or unreal virtues. The virtues of a man in a
democratic society are, indeed, more or less obvious and open. Pride
of family, an ornamental mode of life, and a scorn of death are no
longer necessary and sufficient guarantees of worth. Evidence of value
is both possible and required; before value is admitted it must be
shown. Self-defense in a legal and moral society are in the main
superfluous, and the values of individuals are so changed that to
justify them by the duel would seem out of place. Its service being to
defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it
falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to
depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly
illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to
have nothing but anti-social elements in it.
That nations exhibit the same type of relation toward one another that
we find in dueling and its code seems to be clear, although we must
always avoid pressing any analogy between individual and nation too
far. A claim to superiority that is deep and irrational, and which
appears on the surface as sensitiveness in regard to honor and
vanity, keeps nations always in defensive attitudes, quite apart from
the actual fear of aggression. This superficiality or at least
externality of relations is the source of actual conflict. The forms
employed to maintain these relations are obviously ornamental, are
elaborations of the forms of courtesy among individuals, are little
dramas of friendship, so to speak, little plays representing
friendliness, while the diplomatic motives are simply to obtain
everything possible, each nation for itself, without war, and to
maintain prestige. These relations are substitutes for social feelings
that do not exist. Generally speaking, nations are never friends. They
never really share in anything. They are all highly conscious of their
own prestige and dignity, and they always communicate with one another
in a formal way. In it all, we see the signs of emotions and habits
that extend far back to the beginnings of social life and indeed into
animal life. The display which takes the form of social relations
among nations, represented well by uniformed diplomats, is so plainly
archaic and its real meaning so obvious that we can hardly fail to
understand what it is all about. That the attitude is really
defensive, and the purpose to keep up appearances before strangers, so
to speak, can hardly be doubted.
The fact that these questions of national honor are in some respects
detached from the main realities of _political relations_, and are,
indeed, fictitious and exist in the region of the imagination, that
they pertain to the conventional and ornamental sides of national
life, might be supposed to indicate that they could easily be done
away with, and all these fertile causes of war be eliminated. That
must not be assumed. Vanity has deep roots. The ornamental in life
symbolizes the real. It is the point of entrance to the deepest
motives. Conventional and archaic forms do not die out, just because
we discover that they are irrational and harmful, and the causes they
serve seem to us to be unreal. This kind of unreality in the
consciousness of nations is in fact the ideal for which nations live.
Nations play at being great, and fight to defend their prestige--but
this play, as we know, is oftentimes terribly real.
CHAPTER VI
"CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR
The causes for which wars are fought, or which are asserted to be the
causes, make one of the important psychological problems of war.
Sometimes these causes are elusive, sometimes they may give occasion
for cynicism and a pessimistic view of national morals; again we see
self-deception, again ideals seeking for light, peoples trying to find
something to live for or to die for. We see in the recent great war as
in other wars, a great variety of causes for which men are said to be
fighting. Some would say that the war was entirely a war of
principles; some take a purely political point of view and say that
principles are not involved at all, and others that nothing was
displayed at all of motives except primitive passions which are
equally devoid of moral issues or any principles.
It would be interesting from the psychological point of view to make,
if possible, a complete collection and classification of the causes
that have been brought forward as the fundamental things fought for in
the late war. Many widely different and divergent views are held. The
forms in which the issues of the war have been stated are almost
innumerable. New definitions and new statements of old conventional
ideas appear continuously. Every writer seems to see the war from a
different point of view from all others. Eventually, we may suppose,
all this will be clear, since these "causes" of the war will be one of
the great themes of future philosophical history. At present we can
only formulate such a view as may be suggestive with reference to
general interpretations of the place of principles and causes in war.
Let us examine a few of the opinions about the issues fought for in
the recent war. MacFall (56) says that the whole strategy of the
civilized world is bent upon creating permanent peace. Many speak of
the war as a war to overcome war; we are told that one of the most
conscious motives of the soldiers in the field has been to make the
great war the last war the world should ever see. Something of the
same idea is involved in the view each nation has that it was
attacked, and that the purpose of the war was to defeat and punish
aggressors. Apparently every nation and every army engaged in the war
has had the feeling that it was fighting in the interests of world
peace.
The German explanations of the war and of its issues have been very
numerous and widely varied. The German has had his own interpretation
of the "white man's burden," Tower (57) calls attention to the German
hybrid word "Sahibthum," expressing the mission of a people. Each
nation has its essence, which becomes a deep impulse. The German's
impulse is translatable in the words "Be organized." The German has
been eager to organize the world. He-believed in all seriousness that
he was fighting the fight of order against chaos. It was the fight of
the spirit against that which is dead and inefficient. The German
believed that the systematic exploitation of the world was his
peculiar mission. Ostwald is the great apostle of this view. He said
that the war was a battle of the higher life against the lower
instincts. Germany represents European civilization. The German
emperor said that Germany should do for Europe what Prussia had done
for Germany--organize it. In the German philosophy of life this
principle of order had become a serious principle. An inefficient and
disorderly world had need of Germany. Everywhere there was waste and
stupidity, and a want of reason in the world. System was to be the
cure. The fundamental fault in all this disorder the German mind
recognized as an excessive individualism. Individual instinct and the
social order were in eternal conflict, as Dietzel expressed the issue,
and Germany stood for the social order, for reason, since reason is
precisely the denial of the instincts and the desires of the
individual in the interest of a foreseen result.
Shortly after the beginning of the war, we remember, a manifesto
appeared signed by three thousand German university professors and
other teachers, saying that they, the signers, firmly believed that
the salvation of the whole of European civilization depended upon the
victory of German militarism. Hintze (49) said that Germany was
fighting for the freedom of everybody, meaning presumably according to
the German principle that freedom consists in voluntarily submitting
to order. This freedom is also in Hintze's view a principle of freedom
and equal rights for all nations, in so far as these nations have
reached the necessary stage of civilization. The mission of the coming
central management of mankind (_Menschheitzentralverwaltung_) implied
in the most ideal theory of Germany's mission is the true German
burden. Haeckel says that the work of the German people to assure and
develop civilization gives Germany the right to occupy the Balkans,
Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and to exclude from those
countries the races that occupy them. Schellendorf says that Germany
must not forget her civilizing task, which is to become the nucleus of
a future empire of the west. Koenig says that the spiritual life of
Europe is at stake, Germany's fight is the fight of civilization
against barbarism--against Russian barbarism he means. This ought to
be the cause of all Western Europe, but England and France have
betrayed the western civilization into the hands of the East. This
belief gave to Germany's cause a deep impulsion (12).
Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that
Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the
older civilizations of the world. Vigor was assured of victory in any
case, but young life had a duty to perform--that of clearing the way
for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among
German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for
example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the
male and the female, assuming that the German is the male among the
national spirits.
With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have
gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and
principles of other nations. In general other nations had no
principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and
America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause
was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they
said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy,
but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that
democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the
purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid
interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and
material gain.
Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs
through many fields of German thought--that values are something to be
determined objectively. It is a scientific principle. Its conclusions
rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation.
There is another argument which is in part based upon an
interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a
fatalistic doctrine--confidence in the issues of battle as a means of
testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail,
on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some
sense strength _is_ the right, and because the method of selection of
the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to
everything that is living or is a product of life.
If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by
an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about
subjective rights and subjective evaluations--the right, for example,
of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to
decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they
were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and
that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle.
The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like,
is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in
the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of
opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against
materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are
material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The
ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.
Boutroux (13) says that France, in the war, has had before her eyes
the idea of humanity; France was fighting for the recognition of the
rights of personality--rights of each nation to its own existence.
France is a champion of freedom; she wants all the legitimate
aspirations of peoples to be realized. Germanism, with its ideal of
force, is contrasted with the ideal of Greek and Christian culture and
philosophy. A cult of justice and modesty is contrasted with the cult
of power; in the former, sentiment and feeling have a place as
criteria of values; in the latter the appeal is to science and to
reason.
Hobhouse (34) says that the war is a conflict of the spirit of the
West against the spirit of the East (precisely the same as the German
view, we see, but with a very different identification of the
champions). Germany has never felt the spirit of the West. The war is
for something far deeper than national freedom; it is a war to justify
the primary rules of right. Burnet (18) thinks that the great conflict
was a conflict between Kultur as nationalistic, and humanism as
something international--that Germany, in recent years, had abandoned
an ideal of culture for that of specialization in the service of the
State. England's answer to the call was not to the specific need and
appeal of Belgium, but because England felt that there was something
in Germany incompatible with Western civilization.
Le Bon (42) says that we must always remember that the Teuton is the
irreconcilable enemy of the civilization of the French and of all it
stands for, and that he must always be kept at a distance. Durkheim's
view is that Germany's ambition and energy and will antagonize the
freedom of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world felt this
and the war was the consequence. Dillon (55) says that the future for
which Germany has been striving is a future incompatible with those
ideals which our race cherishes and reveres, and that we must make a
definite choice between our philosophy and religion and our code on
one side and those of the German on the other. Drawbridge (19) says
that the war has been a conflict between the ideals of gentleness and
tact, on one side, and of brutality and ruthlessness on the other. It
is the Christian spirit against the Nietzschean.
Again we have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy
against democracy, of mediævalism against modern life, of progress
against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the
Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more
personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was
fighting solely to retain mastery of her own genius, in order to draw
from it noble joys and just profits.
The American point of view has been expressed in several forms by the
President of the United States. For example, he has said that we are
one of the champions of the rights of mankind. The world must be made
safe for democracy. And again, that America is fighting for no selfish
purpose, but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from the
aggression of autocratic powers. This view that the war was remedial,
that it was in the interest of progress, to prevent that which is
belated in civilization from gaining the upper hand, and that it is on
the part of America a war of participation and aid in a cause which
though supremely good might otherwise be lost, is the prevailing idea.
That this spirit of the championship of causes and of justice to other
nations is a stronger motive in the Anglo-Saxon peoples than in others
appears to be an opinion that history on the whole can confirm.
It is relatively easy to obtain the opinion of philosophers about the
"causes" represented in the war; it would be of interest also to know
what the millions of men in the field think. Data are not altogether
wanting, but there appear to be no general studies. That many men, in
more than one army, have no clear knowledge of any cause for which
they have fought, except as these causes are nationalistic is certain.
That there is ignorance even among the men of our own army in regard
to the causes and purposes of the war has been made evident. Knowledge
and enlightenment can hardly have been greater elsewhere. German
soldiers are credited with believing that they are defending Germany
from attack. The French soldier was fighting for France. The invasion
of his country left him no doubt and no choice. The English soldier
has often said that he was doing it for the women and the children,
and one writer says that the deepest motive of two thirds of the
British army was to make this war the last. The American soldier, from
the nature of the circumstances under which he himself entered the war
has been more conscious of a motive of helpfulness and of comradeship
with other peoples who are in distress and danger. Probably the idea
of America's honor, and the more abstract idea still of the cause of
freedom, even though this idea has been, so to speak, our watchword,
have not been the most influential motives in the mind of the
individual. Germany was attacking people who were in distress, and
the American soldier went over to make the scales turn in the
direction of victory for the oppressed.
There is, of course, a literature of the war produced by the soldier
in the field, in which there are expressed high ideals, abstract
conceptions and firm principles. The French soldier has written about
liberty, the German soldier has had considerable to say about a Kultur
war. An American volunteer in the British army has written, "I find
myself among the millions of others in the great allied armies
fighting for all I believe right and civilized and humane against a
power which is evil and which threatens the existence of all the right
we prize and the freedom we enjoy" (24). But in general the
consciousness of the soldier, from all the evidence we have, was
concerned, as presumably was that of most of us, mainly with the most
obvious qualities of opposing forces, their concrete actions, and the
personal motives of rulers.
Leaving aside so far as one can one's own partisanship and mores
(which is not a very easy task), what causes can we say, with a
considerable degree of certainty, have actually been issues in the
present war? To some extent what one thinks these causes are will
remain matters of personal opinion and preference. Are there also
principles which, when once observed, will be accepted as the
fundamental "causes" of the war? There seem to be three at least which
characterize wide differences in the ideals and the civilization of
the opposing forces.
There is, first of all, an issue between the ideals of a relatively
autocratic form of government and a relatively more democratic form of
government. This was a cause of the intellectuals, but it was also a
popular cause. Men in general like the form of government under which
they live. From the standpoint of those who hold that a democratic
form of government is right, the war seemed to be a conflict between a
modern and progressive régime and an old and vicious one. So far as
this autocratic principle aimed to suppress the rights of individuals,
or to menace the liberties of small nations, so far as it was
aggressively militaristic and had imperial ambitions, which could be
achieved only by force, it stood clearly opposed to democracy.
Democracy and autocracy were plainly at war with one another, and yet
if we look closely we shall see that neither one can offer any actual
demonstration of its validity as the most superior or the final form
of government. In part they may appeal to the observable course of
history for their justification, but the final source of judgment
seems to rest in the mass of opinion in the world. Questions of form
and taste are not wholly absent. But the believer in democracy and the
believer in autocracy will both assert that deep differences in
principle are involved. They will not admit that democracy and
autocracy are superficial forms, and are questions of taste, and they
will not agree with Munsterberg, who says that the two forms tend
inevitably toward a compromise, by a process of alternation in which
first one and-then the other is the dominant form in the world.
The war, in another aspect of it, has been a conflict between the idea
of nationalism and that of internationalism. It is a conflict between
an ideal of state, represented in the German philosophy of state by
the principle of complete autonomy of the individual nation, and one
which assumes that states, while retaining their rights of sovereignty
are to be governed by laws which regulate their conduct as functioning
members of a society of nations. The difference is that, relatively,
between a state of anarchy among nations and a state of order. To some
extent there has been a conflict between the idea of rights and the
idea of duties of nations. This internationalism is not merely a
sociological principle, something academic and scientific, as a theory
of state or society; it is an ethical principle, which contains some
recognition of justice as a subjective principle. It has some roots
in theory, but it is also based upon the immediate recognition of the
rights of peoples to their own individual lives. Its ideal is a world
containing many nations, coördinated by natural processes and not a
world in which a single nation or a few may hold the supreme place,
except as this supremacy might come by a process of natural
development.
The third conflict of the war was one which we may call a
psychological conflict. It was a conflict between two ideas of life,
one based upon a belief in the supremacy of reason, the other implying
that the final test of values in life remains in the sphere of the
feelings, or is a matter of appreciation. Germany, in her recent
history, has stood conspicuously for the belief that human society may
and indeed must be controlled and regulated by definite
principles--principles that must be determined according to the
methods of science. These principles take the place, in this
philosophy of life, of certain typical human reactions that are
believed to be demonstrably irrational. In its visible and most
practical form the application of this principle is through
organization.
This characterization of German life reveals something very much like
a paradox in the principles of the war. We see a conflict in one
direction between a certain mediævalism in government and social forms
and a more modern and progressive type; we see also a conflict of a
modernism of an extreme form, represented by a scientific
civilization, united with this mediævalism, and in opposition to a
conception of life which is in some respects more naïve and more
primitive. The explanation of this paradox is that Germany offers an
illustration of a phenomenon of development that has been seen before
in history, of an excess of development and specialization in a
direction that appears to be off the main line of progress, or at
least is an anachronism. Germany has shown us the effects of
rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This
rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and
propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part
temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with
a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that
Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor
by force. If we may apply a biological analogy we may say that German
Kultur in its modern form cannot survive. That this German
civilization has been felt by the world at large to be abnormal and of
the nature of a monstrosity we can hardly doubt, and that therefore to
some extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of
Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany,
seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has
been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent.
Germany, governed by the ideals of rationalism, has assumed that
history can be made, wars conducted, life regulated in accordance with
a program. On the other side we see a very general acceptance of a
philosophy of life in which many evils of disorder and waste and the
necessity of an experimental attitude toward life are accepted as
necessary consequences of the life of freedom. We see implied in this
philosophy of life a belief in a morality and a religion that are
based upon feeling rather than upon objective evidences, and a way of
judging conduct more or less naively and simply or according to
methods of appreciation that are essentially æsthetic, using the term
in a wide sense. This mode of life is accepted in the belief that
order in due season will come out of relative disorder, by a natural
process or by a gradually increasing organization and voluntary
adjustment. If we accept the validity of this attitude in life we
shall be inclined to regard rationalism as it is manifested to-day in
German life as an evil. We may believe that in the end the cure for
this rationalism will not be less reason but rather more, but we shall
see also that it is possible for reason to outstrip and pervert life,
and indeed involve life in an absurdity, simply because as a method of
dealing with the whole of life it cannot be sufficiently
comprehensive.
Are these and all such issues that we find in war, causes of war? Do
nations fight for principles? Opinions certainly differ on this point.
Some think of wars, we say, as essentially conflicts of principles;
some interpret wars wholly in terms of political issues. We should say
that the truth lies between these assertions or is the sum of their
half-truths. Wars are not in their origin wars of principle. The
political, the personal, the concrete aspects of the relations of
nations are always in the foreground in causing wars. Wars become wars
of principle after they have been begun for other reasons. Sanctions
and motives appear after the fact. Fundamental differences of mores
which include the raw material, so to speak, of principles and causes
are factors in wars in so far as they create misunderstanding and
antipathy, but in so far as these differences of nature and of
principle do not enter into the sphere of politics and of national
honor, they do not as such cause wars Those deep moods which
accumulate in the minds of peoples and enter into the causes of war
are not convictions about principles. They are more generic and
natural. History does not seem to show us wars caused by pure
principles. We sometimes say that the Civil War in our own country was
fought over a principle, but that is something less than the truth.
The fundamental question at issue was plainly that of the rights of
certain states at a particular time to be independent and free.
Principles emerge in war, we say, and then they become secondary
causes. And it is precisely this emergence of principles from fields
of battle that perhaps constitutes the greatest contribution of wars
to the civilization of the world. We need to reflect upon this deeply,
since the whole philosophy of history is concerned in it. The virtues
that nations discover in themselves in war they elaborate in peace.
Nations at war become conscious of their spiritual possessions. Since
their existence, they believe, is at stake, it is a part of their
self-defense to justify their value in the world. They discover in
themselves that which is most characteristic of them, and this becomes
their principle. The principle of a nation is that which the national
consciousness fixates itself upon as the title of the nation to
continued existence. Nations do not go to war over their causes, or
about their distinctive virtues and missions in the world. Rather it
is their likenesses that precipitate wars,--their resemblances and
identities in being the same in ambition, and having the same
conceptions of national honor and the same motives for war and
desiring the same objects. Nations in general do not go to war over
principles because they are not motivated by principles in their
historical course. The principles of nations are aspects of their
inner development. The "causes" of nations at war, according to our
view, are these inner qualities of which they have become conscious.
Nations discover them in the stress of war, and it is quite natural
also that in such times they should not always judge them fairly, and
that they should often make for themselves a fictitious character.
CHAPTER VII
PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES
Philosophy, in the minds of many writers, must be given a high place
among the causes of war, and a considerable fraction of the literature
of the late war is devoted to the problem of discovering, in the field
of abstract thought, the influences that led to the great conflict.
Nietzsche, especially, seems to have been held responsible for the
European conflagration. As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the
chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the
super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand
convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the
German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by
abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many
to be convincing.
Schopenhauer, also, as the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine
of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on
earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle;
English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism,
as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual principles of thought and
conduct; even the whole spirit of the English philosophy, which Wundt
says is nothing but an attempt to reconcile thought with the ideas of
peace and comfort--all these have been charged with being instigators
of the war.
Bergson (17) takes a different view. He says that the desire comes
first, the doctrine afterwards. Germany, determined upon war, invokes
Nietzsche or Hegel. Germany in a moral temper would appeal to Kant, or
in still a different mood to the Romanticists. Le Bon (42) says that
nations are pushed forward by forces which they cannot understand, and
that rational thoughts and desires play but a little part in war. That
appears to be true. We cannot say that philosophies do not enter at
all into the causes of war, but among these causes they must be
insignificant as compared with other causes that neither arise from
abstract thought nor are greatly modified by reason in any way.
Consider the influence of Napoleon (himself so little a product of any
philosophical influence), as compared with Hegel; or of Bismarck as
compared with Nietzsche, and this will be apparent. There are in the
course of the centuries books and men that, as rational forces, do
exert profound effect upon the practical life, but they must be rarer
than is sometimes supposed. It is all too easy to assume a relation of
cause and effect when there is only a similarity between thought and
subsequent conduct. Rousseau may or may not have inspired the French
Revolution. Probably he did not. The recent great war, we might say,
has occurred in spite of philosophy, and if Nietzsche's influence
gravitated toward war, it can hardly be thought to have had any
deciding force in turning the scales already so overloaded by fate.
Philosophy failed to prevent war. Nietzsche's philosophy did not cause
it. His philosophy affords a convenient phraseology in which to
express a philosophy of war, granting sufficient misinterpretation of
his philosophy. Probably what influence he has had has been due rather
to his literary impressiveness than to his thought as a contribution
to philosophy.
Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of
science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods
and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the
great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or
applied uncritically may become a justification of war or even its
basic principle that has made him so great an influence, but
precisely because his thought, by becoming one of the great
coordinating principles of all the natural sciences has given power to
a movement which has had various practical consequences, not all of
them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age.
Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward
naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism
and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and
Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and
objective spirit of the day.
Facts must be faced. It is not such influences as that of
Schopenhauer, who expresses a logical or at least an abstract and we
might add literary form of pessimism, that in the generations just
past have transformed most of the conceptions of religion, with all
the effects upon the practical life that have followed, but the force
of our modern science combining with tendencies which it fosters but
perhaps does not create, giving momentum to industrialism and
specialization,--it is this change in the ideas of men that we must
suspect of being implicated in the present catastrophe of the world,
if any influence from the rational life is to be counted at all. Hegel
and Kant hover in the background. The author of the plan for universal
peace provides us with a subjective principle of morality which can be
distorted into a philosophy of moral independence and even of
independence from morality, and Hegel must have helped to establish
the German theory of the State, although with Treitschke and with the
practical state-makers like Frederick the Great and his followers, we
can hardly believe Hegel indispensable. The causes of war are too
general, too old and too fundamental to be greatly added to or
detracted from as yet by philosophy. Philosophy is the hope of the
world, it may be, and by no means a forlorn hope, but it is not yet
one of the great powers. When philosophy is a mere endorsement by
reason of some motive that has arisen in the practical life, or is a
literary expression of views about life, it may give the appearance
of being a profound force in the world. But this is not real
philosophy, in any case. Philosophy has not as yet shown itself highly
creative even in the calm fields of education and the moral life.
No! Philosophy is a factor in the motives of war rather by reason of
what it has not done, than because of its positive teachings. To-day
we ought no longer to be under illusions on that point. Neither
Christianity nor philosophy can make or prevent wars as yet. They have
not been able to cope with the practical forces of the world which
make for nationalism, partisanship and personal interests. It would
require a greater amount both of religion and of philosophy than we
now can bring to bear upon the world to offset the influence of
Napoleon alone in the practical life of nations. It is the Napoleonic
spirit that still governs Europe. Philosophy has been thus far a
science of being an explanation of the world after the fact, and not
even to any great extent a science of its progress, except in so far
as, we may say, beginning with Hegel and with Spencer, there has been
some development of the methods and the most formal conceptions of
such a science. It is asking too much of philosophy, in its present
stage, to expect it to preach the gospel, or to teach school, or to
direct politics, and for the same reason it is unjust to charge
philosophy with having created the greatest catastrophe of history. If
philosophy cannot wield any great power now in those parts of life
that are by their nature presumably most amenable to reason, its
effect upon those events that express the supreme force of human
passions and the totality of life will not be very important. The
influences of philosophy are academic, and presumably any doctrine of
life that preaches achievement, virility and unmorality will include
in some degree war among the interests that it will affect, within the
limits of its academic nature. But youth is inherently warlike,
because above everything else it seeks to realize life in its
fullness, and war at least does symbolize this reality and abundance
of life. A philosophy which preached peace would hardly become a great
influence with youth. A philosophy advocating the cause of war would
form a natural background for the essential motives of youth. If the
scales were evenly balanced, it might turn them. It is hard at least
to see the relations of philosophy to the practical life in any other
light to-day. Philosophies are tenuous and adaptable things. We see
them used to support opposite causes, and they change color under the
influence of strong desires. Bosanquet (91) shows us how Hegel's noble
conception of the State, if we but substitute for its central thought
of welfare of the State, that of selfish interest, may be made to
change before our eyes into the meanest of maxims. This process is,
however, not unique in the history of the relations of thought and
life.
A detailed study of the relations of intellectual factors to war would
need to consider the effects of a great number of more or less
philosophical ideas which throw their weight on the side of war. So
far as these ideas are simple and clear, and especially if they can be
conveyed in the form of the phrase, their influence cannot wholly be
ignored. Some we have already referred to. The doctrine that might
makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the
divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of
aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social institution, the
doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual
pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-worship, whether Hegelian
or other, acceptance of the methods of science and the results of
science as applicable to all the problems of life--all such principles
which inhabit the region, so to speak, between philosophy and the
practical life manifestly have some relation to the spirit of war. In
a very general way they may be counted as philosophical factors in
war. For the most part, however, those ideas that have been accused
of abetting war are exaggerations and perversions of philosophical
ideas. Nietzsche, Darwin and Hegel have all been exploited and made to
stand sponsor for specific philosophies of war. In the new philosophy
of life which Patten thinks has greatly influenced German conduct, and
which may be expressed in the words _Dienst_, _Ordnung_, and _Kraft_,
we can see both the effects of impulses that have grown out of the new
life itself, and the influences of formal philosophy. That such ideas
have had relatively a greater influence in Germany than elsewhere must
be admitted, but that either this devotion to ideas or the ideas
themselves have been derived from philosophical interests and from
philosophies that have played any important part in the history of
thought we may well doubt. We should suspect that the same practical
interest that works unceasingly to distort and popularize philosophy
would help to create such pseudo-philosophy.
Von Bülow (65) says that the German people have a passion for logic,
and that this passion amounts to fanaticism:--that when an
intellectual form or system has been found for anything, they insist
with obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into the system.
Durkheim (16) says that the Germans' organized system of ideas is a
cause of war. It is also true, we should say, that the tendency to
organize ideas and even the fundamental ideas by which the Germans
have been guided are deeply rooted in temperament, in history and in
the social order of the past. Boutroux (13) says that the Germans
themselves regard the war as the culmination of their philosophy. We
should say on the contrary that the whole war philosophy of Europe is
almost wholly a product of strife and comes from impulses that arise
irresistibly in the practical life. Into these movements philosophy
fits or may be made to fit, and the presence of ideas in a society in
which the academic life has great prestige, ideas which coincide with
beliefs readily gives an illusion of an order governed by the higher
reason. The fact that Germany's recent wars had all been highly
successful, the fact that Germany had learned to depend upon her good
sword in time of need are the chief sources of Germany's doctrines of
war: the Hegelian background in the light of what we have learned in
recent times about the psychology of nations, must seem to be rather
of the nature of the ornamental. The ideal of the Prussian State to be
a power directed by intelligence suggests Hegel, but it seems highly
improbable, to say the least, that Hegelian philosophy has had much to
do with shaping this ideal. Behind all this is the necessity of
shaping German life in the form which it has taken--necessity if we
accept, at least, Germany's national temperament itself as a
necessity. That other belief, widely held by German intellectuals and
officers that war is the testing of the validity of national cultures
would also probably never have appeared on the scene had not Germany
been secure in the belief that she herself had both the right and the
might on her side. It is possible, of course, that the war has
distorted our vision so that the relations of the practical life and
the life of reason have all been thrown out of focus, but when we see
what forces have been at work, and what they have done, it is
difficult to escape the conviction that we have been inclined to
believe too much in the power of mere ideas. This may be the great
lesson of the war. We may learn from it how to make ideas become the
power that hitherto they have failed to be.
CHAPTER VIII
RELIGIOUS AND MORAL INFLUENCES
That war and religion have always been closely associated with one
another is one of the outstanding facts of history. This is true both
of primitive warfare and of warfare to-day. Yet we cannot say that
religion as such has been a cause of war. Religious wars are almost
invariably also political wars, and as soon as religion and politics
are separated, religion no longer appears to be a war motive. When
religion becomes associated with worldly ideas which it supports and
makes dynamic it may become a strong factor in the spirit of war, but
as a means of segregating men, and giving them unity of action
religion can no longer be regarded as a power, if it ever was. Any
motive that will not so segregate men and break up all other bonds
cannot be said to be a very fertile cause of war. Religion as a cause
of war belongs to a day in which the spirit of nationalism was weak,
and when religious empire had a visible and political position in the
world. Nationalism, growing stronger, became the supreme force
dominating the motives and interests of men and governing the
formation of groups, or at least the actions of groups as interrelated
units. In the recent war we have seen how the sense of national unity
has been able to hold in check all other motives. Neither religion nor
any class or clan or guild interests could trace the faintest line of
cleavage so long as the motive of war remained.
The mood of war always contains a religious element. Not only is this
shown in primitive wars, where the relations of religion, war and art
are indicated in such phenomena as the war dance, which is of the
nature of a magic weapon, but we see it also in the complex moods of
the present war spirit of the world. The idea and mood of valor have a
religious significance. Cramb says that we can trace in Germany before
the war, showing through the transient mists of industrialism and
socialism, the vision of the religion of valor which runs through all
German history. The craving for a valorous life, for reality, the
desire to lose one's own individuality--these moods of war are
religious or mystic whatever else they may be or contain. The
inseparable relation of war and death necessarily inspires a religious
consciousness. Without exalted moods which in some way contain
religious faith--faith on the part of the individual in the eternal
values which he represents and in his own security in the hands of
fate, and in the immortality of the country which he serves, war could
not exist.
The mood of war always contains a religious sanction, and every
important religion sanctions war. This explicit relation between
religion and war is seen very early. Wherever there is ghost worship,
and the warriors justify war and fortify themselves for it by
believing that their ancestors still participate in the combats of
their children, and that in waging war they are doing a duty in
keeping up the traditional feuds of their race there is found the root
of the relation between war and religion. Every war is a holy war; it
is but a change in degree from these primitive wars in which the ideas
of ghosts must have had almost the clearness of reality to our modern
wars with their deeper but more indefinite religious sanctions. Since
war always creates the need of moral justification, the war mood at
all times tends to seek religious sanctions. Christianity, the
doctrine of peace and good will, very readily lends its support to
war, since wars are almost invariably regarded as defensive by all who
participate in them. War in the service of the weak and endangered
can always invoke the spirit of Christianity. The logical ground for
this has been laid for us by many writers; Drawbridge (19), one of the
most recent, finds no support in Christianity for the doctrines of
pacifism. All nations, when they fight, fight for God, for liberty and
the right, with the implied belief that their own country has a
mission in the world, supported by divine authority.
All governments have in them a strain of theocracy. We see this in
many degrees and forms, from the original totemistic belief in descent
from animals that are also gods to the vaguest remnants of the habit
of interpreting national interests as guarded by divine powers that we
often see in the language of practical statesmen. The doctrine of the
divine rights of kings of course had its origin in that of divine
descent. The most striking revelation of the place such theories may
have, even in modern times and in enlightened nations, is to be seen
in the revival and deliberate use of the doctrine of divine descent as
a fundamental principle of the government and theory of State in the
New Japan. All nations hold something of this philosophy; God and
State are always related and all wars, whatever else they may be, are
waged in the service of religion and with the sanction of it. This
spirit is not wanting even in the most modern democracy. The
historians of Germany have shown us to what an extent the theory of
the divinity of state and its divine mission may be intermingled with
practical politics and have helped to bring to light the psychology of
this movement in history.
Several writers, but especially Le Bon (42), have written about the
relation of mysticism to war. Le Bon said indeed that the main causes
of war, including the most recent one, are mystical causes. By
mysticism he means unconscious factors which are religious in quality
and which contain a race ideal which is both powerful and irrational.
German mysticism appears to have attracted much attention during the
years of the war. Germany has presented the picture, we are told, of
a people becoming dangerous by couching national ambition and honor in
terms of religion. This mysticism of the German contains a powerful
belief in race superiority, and in the supremacy of the culture of
their own nation, beliefs which have the clear marks of mysticism
about them. The traces of the theory of divine origin still cling to
them. Boutroux (13) says the Prussian State is a synthesis of the
divine and the human. Another writer observes that the Germans believe
in the altogether unique and quasi-divine excellence of the German
race, and of Germanism, and that the Germans have a new religion which
they believe in spreading by the sword. Some see in Germany a serious
demand for the revival of the religion of Odin and Thor, the religion
of conflict of primeval forces, and of the triumph of might. Literary
expressions of this religion are certainly to be found, and it may
fairly be maintained that Germany has never become Christianized to
the extent that most modern nations have.
That mysticism has been a large factor in the war spirit of the
Germans in the late war can hardly be doubted, or at least that a
religious element of some kind has played a great part in it. The war
began as Germany's holy war. A cult of State and of self-worship are
involved in it. If not, innumerable expressions of Germany's cause
among German writers are simply literary exaggerations. The Germans
have believed that they are God's chosen people, that they represent
God, and since the German civilization grew up in antagonism to the
Graeco-Roman civilization, God must have adopted the one and discarded
the other. One German writer says that we must eliminate from our
belief the last drop of faith in the idea of a progressive movement of
humanity as a whole. Reality is represented in one nation at a time,
and the chosen nation is the leader of all the rest.
While such mysticism as this (if it be mysticism) is most conspicuous
in aristocratic and imperialistic nations, we find it elsewhere. It is
a powerful force in imperialistic Japan and in Russia. We find it
everywhere in history in some form. In France it is still the "saintly
figure" of France that inspires the soldier and induces a religious
mood. There is no longer a vision of an empire of the future, perhaps,
and this mysticism of France has not in recent history shown itself in
the form of aggression, but French mysticism clings to the ideal and
the hope of a glorious future for a deathless France soon to be
renewed. All peoples that have declined or suffered an adverse fate,
even the pathetic remnants of the American Indians, expect the return
of their lost power. Such mysticism is, we may think, the only
condition under which national life in many cases can continue. The
religious or the mystical mood of nations is created by the need of
making belief dynamic, of overcoming doubts and fears. Hence the
exaggerated and irrational claims peoples make in regard to the value
of their culture and about their mission on earth. By their mysticism
nations justify their aggressive wars and fortify themselves in their
defensive wars. Thus nations acquire a feeling of security. They
believe in their star of destiny. They feel that their life which is
of supreme value to the world cannot perish. It is this spirit that
nations take with them into battle. It is a mystic force, and this
mystic force is, in great part, we may believe, one of the by-products
of the tragedy of history. Faith and hope have one of their roots at
least in fear and pessimism.
_Moral Motives and War_
That the attitude of nations toward one another is not, generally
speaking, an ethical attitude and that moral principles do not
motivate the conduct of peoples we have already suggested. Sumner (70)
says that the whole history of mankind is a series of acts open to
doubt, dispute and criticism as to their right and justice.
Differences end in force, and the defeated side always protests that
the results are unjust. And yet wars are always conducted with moral
justification and in the belief that moral principles are involved.
These moral principles, however, are not the points of difference upon
which the beginning of wars depends. Nations never go to war for
purely moral reasons. Moral feeling may coincide with the interests of
state, and a defensive war may of course be conducted in the spirit of
deep moral right and duty, but plainly it is never the sense of right
and duty alone that is the motive of defense. Perhaps after all this
question of the moral element in the causes of war is a futile one,
and leads to casuistry. There are always political and other practical
questions involved, whenever strain occurs between nations, so that
wholly moral issues can never arise.
If wars are not moral in the making they are always justified morally,
whatever the motives may have been that caused them. Without this
moral sanction it is doubtful whether wars could be conducted at all,
although this moral sanction may be based upon very superficial
grounds. The higher patriotic feeling runs, says Veblen (97), the
thinner may be the moral sanction that satisfies the public
conscience. On the other hand moral sentiment may often be strong and
deep in the minds of the masses of people in a nation, and the public
feeling of obligation to enter a war may be strong, but in general
such moral feeling does not lead to war. Righteous indignation lacks
initiative. Honor as moral obligation requires the aid of honor as
national pride and dignity. The relations among allies may at first
thought seem to be moral relations, but when we observe closely we see
that usually nations go to war together because their common interests
are endangered. When their common interests are not involved they
usually break treaties and so do not stay together. Actions directed
offensively against one member of a coalition are usually directed
against the others, so that in most cases the allies of a nation have
no choice, but must defend themselves.
The relative importance of moral principles in the motives of war may
be observed by comparing the motives assigned by the nations that
participated in the late war with the motives which a study of the
history and political situations of these countries reveals. There are
wide disparities between these historical causes and the assigned
causes. These need not, however, lead us to take a cynical view of
history as many sociologists and students of politics do. We have as
yet no organized world in which moral principle can operate. The
world, we might say, is still infantile or immature. The world is
still unmoral. We cannot say that nationalism as the principle of the
conduct of nations is a wholly selfish principle as contrasted with a
moral or altruistic motive, since such an analogy with individual
morality fails to take into account the complex nature of nationalism,
and overlooks the social qualities of patriotism.
England's purpose in entering the war has been freely discussed in
England. The popular impression is that England declared war upon
Germany in order to defend Belgium and to keep her treaty obligations.
If we consider conduct in a certain abstraction from the practical
setting in which it is performed such a conclusion can be drawn. There
was a moral stirring in England, and several writers have commented
upon the fact that England subverted her own conscious purposes by her
unconscious and instinctive morality. There was a strong feeling
against war, even a widespread moral sense that England had become too
civilized to wage war. There was a shrinking from the economic
hardships that war would entail. Against these strong tendencies there
prevailed, at least in popular sentiment, a profound feeling that in
some way Germany's civilization was incompatible with England's, and
this feeling was in part of the nature of moral aversion. Dillion
(55), at least, sees a profound ethical motive in Italy in the late
war. After a pro-German party had won out in favor of war, he says, a
_deus ex machina_ in the shape of an indignant nation descended upon
the scene. But after making allowance for all moral feeling and the
unusual and dramatic manner in which moral issues, to a greater degree
than ever before in modern history, were brought to the front, we must
admit that the political and diplomatic interests and manners of
nations have taken their usual course in the war. Nations have been
governed by the motives that have always dominated the relations of
groups to one another.
Germany presents the most glaring example of the contrast between
public opinion and expressed motives and political facts. Such
expressions as these: that Germany's ideal is one that does violence
to no one; that humanity and all human blessings stand under the
protection of German arms; that, where the German spirit obtains
supremacy, there freedom reigns; that in regard to England's downfall,
there can be but one opinion--it is the very highest mission of German
culture; that Germany's war is a holy war--such expressions as these,
which are psychologically explicable without questioning their
sincerity, seem out of harmony, to say the least, with what we know of
Germany's political aspirations. Germany's desire for England's
downfall does not appear to us to be based upon a moral motive;
Germany's war seems far from being a holy war, and it is hard to see
in it a means of spreading culture abroad in the world. We cannot give
any place in the causes of this war to a moral desire to make the
world better. However much Germany may have been convinced that
Germany was destined to be a civilizing force in the world, the moral
obligation thus aroused, we may be sure, did not become the real
motive of the war.
The moral justifications of war are very numerous, and that this
belief in war has some effect upon the spirit of war and helps to
perpetuate it, and is not a mere reflection of the warlike spirit
itself, may of course be admitted. Many believe that war accomplishes
work in the world; war is a great organizing force. There is also a
view that war is good as a moral stimulant, or as a creative moral
force. War is often regarded as the means of moral revival of a people
that has become sordid and dull. Schmitz (29) says that war gives
reality to a country. War strengthens national character, some think.
It purges nations. In war people grow hard but pure. Irwin (25) says
that such war philosophy as this is to be heard broadly in Europe,
chiefly in Germany, but also in France and in England. Mach (95) says
that disintegration takes place in times of peace. Schoonmaker says
that war has taught men socialization. Again we hear that wars are
just and right because they are necessary. Redier (30) says that war
is a way of giving back courage to the men of our times. This praise
of war which comes from the depths of feelings, we must suppose helps
to give continuity and force to these feelings.
_Institutional Factors_
If the spirit of war is to any extent educable, and is created in
national life and is not merely something instinctive, it is
presumably modified in one way and another by all those institutions
that are educational in their effect. Perhaps one of the most pressing
problems of education in the near future will be that of the relation
of education to war. We shall need to know what the school has done to
cause wars, what changes should be made in the future with reference
to this influence of education upon the fundamental motives of
national life. The schoolmaster has been indicted among other
instigators of war. We must see how much truth there is in this
allegation. We must understand also how the whole educational
process, as we may see it now after the war, may be made if possible
to become a greater factor in life than it has been in the past, if it
is at all an important element in the development and the control of
the psychic powers of nations.
Schmitz (29) says that the eighteenth century and the French
Revolution were dominated by the phrase, the nineteenth by money, and
that there was a danger that the twentieth century would be dominated
by the schoolmaster and by the concept, but that this danger is past
because life has become so full of realities. Russell says, we know,
that men fight because they have been governed in their beliefs and in
their conduct by authority. If this be true the authority exercised
upon the mind of the child by all his teachers may be suspected of
having been in one way or another an influence in creating the moral
attitudes that prevail in regard to war and peace. We have heard the
question raised as to whether in the past the teaching of history as
the story of wars, and the presentation of the facts of history from
the nationalistic point of view, have not been morally wrong.
German schools, and the method of public education the sinister
effects of which we have abundantly felt--that is, the propaganda,
show us educational phenomena that are psychologically of great
interest and which are also unique from the educational point of view.
The influence of schools seems in general so negative, and there is so
little connection between what is learned as fact and conduct in the
practical life that, even in the case of the German teaching of war
philosophy we must suspect that this teaching has been successful only
because it has gone with the strong tide of feeling in the popular
mind. That the German schools have directly and indirectly fostered
the development of ideas that lead in the direction of war there is no
doubt. Even more influential than the specific ideas that have been
implanted, is the spirit of these schools: it is their militaristic
and routine life, the great authority assumed by the teacher, the
specialization, that has helped to nourish the warlike spirit of
Germany, quite as much as the fact, for example, that Daniel's
Geography teaches that Germany is the heart of Europe, surrounded by
countries that were once a part of Germany and will be again.
German education, we say, seems to be unique in the extent to which it
influences public sentiment and national conduct. In general,
education has appeared among the influences that lead to war rather by
default of positive teaching than by anything positive it has done.
Even in Germany, we should say, the spirit of war has been made to
flourish less by the teaching of a narrow nationalism, by inculcating
hatred, and implanting wrong conceptions of German history than by
failing to provide youth with means of deep satisfaction, by failing
to coordinate deep desires of the individual, and to organize
individuals in a normal social life. This is true everywhere.
Education has not affected life as a whole, and it has not thus far
been an influence which, to any appreciable extent, has accelerated
the development of peoples in their especially national aspects and
relations. It has nowhere fostered any conception of the whole world
as an object of social feeling. It has everywhere accepted a certain
provincialism as natural and necessary, and has tacitly assumed that
national boundaries are the horizon of the practical life of the
child. The school has in fact failed to take advantage of its
unmatched opportunity to use the imagination of the child to develop
his social powers. Sociologists say that if sociologists had been more
diligent in spreading abroad information about the social life, the
great war would perhaps never have happened. That we may certainly
doubt; something more profound must be done by education than to
disseminate knowledge, if it would undertake to be a power in the
world and to do anything more than add its influence to the tendencies
of the day, or perhaps temporarily change the direction of these
tendencies.
CHAPTER IX
ECONOMIC FACTORS AND MOTIVES
Thus far we have considered the motives of war mainly from the
psychological point of view, discovering its main movement and
development in the world to be a product of the psychic forces in the
social order. This method, however, did not exclude the objective
facts, and did not ignore the practical motives. We found that war is
a manifestation of many tendencies, and in fact is related to all the
deep movements in the life of society and of the individual. War comes
out of the whole of life in a way to preclude the interpretation of it
in terms of any single principle, or at least to prevent our finding a
single cause of war. We ought to try to see now how such a
psychological view of war stands in relation to certain more objective
views of it, which in a very general way may be said to be centered in
two closely related views. One is that war is almost exclusively an
economic phenomenon, and the other that war is the work of
individuals. One is the economic interpretation of history, and the
other is the great man view of history.
We still see a lingering theory that war is a result of the ancient
migratory or expansion impulse--that over-population and the pressure
of various economic conditions are the source of the impulses that
lead to war. We have seen reasons for believing, however, that war,
even in the beginning, has not been a wholly practical matter. Hunger,
pressure of population, migratory movements because of economic
conditions, will not explain the origin and the persistence of wars.
Wars are not simple as these views would imply, at any stage. That at
the present time economic advantage, whether or not it be the motive
of war, is in general not gained seems to be very clearly indicated.
The taking of colonies and other lands may be a detriment rather than
a gain to the conquering nation. The industry and the finance, of all
concerned in war, are likely to suffer disaster. Peace is the great
producer of wealth. War is a terrible destroyer of it. Ross says that
as industry progresses, wars become continually more expensive and
less profitable, that the drain is not upon man power so much as upon
economic power; nations bleed the treasure of one another until some
one of them is exhausted and must yield.
The theory that war is caused by the pressure of population,
especially as applied to the recent war, now appears to have been very
naïve. It was maintained that Germany needed more room for her growing
population, that Germany must have more land at home and more
colonies. Claes (46), among several writers, shows that this is not
true. Germany had no pressing need of more land, except for political
purposes, or such land as provided the raw materials for her military
industries. Bourdon (67) maintains that it is not true that Germany's
population was becoming excessive. Le Bon (42) says that this theory
of over-population is a myth. Still others have shown that in a
country that is rapidly becoming industrial, as was Germany, where
population is becoming massed in the great cities, emigration ceases;
and that actually, in Germany's case, labor was imported every year,
and that there are great tracts of arable land in Germany still but
sparsely populated. Nicolai (79) also attacks the theory that war is
sought for economic gain and says that an economic war among the
European states is an absurdity.
The need of colonies is often put forward as a real and also a
legitimate motive for war. Colonies must be provided, they say, for
the overflow of population from the homeland; colonies are the
foundation of the trade of nations--trade follows the flag. They think
of colonies as the offspring of nations, and nations without colonies
seem sterile and destined to extinction. We know that Germany's desire
for colonies is one of the causes of the European crisis, and that the
colonial question has been a fertile cause of trouble in Europe for
many years. And yet we have evidence that in the present economic
stage of the world, colonies do not perform to any great extent either
of the functions that are claimed for them. Trade does not in general
follow the flag; industrial nations do not need colonies either to
provide for over-population or for commercial reasons. The acquisition
of colonies does not as such benefit the great industrial and
financial interests. Why, then, do nations so ardently desire
colonies; and why, without colonies, do they feel themselves inferior
and at a disadvantage? Why, in a stage of industry, in which it is
presumably more to their advantage to conduct aggressive campaigns in
countries already densely populated, are nations so willing even to
fight to obtain colonies? Powers (75) says that the desire for
colonies comes from the idealistic tendencies of nations. This appears
to be true. Correspondingly we find that colonies are of more interest
to general staffs and admiralties than to captains of industry.
Colonies are wanted for military reasons, more than for trade reasons.
Colonies are desired as bases of operation in the game of empire
building by conquest. There is still another reason. The race for
colonies perpetuates an ideal which has grown out of an earlier stage
of the life of nations. Colonies were once actually the means of the
greatness of nations. The longing for colonial possessions, for the
extension of commerce, the great jealousy and apprehension of peoples
in regard to their trade routes, and the fear nations have for their
commerce, quite out of relation to present needs and conditions, hark
back to an old romance of the sea. The waterways of the world, the
islands and new continents have a traditional appeal, which comes down
to us from the days when the small countries of Europe, one after
another--Portugal, Holland, Spain, England--became great in wealth,
and grew to be world powers, by their commerce and their colonial
possessions. In those days the expansion of nations was not at all due
to economic pressure at home. The landowners, the rules, the
privileged class in general were interested in colonies, because in
that direction stretched the path to fabulous wealth, and because over
the seas were the lands of adventure. The seeking of colonies was both
the business and the pleasure of the nations. To-day the gaining of
colonies may be only a loss to nations economically, but they satisfy
the craving for visible empire, and also a longing that is deep and
intense because tradition and romance are deeply embedded in it.
Probably no one now believes that war among modern nations is due to a
pure predatory instinct or to a migratory instinct which is supposed
to have led primitive hordes to seek new habitats and to prey upon
other peoples. Hunger does not now drive people in companies from
their homes and pour them into other lands, although it is true that
any threat which excites the old hunger-fear tends to arouse the war
spirit and to stir the migratory impulse; and a deep sensitiveness to
climatic conditions and a claustrophobia of peoples have remained long
after the need of land urged as the main cause of war, and we hear war
justified on the ground that crowded peoples require more land. This
_land hunger_ is an old motive and it still remains deep in the
consciousness of peoples long after its economic significance has
ceased. Just as we say the threat of hunger is often imagined, and the
fear of hunger and a deep and persistent fear of peoples and the sense
of danger of being engulfed and destroyed by other peoples linger in
consciousness, so the consciousness of the old struggle for land
remains as one of the most powerful of traditions, and any threat,
near or remote, to a nation's land arouses all the forces of the war
spirit, and the thought of aggression as a means of conquest of land
is always alluring.
Land was once the main possession and the main need. To-day it is the
chief symbol of the power of a nation. The possession of it is desired
when it gives nothing in return, certainly when there are no valid
economic reasons for taking it. This land hunger becomes the excuse of
nations for their sins of aggression. A differentiated society, so
organized that only the few, if any at all, can by any possibility
profit by the taking of lands still hungers for this primitive
possession. To a great extent land as a national possession has an
ideal rather than a practical value. It was one of the original
sources of prestige and distinction, having become the main material
interest of man as soon as he came to have fixed abode. The whole
historic period of the world has been a story of a struggle for land.
It is the memory of this land struggle, which is one of the deep
motives of war, which often determines the strategy of war, and the
policies of nations.
Precisely how the system of great land ownership originated is
obscure. Sumner (70) says that the belief that nobles have always held
lands, and are noble by reason of this possession, is false. Nobles
have in one way and another enriched themselves and bought land; or
rather having acquired land they have succeeded in acquiring titles of
nobility, and establishing their lines. In all nations which have
retained any traces of the feudalistic form, and to some extent
everywhere, land continues to be the basis of wealth, and also of
power, and the land-owning classes are still mainly the ruling
classes. This land-owning class is still dominated by the old
traditions of the landed aristocracy. It is the fighting class, and
supplies great numbers of officers for the armies. It upholds the idea
of national honor in its ancient forms as related to private honor;
it provides the great number of diplomatic and decorative officers.
Japan, Russia, Germany and to some extent England, at least up to the
time of the war, have retained feudalistic institutions, and the land
interest still remains as a motive of war. In all these nations,
certainly in those which have remained feudalistic in fact, it is the
aristocratic and owning class that usually represents the war
interest. It both rules and owns. It sends out the peasant and the
worker to extend the state. It is the protected class. Laws and
constitutions favor it. Taxes fall lightly upon it. Originally this
was the class that received all the benefits of war. To-day it suffers
less from war than do other classes. Even when it does not gain by war
in a material way, it is likely to gain in power (100).
We have seen this system of class rule at work in very recent times,
and it is a question whether the old ideal of land possession did not
work to the ruin of Germany economically, and indirectly antagonize
the industrial interests of the nation. German politics had been
trying to serve two masters, who were not entirely in agreement.
Germany was still a country of landed proprietors, and these
proprietors always have thrown their weight to the side of war. They
were by no means dominated by a motive of pure greed, and they did not
seek war entirely for their own advantage, but because, we might say,
they are ruled through and through by motives that can be satisfied
only in a militaristic state of society. Their gain from a successful
war is mainly a gain in prestige and distinction. An unsuccessful war,
as we have seen, threatens their extinction as a class. All democratic
movements tend toward land division, or is indeed in part precisely
this process. Aristocracy without land cannot maintain itself.
The economic theory of war comes to its own in the view that industry
now controls the world, that industry is the power behind politics,
and that industrial needs are the real energies that make wars. We
live in an industrial age, they say, and industry rules. Plainly to
find the whole truth about this relation of industry to war is no
simple matter. There are at least three more or less separate
questions involved in it. We need to know whether an industrial state
of society, or the industrial stage of economic development, is
especially prone to cause wars, as distinguished from more general
political and economic interests. We need to know whether wars, in an
industrial stage, do really serve either the interests of industry or
countries as a whole. Finally, there is the question whether those who
control industry and finance do actually create wars.
In the industrial and financial stages of economic development new
conditions arise which certainly must be taken into account in any
theory of war. There are deep changes in national life. The moods of
the city become a new force or a new factor in national life.
Socialistic ideas and new aspects of nationalism and patriotism
appear. There is a spirit of unrest; both pessimistic and optimistic
tendencies in society are increased; the motive of power takes new
forms, and there is a deep stirring of fundamental feelings and
impulses. The crowd instincts, the old hunger motives, are felt
beneath the surface of life. This is the effect of industrialism upon
the psychic forces of peoples in their collective aspects. Nations
also become as wholes more specialized in the industrial life; they
are dependent upon one another as never before. All the ancient
motives of commerce are stimulated, and the minds of nations revert to
the old fears and the old romance connected with the thought of the
seas. The growing interdependence of nations produces a peculiar and
paradoxical condition. Competition in regard to markets arises, with
all the complications and strains that we have seen in recent years.
There are new motives of aggression, but at the same time the need and
motives for peace are increased. Industries in general thrive best in
an era of assured peace. They live upon the wealth and prosperity
they themselves create. Intrigue, not force, is their proper weapon.
Le Bon (42) says, that the desire to create markets was not the cause
of the great war, because expansion went on very well in the time of
peace. Germany had no aggressive designs except commercial designs we
are told. Mach (95) tells us Germany's whole future, the success of
her carefully laid plans for industrial development and supremacy,
depended upon continued peace.
That such views of the relation of industry to war are in the main
correct can hardly be doubted. Industrial relations create strains
among nations, but when as a result of these strains war occurs it
must be regarded as a disaster from the point of view of the
industrial interests. Industry we say thrives upon the wealth that it
creates. A war which destroys half the wealth of the world must be a
calamity for all great industries except at the most a very few having
peculiar relations to the activities of war.
But there is another aspect of the relations of industry to war.
Industrialism as a great institution and movement of modern life
becomes in itself a political power. Howe (100) says that with the end
of Bismarck's wars personal wars and nationalistic wars came to an
end. The old aristocracy of the land merged with the new aristocracy
of wealth and this wealth has become the great political power in the
world. But this is only a half truth. Industry has become a factor in
the foreign relations of nations, and has become a power in politics,
but the motives and powers we call political are exceedingly complex,
and the interests of business, industry and finance are by no means
the whole of or coincident with political interests. There are of
course certain industries and financial interests which may even
instigate wars, and some writers give them a high place among the
causes of war. Especially the makers of munitions and armaments are
credited with a baneful influence in the world. With their
international understandings, their influence in legislative bodies,
their control of newspapers, they are open to the charge of
manipulating public sentiment, and bringing influence to bear upon
governments. They are accused of equipping small countries and setting
them against one another, of deliberately encouraging the race for
military and naval supremacy. No one can doubt that their
opportunities for trouble-making are many and enticing, but to think
of these influences as anything more than the incidental and secondary
causes of war seems to be a curious way of understanding history
(100).
The inside history of the great financiering projects would no doubt
give us some of the main clews to the present diplomatic relations of
nations to one another. If we take into account the various intrigues
in connection with the building of the Bagdad route, the financing of
the Balkan States in their wars, the bargaining of the Powers in
Turkey for financial concessions, the great business interests
involved in the Russo-Japanese war, the loans to China and all the
rest of the financial history of a few decades we should have in hand
materials that no one could deny the importance of for an
understanding of current history. Diplomacy has had added to its
already complex duties the art of securing financial advantages. In
general the art of this diplomacy is to secure these advantages
without war, but there can be no doubt that financial relations have
multiplied the points of contact and strain among peoples, and that
these financial relations have become the main occasional causes of
wars. Howe (100) thinks that surplus capital is to blame for a great
many of the great disasters of modern times--that it destroyed
Egyptian independence, led France into Morocco, Germany into Turkey,
and into the farther East, embroiled the Balkan States; and that the
great war has been a conflict over conflicting interests of Russia,
England and Germany in Turkey. Under the guise of expansion of trade
this invisible wealth has been exploiting the most vital interests of
foreign countries. Veblen would go so far as to say that wars are
government-made, that patriotism is exploited by governments in
advance of pre-arranged hostilities to produce the spirit of war (97).
If we hold that these economic causes are now the most important
causes of wars, it is easy to accept the conclusion that the most
fundamental, and even perhaps the sole cause of war is the evil
principle of ownership, as is actually maintained by many economists.
If men in cliques, and men as individuals did not own privately great
parts of the wealth of the world, these conflicts in which wealth and
its distribution are the most vital interests would not take place.
Many socialists, we know, hold these views, asserting that wars are
due solely to industrial competition among nations, and to the fact
that industrialism is based upon the wholly wrong principle of private
ownership. Hullquist, a socialist, says that wars are likely to become
more frequent and more violent as the capitalist system of production
approaches its climax. The working classes, the socialists say, who
have nothing permanent, are the natural enemies of war; the
capitalists, who have much and want more, are constantly placing peace
in jeopardy. The protective system of tariff also receives much abuse
from these writers. Novicow (71) places the tariff system high among
the causes of war. The belief that it is good to sell and bad to buy,
he says, is the great trouble maker in the world. This was also the
principle of Cobden the great English free-trader of the middle of the
last century. The Manchester school of which he was the leader would
do away with wars by making the world economically a unit.
Veblen (97) charges the price system with being a fundamental cause of
war, and says that it must now come up for radical examination and
perhaps modification. The theory of the rights of property and
contract which have been taken as axiomatic premises by economic
science may itself fail, or at least be thrown open to question.
Either the price system will go, or there will be wars between nations
in the future as there have been in the past, because of the need of
protection of ownership rights, and because of the nationalism these
rights create. To some extent these rights of property _have_ been
curtailed, Veblen remarks; the old feudalistic rights have in large
part been annulled, and the world is at least owned by more people
than was once the case. That these changes and readjustments of
property rights will be carried still further he thinks there can be
no doubt.
Stevens draws similar conclusions about the evil effects of property
rights. The great war and all wars, he asserts, are based upon
existing social conditions--upon the organization of the family, the
school, the state, the church, upon the institution of property, with
its corollaries of foreign markets and other industrial relations.
Protection of trade, which works in the interest of the owner classes,
indirect taxes which fall upon the consumer, the labor system by
which, at the present time, the laborer receives but a small share of
the profits, but must become when necessary the defender of the
interests in which he does not share--all these things we hear being
charged vigorously with being the causes of wars, including the recent
great conflict. This system is blamed not only for our great
international wars, but it is looked upon as the germ of wars to come,
internal wars, when international wars shall have ceased, or
temporarily have been abated. When, perhaps, the restrictions that
assume that the gain of one country is the loss of another have
satisfactorily been adjusted, the system that maintains that the
capitalist can prosper only at the expense of the laborer will come up
for final settlement (97).
All these views, from a psychological point of view, seem to be open
to the criticism that they tend to consider the world one-sidedly and
by a certain abstraction. They are dealing with a world governed only
by economic laws. It is easy to construct these ideal worlds. They are
simple and they lend themselves readily to the purposes of a political
calculus. Finding economic motives in individual life, in the social
life and in politics, and in history it is tempting both to explain
the past and plan the future in terms of the entities and principles
of economics. But after all it is only when we consider economic
motives in their relations to all the motives behind human conduct
that we are likely to see the economic motives in history in their
true light. Then we shall very much doubt whether property has been in
any real sense the cause of wars, or that the abrogation of property
rights will be the means of establishing perpetual peace. We shall see
that economic motives themselves are but aspects of deeper motives,
and involve desire for objectives that are not sought for their
material value, and also objectives that are not material at all. The
process of development of present human society, so far back as we can
see, and as far into the future as we can with any confidence predict,
seems to contain as a necessity some form and degree of human slavery.
This appears to be inherent in the fact itself of the existence of
individual wills, having in any degree individual or personal
interests as they must, and the impossibility of devising any social
order or government that will give to the individual an ideal freedom,
if such a conception be indeed possible at all. We may conjecture at
least that in a world in which every trace of an economic motive had
been removed, if this were possible, there would still be slavery of
some kind, and the inexorable logic of individuality would in the end
produce conflict and war.
Nations, like individuals, live, and they pass through certain stages
that seem in a general way to be necessary phases of their
development. During this process of development certain objects
become, one after another, of the most vital concern because they are
necessary to the satisfaction of the motives which guide the lives of
these nations. But these objects are never so definitely marked off
that they become to the exclusion of other motives the causes of wars.
The social life is never so simple as this would imply. The past is
always involved in the present. One after another certain types of
economic objects-become more or less central in the interests of
nations, but the minds of nations, like those of individuals, are
always influenced by the tradition. Objects are desired with reference
to the satisfaction of motives that represent complex and general
desires. There are ideal objects as well as material objects; and the
material object is often sought because of its possible use as a means
of satisfying the desire for ideal values. First food, then land, then
commerce, then industry, then wealth itself,--this has been the order
in which economic values have become objects for the consciousness of
people as groups, and have become involved in and more or less
completely represent the relations among peoples we call political.
That which is, relatively speaking, an object of necessity at one
stage tends to become an ideal or romantic object of the next stage.
The relations of economic objects to the desires of nations and to war
are complex and not precisely what they may on the surface appear to
be. Nations, like individuals, do not know what they need, and they do
not even understand clearly what they desire. Their desires are
complex: elementary economic motives, political motives, personal
motives, the motives of industry and finance, the motive of power and
the craving for certain states of consciousness all exist together,
and to some extent antagonize one another. The present practical
desire is confused by the traditional object. The will of a nation is
a composite will, and its history is full of contradictory impulses,
and also full of surprises. Nations often think they are fighting for
economic reasons when their real motives are plainly to gain military
distinction. The reputation is quite as satisfying as any material
prosperity gained. There is an illusion and a delusion about it all.
All these economic advantages that nations are always seeking have
something unreal about them. Nations seek them long after they
represent real values. Nations seek colonies when, if business is what
they want, it could better be obtained nearer home. Finance looks for
advantages overseas, when there are quite as safe investments at home
paying quite as large profits. Nations have desires to do great
things, not merely to live and prosper.
That is the way these economic problems of war appear, at least when
they are examined in relation to other aspects of war and of society.
These economic problems are merged into and subordinate to the
political or the historical problems, and economic causes of war must
be considered with reference to the psychological principles that are
at the bottom of all social development.
CHAPTER X
POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS
We think of political causes of war mainly as an aspect of the fact
that nations desire always certain _geographical objectives_. These
desires are represented in part by the policies of governments and
leaders, but we must also think of nations as a whole as having
desires, and as being moved by profound purposes. At once the question
arises whether we shall think of these political objectives, and the
wars the desires for them cause, as essentially the objects and the
work of individuals. Do individuals in any real sense create history?
This, of course, is a profound question and involves fundamental
theories of history. Shall we accept the "great man" theory of
history, and say that history is mainly the work of a few who are able
to shape events with reference to policies of their own, or shall we
think that forces that determine history reside rather in the
instincts or desires of the common life of the people?
A psychological study of history inclines us to the belief that the
forces that make history are mainly forces that do not exist as
conscious purposes and are therefore not essentially political forces.
One of the conditions of leadership seems to be that the leader shall
seek his own personal ends and realize his own purposes for his
country only within the field of the traditional and common objectives
which are held by the people as a whole as their purpose in history.
These are the materials with which the leader must work. Historically
his work may seem decisive. Psychologically it is to be regarded as a
complex effect of lawfully related social reactions. The motives of
leader and people must have large common factors. The leader holds
his power and his prestige by embodying in his own will and
representing in his own conscious policies the will of the people and
their idea of country as an historic entity. The leader is leader only
in so far as he is recognized as representing the will of the "herd."
As genius, this leader is manifestly creative, but the true genius in
statesmanship is even rarer than genius elsewhere. The great leader is
an artist. He must take certain vague or clear ambitions of the
people, must accept the nation's historic objectives as the
foundations of his policies, and working with these objects and
desires make his own page of history. His glory and his prestige
depend upon his fulfilling deep desires of his people. The forces with
which he deals are plastic, but only within narrow limits. Leadership
at best is a fragile thing. However autocratic the power, it is after
all dependent upon the good will of the people, and the acceptance of
the leader as one who is serving the interests of the people.
When we consider the nature and the objects of the ambitions and
desires that the statesman or leader must fulfill, we see why the
relations of ruler to people are difficult to understand. Nations do
not know with clearness either what they desire or why at heart they
desire the objectives that seem of most importance. People give
economic and political reasons, but the consciousness of nations is
subject to deep moods, and is influenced by remote events and
traditions. Nations have generic desires as well as specific ones.
They always crave empire; they all desire to have rank. They are
always ambitious, jealous and watchful of one another. These general
and more or less subconscious desires make their desires for specific
objects intense, but they also make them peculiarly irrational. The
heroic examples of history, hereditary emotions and the effects of
specific events in the history of peoples complicate their politics,
and often make rational politics impossible. Nations will not act in
their own best interests, because they are governed by irrational
motives. In this way certain disparities are often produced between
the people and their practical statesmen, but history seems to show us
that when these disparities exist in the region of fundamental desires
and policies it is the leader who must yield. History seems to show us
also that wars, coming in general out of the deeper motives of
nations, do not belong to such an extent as is often supposed to the
realm of politics. Political causes are often incidental causes and
determine the time and place of wars but do not create them. Cramb
(66) says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there
is something transcendental that supports them, and this
transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers (75) says that
nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things. The
tangible things are existence, commerce, independence, territory;
nations also desire objects that are not useful, the worth of which
consists in their satisfaction of taste. The ambition to own colonies,
Powers thinks, is of this nature. Colonies are quite as much
ornamental as they are useful. They convey the feeling and impression
of power.
That these deep desires of nations as expressed in the ambition to
reach certain geographical objectives are exceedingly strong, often if
not always irrational, brutally arrogant and tenacious, the whole
course of history teaches us. These desires are indeed the forces
behind historical movements. They create politics and policies. War
preexists in these irrational purposes. These purposes are charged
with emotion, with prejudice, and tradition. It is with these motives
that all practical politics must contend, and these motives are the
forces that the statesman must use and make more rational.
The purposes of nations are usually if not always we say obscure and
deep, existing in the form of ideals and tendencies, and likely to
take the form of visions of empire wholly unrealizable. And yet there
are always certain perfectly clear objectives upon which all the
force of these half understood motives impinge. These objectives may
or may not be economically rational or morally justifiable. We always
know with certainty certain of these objectives for which any nation
will if necessary fight. These objectives have often a long history
behind them. They are surrounded by tradition, sincerely and even
religiously sought. They are ideal objects which nations feel they
have a right to possess. Every nation apparently believes itself the
logical possessor of something it does not now hold (99). All peoples
have their longings for these possessions, which are their vision of a
greater self. These objects are often desired for reasons that are
clear enough to all; but they are also often but the symbols of deeper
desires. As such, nations act toward them with almost instinctive
compulsion.
We may suppose that no great historical event is ever enacted that is
not determined more by traditional desires than by conscious politics.
A thousand years of strife have provided the motives for the great
European war. Memories of time-honored objectives have arisen in the
consciousness of many peoples, and these memories cannot be recalled
without exciting passions that make all rational politics unavailing.
Europe has been fighting over again her battles of the past, and at
the moment of the present writing is carrying them into the conference
of peace. The plans of statesmen and the intrigues of finance have but
little success in contending against these forces. Since the leaders
themselves are not free from the prejudices and the compulsion of
traditions and the unconscious desires and deep impulses which move
their people, they can with but dubious success bring international
politics into the sphere of reason. They do not represent merely the
selfish desires of their people. They are not merely spokesmen of the
interests of class or individual. They are embodiments of the whole
history of their nations.
All history, and all the present relations of nations to one another
may, of course, be considered in terms of the desires for specific
objectives caused by the imperial desires of peoples, these desires
themselves being regarded as a sum of motives, the effects of past
political relations, and containing both rational and irrational
elements. The world is a vast field of stress in which the powers at
work are national wills rather than political forces as the projects
of rulers and the diplomats. These powers, when fully aroused, are
quite beyond the control of statesmen acting in their ordinary
capacities, and their final issues no historian ought now to try to
predict. History has been full of surprises because of the nature of
the forces which create history, and these surprises seem to have been
sometimes the greatest for those who were most intimately concerned in
making history. Events seldom run smoothly according to well laid
plans.
It would not fall within the scope of a psychological study of war to
describe or analyze the complex system of strains that exist in the
world to-day, and to point out the conditions that led to the great
war would be for the most part unnecessary, since they must be obvious
to all. The main items in such a study of history, however, may well
be recalled to mind. One would need to show the effects of England's
irresistible development through several centuries; the struggle for
the control of the Mediterranean; Germany's efforts to extend her
empire toward the East, and the closing of doors against Germany's
advance; Russia's pressure upon the Teutonic peoples, the ancient and
terrible dread of Russia on the part of the nations of Western Europe,
the shadow under which Turkey, Germany, and England had lived because
of the presence of the great Slavic state, with its mysticism, its
dynastic ambitions and its great growth force, its need of open ports,
and vital interest in the amalgamation of the South Slavic peoples,
and the determination to own Constantinople and to succeed to the
place of the Turkish Empire. We should need to take into account the
long history of the struggle for colonies, the colonial trust of
Russia, England and France, the ambitions of France for empire in
Africa, the operations of French finance in the Balkans and elsewhere,
Austria's aggressive hatred of Serbia, and her effort to prevent the
revival of Poland, the conflicts of Germany and Austria with Italy in
regard to the Ægean and the Adriatic and their shores, the fierce
irredentism of Italy, and the ambitions of Italy that have brought her
into conflict with the Teutonic powers and with Turkey, all the
conflicting purposes and ambitions of Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, and
Serbia, and the added strain in the Balkans because of the vital
interests of all the Great Powers there, and many other conflicts and
causes of conflicts. These conflicts we see repeated in kind in the
relations of Japan, China and Russia and the other powers interested
in the geography of Asia, and in the waters of the Pacific, and once
more in the growing strains between the East and the West (99).
Taking our world as we find it, and viewing the nature of nations in
the light of their history and of their persistent antagonisms, one
might readily believe that the causes of war and war itself will
continue into a far future. No war, the pessimist might well argue,
will destroy national vitality or neutralize the many points of
strain. There may be great coalitions and even Leagues of Nations, but
these may only make wars more terrible when they come. The friendship
of nations will still be insecure and shifting. The great strategic
points of the world will remain. Small countries will continue to be
ambitious and jealous of one another. Island countries will still be
faced by coasts that contain possibilities of danger. The
Constantinoples and the Gibraltars will remain; Suez and Panama will
be left, and Verdun will still be something more than a historic
memory (99).
That these objectives might all be brought into a permanent state of
equilibrium, by some ideal world politics, that nations _ought_ to
abandon their ideas of empire or at least see how crude these ideas
are, how out of relation to our modern ideas of value, and how out of
place in a practical world--all this we can readily understand, but
who will expect nations to become very different from what they are
now, and who shall say how many imperial eggs there are in the world
yet to be hatched? There are many ways of justifying these
ambitions--Germany justifies hers by reason, and the researches of her
great historians--the Treitschkes and the Mommsens; Russia bases her
claims upon her religion and her ethos; Japan brings her divinity and
her traditions, her vitality and her intelligence; England offers her
justice and above all her proved genius for government as a
justification of empire. But after all, these desires for empire lie
deeper than proof and reason can go. Poetic, dramatic and religious
elements enter into them. There are geniuses among nations. The
creative force in a nation is its life force, its essence and its
reality. In some sense the desire to be an empire is the whole meaning
of a nation, for without the ambition to be supreme, peoples, some of
them, would be nothing. It is the vision of empire, however forlorn
and hopeless, that keeps many nations alive, perhaps all. Nations seek
to express in visible form the evidence of their inner and potential
greatness. The historic and time-honored art of empire-building is the
only art they know. Whether this is the tragedy of history, the
world's fate and the condemnation of it to perpetual warfare--or is
but a term in the logic by which nations rise to other and higher
forms; or finally is a crime or a mistake which it is within the power
of the will of man to abandon or amend--these are problems of the
philosophy of history.
_Historical Causes_
Historical causes of war are in part the sequences of events that the
political causes of war produce (political as the causes inherent in
the wills of nations), and we must suppose they are mainly this.
History, from this point of view, is the working out of the motives or
the desires contained in these national wills. The causes of our late
war, for example, are to be sought mainly in the wills of the great
powers that are concerned in it. Economic forces, the laws of the
growth of nations (both psychological and physical laws), the
conditions of the geographical distributions of peoples over the
earth--all these are involved in the cause of wars. There are also
great personages whose actions must to some extent be considered apart
from these general laws; these personages contribute factors to the
causation of any given war that are not entirely inherent in the laws
of growth or the psychology of nations. Shall we say also that there
are fortuitous factors, historical causes that are not contained in
any logic of human desires? Can we say, perhaps, that these fortuitous
causes are indeed the main causes--in a word that wars are not
desired, mainly, but are the product, indeed, either of the mere logic
of chance, or of a design that transcends human will altogether? Are
wars willed, or are they the results of the complex, the illogical and
uncontrollable factors of the world's existence and movement? These
may not be practical problems, but they are serious problems, since in
the end they implicate the whole of philosophy.
What place shall we give, in the laws of history, to the sudden and
chance turn of affairs; to the quick shift of the wheels of fortune;
to the incidents, the accidents, the mis-judgments of rulers and the
slips of the diplomats? Are wars after all a product of the logic of
life, or are they mere fortuitous syntheses of events which in their
particular combination make a total that is not involved, either as
desire or as tendency, in the sum of the particulars that enter into
the whole? How completely, in a word, do the interests and purposes of
nations determine wars? May we speak of motives that always tend to
produce wars, but never seem to will them?
History seems to show us that wars are less directly willed than we
have sometimes supposed, and perhaps that there is a large element of
chance in them as regards a given war at any time and in any place.
War in general is inherent in, or is a natural effect of, the laws of
development of nations. Wars as historical events are not completely
describable in terms of these laws. It is the old contrast between the
historical and the scientific explanation of things that appears here.
Nations have deep and vague desires, we say. They want satisfaction of
their honor; they crave a dramatic life, even military prestige and
glory, but we do not often find war itself definitely willed. The
desires of nations, we repeat, tend to be too fundamental to be
specific. Their specific desires are indeed and for that reason likely
to be contradictory. They desire both war and peace at the same time,
and have interests that may be served by both. They live in indecision
like individuals. Motives conflict. They hesitate, and doubt, and
fear. They shrink from taking the plunge. It requires the sharp and
clear event, the chance event, most often, to precipitate them into
wars. It is always to-morrow that they are to wage wars. So wars do
not usually occur by the rational plans and devices of any man or any
historical sequences of men, we may believe, and it is a question
whether wars are very often intended in a real sense by any one. Wars
occur as crises in events. The strains that produce them are certainly
inherent in the relations of nations at all times, and even in the
motives of personal politics, but in general these relations as
consciously governed relations are in the direction of seeking the
greatest advantage with the least show of force. The conditions must
all be present, both the match and the powder, before war can take
place. There must be a condition of strain, having certain
psychological features none of which can be missing, the condition
being something complex and not readily analyzable, at any given time.
In addition to these strains events must take place which, in all
their appearances, are fortuitous.
One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal
watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we
must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples
from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the
method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device
for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we
study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how
numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship
undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along
its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for
guides.
The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an
illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to
see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in
general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in
itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting
together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely
historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened,
or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no
further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an
island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have
been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could
have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of
individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken
place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision
slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three
emperors had had a little more reliable information about one
another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a
little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into
the sum--would the war have happened at all?
In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its
madness--and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to
think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of
individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as
a series but never planned or controlled as a whole, or we may resort
to the opposite way of thinking, and say that all of history, in every
particular and detail, is divinely planned and prearranged, and each
event fits into a rational whole. This, of course, is our final
problem of history, we say, as it is the final problem of every
question that considers life as concrete events having value precisely
as the particular sequence that it is--when we view life historically,
in a word, rather than by the methods of the quantitative sciences, or
by the genetic methods such as are used mainly in the psychological
sciences, and which we may say stand between history and the sciences
of matter.
CHAPTER XI
THE SYNTHESIS OF CAUSES
It appears to be no very difficult matter to discover causes of war,
and indeed a considerable number of causes. In fact the problem seems
to yield an embarrassment of riches, especially if our chief interest
happens to be a practical one, and we wish to find the causes of war
in order to see how they may be controlled. We might even have
discovered all the causes of war and still be as far as before from
any real understanding of the cause of war. Unless one can know the
relative importance of the causes, and the manner in which the causes
combine to produce wars; unless the results give in some way a
synthetic view of the causes of war, show _dominating_ causes, or
reveal a total cause which is not merely a summation of stimuli, but
is both a necessary and a sufficient situation for the production of
war; unless we have shown some fundamental cause and movement in the
social order, we are still left in search of the cause of war.
We have, indeed, found a number of causes of war, but at the same time
the causes have not appeared to exist as separate causes. We are
always catching sight of a movement in the development of nations and
of the world--of certain fundamental motives, the most basic of all,
the most general, being the motive of power. These causes of war do
not appear, however, to be of the nature of a _chain_, giving us the
impression that in order to break the habit of war, all we need do is
to discover the weakest link in the chain of causes, break the chain
there, and so interrupt the whole mechanism of war-making in the
world. Above all, although fortuitous events as causes of war must
not be overlooked, war is not continually being made anew by the
appearance again and again of accidental situations, which are thus to
be regarded as the cause of war.
War is, first of all, a natural expression of the social life, resting
primarily upon the fact of the existence, universally, of groups of
individuals acting as units. But here cause and effect are lost in one
another. Conflict cements the group, and the existence of the group,
again, is the cause of conflict. War is an aspect of the social
solidarity of the group acting under certain conditions, and these
conditions are the presence of deep desires that can, in general, be
satisfied only by the exertion of force on the part of communities
acting as wholes.
These primitive motives and moods of war that we find in the nature of
the social group itself, emerge finally in three aspects of the life
of nations, and it is these aspects of the life of nations that appear
to us as the causes of war. They are not separate and independent
features of the social life, and it is in part only for the sake of
convenience that they are sharply separated at all. They are all at
bottom manifestations of the motive of power that runs through all
history, and all the social and individual life. On one side this
motive appears in moods and impulses that we called the "intoxication"
moods and impulses. National honor was found to be another effect of
it. The political motives of war are its concrete expression. These
motives all together--all being but phases of a deep, powerful energy
and purpose, are the source of the main movement in history out of
which war comes. In this movement all the motives of the social life
are always present and active at the same time. The good and the bad
of national life are phases of a single purpose and are not two
contrasted principles or moments. The past is always contained in the
present.
War, then, is the result of certain motives which are fundamental to
the group life. It is a natural form in which, given a certain degree
of intelligence and of complexity of the social life, these motives
express themselves. All the motives and forms of expression are
present in germ at least from the beginning of the development of the
social life. Considering the whole history of war we see that it is a
part of a very complex movement in human society, and yet that no war
appears to be the final term of a process of inexorable logic. Taking
history as a whole, we see that the natural laws involved and the
nature of the social consciousness make a state of war from time to
time highly probable, but war is not a necessary consequence of any
natural law. Nations are self-conscious personalities. Perhaps in the
future they may change their ways, abandon voluntarily their desires,
subject themselves to discipline, or deliberately invent a plan of
international relations that will have the effect of eliminating war
from their lives altogether.
It is always dangerous, but at the same time it is always tempting to
try to explain national life, or all life and history, in terms of the
individual and his experience. Once more, however, we may yield to
that temptation and say that the world to-day is in a stage of
development which has many traits that show its relation in some very
significant ways to certain undeveloped conditions found in
individuals, which in fact always appear as phases of the life of all
individuals in some degree and form. Nations have acquired a high
degree of subjectivism, partly on account of the geographical
conditions under which they have lived, and the many barriers between
nations due to difference of origin and of language, and the
fundamental emotions of fear and jealousy which, as we have seen, play
so large a part in the life and conduct of groups. Nations, however
close to one another, have remained isolated in spirit; they have
lacked both the initiative and the means for becoming definitely
related to one another in purposive and sustained activities.
Therefore all their relations have remained highly emotional,
subjective, influenced by mysticism, filled with hatred and fear, hero
worship and illusion. Nations have lacked both the power, and we might
say, the organs, for externalizing their spirit. They have dreamed
dreams and played plays, and followed their illusions of empire. Even
their wars have not, until perhaps now, become wholly real and serious
in a measure commensurate with their powers and resources. The present
war more than any other, and more than any other event in history,
represents an escape on the part of nations from their subjectivism,
and a beginning, it may be, of the realization of a more mature, or
shall we say more _normal_ conception of the world. Nations have
played at being great and have really produced but little true
greatness. Now, let us say, their dream is over. We see that these
nations can no longer play. Their wooden weapons have at last been
turned to steel. They can fight no longer indeed without destroying
one another. They must now _live_ in practical and moral relations,
give up their bright dreams of empire after the old heroic order, and
be content to be imperial (if they are born to be imperial) by
performing distinguished service in the world, by their own genius of
leadership. There is work in the world for nations to do; there are
empires of the spirit, it may be, greater than have yet been dreamed
of in the nations' childish philosophies of life. The consciousness of
nations contains, it may be, unsuspected powers, suppressed in the
past by narrow nationalism, by fear, habit and convention. These
powers may now, if ever, blossom forth; they have been wasted too long
in patriotic feeling and in idle dreamery. They must now show what
they can do in a practical world that will have no more of mere
assertions.
The world stands to-day balanced between two ideals. Human spirit, the
spirit of nations, is a free and plastic force; it is also a sum of
motives and desires; but most fundamentally of all it is a growing,
living, creative and personal spirit. It still clings to its luxuries
of feeling, to its provincial life, it is still fascinated by its
beautiful romance of empire. On the other hand we see the stirring of
a new idea. A new world arises, less dramatic in its appeal than the
old world, but a world appealing by its practical problems both to the
will and to the intellect. Shall we yield to the fascination of the
old romance and go back to our hero worship; or shall we be inspired
now by this vision of a new and greater social order, create out of
our own powers of imagination the forms this world must assume if it
is to appeal to the deepest feelings of all peoples, and make this new
world real by our own intelligence and determination?
We stand to-day at a dramatic moment in history; a more dramatic
moment than when the victory itself hung in the balance. Perhaps our
sense of responsibility for the future is an illusion; perhaps we are
driven by an inexorable logic of history, and we do not after all
choose what our world shall be. But certainly the sense of human power
in the world has never been greater than now nor seemed better
justified; nor, if we are deceived, has the reality ever been more out
of harmony with the ambitions of man.
PART II
THE EDUCATIONAL FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONS
CHAPTER I
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF THE DAY
Education, like all other institutions, has been charged, we know,
with having contributed its share to the causes of the war. The
Prussian school system, we have been told, was mainly a school of war;
all the emotions and ideas necessary to produce morbid nationalism,
distorted views of history, and a belief in and a love of war were
there fostered and deliberately cultivated. There is, of course, some
truth in this; it is a truth that is deceiving, however, if we regard
it as at all indicating the true relation between education and
practical affairs. If the school was a factor in the late war, such a
creative effect of education appears to be rare in history. In general
it is the negative effect of the school that is most conspicuous. It
is what the school has not done to prevent war, what it has failed to
do in not bringing nations out of their perverted nationalism into a
life of more practical relationship with one another that really best
characterizes the school.
It is difficult or impossible for us now, of course, to perceive what
the war has done--in what way, all in all, the future will be
different from the past. It is very easy and natural to look at
everything dramatically now, see revolution everywhere and believe
that all institutions are now to be radically changed. Or, going to
the other extreme, we may become cynical, and say that, human nature
being unchangeable, we shall soon settle down into the old routine and
we shall see presently that nothing revolutionizing has transpired.
Some will say, and indeed are saying that education must now be
entirely remodeled; some will think that education had best go on as
before--that nothing has happened certainly to require any new
philosophy of the school, or any profound change in its form. We see
these two tendencies in many phases of our present situation: in
politics, in education, and in the business world.
It is impossible, we may repeat, to make wholly safe judgments now
about the future, but still something must in the meantime be done. We
must either stand still or go forward--or backward; we must act either
with a theory or without one. The school is involved in this
necessity. There is a new content of history that we cannot ignore,
but must in some way _teach_. We must say something about the war;
current events can hardly be kept out of the school, and to understand
current events there must be a wider content of history than we have
had in the past. There are new, or at least disturbed, conditions in
the industrial and in all the social life, and these conditions cannot
fail to have some effect upon the school. The school must adjust
itself to them, and it must surely take into account new needs that
have arisen. Patriotism may need to be taught now, or taught in a
different manner. There is a problem of war and peace, the question of
what ideals of national life we are to convey. Internationalism
demands some recognition on the part of the school. It seems probable,
therefore, and even necessary that a new interest in the function of
education will be felt and must be aroused. Must we not indeed now
examine once more all the foundations upon which our ideas about
education rest? Certainly there will never be a more favorable time,
or more reasons for such a task.
It is the impending internationalism, or the idea of internationalism
now so vividly put before us all, that most incites new thought about
education, and about all the means of controlling the ideas and
feelings of the people. We hear much about _re_construction and
_re_adjustment, and these terms obviously imply the old ways and the
old institutions. But internationalism is something new, having many
possibilities; it means new relations among peoples; it opens up new
practical fields and new phases of sociology and economics. It is
because of this new phase of the social life and social consciousness
of man, we might suppose, that education is most likely to be affected
in its foundations, so that no mere readjustment will be enough. A new
politics and a new science of nations appear, and we cannot fail to
see that there is at the present time something decidedly lacking in
education; that there is a larger life perhaps for which our present
ways of educating children would not sufficiently prepare, and that to
prepare for this larger life something more would be needed than an
added subject in the curriculum. This is because internationalism is
not simply more of something we have already; it is a turn in the
road, and a turn which, it can hardly be denied, will finally affect
all institutions. If internationalism has come to stay, it will need,
and it must have, powerful support from all educational forces. It
will need something more than support; education must produce creative
habits of mind, which shall make and nourish new relations in the
world, and it must make people intelligent, so that they can
understand what the new and larger relations mean and what must be
accomplished by them.
A casual observation of the educational situation might indicate that
education is limited in two ways, so far as being a means of meeting
our present needs is concerned. _It is lacking in power_; it treats
children and youths still in a fragmentary way, and the process of
learning is somewhat detached from the totality of living. There is a
lack of richness of content, and a lack of responsiveness in the
school to the stirring life outside the school. If we may say that
history now turns a new page, and that society stands at a change of
tide, education is also in a peculiar and interesting position. The
school may, from now on, if our view of it be at all just, be expected
to do one of two things: it may settle down to a relatively successful
work, in a limited sphere of usefulness, training children well,
especially fitting them to enter into our present social order; or, on
the other hand, the school may now become a much greater power, and
may seize hold upon fundamental things in life and society under the
stimulus of new conditions--find a way to a deeper philosophy, a more
consistent theory, attain a more exalted mood and higher purpose, and
become a far more potent factor in civilization.
That education will remain unaffected in profound ways by the war, is
difficult to believe. One may very readily, as we say, see these
impending changes in too dramatic a way, and begin to talk about
profound upheavals and ideals that certainly will never be realized (and
we ought to guard against this easy idealizing, which leaves human
nature out of the reckoning); still we cannot but feel that in some way
a new dimension has been added to the social life as a result of the
war, and that education, in dealing with this greater society, must
itself be raised to a higher power. If we think, educationally speaking,
in terms of a world at all, rather than in terms of individuals, or
communities, families and nations, we are quickly impressed by the sense
of living in a new order of educational problems, and possessing, it may
be, a new variety of self-consciousness. Nations in this new view are
thought of as parts of a world, as having many external relations,
whereas formerly almost all education has had reference at the most to
the internal life of nations. Patriotism has been the expression of its
most distant horizon.
If we believe that anything new is about to be realized in education,
it might seem natural to begin to think about changes from the
standpoint and in the terms of the old chapters and topics. We might
ask what this or that subject of the curriculum means or must produce
that it did not mean and did not produce before; or we might consider
the old and the new requirements in the education of the feelings, the
will, the intellect; or we might take any other of the educational
categories as a basis for a discussion of the philosophy of the
school. These programs, however, do not seem to be very inspiring.
Would it not be better now to try to distinguish the main fields of
life and the main interests in regard to which new questions and new
needs have arisen, and see what changes in our educational thought are
really demanded by them? On such a plan, internationalism itself would
first demand attention, and indeed most of all. In a sense all
questions about education must now be considered with reference to
internationalism in some way. Then there are the problems already
raised during the war and widely discussed, about the teaching of
patriotism. Patriotism becomes a new educational problem, a chapter in
our theory of education, in which we become conscious of ourselves in
a new way, and are aware of our larger field and changed conditions.
There are questions, too, about the teaching of the lessons of the
war, what we shall think about war in general as a good or an evil,
how we shall conceive peace and its values. Changes are taking place
in government, and in our ideas of government, and governments are
being put to new tests. Political education can hardly fail to be now
one of our most serious concerns. Democracy appears to be our great
word; the control and education of the democratic forces and the
democratic spirit becomes an urgent need. Industry acquires new
meanings; we must take up again all the theory of industrial
education, for we have seen of late that industry contains
possibilities of evil we did not before understand. Social problems
arise in changed forms. The new world-idea or world-consciousness
becomes an educational problem of the social life. Class difference
can never again be ignored as it has been in the past in the schools.
Moral, religious and æsthetic education seems to have a different
place in the school, just to the extent that all life has become more
serious on account of the war. These demands made upon the deepest
elements of the psychic life suggest the need once more of a new
philosophy of education, or, at the least, a greatly increased
recognition and application of the philosophy we already have.
Before the war there was a sense of security and the feeling that our
education was adequate to meet all demands. We were proud of our
educational system. Our democratic ideals, people said, were safe in
the hands of the public school. Industrial education was meeting
fairly well the needs of the industrial life. There were no very
pressing class problems. The troubles of capital and labor, although
always threatening, seemed to demand no educational interference. The
religious problem was temporarily not acute. Aesthetic forms had been
attended to in the curriculum sufficiently to meet the demands of the
day. Hygiene and physical education and individual attention seemed to
be making rapid advances. All of these had been influenced by the
scientific methods of treating educational questions. On the whole we
seemed to have a good school. But now the question must be asked
whether this school of yesterday will be adequate to meet the needs of
to-morrow; whether new conditions do not call for new thought, new
philosophy, new schools. These things of course cannot be had for the
asking. We cannot give orders to genius to produce them for us. But a
generation that does not hope for them, we might suspect of not having
realized what the war has cost. For so great a price paid have we not
a right to expect much in return, especially if we are willing to
regard the war as a lesson rather than as a debt to us, and bend all
our energies to make it count for a better civilization?
We may already see in a general way what the effect of the war is to be
upon the mind of the educator. The journals begin to be filled with
plans for the participation of the school in the work of
reconstruction. There are many suggestions for the improvement of the
school. Industrial education, the classics, history, military
education, social education are all being discussed. Evidently many
minds are at work. Some of them, indeed many of them, are apparently
most concerned about what changes we shall make at once in the day's
work of the school. Many wish to know what we are going to do now with
Latin, or history, and how we can improve the method of teaching in
this or that particular. But there are some deeper notes. Thinkers are
asking elementary questions about the whole of human nature. They wish
to know what the original nature of man is, and what the limits of our
control over human nature are. Such books as Hocking's "Human Nature
and its Re-making" and Russell's "Principles of Social Reconstruction,"
which grapple with the basic problems of human life, are signs of the
times. No one can yet predict what the final result of the increased
intellectual ardor that has come out of the war will be, but it seems
certain that that striving of the mind which has made the literature of
the war so remarkable a page in the history of the human spirit will
continue, and in the field of education as elsewhere in the practical
life there will be new vitality and earnestness.
CHAPTER II
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL
If we take a serious and an optimistic view of education as a social
institution, and think of it at all as standing in functional
relationships with the social life as a whole, we must conclude that
internationalism as a new movement and idea, and the school as an
institution in which changes in the social order are reflected (but in
which also changes in the social order are created) are closely
related. Adjustment is a relatively easy matter; it is the conception
of the school as a creative factor that challenges our best efforts.
Let us think of the school as a workshop in which there must be
created the forces by which we must make a desired and an otherwise
unrealizable future come to pass and we have a new and inspiring view
of education. The school perhaps must do even more than educate the
forces; it must help even to create the vision itself by which the
future is to be directed. _The school becomes, so to speak, the
working hypothesis of civilisation._ In it the ideas and the desires
by which nations live must be made to take shape.
The idea of internationalism implies certain changes in the external
relations of nations which, whatever the form internationalism will
take on its political side, are not difficult to perceive. These in
turn imply internal changes. We might readily outline or
psychologically analyze what could be called the mood of
internationalism, in order to see its relations to education. It
contains a number of factors, more or less related to one another.
_First_, there is a recognition of a world of growing, living
historical entities which we call nations; and this recognition
implies new understanding and an enrichment of knowledge. _Second_,
there is a change in the consciousness of nations, slow but visible,
by which they become more willing to investigate freely and fairly
their own place in history, understand their own desires, functions,
virtues, faults, the value of their culture and civilization. Without
such an attitude all talk of internationalism in any real sense is
idle. _Third_, there is a new and different practical interest. We
begin to conceive our world as a world of complex practical relations,
and this idea of a practical world is likely to become one of the
leading thoughts of the future. _Fourth_, by extending, so to speak,
this idea of a world of practical relations, we idealize a world in
which there is a common interest in great international
achievements,--a world devoted more than it is now to coördinated
efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a
distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency
as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes.
This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian
dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished.
_Fifth_, social and moral feelings are widened in scope, and must be
still further extended; it is in the form of the _democratic spirit_,
that these feelings must find expression. And this democratic spirit
is on one side practical, but it is also something more than the
emergence of the common mind; it is the _aristocratic idea carried out
universally_ that we look forward to, an enthusiasm for all true
values, a mood and activity in which all people participate. _Sixth_,
there is a necessary attitude toward world organization or world
government, according to which we think of world government or world
organization as a means of accomplishing results which fulfill
fundamental desires and purposes of the peoples of the earth; as a
growing structure, something to be added to and improved. _Seventh_,
if so general a tendency and demand may be made clear, there is a
philosophical mood, which must be made a part of the ideal and the
attitude of the future, _if that future is to realize even the
practical hopes of the world_. This philosophical attitude is first of
all a way of living comprehensively and more universally, in the world
both of facts and of ideas. It means a less provincial and a more
widely enriched life for all. It means also an ability to choose the
good not according to preconceptions and narrow principles, but
according to the wisdom contained in the experience and the selective
powers of mankind as a whole. This means a life in which men live, so
to speak, more collectively.
These factors of the idea of internationalism, whatever we may think
of the possibility of their realization, make in their totality an
educational problem: they are specifications, so to speak, laid before
us for the making of a new educational product. If we say that it is
useless to think of such things, we are saying merely that it is
useless to hope to be a factor in conscious evolution, or that the
world as a whole has no purpose and no goal. If we believe education
has any function in the larger work of the world, educational
philosophy must take these things into account, see how they may be
created or sustained, and how they can be made to work together to
help bring to pass the kind of future men are talking so much about.
_I. The Essential World Idea_
Our present situation has plainly made it necessary for us to
understand the world in which we live far better than we have in the
past, and to be willing to make more dispassionate judgments about it.
For better or for worse we have entered upon a new stage of history,
in which heavy responsibilities fall upon all peoples, and upon none
more than upon ourselves. Enlightenment beyond all our present
understanding is a necessity. We have been peculiarly isolated and
separated from the world's affairs; now we are peculiarly involved. We
have, however, one great and unusual advantage. In our case it is
ignorance rather than prejudice that we must overcome in ourselves.
The world feels this and recognizes the unusual place this gives us.
We have no thousand years of continuous strife to distort our
historical perspective. We out to be able to be just interpreters of
the history of the world. Our universities ought to be the greatest
centers of historical learning, and as a people we should feel
ourselves called upon above all other people to know the world.
As a nation we pass out of a local into a broader political field. We
become citizens of a world, but this world is no mere habitation of
individuals who are to be affiliated with one another. It is a world
of _national wills_. Internationalism is first of all a recognition of
the legitimate desires of nations. But such a recognition of the
legitimate desires of nations cannot be effected merely by spreading
abroad good will. A widespread education in the meaning of history
must first be made the foundation of international justice in the
minds of the people. Current history and future events seen in the
light of all history, of history as the science and story of all human
experience, become our chief intellectual interest to-day. The war has
taught us how little the people in the world know bout the world as a
whole. All history thus far has been _local_ history. Everywhere there
tends to be the prejudice in some degree that comes from the private
need of using history for political ends. Unless we can now put
history, real history, at the head of our sciences, the war will have
failed of a great result, whatever in particular, in a political way,
it may have accomplished.
With such an understanding of what is to be meant by history we say,
if that seems an adequate way of expressing it, that the teaching of
history becomes one of the fundamental problems of the educational
work of the day. It might be better to say that living in the
historical spirit is demanded as a way of salvation of the world.
However, adding geography and economics to history we have a content
that must somehow be taught in the schools. History, as the most
concrete science of the actual world in which we live, now seems to
have become a new center for the curriculum. Hitherto we have tended
to regard history too lightly, as the _story_ of the world; now there
must be a deeper view of it. We must have an understanding of the
motives and the desires of peoples; history must not only be broader
and more comprehensive but more penetrating and psychological. It is
the purposes of nations, working themselves out in their history, that
we must understand. There must no longer be great unknown places on
the earth. Germany, Russia, Japan must not continue to be mysteries.
National psychology must be made a part of historical interpretation.
This new history must be the means of showing us our world in a more
total view than we have thus far had of it, so that we may better
discern the continuity, if there be one, behind the detached movements
and multiplicity of facts presented by the world's story; for perhaps,
in this way, we should better understand what the future is to
produce, and what, more important still, it ought to be made to
produce.
The need first of all is for a continuation of the interest inspired
by the war--an interest showing itself in the form of an universal
interest in all history, and an intensive investigation of history. We
need now, indeed, the most comprehensive study of the world that has
ever been conceived or dreamed of by man. This is the duty of the
historians. This new history must show us what nations are at heart,
what they desire, what they can do. Such an understanding of nations
is, we say, the real beginning of internationalism. It is a necessary
foundation for it, if internationalism is to be anything more than a
merely practical, prudential or political arrangement among nations.
In the school-room eventually, and indeed beginning now, there is
demanded a readjustment of interest by which history takes a new and
more central place. We must endeavor to give the new generation a
_world-idea_. And upon the nature and clearness of this world-idea
much, in the future, will depend.
Such a demand upon the school opens once more, of course, all the old
problems of the teaching of history. All the dreary questions of the
precise order in which history should be taught--whether backwards or
forwards, local first or the reverse, may be brought up if one chooses
to do so. But after all, these questions are not very fruitful. What
we need most is the historical _spirit_. We want a dramatic
presentation of the world's whole story, by which the true meaning of
history is conveyed. The methods of art must be added to the methods
of fact. A persuasive use of the materials of history must be made.
This means a change finally, perhaps, not only in the methods of
teaching history, but in the whole mood and spirit of the school.
Methods are likely to adapt themselves to necessity. Certainly the
slow methods of presenting facts, sometimes if not generally employed,
the tedious lingering upon details, seems wholly out of place. We need
a broader outlook in history. Even the young child must have a more
comprehensive world-idea, some sense of the whole of the great world
in which he lives. This is one of the instances, it may be, in which
we must set about breaking up any recapitulatory order, natural to the
child, which suggests an advance from the local to the more general
and wider knowledge. The universal interests of the day so strongly
affect the child, the social consciousness so dominates the individual
consciousness that even the natural law of development must to some
extent yield if necessary. This social consciousness, the interests
and purposes expressed in the child's social environment, present the
experience of the adult world dramatically and intensively, exerting
as we might say, a creative power upon the mind. That indeed is
precisely what the higher teaching, whether in the form of art, or in
the form of vivid experience, conveyed though the practical life does
everywhere in education.
We do not yet know what history, taught thus dramatically and
intimately, under the stimulus of the greatest events of all time
might do for the mind of the child or for all the future of the world.
We have never had the most favorable conditions for the teaching of
universal history. We have been obliged to create interest. History
has been taught externally, from the standpoint of a far-away
observer. Now history may and must be taught more as it is lived. The
world has become more real to every one; this sense of reality of a
world of historical entities must be made to persist. We must not go
back to our unreal and intellectualized history. The spirit of the
nations must be made to live again, so to speak, in the minds of the
coming generation. What each nation stands for, its ethos, its
personality, must be made clear. Powers says that all governments and
all nations are _sincere_. It is the soul of nations, then, their own
realization of themselves that must be made the real object of
history. We must go back of the individual and the event at least, to
the desires that have made history what it is; we must see why events
have taken place, and while sacrificing nothing of our own principles
and standards, understand and feel what the principles and the nature
of these widely differing nations really are. For the actual teaching
of history, it is likely that the story, carried to its highest point
of art, will still be the chief method. But pictorial art must be
heavily drawn upon, and all the resources of symbolic art, as we pass
from the lower to the higher stages in education, or, we had perhaps
better say, as we try more and more to convey moods and the spirit of
nations and epochs and to appeal to the deep motives in the
subconscious life of the individual. Plainly there is much work to do
in the investigation and the teaching of history for every grade and
department of the educational system, from the government and the
higher universities to the teacher of the young child. It is an age of
history, a day in which all sciences have as one of their tasks to aid
in the understanding of history. In the broader world and the
universal life which the idea and the reality of internationalism has
opened up to us, all must live in some way, if only in imagination.
History is a part of the necessary equipment for that life.
_II. The Reëducation of National Desires_
The second factor in internationalism is also, on its educational
side, related to a knowledge of history. This is the attitude which
peoples must take toward their own purposes and ambitions. We must
begin to speak of the education of national consciousness. This
process of the education of nations must be such as will teach peoples
to surrender certain visions most of them have in regard to a future
which cannot now be realized. The content of the desires of nations
must now be changed. The future of many peoples will depend upon the
extent to which they can remain progressive and enthusiastic without
the stimulus of imperialistic ambitions.
Considering our own situation in America, it seems plain that we have
confronting us a serious educational problem, that of imparting to the
rising generation and of acquiring for ourselves, a better
understanding of the meaning and place of our country in the world,
and a more earnest interest in its functions and its welfare. This
requires something more than a teaching of American history. It is
time for us to take stock of all our material and all our spiritual
possessions. We need perhaps to discover what our ideals really are
and what the ideas and the forces are that have made our history what
it has been; and what in the future we are likely to do and to be, and
ought to do and be. We must question deeply at this time our own soul;
we must look to our institutions, our literature and our art for an
understanding of ourselves.
This more profound knowledge of ourselves must be made the basis of
our especial educational philosophy. Here is the most urgent of all
our educational problems. Education is, or should be, a process by
which national character is constantly being molded. In the school the
nation must learn much that cannot be read in books. It must learn to
believe things that cannot be proved, or perhaps even definitely
formulated as truth. The soul of the nation must be subjected, in a
word, to some kind of _spiritual leadership_. Constructive
statesmanship must be felt as an influence in the school. The problem
is really nothing less than that of educating and forming national
character. Now that we stand less alone as a nation our character
cannot safely be left so much to chance and to the effects of our
favorable environment and our original stock of virtues. We cannot
continue to be so naïve and so unconscious of our country as we have
been. What we are and what we must do as a people, we say, ought to be
better understood. We should bring these ideals of ours out of the
mists of partisan thinking and give them more definite shape, and at
the same time translate them into the language of sincere living.
National honor ought to be made a clearer idea. We ought at least to
be sure it contains the idea of honesty. Such prejudices as our
history has encouraged in us must be recognized, and computed in our
personal equation. These prejudices we certainly harbor--in regard to
our own particular type of government, our culture and education, our
freedom and our democracy and our security. Every nation appears to
have its own idols, its concealments and its self-deceptions, its
belief in its own supremacy and divine mission, and its innocent
faith in its own mores. To overcome such narrowness and perversion
without introducing worse faults is a difficult problem of education.
In either direction there appear to be real dangers. A nation steeped
in provincial ways, plunged as we are now into the midst of world
politics, has difficulties lying before it compared to which
contributing a decisive military power is small. There are dangers in
standing aloof from other peoples. But if we surrender too readily our
prejudices and homespun ways, and too rapidly absorb influences from
without, we shall be no safer, for carried too far, that would mean to
lose our mission and our vision. There appears to be, moreover, no
safe and easy middle course which we can follow. Our only course seems
to be clearly to understand ourselves, rise above our limitations and
difficulties, turn our faults into virtues, and make ourselves secure
by our own inner worth and power.
Plainly there are difficult problems ahead of the teachers of American
history. They must not inculcate suspicion and fear, but they must not
present our security in a false light. They must not inspire the
war-like spirit and imperialistic ambitions, but they must do nothing
to lessen our seriousness of purpose and enthusiasm for the future.
They must not teach national vanity, but they must not on the other
hand encourage a spirit which is in any way over-critical and cynical
or supercilious. There must be political wisdom on the part of the
people but not a sophisticated state of mind. These teachers must
inspire a wholesome pride, without creating an inflamed sense of honor
such as has caused so many wars. They must make clear the virtue and
the individuality of our own national life, but in doing this they
must not disparage the foreign and give rise to prejudice and
antagonism. How to establish us still more firmly in our own essential
traits and philosophy of life without making us conceited and closed
to good influences from without; how to give us a strong sense of
solidarity without the attendant sense of opposition to everything
outside the group is a part of our educational work which, in a broad
sense, falls to the teacher of history.
The central problem of the education of national consciousness, in our
view, is to make desires more conscious and to subject them to
discipline and the influence of the best ideals of American life.
MacCurdy says that by making instincts conscious we take a great step
in advance. That we should say is true, if we make them conscious in
the right way, and do not try to substitute rational principles for
them. But we need to go further; we must not only understand and
control the impulses of aggression, jealousy, fear and the like that
have played such a sinister part in history, but we must know more
about those complex and subtile things we call moods, which are really
the main forces in modern life. These moods are accumulations and
repositories of interests and desires, and they must be appreciated by
all who as educators, undertake to direct the forces in our national
life. These desires must be made more definitely conscious everywhere,
and be subjected to influence and education. It is not simply
institutions, organizations and factions that must be watched and
controlled, just because these are the more obvious and most easily
affected expressions of tendencies and desires, but all the subtile
feelings or moods which are the raw materials, so to speak, of future
conduct, ideals, and institutions.
Here comes to view, of course, our whole problem of assimilation of
heterogeneous elements. Favored by our geographical position, and by
the fortunate success and the great suggestive power of the ideal of
liberty with which our history began, America has had, as we all
realize, thus far an unusual career. We have been able to assimilate
foreign elements with great rapidity. We may not be so fortunate in
the future. Distances which have severed our new peoples from their
old ties have become strangely shortened by the war. Our problems of
adjustment have become more subtile and complex. The necessity of
succeeding in unifying our population is more urgent. Therefore our
future development, as a nation, becomes to a greater extent a process
of conscious direction; what we have done naïvely and by sheer force
of our powers of growth, we must do now, it is likely, more
deliberately and efficiently.
We have before us in America the highly important and by no means
easy task of harmonizing, under new conditions, all sorts of forces
and desires by directing them in ways and toward ends which cannot
now be wholly determined. There is both a psychological and a
pedagogical aspect of the situation. Psychology must perform for
American life something very much like a psycho-analysis; we should
expect to see as a result of the war a greatly increased interest, on
the part of the American people, in themselves; self-understanding
and self-interpretation, we should suppose, would be advanced; all
the sciences of human nature we should think would be called upon to
help us to make a new American history and to formulate the purposes
of our national life.
On the pedagogical side we might expect reasonably to see a deepened
sincerity on the part of all who in any way stand in the position of
teachers. We are dependent upon leaders in a democratic country, and
all leaders in whatever place in society would now, one might hope,
feel a heightened sense of duty, both to understand and to influence
American life, to represent in their own persons and teachings the
highest ideals, and indeed to become truly creative forces in
society. Boutroux says that Germany is a product of an external
phenomenon--_education_. America, we should say, must become more and
more a product of an internal phenomenon--_education_. That is, the
forces that will continue to shape our country must be in the form of
leadership growing out of the best impulses and the true meaning of
our civilization. No forces will make of us something we are not by
nature; our strength must continue to come from within, but it is the
aristocratic spirit, the aristocracy of genius in the fields of
intellect, morality and art that must of course have the fullest
opportunity to influence all our institutions, even the school room.
So to organize our educational system that it shall be thrown wide
open to all new and good influences; so to conduct the school that it
shall be immediately responsive to these influences, is one of the
most urgent needs of the internal life of the nation. This, rather
than the introduction of any new content into the school is now our
chief need. Some of these influences must be personal, belonging to
the present. Some belong to the past. We must make American history,
poetry, oratory, science, art and philosophy serve more completely
than they do now the ideals and the right ambitions of the nation.
This is the way we must both bring the past to fuller realization and
also create new life which shall make amends for the deficiencies of
the past.
_III. Practical Interests_
_The foundation of internationalism, in our view, is the recognition
of the legitimate desires and needs of peoples._ The desires of
peoples when educated should become interests in the performance of
all normal functions of national life. The functions are practical;
they take the form of many commonplace and daily activities. The
recognition of the legitimacy of the desires of nations implies, or at
least naturally leads to, coöperation in their accomplishment. It is
very probable, therefore, and it appears to be required in any
internationalism that is more than a name, that there shall be in the
future wide coöperation in the performance of various activities by
international organizations and agreements. If this is to be the order
of the future, new educational efforts will be demanded, and there
must be different methods and different points of view in several
phases of our educational system, for now all education is devised
with reference to an autonomous state of the nation.
If practical coöperation becomes a part of our plan of international
organization in the future, we shall see many problems in applied
economics and industry taken up for far more serious consideration
than has been possible hitherto. Some of these problems, attacked even
on a national scale, have seemed hopeless, but when viewed in their
international aspects and with a prospect of international interest
and effort they seem very different. There are many such problems
toward the solution of which education must contribute a large part.
We might mention the food problem of the world as typical, and point
to the present world-wide interest and coöperation as an indication of
what may come in the future in regard to all the problems of
production and distribution of necessities, _if_ we really mean
anything by our internationalism. Apparently we hold within our hands
the means of alleviating most, if not all, the destitution of the
world. Organization and education in efficiency are the necessary and
the sufficient weapons.
So we may conclude that an efficient method of educating peoples in
the work of food production, and in the habit of conserving
necessities would make a wide change in the economic condition of the
world. Organization which shall include in some way the service of all
children, will add still more to efficiency, and will contribute an
educational factor of great importance. In such ways we may to an
unlimited extent increase the available energies of the world, and
make possible, if we will, the further increase and expansion of the
human race. Such a possibility and such an ideal give a totally new
meaning to much of the fundamental work of education. All our
departments and accessories of the educational system that have
anything to do with the elemental occupations acquire a new interest
and importance from this point of view.
The whole field of industry offers now, indeed, a broader educational
opportunity. Children's hands are ready to do many things that will
increase the happiness and the powers of the children themselves and
at the same time add to the world's prosperity. Children must, of
course, not be exploited in tasks that belong to the adult, but there
is a proper place for practical organization of children in the
world's work, and a potential helpfulness in children in the larger
affairs of society that has not yet been drawn upon, although surely
we have seen, during the years of the war, what children might
accomplish. It is above all in its relations to universal social
feeling that such practical education and use of childhood are most
significant. Out of the practical activities, moral results could
hardly fail to come. It is not too much to expect that the children of
the world may sometime be so organized that the power of childish
enthusiasm, raised to we know not what degree by the suggestive force
of such world-wide relations as are now possible, may quickly be
turned to the accomplishment of great tasks,--doing its part in the
service, the conservation, the self denial, that any serious interest
in internationalism will in the future with but little doubt make
necessary.
Education that shall take into account the principles of efficiency
and economy as applied to universal problems will be a great advance
upon any teaching hitherto done in the interest of internationalism.
It is through practical activity and interest, suggesting and
requiring restraint and coöperation, arousing imagination and the
dramatic impulses, that fruitful and permanent social affiliations of
nations with one another will be likely to be made. We may safely
assume, in fact, that firm affiliations can be made _only_ in some
such way. Internationalism, from this point of view, is at bottom not
a political problem, but an educational problem. The world will be
united only through the mediation of its daily practical needs. The
motives for such union are themselves commonplace. Moral intentions
are represented also, and world crises make the conditions ripe for
such coördination of interests, but they do not alone produce the
definite organization without which the world will continue to be, as
Dickinson calls Europe, a society in the state of anarchy.
CHAPTER III
INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL (_continued_)
_IV. The Higher Industry_
It is in the higher forms of practical coöperative activity and in the
intellectual processes, the interests and social feelings accompanying
them that we should expect to see elaborated and made more ideal the
internationalism that has first been put to work in the service of the
world at a lower level. There is work to do that appeals to profound
motives and feelings. The great engineering projects that await us,
the work of exploring, colonizing and the like in which universal
interest and coöperation are necessary fascinate the mind. These
things satisfy the dramatic instinct, and they may prove to be in the
future an actual substitute for war, as James hoped. The educational
opportunities of this theme, at least, are great. Any nation that
expects to play a great part in the world's politics must expect to do
much in the world's service. These nations must be prepared in every
possible way to contribute greatly to the material improvement of the
earth. To this end technical education, all along the line, must be
kept at a high point of efficiency. Inventive thought in all
mechanical fields will certainly be a large factor in the culture
values of peoples in the future. When we see what four years of war
have accomplished in the way of giving us control over material
forces, we may realize what, with the continuation of a powerful
incentive, might be done in the arts of peace. These great practical
needs have also, as we say, their power of appeal to all the profound
motives of the social life. We must make use of this appeal. All the
power of the strong story of the day's work must be turned upon this
educational problem. All industry, indeed, must be made more dramatic,
as it can be under the inspiration of the larger industrial life which
the idea of internationalism opens up before us. Industry must be made
more satisfying to the fundamental motives of the individual, while at
the same time it is made more efficient, and more social. The new
generation must be filled with the romance of the world's work. Only
by presenting to young and plastic minds the ideal features of work
shall we be able to harmonize the individual and the social will. Only
so, perhaps, in an industrial age shall we be able to escape from
being destroyed by industrialism. Anything that will introduce art and
imagination into work, anything that will even brighten a little the
dull moods of toil will help both to prepare the way for the wider
world relations we talk about, and to prevent the most destructive
elements and moods of industrialism gaining the upper hand.
_V. The Democratic Spirit_
We must eventually think of internationalism on its educational side
as most fundamentally a question of developing in the world the
_international spirit_. We might quite naturally think of this as the
education of social feeling or of the social instinct. This is,
however, not the most productive attitude toward the situation, in our
view, simply because when we think of the education of the feelings we
are likely to be satisfied with the principles of an old static
philosophy of life and of the school. Moral and social feelings, we
believe, grow best in a practical medium. We cannot expand social
feeling at will, or produce a democratic spirit by some simple process
of education. When we try to extend social feeling too far we make the
moral life insincere. To try to expand social feeling and moral
interest so as to make it include the foreign, to try to love our
enemies in advance of all æsthetic and practical relations with the
foreign seems futile. Distance must first be eliminated by
imagination. Social and moral codes must be founded upon intimate
relations. External and distant relations among peoples make for
diplomatic forms and a hypocritical morality. These are substitutes
for social feeling. These purely social relations of nations (like
those of individuals) always hide enmity and jealousy. We cannot
expect, therefore, to create a moral spirit in the relations of
peoples to one another by teaching alone. We cannot hope to change
individualism to altruism merely by exciting feeling. Our main effort
must be directed toward establishing ethical relations, rather than to
stimulating moral sentiments.
It seems useless to preach universal brotherhood either to the child
who lacks entirely the content of experience to make such sentiments
real, or to the working masses who now lack enthusiasm in _all_ the
social relations. At least to depend upon such teaching to create
international spirit is futile. Love for mankind is too ideal and too
remote, as yet, to arouse deep and sincere impulses and feelings. All
teaching, therefore, whether in the school or elsewhere that is
directed exclusively or especially to the moral aspects of peace,
altruistic behavior and internationalism, seems to-day, to say the
least, peculiarly inadequate. Our spirit in education must be broadly
humanistic, and must indeed lay deep foundations for all moral and
social relations, but in so far as it ends in being cultural and
hortatory it can have no deep and lasting effect.
The teaching of international morality and universal interests, and
the development of a _world-consciousness_ depend fundamentally, we
may suppose, upon experiences which are perhaps not specifically moral
in form at all. It is rather even by the aesthetic experience than the
moral that the social consciousness will best be expanded and made to
encircle the world. If we can make the world seem vividly real to the
child we shall have the intellectual content for the making of moral
feelings. The unmoral nature of international relations and of the
feelings of peoples for one another are due in great part precisely to
the lack of power of imagination and of that concrete knowledge and
experience which would make the foreign seem real. That which is
remote from us and different in appearance seems shadowy and
ghost-like. The _internal meaning_ of that which is thus far away in
space cannot be perceived. Everything that is foreign tends to belong
in our categories merely to the world of objects. Moral feeling
towards objects is manifestly impossible. International law fails to
have moral force because nations are in general aware of one another
only in these external ways. The world of foreign objects must be
changed to a world of persons having history and internal meaning.
When we can interpret and understand international law in terms of
relations within human experience and as affecting individuals, it
will begin perhaps to seem real and hence morally obligatory.
There is another aspect of the work of creating and directing the wider
social consciousness and giving it ethical purpose and form, which is
still more fundamental, and at the same time, to casual thought,
perhaps still more remote from definite moral improvement in the world
and from all the immediately practical problems of internationalism. It
is the mood of our social life which we call the democratic spirit, and
which, made universal, is the substratum of internationalism that most
of all needs to be controlled and educated. At the same time this
democratic spirit is least of all susceptible to definite and routine
discipline, of all the factors of internationalism. This democratic
spirit contains possibilities of the greatest good and of the greatest
evil. Out of it may grow international order, or international anarchy
and internal disruption. How to keep this democratic spirit progressive
and constructive in its temper, broad in sympathy and full of
enthusiasm, how to free it from infection by all the poisons that are
prone to attack the popular consciousness is one of our great problems
of education.
This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It
is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life,
that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side
the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a
surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a mass interest in
rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses
that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their
origin in the city. The city represents, with all its evil, the higher
life and the line of progress. Progress passes through the city. The
city is the symbol of creativeness and achievement. Industrialism, the
essential spirit of the city, is the condition, normal and necessary
we must conclude, out of which the necessity of international order
arises. It is a phase of the process by which nations become dependent
upon one another by being specialized and becoming densely populated.
It is also a factor in the cause of wars without and revolutions
within.
The mood of the city is thus in a sense the essence of life, but it is
also the source of disease and death in the national life. It is the
price that is paid for civilization that the city tends to become the
hardened artery of national life. The control of the city moods by
educational forces we may believe is one of the most fundamental of
all the problems of conscious evolution. It is the control at the
fountain-head of the forces out of which internationalism is to be
made that we undertake when we try to educate the life of the city,
with reference to its good and its evil. The too rapid urbanizing of
the life of nations, the production, in the cities, of powers too
great and too rapidly growing to be controlled by the civilizing
forces in a country is the great danger in modern life. So great
indeed are the dangers in the accelerated growth of industrialism in
all the great countries and the increased specialization in the
industrial life, that something radical must be done, in our view, to
counterbalance this movement, and especially to control and to raise
to higher levels the psychic factors of city life.
Our educational work is serious. We are trying to save democracy from
itself--from being destroyed by forces which accumulate in the cities.
We must keep life from becoming sophisticated before its time. We must
prevent enthusiasm from degenerating into mob spirit, and from
becoming attached to wholly material interests. _There must be found,
in some way, means of causing counter-currents to set in against the
tide that flows so strongly from country to city._ Germany's fate
should teach us the dangers of this city life, and show us how the
forces that gather in the great cities can be turned in the direction
either of fanatical nationalism or toward the lowest of all forms of
internationalism, in which all form of government is thrown down. It
must teach us also how to catch the note of new "dominants" that are
concealed in the roar of city life, and to make these prevail.
The control of the formation of the city moods, and the direction and
utilization of the great energies contained in them, now require, if
ever anything were demanded of conscious creative effort, _more power
on the part of all our educational factors_. The school appears now to
be at the parting of the ways, we say, when it must either settle down
to its routine and limited occupation of preparing children for life,
or become a far greater power in the world than it has as yet been. We
must decide whether the school is to control, or to be controlled by,
the political and industrial forces of the day. We must see whether
the school is going to reflect the culture and the moods of the
environment, or whether the school shall exert a creative influence
upon its surroundings.
It is plain that nothing less than a radical change in the school can
now greatly alter its position, and release it from its bondage to
politics and from the overwhelming influences of its environment, and
prevent the leveling downward and the stereotyping process that is
taking place in the school, both as regards its intellectual and moral
product and the training and selection of teachers. Nothing less than
a movement which shall break up some of the deepest and most firmly
rooted habits and conventions of the school and throw the school back,
so to speak, upon more generic and primitive motives than those that
now control it will be sufficient. _The school needs more than
anything else a change of scene_--a change of _venue_, if a legal term
be allowed. The school everywhere, but especially the school of the
city, is surrounded by influences that prejudice it to fixed habits of
thought and keep it true to a type which has long since ceased to be
necessary. The school is causing an in-breeding of the city spirit in
all the great industrial countries.
No single change in any institution, in our view, could strike closer
to the roots of our whole educational problem of the future than the
bodily transfer of the city school far out into the open country. Such
a move seems wholly practicable, economic from every point of view,
even the financial, and it would place the school in a position in
which profound changes in its whole plan and organization could hardly
fail to follow almost automatically. With our present facilities for
transportation, the daily exodus of children from the surroundings in
which are being produced the elements of our civilization that are
hardest to control would be entirely possible. The effects upon the
whole of education, and upon all the future life of countries like our
own could hardly fail to be profound. _The fundamental moods of
childhood would be changed, and everything contained in child life
would be more amenable to control._ Schools would become more variable
and more experimental, and new selective influences would be exerted
upon teachers presumably in the direction of raising the social and
intellectual average of the profession. A much larger field would be
opened up for all those methods of work in education that may be
designated as æsthetic--that is, that contain qualities of freedom,
activity and creativeness.
_VI. Idea of World Organization_
Some form of organization of nations having definite representation,
constitution, and laws, and with a certain degree of centralization
and embodiment in visible institutions and locations will exist, we
may suppose, for all future time in the world. The existence, even in
idea, of such organization presents to us inevitable educational
problems. Instruction in a general way and universally in world
politics, familiarizing all with the meaning of these laws and
political bodies, is but a part, although a necessary part, of the
work. Our democratic principle demands that more and more interest and
participation in all forms of government be acquired by the people,
that peoples and not merely governments shall be the units which are
brought together, that there be more organizations of the people
performing group functions. If the loyalty of nations to one another
is to be secured, as seems necessary, by establishing practical
relations among them, the education of the coming generations in these
relations and organizations and in all practical affairs seems
unavoidable. The people must have a proper appreciation of common
interests as implying common work, and not be encouraged to believe
that rights of representation are their chief concern. All must know
the power of organization. All must see that the international
structures of our own day, however complete in form, are but a
beginning and basis of function, and that there must be put behind
these forms all the energies of the people, young and old, made
effective through organization for practical efforts.
It is through participation in activities that are international in
scope that, in our opinion, the best education in the idea of
internationalism will be obtained. This is the way to the good will
without which political ideas will be likely to remain nationalistic
in fact whatever political coördinations may exist among nations. It
is as a practical idea that internationalism needs now to be impressed
upon the minds of all. An international organization must be looked
upon as something useful, which will remain only if it performs
functions in which all are interested and in which all can in some way
take part. _It is a sense of living in the world_ rather than of
belonging exclusively to one locality that must be taught. It is the
idea of a world of nations in organic unity rather than a world of
nations attached to one another by political bonds that we need to
convey.
It is active participation in the business of a world that must be
regarded as the necessary basis for education in the idea of
internationalism. World government must be conceived in terms of world
functions. But we must also provide for the most dramatic possible
representation of everything contained in the idea of internationalism
and represented in its laws and forms. The most vivid possible
presentation must be made of everything that is done internationally,
if we wish to keep alive the spirit which now prevails in the world.
We must lose no opportunity to make current history impressive; we
must bring out all its dramatic features in order to fixate once for
all the idea of the organic unity of the race, and its necessary
coördination in tangible forms. International law must be made
intelligible to very young minds, and now that we are to have an
international seat of congresses and courts the utmost must be made
of its existence to give reality to the idea of internationalism.
Those who plan for the future of the international idea will do well
to take into account these pedagogical aspects of it. _It is quite as
important to make the international idea pedagogically persuasive as
to make it politically sound._ Such an idea must have a place and an
embodiment if it is to seize hold upon the popular mind. An
international city seems indispensable, and the further the thought of
it can be removed from that of existing countries the more readily
will it aid the young mind in making the abstractions necessary to
conceive the true interests of all nations or all humanity as distinct
from the interests of one nation. In this we are making beginnings to
be realized perhaps in a far distant future. We want no unnatural and
sentimental internationalism, but there is every reason now for
wishing to plant the seed of a higher and more organic life than at
the present time exists in the world.
The question of the possibility of an universal language arises again.
The invention of a new language, if we may judge at all by the past,
is not practicable. But the extension universally of some living
language seems possible. This seems to be demanded in the interest of
the international idea. It is desirable and quite possible to make all
civilized peoples bilingual, for of course we should not expect
anywhere to see a foreign language supplant the native tongue. It is
not alone to facilitate intercourse and give a sense of solidarity
that the possession of an universal language is to be desired. We
think quite as much of the impetus thus given to the production of an
universal literature, in which there will be expressed not only ideas
about the world, but moods which will not be found expressed in
national literatures at all. This literature might be the beginning of
a solidarity in the world which is not now definitely conceivable.
Such an extension of language, however, we should hardly expect to
take place except in the course of development of practical relations
which first stimulate the desire for such common language.
_VII. The Philosophical Attitude_
There is an element in the idea and mood of internationalism which we
can call nothing else but philosophic. The ideality and universality
of internationalism itself are expressions of the philosophic spirit.
Internationalism, we might say, is a philosophic idea, although this
might mean to some that we place it among the unrealizable and Utopian
plans. But this is not the case. The philosophic spirit is, in our
view, the most practical of moods, since it is the creative, liberal,
and progressive attitude and the source of the most profoundly right
judgments even in practical affairs. The philosophic spirit is a
background, we may say, for all the more specific moods, thoughts and
activities that enter into the idea of internationalism.
And yet, real and important as the philosophic spirit is, we cannot
readily discuss it as a definite aspect of education. The reason is
that it involves the educational foundations themselves. The spirit,
the method and the content of the school are all involved in it. We
can, however, find some concrete manifestations of this philosophic
attitude. In the first place we might say that it is a religious mood
in education. It is demanded of any school that hopes to play a large
part in the affairs of the world that, in a broad sense, its whole
spirit be _religious_. The school must be deeply touched by the sense
of a spiritual world. The history of the world must be felt to be
real--that is, as an unfoldment of purpose in the world. The values
and the meaning of everything are to be appreciated and understood,
according to this view, through a process of enrichment of the mind
under the influence of the highest social ideals expressed in the most
persuasive forms. Education thus centers in the work of developing the
power to appreciate values in all experience. Anything, too, that
sustains optimistic moods helps to create the philosophical spirit,
and one function of this philosophic spirit is to forestall the
cynical moods and the narrow and prejudiced ways of thinking which are
among the most dangerous tendencies of the times. The tendency to form
judgments upon insufficient evidence and to act according to narrow
and one-sided principles is incompatible with the philosophic
attitude.
It is of course by no means the actual teaching of philosophy to every
one, or the spreading broadcast of any particular philosophical
principle that one would advocate as a preventive culture or to cure
existing evils. It is rather a mode of living and of thinking
throughout society and in all the educational process that is wanted.
What we need is a better quality of mental product, more capacity to
penetrate into the heart and substance of experience, greater
responsiveness to good influences, greater ability to judge values,
and a more plastic and more freely flowing mental life. These are of
course large demands and imply faith and an interest in a remote
future. _But a school which is religions through and through in its
attitude toward life and is deeply touched by the influence of art in
all its ways of dealing with the child will go a long way toward
fulfilling the requirements of an education in the spirit of
philosophy._
Such conclusions as these might at least serve, we should suppose, as
a working hypothesis, upon the basis of which we may consider in
detail a variety of questions of the day. New problems have arisen
before the eyes of the teacher, and indeed obtrude themselves upon all
who must take part in the practical life of others. Some of these
problems are due to changed external relations of countries to one
another. Some are problems of internal adjustment and reconstruction.
At least they may so be classified for purposes of discussion. In
reality all changes are too closely bound up with one another to allow
us to treat them practically as independent. No nation any longer
stands alone. Internationalism is an idea that penetrates all other
practical ideas. And no internal problems of any nation can be wholly
local. The world is in a peculiar but also an inspiring way at the
present time a single field of labor for the educational thinker and
indeed the teacher in every field of human life.
CHAPTER IV
PEACE AND MILITARISM
Among the many pedagogical questions raised and given new significance
by the war, is that of the teaching about war and about peace. This is
a question of ideals, and of values and the teaching of history. There
are practical and superficial questions to be considered. There are
also more profound problems, since all our teaching of good and evil
is implicated. Shall we continue, in one moment, to assume that war is
the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the
greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of
pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is
really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly
it begins to disturb us, as unimportant. No one passing through the
experiences of the past four years can have wholly escaped this
dilemma, or can have kept himself entirely aloof from the doubts and
perplexities that must always be attached to religious and
philosophical problems of good and evil. These doubts and hesitations
are necessarily increased when we try to become consistent teachers
and wise counselors of the young.
It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the
arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and
evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The
writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong
militarists. They do not try to strike a balance between good and
evil, but war is either a great blessing upon mankind or the greatest
curse of the ages. In general they do not seek to base their
conclusions upon ultimate philosophical principles, but rather upon
moral or biological principles, or, again, upon preferences for the
activities of war or the arts of peace. How very different the good
and evil of war and peace may seem from different points of view is
well shown by the following excerpt from a daily newspaper:
A DEADLY PARALLEL
THIS IS THE WAY GERMANY TALKS | THIS IS WHAT THE SCOUT
TO YOUNG BOYS OF SCOUT AGE | ORGANIZATION TEACHES AMERICAN
| BOYS
|
| From the "Handbook for Boys,"
| 17th edition, page 454.
|
"War is the noblest and | "The movement is one for
holiest expression of human | efficiency and patriotism. It
activity. For us, too, the | does not try to make soldiers
glad great hour of battle | of boy scouts, but to make
will strike. Still and deep | boys who will turn out as men
in the German heart must live | to be fine citizens, and who
the joy of battle and the | will if their country needs
longing for it. Let us | them make better soldiers for
ridicule to the utmost the | having been scouts. No one
old women in breeches who | can be a good American unless
fear war and deplore it as | he is a good citizen, and
cruel and revolting. No; war | every boy ought to train
is beautiful. Its august | himself so that as a man he
sublimity elevates the human | will be able to do his full
heart beyond the earthly and | duty to the community. I want
the common. In the cloud | to see the boy scouts not
palace above sit the heroes, | merely utter fine sentiments,
Frederick the Great and | but act on them, not merely
Blucher and all the men of | sing 'My Country, 'Tis of
action--the Great Emperor, | Thee,' but act in a way that
Moltke, Roon, Bismarck are | will give them a country to
there as well, but not the | be proud of. No man is a good
old women who would take away | citizen unless he so acts as
our joy in war. When here on | to show that he actually uses
earth a battle is won by | the Ten Commandments, and
German arms and the faithful | translates the Golden Rule
dead ascend to Heaven, a | into his life conduct--and I
Potsdam lance corporal will | don't mean by this
call the guard to the door | exceptional cases under
and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick | spectacular circumstances,
the Great), springing from | but I mean applying the Ten
his golden throne, will give | Commandments and the Golden
the command to present arms. | Rule in the ordinary affairs
That is the Heaven of Young | of everyday life. I hope the
Germany. | boy scouts will practice
| truth and square dealing and
"Because only in war all the | courage and honesty, so that
virtues which militarism | when as young men they begin
regards highly are given a | taking a part not only in
chance to unfold, because | earning their own livelihood,
only in war the truly heroic | but in governing the
comes into play, for the | community, they may be able
realization of which on earth | to show in practical fashion
militarism is above all | their insistence upon the
concerned; therefore, it | great truth that the eighth
seems to us who are filled | and ninth commandments are
with the spirit of militarism | directly related to everyday
that war is a holy thing, the | life, not only between men as
holiest on earth, and this | such in their private
high estimate of war in its | relations, but between men
turn makes an essential | and the government of which
ingredient of the military | they are a part. Indeed, the
spirit. There is nothing that | boys, even while only boys,
trades-people complain of so | can have a very real effect
much as that we regard it as | upon the conduct of the
holy." | grown-up members of the
| community, for decency and
| square dealing are just as
| contagious as vice and
| corruption."
The praise of war takes many forms, and invokes many fundamental
principles--ethical, æsthetic, biological, sociological. From
Leibnitz' saying that perpetual peace is a motto fit only for a
graveyard to Moltke's that peace is only a dream and not even a
beautiful dream, there is a long list of defenses of war. This
philosophy of war is by no means peculiarly German, although German
writers seem to have been the most ardent apologists of war in recent
times. Treitschke, Schmitz (29), Scheler (77), Nusbaum (86), Arndt,
Steinmetz, Lasson, Engelbrecht, Schoonmaker, all sing the praises of
war as the most glorious work of man, or as performing for
civilization some noble good. Even Hegel said that wars invigorate
humanity just as the storm preserves the sea from putrescence.
But this praise of war, we say, is by no means exclusively German.
Thucydides thought war a noble school of heroism, the exercise ground
of the nations. To Mohammed and his Arabs war seemed not only in
itself a heroism, we are told, but a divine act. This belief in war as
divine is an idea that is very wide-spread among primitive peoples.
Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate
that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you
may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a
mockery. Redier says that the war has brought us all the noble joys so
necessary to stimulate mankind, and one no longer finds happiness,
therefore, in sleeping comfortably, but only in living bravely.
There is no lack, indeed, of recognition of the heroic motive in war.
Sometimes the argument appeals to religion, sometimes to art,
sometimes to morality. Sometimes the advocates of war are thinking of
war as the great adventure. War and the thought of war induce an
ecstasy, a glow of the feelings. War is thought of as an expression of
normal, healthy life, as making life more abundant and more beautiful.
War brings out fundamental virtues in the individual; it also destroys
the weaker and the meaner race and leaves the strong and the virtuous.
Struggle, they say, is the method of civilization. Again, it is urged
that war is always just in its issues. Like the old ordeal which
always registered the decrees of heaven, war is the just arbiter of
fate. The saving of the world through bloodshed, the uniting of the
world through war, war as the great teacher of mankind, war as the
creator of great personalities--all these are persistent themes in the
literature of war. There is no place for the pacifist in the minds of
these apologists of the heroic order. The crises of war are historic
necessities; they come when it is time to release people from the
bondage of the past and to bring individualistic generations back to
the sense of duty and of loyalty to great causes. This is the belief
of many, even now.
On the other side we find the great variety of pacifistic minds. War
to the pacifists is wrong, unholy, morally sinful, biologically and
economically and in every other way evil. The conscientious objector's
point of view is very simple. War antagonizes some principle which is
religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no
justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any
price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to
commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of
this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds
of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask
them to go.
The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less
emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker
undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the
cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and
produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects
unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many,
among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in
which he calls war _dysgenic_. The psychologist tends to see in war a
reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original
savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say.
War lingers because of man's love of old institutions. We cling to old
habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the æsthetic, because
of their antiquity and old associations. This is the explanation by
Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and
despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery.
MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.
Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer
senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational
desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil. The working man
and all the masses are likely to concur in this opinion. When they
examine war they see that they themselves as they think are used in
the interest of the few, that they shed their blood for a glory in
which they do not share. They say, all men are brothers, and so why
should they kill one another. Men seem more real to them than do
boundaries of countries which they never see, and the interests of
wealth that is also invisible.
Such thought as this has behind it some of the most powerful minds, as
we know. It is Tolstoi's philosophy, and it is the argument of such
men as Novicow. The professional economist and the student of history
add their protests. They say that military peoples fade away, while
the peaceful live and prosper, that "the country whose military power
is irresistible is doomed." These are the words of Roberts. Some try
to demonstrate that nothing is gained economically by war; that all
the work of war is destructive, to every one engaged in it. It is
argued that the nation that is suited to live will prevail without
wars; and that without this inner superiority, war will avail nothing.
War is bad business, in the opinion of these economic thinkers. War is
like setting the dog on the customer at the door, the practical man in
England complained at the beginning of the present war. As to war
being associated with intelligence and with virtue in nations, or as
to its ever producing either intellectual or moral qualities, many
would flatly deny that war ever has such a result. The opposite would
seem nearer the truth to them. Military nations are unintelligent
nations, and militarism is always brutalizing.
Such pacifism and the dream of universal peace are no new ideas in the
world. Like the philosophy of war pacifism has a long history. There
have been pacifists everywhere and presumably at all times, since
pacifism is quite as much a temperament as it is an idea or a
philosophy. Cramb tells us that all recent centuries have had their
doctrines of pacifism, each century having its own characteristic
variety. In the time of the Marlborough wars, there appeared the book
of Abbé de St. Pierre denouncing all wars. In the middle of the
nineteenth century there is the doctrine of the Manchester school,
maintaining that the peace of Europe must be secured not by religion,
but by the coöperation of the industrial forces of the continent.
Finally, says Cramb, we see the characteristic thought of the
twentieth century in the position that war is bad because it is
contrary to social well-being and is economically profitless, alike to
the victor and the vanquished. This is the pacifism of the socialist
who holds that the ties of common labor and economic state are
fundamental, and divisions into nationality are secondary and
unimportant; and that militarism belongs to the pernicious state of
society which perpetuates capitalism and privilege and to government
as a function of the favored classes.
This is certainly not the place to try to put order into this
conflicting mass of opinion about war and peace by working out the
principles of a philosophy of good and evil, since this would mean to
attack one of the most fundamental of all problems of philosophy. It
seems to be plain, however, that neither upon biological grounds nor
by ethical principles, nor by finding any consensus in the desires and
opinions of thinkers can we reach any hard and fast conclusions about
the good and evil of war. It is rather by a broad interpretation of
the world and of history and the nature of national consciousness, by
some genetic view of national life, that we are most likely to see our
way toward a practical view of the present good and evil of war. War
is a phase of the whole process of social development of nations. We
think of nations as living and growing, and of a world which is
gradually maturing. War obtains a natural explanation on sociological
and psychological principles, not as a disease, but as a natural
consequence and condition of the formation of nations, or of any type
of horde or group. In the course of the development of nations we see
psychological factors coming more and more to the front. Desires which
are more or less consciously avowed become the motives of history. It
is in the play of these desires: their fixation, their generalization,
and transformation, the manner in which they become attached to
specific objects, that we seek the explanation of wars and of the
especial psychology of nations. Nations have lived secluded and
guarded lives, because of the nature of the desires which were most
fundamental in their lives, and the objects upon which these desires
have become directed. Now nations show some signs of emerging from
their seclusion, of abandoning their ambitions of empire, and leading
a more complex and more practical life.
In this progress we see the possibility of the final disappearance of
war. But we have no right to pervert either history or education in
the effort to eliminate war, or even to pass judgments upon war
prematurely or upon the basis of personal preferences, or the moods of
any moment. The whole world might, conceivably, be brought together
and be made to declare solemnly that there should be no more war.
Nations would thereby voluntarily relinquish their aggressive
thoughts, put aside the love they have for the heroic and take justice
and peace as their watchwords. And all this would seem ideal. But if
the elimination of war should mean that we have no longer anything for
which men are willing to die, if merely to escape from war we
voluntarily sacrifice good that more than counterbalances the evil we
overcome, we should say that peace had been bought at too high a
price. _Terrible as war is, it cannot be judged by itself alone._ We
have a right to look forward to a time when there shall be no more
war, just as everywhere it seems to be instinctive for us to try to
gain good without its attendant trouble and evil. In the meantime the
world had best busy itself, mainly, in our view, with creating those
things that are best, rather than in destroying those things that are
worst. Nations, like individuals, must lead bravely hazardous lives,
without too much thought of dangers. Peace as a sole program for the
making of history appears to be too narrow, and especially too
unproductive. Internationalism that is merely a combination of peoples
to prevent war is not very inspiring, especially since it is doubtful
whether it even leads to peace. A broad historical view that will
enable us just now to make good come out of the evil of war will be a
better organ of conscious evolution than a philosophy of peace can
possibly be.
Such views as these give us at least some clews to the educational and
pedagogical problems of war and peace. We can distinguish between an
education which deals specifically with such problems, endeavoring to
treat them sharply and with finality, making clear moral decisions,
and an education which by enriching the mind and by educating all the
selective faculties leads to an appreciation of all great practical
and moral questions as aspects of the whole of history and of life.
Let us see what the specific teaching of peace may and may not
include. First of all we cannot, for educational purposes, judge
everything in the lives of nations by _moral_ principles. The ideal of
universal brotherhood and coöperation, of sacrifice and altruism,
cannot be realized in the present stage of history. On the other hand,
the stern picture of justice is one that fits into the present mood of
the world. Justice is the natural link between individualism and
altruism. A world determined upon seeing justice done, a world which,
without setting absolute values upon peace and war, does distinguish
between just and unjust wars, between the demands and the needs of
peoples, leans toward the moral life. It has little to say about
duties as yet, or comparatively little, but it has a strong conception
of rights. A deep enough interest in justice, by its own momentum,
introduces duties into the practical life. In time the world will
perhaps not be satisfied with seeing and recognizing justice, and
ensuring it in great crises; it will make justice as a matter of
course.
This idea of justice seems, on the whole, to be the best basis for the
teaching now of international morality. The teaching of pacifism,
enlarging upon the biological waste of war, trying to present the
realism of war in its worst light in order to overcome the warlike
spirit and to assist the doctrines of internationalism to take effect
upon the mind seems to be the wrong way of teaching peace. We seem to
be obligated to teach war as it is. We cannot conceal its heroic side
for fear of perpetuating war, and we must not conceal the brutality of
war for fear of destroying morale and the fighting spirit. And it is
to be much doubted whether it is _ever_ necessary to teach history
unfairly and one-sidedly in times either of war or of peace. We depend
upon larger effects and deeper judgments than can be produced by
selecting and distorting the facts. Nothing is meaner in national life
than dishonest history.
Education in the ideal of peace, which we may hope to be the state of
the world in the future, will be an adjustment of the mind to new and
practical modes of life rather than the establishing of a principle.
The educated attitude of mind which will best safeguard the peace of
the world must include an intelligent knowledge of all the agencies
proposed to aid in establishing this state of harmony toward which we
look forward. We must all know about arbitration, leagues of nations,
courts of honor, understand diplomacy better and the arguments for
disarmament, understand the economic and the industrial situation, the
possibilities of coöperation, reduction of the rights and privileges
of classes, democratic movements. The inculcation of such knowledge is
an education for peace. There is little that is abstruse in any of
these ideas, and the very young child is not too young to know
something of these wider aspects of the social life. All these may be
presented in a concrete form as a part of the work of conveying a
knowledge of current history.
We may think of various cures for war, and various efforts that might
be made educationally to prevent war. Peace might effectually be
cultivated by an educational propaganda. But after all it is not such
cures of war as this that we are most concerned about in the work of
education. We might even tend to establish in this way a peace which
would be detrimental to the higher interests of civilization. _A true
educational philosophy, at any rate, is not to be dislodged from its
purpose of keeping education constructive rather than inhibitory._
This institution of education must not be too much influenced by the
temporary moods of the day, by the present gloomy evidences of the
devastation of war. We must teach and prepare for an abundant life in
which there is glory and wide opportunity, and in which the motives of
power may be satisfied. Then peace can take care of itself. But this
abundant life must be a life of _activity_, not of mere patriotism and
subjective glorification and nationalistic interest. Vanity, the low
order of enthusiasms, the glory of display, can no longer have a place
in this national life.
There appears to be a pedagogical lesson in the contrast between the
heroic and the moral view of teaching war and peace illustrated by the
German philosophy of war and the ideal of the Boy Scout organization.
Deducting something for literary exaggeration, we may say that
education cannot afford to neglect either of these attitudes, but must
indeed in some way combine them. The exaggeration consists on one side
in praising the specific act of war; but on the other side there is
plainly lacking something of the dramatic appeal which any ideal life
for the young must have. War is an evil, but the spirit that makes war
is by no means an evil. The philosophy of war proves its failure by
ignoring the moral ideal altogether, or regarding morality as
something solely national, but the other, it may be, puts the moral
ideal in a pedagogically impossible position. Both the content and the
form must be taken into account in any educational plan that hopes to
exert power or to be influential in any important way now, and it is
the form which, more than anything else, is still lacking in our whole
procedure of education.
_Preparedness and Military Training_
Military training has now of course become a practical question with
us and with every nation. It is the military use of military education
that must first of all be considered. For that reason it must
primarily be a problem upon which political authorities and military
experts must decide. These experts must be competent to tell us what
military equipment is necessary at any time to meet the requirements
of our political situation, and they must be able to advise about the
amount and kind of actual military training necessary to make this
physical equipment most effective. All this, plainly, must be provided
whether it be good or bad from a general educational standpoint. But
preparedness and national defense mean, of course, more than the
possession of guns and more than military training as such. And there
can be no hard and fast line between military preparedness and the
wider technical preparedness in which all the equipment and skill of
scientific and mechanical activities of the country are always ready
to be mobilized in the defense of it; or between these and the still
more general preparedness through the organization and control of the
human factor in ways that are not specifically military or
mechanically technical at all.
If preparation for defense is by no means exhausted by military
training, on the other hand not all military training is intended for
defense. Decision about the actual amount and kind of military
training, we say, may be left to the expert, but it is for the
psychologist and the educator to decide whether we need a mere minimum
of such training or a general military training for educational
purposes. After all, however, this is perhaps more a matter of taste
in educational practices than of learning. There is plenty of opinion
at least on both sides. Some maintain that military discipline is of
very great benefit to the man and to society. From the German point of
view it is the equivalent of hygiene for the individual. It is a
national regimen for physical and mental health. It is also the symbol
and the expression of social solidarity. Many believe that the
discipline of soldiering would be especially good for all American
boys. But there is no dearth of evidence on the other side--that
military training in so far as it is really conducted in the military
manner is brutalizing.
After all, we say this may be a matter of preference. Some like
military discipline in the schools and everywhere; some do not. The
present writer for one will confess that he does not. It is not the
danger of making a people warlike that one sees in it, so much as the
certainty of introducing into all the daily life a spirit that is
inconsistent with our stage of civilization and with the most
wholesome spirit of education. It savors of the unprogressive. It
means, in our opinion, the introduction into the school, in a far too
easy and simple way, and consequently at far too low a level,
something that ought to be put into education in a different manner.
The sense of solidarity and the idealism which the German has found in
his military discipline we must express in some other way. It is
especially the unproductiveness of military life, and the constant
suggestion of that which is archaic without either the practical
setting or the ornamental life to which such things belong, that are
especially to be charged against militarism.
We ought to ask, rather, how peace morale, and the essentials of the
warlike spirit may be maintained _without military training_. Is it
not rather by way of the more general and untechnical processes of
education which make for physical expertness, by fundamental social
education, by giving attention to our foundations of religious
education, that we shall be able to create and sustain the most
efficient morale? The best foundation for all necessary military
activities of a free people appears to be a by-product, so to speak,
of peaceful life sustained at a high point of efficiency and
enthusiasm. Military training disconnected from its immediate use and
application in war must appear to some and indeed to many as a misfit
in modern civilized life. This is not an argument for pacifism,
however. The war has taught us that militarism and military capacity
in high degree may spring up from very peaceful soil, and also that
military training, however perfect, is no substitute for the generic
virtues out of which courage and patriotism grow. In the long run will
it not be the country that can do without military training that will
have the advantage? Or the country in which military preparedness is
so merged in everything else as to be indistinguishable from the rest
of life? Is there not, in a word, a preparedness that will make a
country superior and safe both in war and in peace?
CHAPTER V
THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM
It would be hard to find a word (unless it be democracy) about which
so many questions gather as now cling to the word "patriotism."
Patriotism is praised as the highest virtue; it is also cursed as the
cause of war. Some think of it as the _sole_ cause of war. Some would
like to see it disappear for the reason that they believe it at best
an old and out-lived social virtue, now having become merely
ornamental and an obstacle to the true socialization of the world.
Some think patriotism still the center of the moral and the social
life.
This is not the place to attempt a psychological analysis of
patriotism, but we may at least try to enumerate the principal factors
in it, and say what we think patriotism as a virtue--or a vice--is.
_Patriotism in our view is normally loyalty to country as a
functioning unit in a world of nations. It is devotion to all the
aspects and functions of a country as an historical entity._ We must
think of these historical entities, moreover, as leading lives in
which, although their own ambitions for honor and greatness are
legitimate, there must be a practical recognition of the legitimacy of
similar interests on the part of all other nations, and in which the
recognition of the common interests of nations is also freely made.
Since nations perform no one single function and have no single motive
of life in their normal state, patriotism can be no devotion to a
single purpose or cause. Such patriotism as this, we may say, does not
antagonize internationalism. Loyalty to country is loyalty to the
functions and interests that properly belong to country. The
individual, the family, the country and all intervening groups and
entities are natural formations. To each of these entities there is
due a loyalty precisely measured by the character of the functions
which these entities perform.
This view of patriotism is plainly, both in its theoretical aspect and
its practical consequences, widely different from those that end in
pure internationalism. Its essential feature is that it recognizes the
validity of all entities and groups about which deep feeling has grown
up. This means, of course, that as criteria of social values these
feelings are placed ahead of certain logical or scientific
considerations. Pure internationalism of the intellectual type
recognizes the validity only of the whole world group. Nicolai, for
example, says that there is a morality and there are rights pertaining
to the individual and to the whole of humanity, but all intervening
groups are temporary and artificial. That, certainly, we should not
agree with. The coming greater coördination of the world we may
suppose will deepen and intensify patriotism, rather than diminish it.
The homogeneity toward which the biologists tell us we are tending and
ought to approach is one in which, it is likely, still sharper
national outlines may well appear. The ambitions, the functions, and
the culture of nations ought to be made clearer rather than be lost in
the coming internationalism. We shall still in the Hegelian sense find
our reality in and through the state. An aroused sense of the function
and worth of country will be the basis of patriotism. Advancement
toward internationalism will be made by a generalized patriotism
rather than by outgrowing patriotism. That is, it is by passing from a
deepened loyalty to country through a sense of the validity and right
of the patriotism of all peoples that international social
consciousness will be developed.
So all those very numerous views of patriotism which assert that it is
only through a decline of patriotism that a rational international
order can ever be established, appear to be wrong. A fundamental
question is at issue here. It concerns in part the criteria of
valuation in the field of the social life. The kind of cosmopolitanism
and internationalism that demands the final abrogation of the
sentiment of patriotism is, as we have intimated, a rationalistic
doctrine. It is an attempt to extend objective principles into the
realm of social values. Reason tells us, they say, that we ought to
organize universally and obliterate national lines. Reason tells us we
should make no distinction between ourselves and strangers, between
enemies and allies. But by the same rationalism we may break up any
loyalty. Patriotism is an inner, a spiritual force, and it has its
roots in moods and forms of appreciation which have a certain finality
about them, for the reason that they are deposits from the whole
course of human history. Veblen says it is a matter of habit to what
particular nationality a man will become attached on arriving at years
of discretion. That is true, and it is of course the whole secret of
loyalty. But it is not a matter of unimportance whether a man shall
become attached to any country. It is the dynamic power of loyalty
that is in question, if we consider its practical value. Loyalty grows
because it has a use, which is related to the most basic feelings. It
is not a product of reason, and cannot justly be judged on purely
rational grounds.
Any political ideal, or any plan for a world order, that would
minimize patriotism is unnatural. The forms of socialism that do this
and the _laissez faire_ tendencies appear to have left out of the
reckoning some of the modes of evaluating experience which are most
basic. We may recognize all the excess of provincialism in the native
patriotism of the peasant, and all the egoistic motives in the
patriotism of the aristocrat and the militarist, but still we see no
place in the world for the man without a country. It is not yet the
workmen of the cities, who say that all men are brothers, who can lead
us to a better social order. Patriotism must be educated, modernized,
made more productive, but certainly its work is not yet done. It
cannot be cast aside as something archaic and only a part of the
ornamental and useless encumbrances of life. _It is not by weakening
loyalty to country, but by strengthening it, that internationalism
will be made secure._ If patriotism fits into modern life like sand in
the machinery, as Veblen says, we must see how patriotism may be made
to do better service.
Some views about patriotism which thus disparage it seem to be based
upon a biological conception of it. Not a few writers apparently think
of patriotism as a fixed trait of the human organism, even as a kind
of mendelian character unrelated to other social qualities. This trait
antagonizes social progress, but it is preserved because of secondary
values which it represents, such as moral or æsthetic values.
According to these views patriotism may be complex, but it acts like a
unitary character. It is subject, theoretically, to selection, but as
a matter of fact it remains a strong factor in the temperament of
nearly all races.
But in our view patriotism is something less precise than all this
would imply. It is a form in which the most fundamental and general of
desires are expressed, in becoming fixated upon their most natural and
necessary objects. It is an aspect of the whole process of development
of the affective life. Leaving out patriotism (if such a thing were
possible) would mean a break in the continuity of the social life. It
would leave one group of functions without their natural support in
desire. Economists sometimes seem to leave out of account the profound
emotional forces and the irresistible tendencies which make social
groups. They want organizations without the moods and impulses by
which alone social bodies are formed or sustained; and they expect to
see organization broken up or interest in it lost while all the
conditions that keep alive the passion for it are intact. Patriotism
and the existence of nations seem, however, to be the opposite sides
of the same fact. And we may assume that so long as nations exist, at
any rate, patriotism will exist, and one of the most necessary
functions of public education will be the regulation of the motives
and feelings which are contained in this sentiment.
Patriotism is first of all to be considered, then, as a phase of the
social life as a whole, rather than as an unique emotion or a special
variety of loyalty. It is a way in which the sum of tendencies that
enter into the social life become fixated upon certain qualities of
the environment, or upon certain objects. Patriotism will best be
understood in a practical way by observing its objects. Patriotism is
a total mood; country is a total object. But the mood of patriotism
expresses varied desires, and the object of patriotism is a highly
complex and variable object. In being loyal to or devoted to country
in the sense which we usually mean when we say one is patriotic, we
are devoted to at least the following objects: 1) physical country as
home; 2) the ways, customs, standards and beliefs of the country; 3)
the group of people constituting the nation; and here race, social
solidarity, ideal constructions of an united people having common
purposes and possessions enter; 4) leaders; 5) country as an
historical entity having rights and interests--a living being having
experiences, ideals and characteristics. The educational problem is of
course the regulation of the attachment of the individuals of a nation
to these objects. In one sense this educational problem of patriotism
is nothing less than that of developing social consciousness itself.
It is precisely the task of fostering or creating in the child the
basis of all loyalty. Given a loyal mind in the child and a normal
environment, we need to be concerned but little about the causes and
the groups upon which that loyalty will expend itself, for the
conditions are all present for forming an attachment to every natural
group. Considered generically and psychologically there is no
patriotism, we say, marked off from everything else, and there is no
one object that excites patriotic loyalty. All educational influences
that strengthen attachment to home, all social feeling, devotion to
the ways of any group and obedience to its standards, respect for all
law and authority, all appreciation of historic relations, help to
develop patriotism, merely because country, in these aspects, is an
omnipresent object to which the feelings thus engendered will
automatically become to some extent attached.
The first task in the teaching of patriotism (first at least as
regards the obviousness of the need) is to give all children a vivid
sense of country as physical object, and a deep aesthetic appreciation
of this object--although of course this idea of physical country
cannot be detached from everything else. Each country has its
different problem. Ours is to create a total country, in the
imagination of the young. A German writer not long ago predicted that
the future of America lay in the direction of breaking up into a
little England, a little Ireland, and a little of the other
nationalities here represented. That particular danger may seem remote
enough, but in another way we do continue to be lacking in unity. Our
patriotism has been too local, and America, even after the great war,
is to some extent still a collection of geographical regions. New
England, the South, the Coast are more real to many than country as a
whole. Our great distances, and the impossibility of clearly imagining
them have necessarily presented obstacles thus far to a unified image
of country. The time may come, and perhaps soon, when such a divided
consciousness of country will be a grave flaw in our national life.
It must be a serious function of some kind of geography to give
reality to the idea of country, although of course we cannot separate
entirely geographical from historical idea of country. The teaching of
the geography of the native land must be different from other
geography. Native land must have a warmth and home feeling about it
that other countries do not have, but as yet the psychological
conditions for this have apparently not been worked out. With our
present facilities in pictorial art, the geographical element in the
idea of country seems controllable. The minds of children are
exceedingly impressionable in this direction. Intensity of feeling and
vividness of imagination are at the disposal of the educator. The love
of color, especially, must be used to make lasting impressions upon
the mind. We need to notice also that the idea of physical country
that enters most into patriotic feeling is not an idea of city streets
but of the open country. It is the country that inspires the strongest
home feeling, and it is the country that is the basis of the sense of
changelessness and eternity of native land, that is a strong element
in patriotic sentiment. This element of patriotism, it is plain, is
something aesthetic. It is not so much a moral loyalty to country that
is inspired by the everlasting hills, as an aesthetic love of it as
the home land. This aesthetic love of the home land is a response to
such stimuli as the beautiful arouses everywhere. It is susceptible,
therefore, to all the influences of art--of music, picture, symbol;
these must all be employed in teaching patriotism. The theme of home
is especially sensitive to the effects of music. It is this idea of
home, enlarged and enriched by pictorial representation of country,
deeply impressed and influenced by music, and unified and imbued with
the feeling of personal possession by the story of country that is the
core of patriotic feeling. It is the function of art, especially of
music, to help to make the home feeling of the child normal and
enthusiastic--to raise it above the stage of being an "anxiety of
animal life," as Nicolai terms the primitive love of home. Art must
help to remove the fears and depressions that may lurk in the idea of
home, which are great obstacles to the development of the higher
devotions. It is the lack of normal love of home in the city, we
should say, that makes socialism and all forms of internationalism
that breed so rapidly there such dangerous moods in a democracy.
Without true home love, we may conclude, the wider loyalties can never
be quite wholesome, although they may be intense and fanatical.
The second element in patriotism we identify as the love of, or
loyalty to, the sum of the customs, beliefs, and standards that make
up the _mores_ of a people. A peculiarly perplexing educational
problem arises, since there are two opposite evils to be avoided We
may too readily cultivate a spirit which either takes the form of a
narcissistic love of one's own ways, or which, extraverted, so to
speak, becomes a fanatical ambition to impose one's own culture upon
the world; or, on the other hand we might become too self-critical,
too cosmopolitan, and too receptive toward all foreign culture.
National conceit, complacency and destinism face us in one direction,
the danger of losing our identity and our individuality and our
mission in the other. These problems of course confront all nations;
they are especially urgent in America, because of the composite nature
of our national life and the rapid changes that take place in it, and
also because of the ideal nature of the bond that holds us together.
We are still a somewhat inchoate and flowing mass of social elements,
imperfectly coördinated, manifestly, yet deeply united by ideals which
appeal to very deep emotions. Our work is to maintain social
solidarity, preserve and educate certain fundamental qualities of our
national life which are our real claims to individuality as a people.
These essential traits, perhaps because of our newness as a form of
civilization, appear to be less clearly defined, less definitely
represented in institutions, and to be more abstract than the
qualities that make up the essential character of other peoples.
Our educational problem is, naturally, different from all others. We
are committed to an idea of liberty. We make this principle of freedom
the dominant in all our national life. We have not tried, and cannot
consistently attempt to centralize our educational institutions very
much, or even allow our culture to become crystallized into a definite
type, for this would be almost as bad as denying our principle of
religious freedom. But we cannot, in the other direction, become too
diversified intellectually, and still less in regard to more
fundamental aspects of life, for this would break up our unity
altogether, or determine it more and more in the direction of
political coercion. Thus far, it appears, it has been our great virtue
as a people that we have remained united by emotional forces, or by
the suggestive power of an idea. Sooner or later we shall need to see
whither our present tendencies lead, and education must in all
probability be put to work to control and regulate the elements that
make for unity and for disruption in our life. _Our work as educators
will be to maintain a working harmony in the affective and instinctive
life of the people._ We need now, and we shall need more and more,
religious, moral and aesthetic unity in our life as a nation--not a
forced and superficial agreement, but a deep harmony of ideals and
moods. This purpose must never be lost sight of by the educator. It
must be made to pervade all our educational philosophy and all our
plans for the school. This educational problem exists of course
everywhere in some degree, and in regard to all manner of social
groups. But American life as a whole is peculiarly a growth in which
diverse and even divergent elements must continue to be brought
together and held together through the power of ideas which are
subject to many influences. Diversity and differentiation are added as
fast as the process of assimilation can be carried on. There can be no
closing up of differences in a final perfection and security.
Must we not, then, make the education of instincts and feelings, and
the control of the basic moods, rather than the development and
stimulation of specialization and differentiation our first and chief
concern? Must we not do this even at a loss of efficiency in some
directions, if necessary? Certainly we must not go too fast nor too
far towards industrialism. To control any tendency to over
differentiation and industrialism that is now likely to occur we must
have a broad humanitarianism and a humanistic ideal of culture (by
which we do not mean classicism). _The sharing of all experiences that
represent our spirit and purpose and American ideas, and equal
opportunity to realize them, must be our thought in planning our
educational work._ The future of America may well depend upon our
power, or upon the power of our original idea, to hold people together
by the essential moods in which our American ideas are represented.
The production, out of these elemental moods, of common interests on a
high level will be, we take it, the only preventive in the end of the
growth of common interests on a low level, which is always threatened
in democracies, and is the way democracies tend to destroy themselves
by their democracy. Education in the fundamentals of industrial life,
in social relations, in play and in art, in religion, is what we most
need--the latter, we may conclude, most of all. We must have in some
way a greater religious unity and more religion, not by attempting an
impossible amalgamation of creeds as was promulgated by some of the
founders of the New Japan, but by an education that includes and
brings forth all that is common in religion. That at least is the only
kind of unity that offers hope finally of making a world safe with
democracy in it. This is not a plea for a back-to-nature movement, for
the simple life, for a life which tends away from industrialism.
Industrialism will go on, if for no other reason, because pastoral or
agricultural peoples would soon be at a disadvantage in an industrial
world as it is organized now, for want of rapid increase in
population. But it is implied that industry itself must be made
suitable for the democratic life. It means that we must go back of the
identities of language and obedience to common laws, and take as our
educational foundations that which American life is in truth based
upon: physical power and motor freedom, the sense of liberty, the
colonial spirit of comradeship and devotion to common cause, the ideal
of an abundant and enthusiastic life. Merely becoming conscious of
these and observing their meaning and their place in our national life
is in itself a large contribution to the sources out of which
patriotism may be drawn. _When our patriotism is sincere enough so
that we shall be milling to sacrifice for country our religious
intolerance and bigotry, our social antipathies, and our industrial
advantages, we shall have a morale which for peace or for war will be
wholly sufficient._
Must our ambition be to teach American children that American ways are
the best, and that these ways ought to be established in the world?
There is both an evil and a good, both an absurdity and a sublime
loyalty in the view which all nations have, that their own culture and
life are the best. This conceit is in part a product of isolation, and
is pure provincialism. But it is also of the very essence of the
reality feeling and the sense of solidarity of peoples and of their
loyalty to country. It must not be dealt with too ruthlessly. There is
a primitive stratum of it that must remain in all peoples. Nations,
however benighted, will not be dispossessed of this idea, but
experience and education will make nations more discriminating so that
they can at least see what is essential and what is superficial in
their own characteristics. Certainly whatever is ethical in our
foundations we, and all other peoples, will be expected to hold to. We
feel it a duty to spread our moral truth abroad and our mores are
necessarily right for us, and this idea of rightness of mores must
imply a desire to make them prevail in the world. We may recognize,
abstractly, other standards of conduct, but there is something in
moral belief which, of course, cannot voluntarily be changed, and
which must stand for the ultimately real in consciousness so long as
it is held to be so by the mass of the people. This must extend also
to æsthetic standards, and to all final judgments of values to some
extent.
For these reasons we must suppose that the spirit of competition among
nations, certainly so far as it concerns the ambition for empires of
the spirit, must remain. Belief on the part of a people in the
superiority of their own culture cannot and should not be eliminated.
By this spirit the good, we may be sure, will prevail, but prevail
only through opposition and competition. There can be no real
compromise in the field of these moral possessions and appreciations.
_We_ must be Americans, and react with American ideas. True
nationalists everywhere appear to recognize and to be guided by this
truth. We cannot voluntarily lay aside our own beliefs nor help
believing they are right, although we may see that were we differently
situated we might change them.
There are three things at least, as regards our mores that cannot be
accomplished. For this we may take our evidence and our warning from
Germany. Culture cannot be spread by force, since force does not
conquer spirit. Devotion to the basic principles of one's civilization
cannot rationally nor safely be extended to include all customs and
manners, so that we may assume that there is a right way in everything
which is ours and a wrong way which is foreign. The mores of a people
cannot be changed or manipulated by education and propaganda without
uprooting the moral structures of society. When we begin to practice a
Social-politik we enter upon dangerous ground.
Are we not, then, to take the attitude in education that _our culture
is an experimental culture and represents an experimental
civilization_? Although for us our ways and beliefs are final criteria
of values in conduct, and we cannot hope or wish to free ourselves
from them or to be guided by objective data, still we put them forward
in the spirit of the enquirer, rather than as eternal principles. If
this be right, we are not to guard our civilization jealously, hedge
it about with national jealousy and bigotry but rather send our
culture abroad on a mission. We are to understand and to teach the
culture of every other nation sympathetically, trusting to our own
foundations to hold firm. We must be so fortified in our own virtue
that we shall not be afraid to send our spirit abroad to compete with
whatever it shall meet in the old world or the new. This impulse to
extend one's culture and philosophy is a deep one, and we believe it
to be well-grounded. It has been said that the deepest impulse of
British imperialism has been to extend English ways of thought
throughout the world. There is truth in this. We may conclude also
that unless a nation can feel sincerely that it is founded upon
something that ought to endure and at least to have an opportunity to
become universal, it lacks a growth principle and its civilization is
not very secure. Certainly it lacks a great pedagogical advantage in
all the internal work of education.
The work of the intellectual leaders of a people is to uncover this
kernel of sincere belief and worth, and strip nationalism at the same
time of its encrustations of vanity and deception. There are, we may
suppose, at the bottom of every nation's consciousness such sincere
principles which are entitled to a fair field in the competition of
the civilizations and the cultures of the world. We may be sure that
there is Americanism that needs to be taught both for the sake of the
world and for our own sake; something which constitutes our best
contribution to an experimental world in which the over-emphasis of
all sincere principles can ultimately do no harm. Americanism, with
all the errors it may contain, and all the limitations it may have as
a universal principle is better for us and for all, we may believe,
than any dispassionate and well considered intellectualism, or a
cosmopolitanism that is based upon a fear of provincialism. Let us be
prepared, therefore, to go forth not to conquer but to participate in
the life of the world.
As regards materials by means of which we are to teach a patriotism
that shall be a strong devotion to the mores of the nation, there
appear to be three important elements. We have, first, a literature
which contains in part at least the spirit of our national life,
although it does so _only_ in part. Secondly, we have a beginning at
least of an interpretation of American life through an American
history that is to be something more than a history of political
events, and shall be a true history of the American people. This
history must include the history of our ideas and our ideals, our
literature, institutions, art, and be indeed a true social history.
This history must be the main source book for teaching what our
country has meant to those who have lived in it, and what these people
have really been and done. This is national character study. Character
study, a truly psychological and interpretative history, should teach
us what we are likely to do and what we ought to do in all typical
situations with which we are likely to be confronted. How far we are
as yet from such a general knowledge in regard to ourselves needs
hardly to be suggested. The third element in this aspect of the
teaching of patriotism is something more tangible and more immediately
practical. Our ideals have to some extent at least been crystallized
in our institutions, where they will still further be elaborated. The
participation on the part of all in some way in these institutions is
a part of our required training for good American life. A book
knowledge of institutions is, of course, better than none at all, but
there is no reason why knowledge should end there. All people,
especially those now being educated, ought to have more direct and
more intimate part in all the representative institutions of our
country, even in the political institutions, and perhaps in them most
of all. Americanism, whatever else it may be, must be a practical
Americanism. It must have ideals and clear visions, it goes without
saying, but it is the making and shaping of institutions by living in
and through them that must be the main feature of our social life and
of our education. When the individual and the social form are molded
and developed together, patriotism will be a natural phase of mental
growth.
CHAPTER VI
THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM (_continued_)
Patriotism we thought to be, in the third place, devotion to the
_group_. Here the problem of the teaching of patriotism becomes
specifically a question of social education. The question arises as to
precisely what the objects of the devotion we call loyalty to the
group are, and what factors in group-consciousness need most to be
emphasized or educated as patriotism. Is it race or manners or the
pure fact of propinquity or herd contact or all together that are the
objects of social desire and the feeling of solidarity?
_Race_ has been emphasized as the prime interest in group loyalty, but
there seems to be doubt about this. At least there are difficulties in
isolating anything we can call love of race. We can never separate
race from propinquity, for example, or from mores, or from the bonds
due to common possession of causes. Race loyalty appears to be a
primitive feeling. When races were pure, groups small and possession
common, all the elements of loyalty to group were present at once and
coextensive. As civilization progressed the bond of pure race
lessened. All races have now become mixed, we are told, and kinship in
a group has ceased to be a fact. Nicolai maintains that race
patriotism has grown out of family instinct, as something quite
separate from herd instinct, but it seems likely that common
interests, organization under necessity, or the social attraction
resulting from any common cause must have been stronger than any
consciousness of kinship, or any herd instinct as such--which may
indeed not have existed at all.
It is this more conscious bond of function and propinquity at least that
must be taken into account in the education of patriotism--certainly
American patriotism. We in America can hardly emphasize race patriotism,
without producing internal disruption. It is common function that is
the distinguishing mark of the individuals of a group, rather than
common origin. Common function, especially subsumption under one
ordered government, particularly if the purpose be that of securing
common protection, can plainly overcome all loyalty to race. Common
religion antagonizes race consciousness, and we see therefore within
nations races splitting up along lines of religious difference. We see
within races also greater antagonism and greater lack of common
interest between classes than between the same classes as found in
different races. Aristocrats everywhere, for example, appear to have
greater mutual sympathy and sense of nearness than do the upper and
lower classes of the same race.
One of our own urgent educational problems is that of overcoming race
differences and of utilizing racial bonds for practical ends. We try
to put loyalty to group first, and we assume that race patriotism can
be supreme only among those who have no country worth being loyal to.
Loyalty to race, however, has a pedagogical use. We see it being
employed to extend social feeling beyond the point to which
propinquity and common cause can carry it. It was used, we know, in
the propaganda and educational campaign by which German statesmen and
historians hoped to develop a wider German consciousness. The racial
object in this case is apparently purely fictitious. We see the same
concept being used now to create or expand social feeling throughout
the Anglo-Saxon race. What we mean mainly by Anglo-Saxon race is
really English speaking peoples, having common or similar mores and
ideals. It is, of course, by emphasizing and participating in common
functions that loyalty either to an Anglo-Saxon union or to the total
group in our own nation will be developed. Our own type of
patriotism, in which there can be little or no racial loyalty as such,
must be built upon more ideal and abstract conceptions than that of
race. It is loyalty to group having a common idea, we say, which must
be the basis of American group loyalty. This we must regard as higher
than any race patriotism. All nations are now, as Boutroux remarks, to
a greater or less extent _psychological races_. The factors that have
produced them are the factors that have caused men to become
functioning units.
This gives us a clew at least to a practical principle for the
education of social loyalty. We must secure participation on the part
of the individual in every function that belongs to each group to
which the individual himself is attached. Thus all degrees and kinds
of loyalty may be made to exist in the same mind without conflict or
confusion, precisely because the loyalty desired is loyalty to people
as groups or organizations having causes, not to collections of
individuals as such.
The teaching of loyalty to any cause appears to be a lesson in
patriotism. So far as teaching of patriotism is centered directly upon
the production of loyalty to the whole group which constitutes the
nation, the first object must be to create a sense of reality of the
group in the mind of the individual. We may expect to do this in part
by the teaching of geography and history in an adequate way, but we
must also instill such patriotism by inducing individuals to
participate in nation-wide organizations, which are capable of
realizing dramatic effects. The experiences of the war have taught us
to see this. It is organization or coöperation for practical ends,
under conditions in which deep feeling is aroused, that most quickly
and effectually creates the sense of solidarity in great groups of
individuals. We must study the psychological side of this matter, and
see how the power and momentum that are so readily gained in time of
need can be better controlled for all the routine purposes of
education and the practical daily life. The organization of national
activities by means of voluntary associations will be likely to be one
of the main educational methods of the future. If we are far-seeing we
shall try to utilize the powers of organization, coöperation and
communication to overcome many antagonisms now existing in society.
War temporarily suspends class distinctions and many other forms of
social dualism. The reaction after the war may be in the direction of
increasing all the former antagonisms. To attain a strong morale and
unity in times less dramatic than those of war is an educational
problem, in a wide sense, but it is also a problem of the practical
organization of all the social life.
All nation-wide affiliations of children which in any way
cross-section classes or antagonistic interests of any kind tend to
create materials out of which patriotic sentiment is made. The school
itself has tended to produce social unity, but it has also tended to
level downward, and also to mediate associations which do not touch
upon the activities and interests and differences of society. Our
schools are democratic by default of social interest in them, so to
speak. We need organizations that shall level upward and to a greater
extent involve the home. Then we shall see how democratic and how
unified our social life really is. These organizations must be both
democratic and practical. They must engage the interests of all
classes. We know little as yet about the potential power, both for
practical accomplishment and for the building of a higher type of
loyalty and patriotism, there may be in wide organization. Here we can
best combine the initiative and spirit that usually come from the
upper classes with the great powers of achieving aggregate results
inherent in the people as a whole. If we are to have a nation which
shall be a unit, the people as a whole must have practical interests
that require daily exertion and attention. They must be not merely
united in spirit as a people, but united in common tasks that are
definite and real. Devotion to the functions of the people is loyalty
to the nation. This we should say is but an elaboration of the old
colonial spirit of coöperation, when merely living in a community
meant a certain daily service to all the community. We must continue
to do now more consciously and with more technique, so to speak, what
was once done more spontaneously and in a more primitive way. It is
thus that the idea of neighbor might extend throughout the country as
a whole. All the materials are at hand for an unlimited development of
the practical life. _The sense of solidarity and the comradeship and
helpfulness that grow naturally in a small community, where conditions
are hard and dangers imminent, we must still maintain in a great
nation by organization._ This is at heart an educational problem. It
is a work of national character building. It is training in
patriotism.
In this, as in all other phases of education now, we must consider how
the great energies hidden in the æsthetic experiences can be put to
use. The æsthetic, especially in its dramatic form, is a power to be
reckoned with. Interest, organization, moral obligation do not control
or release all the energies contained in the social life. We need the
high moods of dramatic situations to reach the most fundamental
motives. The teacher must not only present ideas; he must generate
power. And this is true of all efforts to employ for any end the
interests of the people, old or young. The social life, if it is to be
effective, must constantly be brought under the influence of dramatic
stimuli. Dillon, a political writer, earnestly pleads for an extension
and deepening of the sympathies of children, and says that patriotic
sentiment must be engrafted upon the sensitive soul of the child. No
one could refuse to admit this. The question, however, is of ways and
means. In our view it is mainly through play, or better, art, that the
soul of the child is thus made sensitive. A dramatic social life must
be the main condition upon which we depend for thus extending and
deepening the sympathies of the child.
Among these dramatic social effects we seek, the use of national
holidays, all methods of symbolizing events, causes, or functions
which are nationally significant are of course not to be ignored, but
after all it is through practical activity made social and raised to
dramatic expression or feeling, either by its own inherent idea and
suggestive power, or by the addition of æsthetic elements, that
loyalty to the greater group and its functions will best be educated.
It is precisely the lack of these dramatic elements and these mass
effects in the social life that now leaves the social sense in its
national aspects weak, and allows the various dividing lines
throughout society to make even the most necessary activities to a
greater or less degree ineffectual.
The educational problem itself is plain. Unity of public interests,
which can apparently now be obtained only under threat to national
existence, must be maintained, not artificially, but voluntarily. We
want the morale of war and the social solidarity of war in the times
and activities of peace--in those activities that represent service to
country and also those which consist of the service _of_ country in
the performance of its broader functions as a member of a family or
society of nations.
A fourth factor in patriotism we recognize as loyalty to government,
to state, or to leader. The place of such loyalty in a truly
democratic country as contrasted with an autocratically governed
country seems plain. It is not only sovereignty but statesmanship as
well that must reside in the people. The people must not only have the
power but the wisdom to rule. Even the ideals of the country must come
out of the common life, or there at least be abundantly nourished. The
German writers protest that the purely native ideals of the people do
not represent the meaning and purpose of the State. The natural
feelings of the people lack purpose and definiteness. The State is
something very different from the sum of the people and the
representation of their will. The native sense of solidarity is not
at all like the organization that comes through the State. But this
abstract conception of the State as a being different from the people
is precisely, in the view of such writers as Dickinson, the cause of
wars. Upon this point Dickinson sees now a wide parting of the ways.
We must have either one kind of world or the other. We must continue
our warlike habits, and make the God-state the object of our religion,
or abandon all this for a thorough-going democracy. It is the special
interest that is assumed to inhere in the God-state that is the menace
to peace everywhere. The abstract theory of State inspires far-seeing
policies, democracy lives more by its natural instincts and feelings.
The theory of necessary expansion, the right to grow and to intrude,
is a natural deduction from the conception of the God-state; loyalty
to the State demands ever increasing lands and population in order to
have more military power.
The democracy, of course, can harbor no such conception of State.
Loyalty, in the democracy, must be to state and to statesmen rather as
leaders of the people. The first and most necessary factor in
patriotism as loyalty to authority is that authority _must_ represent
interests of country and people and must for that reason deserve
loyalty. Educationally, the problem is quite the reverse of the
educational problem of the autocracy. The people are not to be trained
in obedience and subservience to the state, but we have mainly to
create in the minds of all people the capacity to recognize true
leaders. It is not loyalty to authority as such, we say, that is
wanted, but loyalty to leader _who has no power at all except the
power of the good and its forceful presentation_. A democracy is a
society in which the aristocrats rule by persuasion, although we must
think of this aristocracy as an aristocracy of intellect and morality
rather than of birth and wealth. The ideal, we suppose, toward which
our definition of democracy leads is a state in which authority as
represented in the institutions of government, and leadership
represented in natural superiority coincide. It is a State in which
the good and the great shall govern. But in general, parliaments
cannot now be the sources of moral and intellectual leadership of the
people. They are subjected to too many conflicting interests. The time
may come, we say, when authority and superiority will coincide, when
laws will be made and executed by those who ought to do these things
rather than by those who merely have the power to gain opportunity to
do so. At any time and place we _may_, of course, behold great
leadership combined with great authority. A true democracy is a state
in which such coincidence will be inevitable.
The minds of men are now full of these themes. They ask how nations
may become unified without injustice and autocracy. Trotter says that
national unity is what is wanted most of all things now in England.
England must become conscious of itself, he says, and infuse into
public affairs a spirit that will carry leaders far beyond their own
personal interests. England has survived until now in spite of a
strong handicap of discord. He speaks of the imperfect morale of
England, shown in the war, which arose from the preceding social
discord, and shows that the only perfect morale is that which is based
upon social unity in the nation. All this is true also of ourselves.
We also have our problem of creating loyalty to government and a
national unity upon which a perfect morale both for peace and for war
may be assured, by inspiring an ideal of honor, honesty, and
efficiency in all public service, and also by arousing an intense
interest in public service and deep appreciation of what public
service and leadership mean, on the part of all the people. This is
plainly not merely a work of _cleaning politics_. It is a work of
public education. The attitude of a people toward authority and
leadership is something more than a _susceptibility_ to leadership and
influence. There is a desire for the experience of ecstatic social
moods, the craving to be active and to be led. We make a great mistake
if we think all that democracy means is an instinct of individual
independence, a desire to take part in the government as an
individual. It is also a social craving that is involved. The presence
of the great leader, even in times of peace, stimulates social
feeling, and raises it to a productive level. This social feeling, we
say, is not a mere reaction. It is the expression of a desire and
readiness on the part of the people to participate in social
activities, and to attach themselves to worthy leaders, or to those
now who appeal to the most dominant selective faculties.
It is precisely at this point that the educational problem comes into
view. We are likely to think of the public education required in a
democracy as too exclusively political education, education that will
enable the individual to assert himself--to know, to criticize, to
vote, to take an active part in politics. This spirit is especially
prominent in English life. It is all very good in itself and
necessary. But we need to educate ourselves also so that _we may have
a capacity to be led, in the right direction_. To increase
sensitiveness to leadership, but also to make that sensitiveness
selective of true values, is one of the great educational problems of
a democracy.
It seems to be a part of the work of education to create popular
heroes, to do upon a higher level what the public press does in its
own way, but mainly partisanly and too often from wholly unworthy
motives--make reputations. We must do more in the teaching of history
and biography than to glorify the lives of dead heroes. We need to be
quite as much concerned about coming heroes. We must excite the
imagination of the young and prejudice the public mind through
educational channels, in favor of sincere and true leaders. The
opportunity of the story teller is large, in this work, and we need
also to develop to a very high degree of excellence the educational
newspaper. One of our great needs in education in this country is a
daily newspaper for all schools--one that shall be both informing and
influential, appealing by every art to the selective faculties,
governed absolutely by ethical, or at least not by political and
partisan motives. The power of such a press might be very great
indeed. As an unifying influence and a ready means of communication,
and an instrument of use in the organization of all children, the
function of this press would be a highly important one.
All means of creating political ideals from within, of forging the
links between leader and people in the plastic minds of children and
youths, will be an education in one of the fundamental elements of
patriotism. Such an education would be very different, however, from
the state planned and authorized education that has been carried on
under autocratic regimes. The difference is one of spirit and result,
rather than of method. In one case the State becomes a kind of
Nirvana, in the thought of which personality and individuality are
negated. Patriotism produced in the minds of the young under the
influence of a democratic spirit tends to become a creative force
rather than a blind devotion to an accepted order. Institutions are
made and advanced rather than merely obeyed and defended in this
educational process. The widest scope and the freest opportunity are
allowed for superior qualities of leaders and for right principles to
have an effect upon society (and the result we invite indeed is a
profound hero worship on the part of the young), but the conditions
would be such that no other kind of authority would be able to exert a
wide influence. To secure these conditions is, of course, one of the
chief tasks of all the administrative branches of our educational
service.
The final factor of patriotism, according to our analysis, is loyalty
to country as an historical object. The ideas and the feelings
centering about the conception of country as personal, as living, as
having rights and experience, duties and individuality are likely to
be vivid and intense. They are the inspirers of supreme devotion to
country, and also at times, of morbid national pride and fanatical
country-worship. The education of this idea of country we should
suppose would be one of the fundamental problems of the development of
patriotism. Presumably we are not to try to destroy this idea of
country that all people seem to have, or to show it as one of the
illusions of personification. Country is, of course, different from
the mere sum of the people. It has continuity and it performs
functions and it is an historic entity. Modernize and reform this
idea, we must, but we cannot do away with it as something archaic and
superstitious. Country is real, the concepts of honor and right belong
to it, and country is something to which the mind must do homage.
Boutroux says that a nation is a _person_, and has a right to live and
to have its personality recognized as its own. Granting this to be
true, and that we must think of country as personal and active, the
question arises whether this concept of country is something that
_requires in any definite way educational interference_. We should say
that if countries are essentially living historic entities having as
such a high degree of reality, this reality-sense will be an important
element in the practical life of peoples. There can be no thought in
our historical era of breaking up these entities we call nations. It
is a day of intensified rather than of diminished nationalism. The
sense of reality of nations must, we might think, be made more
intense; pride of country must remain; we may find some place even for
the idea of the divine nature of country, which is an element in the
patriotic spirit everywhere. That this conception of country is a very
necessary element in the morale of a country in war seems clear; that
the morale of peace must be founded upon the same personal and
religious sentiments we can hardly doubt.
_Ambition for country_ is a normal result of the acceptance of the
idea of country as personal, and ambition for country appears to be
the very essence of any patriotic sentiment that is sincere. Still
ambition for country has been, in some of its forms, a cause of wars.
What other conclusion can we come to, then, than that ambition for
country must be subjected to radical educational influences? This is
the reverse side of political progress. Ambition must be given new
content and new direction. All the power and the sentiment of the old
imperialistic motive must remain, but all peoples must now be educated
to see that the maintenance of its position in the world on the part
of any nation is now a far more difficult and far more complex task
than ever before. The building of empire must be shown to have been
far easier and far less heroic, and much less a test of the
superiority of a nation than we have supposed. We can show that
military virtues are much more nearly universal than has often been
assumed, and that nations that are inherently superior must abandon
voluntarily their ambitions of aggression, if they wish to remain
superior and to have a place of honor in the world.
This implies no teaching of pure internationalism. We still recognize
as fundamental the whole spirit of nationalism. Country must remain
first after all. All must indeed learn to take in some way the
statesman's point of view in regard to country--with its sense of the
future, of wide relations and long periods of time, and its practical
vision. It is futile to think of this future as one wholly without
struggle and competition. We must teach history also far more with the
forward view. History has dealt too exclusively even in America with
the past. National ambition that has as its aim to realize, with
independence and power, all the good that an enlightened nation
contains, but at the same time to act with justice and with the
thought of the nation as a part of a coördinated world must take this
point of view.
It is a median course between merely naïve and day by day living, such
as Lehmann (15) complains about as the natural tendency of uneducated
patriotism, and the kind of program making that takes into account
only the purposes of a single nation that we must follow in teaching
this forward view of national history. There is a danger in either
extreme. We may remain a nature people, without a true historic sense,
and be conscious only of a dramatic past which appeals to sentiment
and a still more ambiguously glorious future; or, on the other hand we
may become too definitely ambitious and too conscious of some special
mission in the world. A nation with a program, a nation that does not
recognize the experimental nature of history, is a dangerous element
in the society of nations, even though its ambitions be not purely
selfish. Excessive rationalism in national consciousness is itself a
menace. We must live by our historic sense, by some ideal of a future
for our nation; the people must have _some_ vision of a glorious
future, and not be expected to see only an unending vista of problems
and labors, but this history must be understood and taught intimately
and appreciatively and not merely objectively and logically. We must
take an interest in the careers of all nations, and understand history
psychologically and be willing to judge it ethically. So far we have
had the opposite view in most of our teaching and writing of history.
We must take a fair and tolerant view of the power motive that exists
in all nations, and try to understand what it means to be of another
nationality and to have ambitions like our own. Without such an
attitude, we should argue, no one can be truly patriotic, if
patriotism means having at heart the true interests of one's own
country.
It is not only possible and fair, therefore, but necessary that
patriotism be enlightened. It is possible to be devoted each one first
of all to his own country, to have few illusions about its values, and
at the same time to have tolerance for all other nations. What other
spirit is there, in fact, in which our history can now be taught? It
seems absurd to say that such a spirit is weak. It implies
consciousness of strength, of being able to hold one's own in a fair
field, to have the dignity and sense of maturity that come from
contact with a real world. With such a spirit it would not be
necessary to accept as inevitable the brutality of all national
development, to use the words of Mach, a recent writer. We need no
longer believe that war is the only thing that can prevent national
disintegration, as many maintain. National consciousness certainly
makes progress even without such dramatic and tragic events as have
recently taken place. Boutroux says that in France, after the Dreyfus
affair, although strong nationalistic feeling was stirred, there was
also a new vision of the destiny of the French people as not only
defenders of their own country but as champions of the rights of all
nationalities. German writers have not failed to notice this, and have
been inclined to regard this spirit of France as a sign of
degeneration and decay of the national life. We see now that
generosity and justice are far from being evidences of weakness, and
also that in the larger logic of history these weaknesses generate
strength; at least they bring powerful friends in time of need.
Once Germany herself was affected by such ideals of history. In the
time of Goethe, Cramb reminds us, mankind, culture and humanity were
the great words. But upon this love of humanity and culture and love
of the homeland a political spirit was engrafted, and this new spirit
of Germany has manifestly now led to her downfall. No! there is no
threat to national existence and no disloyalty to country in the form
of internationalism that now is before us. As social consciousness
widens and social relations become more intricate and more practical,
national lines are not lost, but indeed become clearer. These national
boundaries are not temporary or artificial or imaginary lines, for
they represent and define activities and interests that engage the
most fundamental and the most persistent of human motives.
It is in this spirit that loyalty to country as historic object
should, we believe, be taught. This idea we teach of course through
history, in part, but history alone in any ordinary sense, as we might
think of it as a subject in the curriculum of a school, is not enough.
These ideas must be made persuasive and dynamic. For this as we see
over and over again, art is the true method. The object to be
presented and which must inspire devotion is an ideal object. It is
complex and it performs practical functions, but it is through and
through such an object as appeals most deeply to the æsthetic
feelings. The image of this object must be made impressive. Since the
ideal of our country is more abstract than that of most countries, as
an object still less vivid and less personal, since it lacks some of
the means of appeal to the feelings that imperialistic countries have,
there is all the more need of art to make the figure of ideal country
stand out sharply before us. As we pass beyond the patriotism which is
only a love of home, or a devotion to a political unit, to a
patriotism that is a loyalty to a more abstract and more intangible
idea, the art by which the idea of country is conveyed would, we
should suppose, also become more abstract. Hocking says that it is
through symbols that the mind best gropes its way to the realization
of ideas. Feeling and imagery, we know, are very susceptible to the
influences of the symbol, and also to the phrase which is a lower
order of symbol. Dramatic representation, all pageantry, pictorial
art, music, even the art of the poster artist and the cartoonist have
a place in the work of portraying country as an ideal object, and
inspiring devotion to it and its causes. A far-seeking educational
policy will scorn none of these in its effort to crystallize the
concept of country and give it power and reality.
Finally this idea of country must be put to work in every mind and in
every life. Otherwise all education of patriotism will tend toward
inevitable jingoism, and arouse all the violent and introverted
feelings that have made history a long story of wars without end. This
idea of country has been too aristocratic. It must now become
accustomed to a life of daily toil, and not merely expend itself in
enthusiasm and in self-sacrifice in crises such as war. Country as an
idol of the aristocratic patriotism has always been too far removed
from practical affairs. This patriotism has been too personal and too
exclusive. Glory, honor and fame have played too large a part in it.
On the other hand, the common idea of country needs to be made more
vivid and more glorious. This spirit is accustomed to toil but not to
have enthusiasm. It certainly needs more of art in its patriotism as
well as in its daily life. We all need historical perspective. We must
have through education what tradition has failed to give us. It is
just by lacking the patriotism that a vivid sense of country as
historic personage gives, by lacking imagination and the ability to
detach themselves from the reality and the surroundings of the daily
life that the working classes are so likely to be affected by
influences that tend to break down _all_ patriotism.
We shall have a true patriotism, we should say, only when country is
an idea that is worked for by all classes; when it is an idea that is
woven into the daily lives of the people; when it makes the daily toil
lighter and touches it with glory, and when it enters into all the
enthusiasm of the more favored classes and inspires it with the spirit
of daily service.
CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY
One of the results of the war has been to raise in the minds of all
peoples, to an extraordinary degree, the most earnest questions about
the nature and validity of government. The political sense of all
peoples has been stimulated. We see on every hand new conceptions of
government and demands for more and better government, but also the
most radical criticism and the denial of all government. The
determination in very fundamental ways of what government is, and must
be, what ideas must prevail, what must be suppressed, what an ideal
government is, if such an ideal can be formed, the question of evils
inherent in the idea of government itself (if such evils there be),
the laws of development of government in all their practical
aspects--all these questions now come up for examination, and will not
be repressed. If we do not take them at one level we must upon
another. Naively or scientifically, philosophically or radically, the
nature of government must be dealt with.
Government is now being examined, we all see, from points of view not
hitherto taken. The conscientious objector raises the question of the
ultimate basis of the right of the many to control the lives of
individuals, and he asks especially whether there is any ground for
the assumption that in this sphere, more than in any other, might
makes right. Conscription, in fact, has driven us to consider the
meaning of liberty and the foundations upon which the right to it
rests. This stern fact of conscription, the realization that in a
moment the most democratic governments in the world are capable of
bringing to bear, quite constitutionally, absolute control over the
most basic possessions of the individual, has led many to ask
seriously whether government is after all a good in itself, or is
merely a necessity having many attendant evils. They wish to know
whether there is in the principle of government something that takes
precedence over all the assumed rights of the individual. Does
government, they inquire, have a _right_ to the individual; or is it
only in _serving_ the individual that it is entitled to exercise
authority that limits the individual?
These are questions, manifestly, that involve the whole foundation of
sociology, but we need not be unduly dismayed at that. This is a time
when naïve thinking and exact science must make compromises with one
another. For better or for worse we must find some working hypothesis
upon which a fair adjustment may be made in the practical life of the
present moment. This _working hypothesis_ must also serve--and perhaps
that is after all its main function--as something to guide us,
something having solidity upon which we can stand, in performing our
work as educators.
What we need, what we believe all feel now the need of, is a
conception of government satisfying to the multitude of common people.
We wish to know whether we live for the state, we say, or whether the
state lives for us. We wish to understand what the basic rights and
duties of the individual are. As average individuals, willing to give
service in any cause that seems good, we do not ask so much to have
determined for us precisely what type of government best satisfies the
requirements of science or philosophy, but what the best working basis
for harmonious adjustment in the social life of the future is to be.
These enquiring moods on the part of the people are a part of the
temperament that has issued from the war. We shall make a mistake if
we regard it as a mere passing effect, however; _it means a deep
stirring of the political consciousness of people throughout the
world_.
Significant differences may be observed in the general attitude toward
government among the people in the great nations of the world. Each
nation appears to have its own political temperament, and this quite
apart from the views represented especially by political parties and
the like, and quite independently of the scientific and philosophical
conceptions of government and its functions of which there are a great
number, and among them certainly no agreement upon the main issues and
values.
Taking public opinion as a whole, Germany, England, France and America
seem to represent distinctly different attitudes toward government. The
State in the German philosophy of life, as every one is now aware, is
all; the individual derives his reality and his value, so to speak,
from the idea of the supreme state. Individuality and freedom in this
philosophy of life do not refer to _political_ individuality and
freedom at all. In England, and perhaps to some extent in all
democratic countries, the prevailing thought seems to be that the
government that governs the least is, on the whole, the best
government. The English government is supposed to be the servant of the
people, and the individual has been in the habit of looking to the
government for many services. The individual, free and self-determined,
is the unit of value and of society, and the regulation of his conduct
by government is at best a necessary evil. It came as a surprise to the
Englishman when he realized that the state could command the most
personal service and the most complete surrender of the property rights
of the individual.
Le Bon says that the Frenchman, too, thinks of the state as something
to be kept at a minimum and to a certain extent to be opposed.
Opposition to the government is a part of the Frenchman's plan of
life. Boutroux says the same--that in France the habit of thinking of
the government and of society as two rivals has not been overcome.
Our own idea of government is certainly somewhat different from these.
We are watchful of individual right, but we do not tend to think of
government either as opponent or as servant. We do not ask the
government to take care of us as individuals, and we do not feel in
the public attitude the resistance to government that the French
writers observe in France. The American expects on the whole to look
out for his own interests and he has never felt the pressure and
over-powering force of government--until perhaps now. Mabie says that
the American has conceived of his government as existing to keep the
house in order while the family lived its life freely, every
individual following the bent of his own genius.
These temperamental attitudes toward government, we said, seem quite
apart from scientific and philosophic conceptions of state. We see,
however, something of the temperament reflected in the philosophies.
Philosophers do not wholly detach themselves from the mores of their
race. The monarchy of Germany, Munsterberg says, appeals to the _moral
personality and the æsthetic imagination_. Its main function, however,
is to safeguard the German people. Its faults are the faults of its
virtues. Other German writers praise the German government especially
for its efficiency, for its incomparable body of officials--indeed for
its very clock-work perfection that Bergson hates in Prussian life.
Lehmann goes so far as to say that the German state had reached the
_perfect balance_ between individualism and communism. These writers
see plenty of self-realization in German society, and quite enough of
participation, on the part of the individual, in the government.
Schmoller (51) denies that Germany ever lacked the spirit of free
institutions, and even compares Germany with ancient Attica, which he
thinks was great not because of the rule of the _demos_, but because
the people followed their aristocratic leaders. Troeltsch tries to
show that the German idea of freedom is different from, and indeed
superior to, that of all other peoples. The French, he says, rest
their idea of freedom upon the doctrine of the equality of all
citizens, but in reality lawyers and plutocrats prevail. The English
idea of freedom comes from Puritanic ideas; the individual's
independence of the state is based upon the idea of natural rights,
and upon the theory of the creation of the state by the individual.
But German freedom is something entirely different. Here freedom is in
education, and in the spiritual content of individuality. German
freedom is the freedom that comes from the spontaneous recognition of
rights and duties. Parliaments are good in their place, but after all
they are not the essence of freedom.
Totally different conceptions of state are easily found. Consider, for
example, the views of Russell. Through every page of his book there
shines the determined belief in the inalienable rights of the
individual. Self-expression of the individual through creative
activity is the basic value, or at least the fundamental means of
realizing values. Russell sees nothing sacred or final in any form of
existing government. He would like to see government expanded in some
directions and contracted in others, for the functions of government
cannot all be vested in one body or organization. For defense the
nation is _not large enough_. For all civic government the nation is
_too large_. In its internal control it treats the individual too
ruthlessly. Wasteful and in large part even unnecessary, it
antagonizes the free development of the individual. Government should
cease its oppression, it should no longer support unnatural property
rights, or interfere with the personal affairs of individuals. At the
present time, however, we should not expect a radical cure for all the
evils of government. If only we can find the right direction in which
to make advance, we should be satisfied with something less perfect
than an ideal.
The state in Russell's view, instead of being an ideal institution, is
even harmful in many ways and terribly destructive. It promotes war.
It makes the individual helpless, and crushes him with a sense of his
unimportance. It abets the injustice of capitalism. It excludes
citizens from any participation in foreign affairs. We must indeed not
let this incubus of state overwhelm us. We must keep it in its proper
place, even in performing its necessary functions, such as preserving
public health. It is better to take some risk, even in such matters,
than to override too much the individual's personal rights. All the
functions of the state must be made to center more about the welfare
of the individual, and in doing this the state must plainly regard as
fundamental the right of the individual to free growth and the
development of all his powers. We must learn to think more in terms of
individual welfare and less in terms of national pride.
In syndicalism in some form Russell sees the most promise for reform
of government. Some type of government at least which does not make
the geographical unit the basis of everything must be the government
of the future. This would lead in the end to a higher state than that
based primarily upon law, for it would be a government in which free
organization would be the first principle.
Plainly we are to-day in a time of flux in which ideas and
institutions are unsettled, and there is a great variety of political
theories of all kinds. We can hope to find no agreement among
theorists and certainly no common ground for the reconciliation of
conflicting parties. Still, even for the most practical daily life we
must find some guiding principles. We must look for some means of
bringing order out of the present diversity and conflict. Some
valuation of government, some idea of the ultimate purpose of
government ought to be agreed upon, if for no other reason that we may
have some principle which will give us continuity in our educational
work.
Consider the varieties of political creed now offered us, and there
can be little doubt both of the difficulty and the necessity of
finding guiding principles for the practical life and to preserve
sanity of mind. The monarchical idea still lingers; there is a variety
of conceptions of democracy, differing widely; there are
socialists--state socialists, Marxian socialists of the old line,
Bolshevists, regionalists, syndicalists, and others--and anarchists of
pure blood. Of internal and party differences, policies, and plans
there is no end. Through all these we have to thread our way, and
reach what conclusions we can.
No American can of course be expected to see the question of
government otherwise than through American eyes. He is to some extent
prejudiced and bound to the ideas of liberty, individualism, and
democracy, whatever his variety of party politics be. Democracy he may
regard as an assumption, but it will seem now even more than ever a
necessary assumption upon which to build a working conception of
government.
We have to look somewhere in actual life for the elements and
principles of government. Why should we not look for them in American
life, where government has grown up comparatively free from traditions
and prejudices and where it has been by all the ordinary tests
_successful_? There has been something both ideal and generic in
American life. Whatever personal equation may be involved in saying
this, the point of view has some objective justification. It is a
genetic method, at least. In early American life society was simple,
and life was earnest, and we see government and the individual in
their essential relations to one another.
In this primitive and yet modern society we see the individual as a
collection of functions, so to speak, existing in a group. The
individual also has various desires, which do not appear to be wholly
in agreement with his social functions. Some of these desires of
individuals are strongly antagonistic to society. In this society,
government is plainly the means of protecting the individual or the
group, by the suggestion or the exertion of lawful force, from the
threat of lawless force. Law is a means of enabling and also
compelling the individual _to perform the various functions which_
belong to him as an individual or as a member of the group. To some
extent the law also _aids_ the individual in performing his functions.
But this simple social order already shows certain basic disharmonies.
It is an experimental regulation of the individual. Every restriction
the individual helps to put upon other individuals by participating in
or acquiescing in the establishment of government and law reacts to
limit his own freedom, in ways which he cannot wholly predict. Freedom
of the individual, even in the simplest social order, becomes greatly
limited, if not necessarily, at least naturally--and indeed
necessarily, since the only choice appears to be between lawful and
lawless limitation of freedom. From the beginning, therefore, there
can be no perfect satisfaction of individual desires or of either
general or individual needs, in the ordered social life. Society as a
whole regulates the conduct of the individual both by aiding and by
inhibiting his activities, and must do so. In doing this, it is plain,
it promotes all or most of the functions of the individual. Ordered
society widens the total sphere of action of the individual. The
individual left to himself tends to become an end-in-himself. Law
makes him to a greater extent a means. In doing this it serves him and
it also uses him, and there can never be any guarantee, in any
individual case, of what the sum of these services and restraints
shall be. Society uses the individual in part, but not exclusively, in
his own service. The good and the evil, the necessity and the dilemma
of all government are outgrowths of this primitive service of the
social organization and this original disharmony among the wills of
individuals and the will of the group to serve the individual and also
at the same time certain general purposes which may not in any given
case coincide with either the desire or the need of the individual.
For this reason we conclude that there can be no _perfect_ government.
All government is experimental and exists by compromise.
What, then, in the most general way, can we say is the legitimate
function or purpose of government? Hocking says that government is the
means of assuring the individual that his achievements will be
permanent. To this end it puts order into the structure of society. In
our view something similar, but not identical with this, is true. We
can say that in its complex forms it is in principle only what we
found it to be in its primitive or simple forms. _Government is
ideally a means of aiding all the functions of every individual._
_Functions_, let us observe and not primarily desires are served.
These functions are such functions as the individual has as a member
of every group to which he naturally belongs. Government, then, so to
speak, has no standing of its own. Its proper function is to
facilitate all other functions. Neither individuals nor governments
have any rights as abstracted from the sum of functions which they
essentially are.
If this be true, we can certainly define no one best and eternal type
of government, any more than a fixed and perfect plan of life for an
individual can be defined. Government might be supposed properly to
change according to the functions which from time to time were most
important for the society in question. Social life, under government,
differs from a free and unorganized social life mainly in that a
certain _objectivity_ is acquired in regard to the functions of the
individual. The individual becomes a creature of functions rather than
of desires and needs. Common interests, or the interests of the group
are served, we say; in doing this the individual is made to serve his
own interests, perhaps, but the most outstanding fact is that in this
organized life the _immediate desires of the individual are likely to
be thwarted_. Regularity is put into conduct, and conduct is made to
serve multiple and distant ends. The functions of the individual, left
to the desire of the individual, will seldom be harmoniously
performed. They will lack precisely objective consideration. But in
the organized social life there will also be no perfect order and
harmony, no final balance of functions. Everything is still relative
and experimental. Government is a system in which any one individual
at any moment may gain or may lose. But _on the whole_, under the good
government, both more freedom for the individual and better conditions
and better life for the individual will presumably be obtained than in
any possible disordered or unorganized society. But government will
really add nothing that does not already belong to the functions that
naturally develop in any social group.
The actual functions of governments are, therefore, highly complex,
because it is in some way involved in all the functions of the
individuals themselves. Governments will be judged good or bad in two
particulars: according to the completeness with which they include all
the social functions, and as regards their efficiency in facilitating
these functions. We must not make the mistake of judging a government
merely by its form. Under the same constitution and holding the same
ideals, there is room for widely different forms of activity on the
part of the government, and great differences in efficiency and in the
functions performed. The same functions may be performed and the same
degree of efficiency reached apparently with different organizations.
Cleveland shows, for example, how our own government might become much
more efficient and make radical changes in the mechanism of the
legislative and executive functions without sacrificing any principle
we hold to, and perhaps without any change in our constitution.
It is this idea of the proper functions of government and the relative
adequacy of existing governments to perform them that seems to be
deeply questioned. Life has suddenly grown more complex. The
individual is brought face to face with new demands upon him. He
becomes, it may be, a member of new groups, having new functions.
Government also, and correspondingly, expands. The question is not now
of the efficiency of government in doing what it has hitherto
undertaken; we wish to feel sure that government is adequate to meet
the requirements of a rapidly changing social order. That just now is
indeed a very vital question. Governments, we say, may be obliged to
adapt themselves to entirely new tasks. Society assumes new external
relations, and therefore we should expect that new organs would be
needed for performing these new functions.
In all this we have been making _objective_ valuations of government.
An ideal or a definition of government in terms of its functions and
the degree of efficiency in the performance of them might still, we
ought to observe, leave a wide scope for preference in regard to
forms, and other subjective valuations. Even between aristocratic and
democratic forms, there may be still room for valid appreciations on
æsthetic or moral grounds. Our objective valuations of government must
in fact in various ways impinge upon fundamental questions in which no
purely scientific considerations will be wholly decisive.
We can certainly find no precise way of valuing in detail or in their
totality existing or proposed forms of government. Our most valid
method, however, appears to be to refer at every step the functions of
government back to the functions of the individuals who make up
society. Every phase of legitimate government must thus go back to the
individual, and his desires and functions. If we do this we shall see
again why in national life we have the same kind of experimental
problem that we have in the life of the individual. There can be no
perfect adjustment among the acts of an individual, and no final
valuation of them. There is no perfect balance between present use and
future good, between individual and social values, between desires or
needs and functions. The reason for this, we say, is that life is so
complicated and made up of so many functions and of so many
conflicting desires that it cannot be conducted according to any
single principle or combination of principles. If we think of
government as only a phase of the widest social living, and so as
being through and through of the nature of the life of the individual,
we ought to have the right point of view for all practical
consideration of it. We must not expect consistency or perfection in
government, and we can have no hope of passing absolute and final
judgments upon it. Radical politics, in our present situation, must be
regarded as one of our greatest dangers.
Democracy has become the "great idea of the age." It is our own
fundamental principle, so we of all people ought to be able to
understand and to defend it--and to _define it_. Yet many writers
complain and more imply that the idea of democracy has never been very
clear, and perhaps not even very sincere. Sumner says that democracy
is one of the many words of ambiguous meaning that have played such a
large part in politics. Democracy, he says, is not used as a parallel
word to aristocracy, theocracy, autocracy, and the like, but is
invoked as a power from some outside origin which brings into human
affairs a peculiar inspiration and an energy of its own.
Democracy has apparently meant quite different things to different
people. To some it is essentially a form of government in which
control is represented as in the hands of the majority of the people.
Some seem to have no further interest in democracy, if only they see
that the democratic form in government is preserved and jealously
guarded and the majority by its ballot rules. To some it is the aspect
of democracy as individualism that has appealed most--freedom of the
individual even from the restraint of law and custom--or again
equality of opportunity. These perhaps think of freedom as a supreme
value in itself. Some think of democracy more in terms of its internal
conditions or its results. They think of freedom as a means of
_accomplishing_ good, not as merely _being_ a good. They believe that
the good of the individual is not necessarily represented by the
satisfaction of his desires, and so perhaps think of the law and order
of the democratic community, the control and regulation of the
individual in his daily life by the will of all, as the essential
feature of a democracy.
Here in America, taking our history and our life as a whole, it seems
certain that the dominating mood has been the love of _individual
freedom_. Our democracy is founded upon the idea of the _rights of the
man_. But these rights and privileges of the man can be secured only
by social organization that immediately takes away some of them. So
our national life, just because of the strong individualism with which
it began, also began with a firm principle of law and order modifying
the idea of freedom. Some would say it began thus in a paradox or a
delusion. Even to be morally free was not allowed. The group, in the
Puritan society at least, exercised strict supervision over the moral
life of the individual. Giddings says, in fact, that this experiment
in moral control on the part of the people over all individuals is one
of the chief characteristics of American life.
_Our history is the story of an experiment in freedom_, in which
according to some we have more and more suppressed the individual.
Grabo says that the history of democracy here is the story of a dream
rather than an accomplishment. Such views, however, do not appear to
be true representations of the case. They assume that the independence
of the individual is more real or more realizable than it can be in
any society. Is it not rather true that _our apparent relinquishment
of the idea of freedom is the reverse side, so to speak, of the
persistence throughout our history of an impossible ideal of
independence of the individual_? It is individualism, rather than
control, that has increased. The original freedom was a freedom such
as comes from the willing participation of the individual in an order
in which the control was immediate and vested in the whole. Control
has become more definite and precise as the individual has become
further removed from the direct influence of the social environment.
We have developed relatively too much our original idea of
independence, and from time to time elements have been added to our
national life that represent an ideal of radical individualism, as for
example Jacksonian democracy. Willingness to participate freely in the
functions of society, and desire on the part of the individual to
perform all his functions, have been relatively too slight. Even in
politics it is not so much by the desire to participate in government
that we have shown our democratic spirit as by the desire not to be
individually governed. The old colonial spirit of coöperation and
neighborliness with which we started has been (speaking relatively
again) neglected. We have developed toward individualism and control
rather than toward free association under leadership. We have lacked
ability as individuals to see ourselves from the standpoint of the
whole of society. Now, therefore, we are faced by the apparent still
further decline of our principle of freedom, because we see that we
may have _efficiency_ only by increasing _authority_.
The question may fairly be asked whether we are not at a parting of
the ways, when our democratic idea must be more clearly defined, and
we must decide whether we shall change toward autocracy; or now, at
the end of our stage of primitive democracy, enter upon a plane of
higher democracy. Sumner says that always in a democracy it is a
question what class shall rule, that the control in a democracy always
tends to remain either in the hands of the upper class or the lower
class, and that the great middle class, the seat of vast powers, is
never organized to rule. Such conditions show, again, the effects of
the individualism that prevails--national unity and the capacity for
free organization without individual or special motives are wanting.
Cramb has stated a fundamental truth, from our point of view, in
saying that hitherto _democracy has been more interested in its rights
than in its duties_. It is very true that the _subjective state of
freedom_ has been the real attraction and appeal in our social life.
It has brought to our shores vast numbers of people who would
otherwise never have crossed the seas. Perhaps it has brought us too
many, and those with too keen a love of freedom. At any rate, the
question is now whether as a people we shall be able to take a more
advanced view of the individual, a more functional view, so to speak,
a new and enlarged conception of the meaning and place of the
individual man in society. Democracy, in a word, must henceforth,
certainly if it is to be a world state or order and not a condition of
world-wide anarchy, go beyond the negative idea of _freedom, justice
and equality_, to a more positive idea of service, in which we think
of individuals as having more complex, more free and more internal
relations among themselves.
In this idea of democracy, freedom is seen to mean first of all
freedom to perform all the functions which belong to an individual as
a part of a highly organized society. It does not include, however,
freedom not to perform these functions. It is freedom to lead a normal
life, in a word, not freedom to lead an abnormal life. Whether, in
this democracy, the performance of these functions will be more or
less under compulsion, whether the individual will voluntarily
surrender certain _rights_ assumed to be inherent in the principle of
_freedom_, or whether these rights will be taken away by the show of
force on the part of authority, seems to depend now mainly upon two
things: whether in this society superior leadership will have an
opportunity and be strong enough to exert deep influence upon the
people; and whether, in general, such an educational program can be
carried on as will make men susceptible to such leadership, capable of
judging its values and able also to organize freely for the
accomplishment of the purpose and functions of the social life. In
such a democratic society as this, it is plain, the evils of
individualism and also the evils of control will _tend_ to disappear.
Perfect identity of individual and social will we should not expect to
be attained anywhere.
The evils of our present democratic society--the individualism, party
politics and class rule--appear in sharp relief when we compare
existing institutions and the present spirit with what is required in
a true democracy. The old idea that the will of the majority must
prevail is seen to be inadequate, if we mean by will of the majority
the average or the sum of the desires and opinions of the majority.
These do not necessarily represent the good, and indeed under existing
conditions, they cannot. We want the will of the superior man to
prevail, but to prevail not by force, but by the power of influence.
The politicians talk about the soundness of the instincts of the
people Something more than instinct is wanted in a democracy.
Instincts are not progressive. Individualism, the pleasure of the
moment, and mediocrity are represented too much by instincts and in
every expression of the mere will of the majority. People in the mass
are governed too much by impulse. Conduct and purpose are too
discontinuous and fragmentary; or perhaps we had better say that the
stimuli of the moment are too likely to control conduct. Whereas
social life under the influence of the highest type of leadership is
governed by more complex states of consciousness, by moods, which are
more original and creative, and in which desires and impulses are no
longer the controlling factors in conduct.
This view of democracy shows that democracy is something still to
come. It is not an achieved social order or a well-founded doctrine
that must merely be exploited and spread abroad over the world.
Democracy is experimental civilization. We do not know whether it
represents the ultimate good in government and society or not, and
whether it is destined to continue and to prevail. That will depend,
we suppose, upon what we make it. We have our evidences of history,
but after all democracy is still based upon assumptions. It is an
experimental order, we say, in which we try to realize many desires
and to harmonize many functions. The final justification of democracy
must be in the far future. It must be judged then by its fruits,
rather than by rationally testing the validity of its principle. Thus
far it is a working hypothesis.
The precise form which government in a democracy ought to take is,
from our present point of view, of secondary importance. Democracy is
a spirit, an idea, a social quality, first of all. A monarchial
government, though it might be otherwise out of date, might be
entirely democratic in spirit; and republics, we know, may be anything
but democratic. Where control is in the hands of the people and not of
a class, but of the people subject to the best leadership--a
leadership that is based upon influence rather than upon any excess of
authority or show of force, there is democracy, and of this, of
course, the ballot itself is by no means the only test. But where thus
far shall we find any democratic society that is so sound that it can
offer itself as a model to the rest of the world?
Most of the political questions of the day appear to be relative and
conditioned questions. The question of governmental control of
industry is an example. This seems to be a question of expediency, and
to be conditional upon local needs and the status of particular
governments. It is certainly no fundamental question of the social
order. Those who make socialism a supreme and universal principle also
appear to be too radical. Sellars says that socialism is a democratic
movement, the purpose of which is to secure an economic organization
of society that will give a maximum of justice, liberty and
efficiency. Drake, in "Democracy Made Safe," says that socialism
implies equality everywhere; more than that, it means social,
political, economic and legal equality throughout the earth. One
cannot but feel that these enthusiastic writers are making the mistake
of undertaking to do by political mutation, so to speak, that which
can be accomplished, we may suppose, only by a slow process of
experimentation in government, and the still slower but more certain
method of education, in which all people are trained in fundamental
social relations. Radical and venturesome change in so great and
complex an organism as a great nation is now dangerous, because only a
part of the conditions can be taken into account, and the result,
therefore, must be conjectural.
Radical socialism that threatens to throw political power into the
hands of a political class, or of any social or economic class,
bolshevism which Dillon (speaking of Russia especially) says is doomed
to failure because of its sheer economic impossibility, any plan which
tends to concentrate authority in any class is threatening to our
future. The democratic spirit must hold fast against the rising tide
from the lower classes, just as it has been obliged to contend against
autocracy. Democracy has on one side to assimilate aristocracy, and
not overturn it. So it resists the rise of the proletariat, not to
turn this force back, even if this were possible, but to control it.
It is precisely because of the deep movement of the people--the world
revelation and the world revolution, as Weyl calls it--that we must
make all political institutions flexible and adjustible, and also
throw into the balance all the powers of education and thus save
democracy from itself.
These dangers to democracy are not to be taken too lightly. Democracy
indeed faces two dangers. Hobson in "Democracy After the War" has
stated one of them. He says that the war will result in no easy
victory for democracy, for the system of caste and bureaucracy is very
likely to become fixed. Democracy therefore must be worked for, and to
that end there must be a union of all types of reformers. We must play
off the special interests against one another, says Hobson, work for
industrial democracy, educate the people. On the other hand there is
that danger from the rising of the masses which Weyl heralds. This war
underneath and after the war is as Weyl sees it, the war of the poor
and exploited against all the exploiters. These elements are at heart
antagonistic to government. Democracy, if all this be true, is neither
well defined as an idea nor well established in the world. An unjust
and privileged class above and an unwise and uneducated class beneath
threaten it. But the case seems by no means hopeless. Indeed the
remedies and the way of escape seem in a general way plain. Political
changes on one side and political education on the other must become,
we should suppose, the order of the day.
Of the actual political changes impending and those that ought to be
advocated this is not the place to speak, except to say that they must
by their nature be tentative and experimental. The radical mind is
to-day one of the most dangerous elements in society, just because all
the world over men are very ready to be influenced and are eager for
change and are uncritical. Cleveland in an essay entitled _Can
Democracy be Efficient?_ exhibits a type of thinking about political
questions that ought to appeal to all practical thinkers. It is his
method rather than, in this connection, his conclusions that one
should notice. Cleveland would study all countries with reference to
the efficiency of their governments in fulfilling what seem to him to
be the proper and essential functions of a government, working under
our present conditions. Germany, France, England and America, he
observes, have all adopted different ways of conducting the work of
government. These essentials of government he reduces to five: 1)
Strong executive leadership; 2) a well disciplined line organization;
3) a highly specialized staff organization; 4) adequate facilities for
inquiry, criticism, and publicity by a responsible personnel
independent of the executive; 5) means of effective control in the
hands of the people and their representatives. Of these principles,
Germany used only the first three, England left out the second and the
third, France used all (but was late in seeing the need), America has
left out all of them.
This is the type of thought, we suggest, that seems best adapted to
meet present requirements for a practical theory of government.
Analysis of the functions of government, critical examination of the
needs of the present time, and a plan of modifying what already
exists, rather than of making revolutionary changes, seem to be the
right direction of progress.
If the source of power in the future is to be vested in the people,
the education of the people with reference to their function as rulers
will naturally be one of the most vital and permanent of the
requirements of the social life. Dickinson says that the time has gone
by for entrusting the destinies of nations to the wisdom of experts.
If this be true, and popular opinion is to supersede the wisdom of the
experts, if the people are really to have power, and be competent
critics of good government, or merely to become good material in the
hands of constructive statesmanship, education must include or be
essentially _political education_. The people must be educated _for_
democracy, but also made competent to _create_ democracy.
Of course everything we do in the school, the intention of the school
to represent what is best in civilization, and to be a center in which
creative forces come together has some reference to education for the
democratic life, but there are also more definite and more
specifically political things to be taught. And yet, if what we have
said before has any truth in it, it seems certain that no educational
policy at the present time can include the teaching of specific
political _doctrines_, or try to prejudice the minds of children or
the people to any political creed. We are in a position in regard to
political teaching very similar to that in which we stand about
religion: we must not teach creed, but we may and must teach natural
religion. We cannot teach politics as such, but we must teach natural
democracy, or at least the fundamental social habits and functions.
There are two essential educational problems of democracy that have
especial reference to the political aspects of it. The first is to
teach universally in as practical a manner as possible the materials
out of which political wisdom may be derived. We maintain that the
lack of political education and experience is one of the most serious
defects of the German people. These people are at first submissive to
an extraordinary degree and then they become dangerously
revolutionary. The lack of political competence is shown in both
cases. We wish, of course, neither of these excesses in our own
country. And yet we do have to cope at the present time with both a
tendency to fanaticism, radicalism and intense partisanship, and with
indifference and ignorance of the nature and purpose of our
institutions and government. Both the indifference and the
partisanship play into the hands of party politics, and no advantages
gained by the balance of parties in opposition to one another can
compensate for the loss of energy and the encouragement of inefficient
service the system fosters.
To help offset these tendencies it must be possible to give to all
youths, and of course we mean both sexes, through our educational
system and otherwise an education in politics, and besides this some
practical experience in public service in institutions and in
organizations. This is a vital spot in education in a democracy; we
have tried too much to reform or make progress in government from
within the political system itself, and too little by going back to
the ultimate sources of social life and educating the people as a
whole with reference to playing their part in political life.
The work of education in the field of politics is not merely to give
information, but to establish what we may best call _morale_. We need
an attitude and spirit throughout the public life of the nation in
which there shall be constantly displayed the same qualities which we
see so quickly coming to light in time of war. Enthusiasm, seriousness
of purpose, devotion of the individual to common purpose are the
essential elements of this war spirit. To produce and sustain this in
the activities of peace is an _educational_ problem. The first task is
presumably to establish the causes and the organizations through which
they may be served, but _political education itself consists largely
in the production of public spirit_. The correction of evils in the
political system is of course but a small part of the work of
political reform. Dowd says that it is the low personal idealism of
mankind that creates our multitudinous social problems and strews the
path of history with wreck and ruin. That is of course true. Raising
the quality of the personal idealism of the people is the real work of
political education. Political thought which is most concerned as it
is now with securing advantage for party, class and individual must be
superseded by a wider interest in government as a means of aiding the
performance of the functions of the individual and the group. It is
the purpose to be accomplished by government, not its form, and
certainly not the interest of the few or of any class that must be
emphasized, until partisan politics no longer dominates our political
life. To accomplish this change means, we say, raising the quality of
the personal idealism of the people. This may seem an ideal and
impossible task, but we have some of our experiences of the war at
least to give us encouragement.
If we wish to consider details, we may notice that in an educational
process having such ends as we have suggested, the teaching of civics,
for example, becomes more functional, the teaching of what an
individual in a community and what all governments do, rather than
analyzing the structure of government. Such civics teaches the meaning
of individuals as having functions which are represented and fulfilled
in the institutions and organizations of society, including every
department of government. It is not the intention to enter here into
the special problems in regard to the content and method of teaching
civics in the schools, although it is evident that this subject must
have an increased place in the future. We already see advances both in
the purpose and the plan of civics teaching and in the literature
prepared for the schools. Dunn, for example, makes fundamental in all
the teaching of civics the question, What are the common interests
which people in communities are seeking? Tufts also tries to deal with
the fundamental ideas upon which government is based.
Presentation of facts is surely a necessary part of all education, for
it is an indispensable means of giving the content of experience upon
which wisdom as a selective appreciation of experience is based. But
erudition is only a part of education. We must hold firmly now to the
principle which is indeed an aspect of the democratic ideal itself,
that participation is also a necessary part of education.
Institutions become real to the child through the child's association
with them in some active way. We shall probably see the idea of free
organization carried far, and in every organization and every
institution, private and public, there must, we believe, be some place
for the services and the interest of all. Let us take the position
that there is nothing in government, in any of its branches, that is
outside the sphere of the practical life of the individual and we
shall have the right point of view even for the work of the school
room. Government, in a word, is not a specialization of function in
which the few are involved, but it is a generic function, the means,
we assert, of carrying to completion all the projects of individuals
in all their social relations. Therefore all, not merely those who
just now are included among voters, but all women and children, must
have a part in the general education for democracy and also have a
part in some way in the institutions of government. From first to last
government must be thought of and understood in terms of what it does,
as a phase of the total social life of the nation, not as something
outside the social order. Government is a collective activity. It is
as an aspect of the day's work of the nation, that government must be
impressed upon all--both legal citizens and citizens in the making.
The second phase of the educational problem in regard to government is
perhaps after all only the first in another form. If we hope to have a
democratic civilization in any real sense anywhere, we must secure
efficiency and superiority both in individual and in social conduct,
not mainly by the exertion of authority (except as a temporary
make-shift) but by making all the people of a nation susceptible to
the influences of the best life and thought the nation contains. This
means the voluntary and intentional development of leadership. This we
have spoken of as a general need; it is also a phase of political
education. The genius, the leader, must of course himself be produced
in part by education. We must have such conditions as shall allow
natural leadership to come to the surface, and every spark of genius
must be carefully nourished. But there must be also opportunity for
what the genius produces to work its effect upon all, as a stimulating
and directing force, in turn arousing the creative activities of the
people. Democracy seems to be wholly dependent upon what seems now the
accident of genius for raising it above the mediocrity of the average,
or even preventing a decline in its civilization. It is this idea of
the relation of the best to the average that James evidently thought
to be the fundamental point in education. Education consists in his
view in the development of ability to recognize the good in every
department of life, the ability to recognize all sham and inferiority
and the habit of responding to and choosing the best. Applied to the
problems of government, this means such a method of educating the
young as will make all susceptible to and appreciative of the superior
qualities of mind and character that may be exhibited in public life.
Such responsiveness being itself creative and a powerful factor in
producing and bringing to the front the superior man, it must be
regarded as one of the most necessary and fundamental qualities of a
democracy.
We might single out the teaching of history and biography as the best
means of educating the appreciative powers in regard to values in
human life, and the best means of facilitating the emergence of the
best individuals and the best principles, and of making their
influence powerful, but after all it is something more than any or all
teaching that is required. Most fundamentally, no one can refuse to
admit it is such an organization of the whole educational situation as
will allow, or rather cause and encourage, precisely the total of the
good and progressive life of the world to play upon the mood and the
spirit of the school. Assuredly the school is not to-day so
fortunately situated. It is too much removed from some influences and
far too closely joined to others. Much of the good of society is
walled out from the school by barriers that arise in politics, City
ways, all the bad life of the streets, the trivial interests of the
day, affect the school too much. We are greatly at fault in all this,
because we do not take education as yet seriously enough. There must
be now a decision. Either the school must be content to remain what it
is now, a local institution performing a very limited service, or it
must arise to quite new heights, and mean far more as a civilizing and
creative force than it has thus far. The school must occupy more hours
of the day and more days in the year. It must claim the child more
completely. It must extend its influences further, and draw its life
from a deeper soil. We certainly shall never allow the school to
become a great evil in society, but it is almost as bad morally to
leave it but a feeble good. Let no one speak any longer of good
schools. Our schools were good for yesterday, perhaps. But of
to-morrow's needs they are not yet even fully aware. The school has
yet to learn with certainty to lay hold upon the fundamental things in
the nature of the child, and to appreciate the child's real and
greatest needs. Continuity and creativeness are still for the most
part beyond the powers of the school.
But perhaps after all we are asking the impossible. Perhaps the forces
needed cannot be brought to bear upon the child. Perhaps conditions
are too unfavorable, and an educational situation cannot be devised
that will be greatly superior to what we have already. Perhaps the
time is too short. Perhaps worst of all the nature of the child
himself is too trivial and unpromising. But if we believe this, we
certainly at the same time conclude that democracy is a failure and is
not in any true sense possible at all. Democracy cannot be created by
forces from without, for this would be indeed a negation of its
nature. Democracy is self-creative. It grows from within. But how can
it grow from within unless the new life which enters into it be
creative; and how can this life be creative and progressive unless it
be so lived that it shall absorb all the good the old life has in it,
and also be inspired to go beyond it in every possible way? Unless
democracy is merely a product and natural direction of growth in
society, democracy and education are not unrelated to one another. If
democracy is a good that can be obtained only by conscious effort, we
may suppose that one of the greatest factors in producing it will be
education.
CHAPTER VIII
INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION
We have as yet no deep philosophy of industry. For better or for worse
work came into the world as a result of desire. Men did not desire
work, but they desired that which could be obtained only by work.
These desires multiplied and the modern industrial world is the
result. When material objects alone were desired, the motive of work
was relatively simple; but as we pass from the desire for goods to the
desire for wealth, and to the desire for wealth as a means of gaining
power and prestige, the industrial movement becomes more complex. We
go on and on, producing ever greater wealth and generating more and
more power, and we do this we say with no deep purpose and with no
philosophy of life. For the justification of it all, if it be under
our control at all, we can only say that through industry we realize
an abundant and enriched life.
The good and evil of work put upon us some of the most perplexing of
our problems. Industry, we say, is the way to the rich and the
abundant life. It makes life more complex. The relations of life are
multiplied by it. It represents and it achieves man's conquest over
nature. It puts force into his hands. It has its ideal side and its
romance. It gives scope to pure motives of creativeness. But the
industrial life has also its dark side. It has created the city with
all its good and its evil. It has created great nations, but see what
the added populations consist of. It brings on the old age of nations.
It stands for struggle that is often fruitless and unproductive. It
engenders moods and arouses interests and powers that lead to wars
and revolutions. It fosters sordid interests, and has made almost
universal the necessity of an excess of toil in order barely to live.
The great majority of workers do not live in their work, because they
produce nothing that is in itself satisfying. The spirit remains
outside their daily life. Life is divided into a period of toil
without deep interest and motive, and play which may be only a
narcotic to kill the sense of monotony and fatigue. Individuals have
specialized at the expense of a whole life. Men have been exploited
and used like material things. Bergson says that by industry man has
increased his physical capacities, but now it is likely that his soul
will become mechanized rather than that his soul will become great
like his new body. Industry, worst of all, has become an end in
itself, rather than a means to higher ends. To live, on the one hand,
to gain wealth on the other, men give all there is in them to toil.
We saw all this before the war, but one important result of the war
has been that we now see that this industrial life which has so
rapidly created new institutions, and which grips the world almost
like a physical law, is not in all its ways so fixed and inevitable as
we had perhaps thought. In regard to the industrial life, more than in
any other department of life, we see new and radical thought, and the
possibility of conscious effects, although it must be admitted that
some of the proposed changes may well cause apprehension.
We had hoped, even before the war, to see industry and art become
gradually more closely related, and to see industry become more
socialized. Its physical hardships were to some extent already being
ameliorated. We hoped to separate the great industrial interests from
politics, and to curb the powers industry has that make it a trouble
producer in the world. But now, after the war, we see possibilities of
more fundamental changes in the industrial order than these
improvements implied. Our thoughts now touch upon the whole theory of
the industrial life. We see that by a coördinated effort and common
understanding which it is no longer chimerical to hope for, the
conditions of the industrial life might be very different. In the
first place we are convinced that the world could produce vastly more
and could use its products with far greater economy than now. We see
that much greater return for less labor could be gained. Even the
desires themselves upon which many of the evils of industrialism are
based have shown themselves to be controllable. It is no longer idle
to believe that the restraint and coöperation necessary to eliminate
most of the poverty from the world are possible to be attained. The
isolation of the individual worker, which has made his struggle so
hard, seems about to be relieved to some extent at least. We even hope
for permanently better relations between the capitalist and the
laborer, and to see some of the evils of competition, even the
industrial competition among nations, lessened.
Although the interest here is in the relations of industry to
education, rather than in the practical changes pending in the
industrial world, we must think of the two as related. Changes that
take place in political and industrial conditions will be likely to be
temporary and ineffectual unless they are supported by changes in the
field of education. The reformer and the educator must work together.
Noyes says that the most fundamental change that has occurred during
the war has been the world-wide assertion of public control of
industry by the government. Perkins says that centralization is the
order of the day, and that the government now properly takes on many
functions that once belonged to the states, and that this process of
centralization naturally extends to international relations. Smith
speaks of the growing interdependence of government and industry which
will especially give security to investment in productive enterprises.
Hesse says that there must be national team work in all industries,
and that in a democracy everything that autocracy can accomplish must
be repeated, but upon a basis of voluntary coöperation. In France it
has been proposed by Alfassa that there shall be established a
department of national economy, to bring about a closer coöperation
than there has been in the past among private interests, and to
centralize industry. Wehle thinks that in America, even before the
war, industrial concentration was leading to political concentration
and that the states were losing their relative political importance.
The grappling of states individually with large industrial problems is
now, he says, at an end. Dillon has expressed the view that England
ought to adopt industrial compulsion. Clementel, the French minister
of commerce, thinks France ought to substitute for liberty without
restraint in the industrial field, liberty organized and restricted.
There can be no doubt that the world is thoroughly awake to the need
of more effectual coöperation in industry, and it is natural that the
first thoughts should turn to government control as the simplest and
readiest method of securing it. When we examine these suggestions
about the coördination and centralization of industries it becomes
evident that most writers have been strongly influenced by Germany's
remarkable success, both in peace and war, under the system of
governmental control of industries. The manner in which the German
government turned all the country into one great industrial plant has
appealed to the imagination, and many writers see in centralization
under the control of government the means of curing most of the evils
of industrialism. There are many proposals, all the way from the plan
to introduce cabinet ministers with limited power to have oversight
over industry to the total abolishment of the capitalistic system and
all the rights of property. Many of course, while still believing in
concentration and coöperation, cling to the system of private and
individual ownership, and believe that the best results will be
obtained in the end without any radical change in the relations
between government and industry, and without resorting to any
socialistic reform.
Another phase of the problem of industry in which we may expect to see
great changes in the future concerns the status of labor and its
relation to capital. The rising of the laboring class is certainly the
greatest internal result of the war. Here again the question is
whether the changes will take place by coöperation or by
compulsion--either on the part of government or of some organized
class. Will labor and capital continue to be antagonistic, or will
they find common interest; or will the only solution be again some
radical change involving change of government or abrogation entirely
of our present system of ownership? That the position of labor has
become stronger as a result of the war no one can doubt. Perkins says
we are just entering upon a period of copartnership, when the
tool-user will be part tool-owner, and capital and labor will share
more equally in the profits. Increase in wages will not be the remedy,
but only profit sharing. Others think the same; they see that the
laborer's discontent is not all a protest against his hard physical
conditions. He wants more social equality, more equality of status in
the industrial world. He objects not so much to what the capitalist
has as to what he is.
There has no more illuminating document come out of the war than the
report on reconstruction made by a subcommittee of the British Labor
Party. This report calls for a universal minimum wage; complete state
insurance of the workers against unemployment; democratic control of
industries; thorough participation by the workers in such control on
the basis of common ownership of the means of production; equitable
sharing of the proceeds by all who engage in production; state
ownership of the nation's land; immediate nationalization of
railroads, mines, electric power, canals, harbors, roads and
telegraph; continued governmental control of shipping, woolen,
leather, clothing, boots and shoes, milling, baking, butchering, and
other industries; a system of taxation on incomes to pay off the
national debt, without affecting the living of those who labor.
Although such a document as this could hardly up to the present time
have been produced by American workmen, since here political doctrines
of socialism have never obtained a strong hold upon the laboring
classes, in England these radical demands are nothing surprising. They
have the support at many points of so keen a thinker as Russell.
Russell does not, it is true, believe that Marxian socialism is the
solution of the problem of capital and labor, but he does believe in
the state ownership of all land, that the state therefore should be
the primary recipient of all rents, that a trade or industry must be
recognized as a unity for the purposes of government, with some kind
of home rule such as syndicalism aims at securing. Industrial
democracy, as planned in the coöperative movement, or some form of
syndicalism, appears to him to be the most promising line of advance.
That such demands and proposals as these are significant signs of the
times can hardly be doubted. That from now the status of the workman
will be changed and changed in directions more satisfactory to the
workman we may accept as one of the chief results of the war.
Politically the laborer is prepared to assert his independence. Both
his social and his industrial status are likely to be improved. He
will be better safeguarded against unemployment. Wages in the old form
and the old tradition that the worker has no contract with his
employer will, in all probability, be less generally acceptable. Work,
if these new conditions are realized, will mean more to the worker.
His own interests and the purposes of his work will be more
harmoniously related. The individual made more secure in his work,
protected more by law and participating more in the affairs of
business and government, will have a sense of playing a more dignified
part in the social economy. Conceal as we may the inferiority of the
laborer's position under the pretenses of democracy and liberty and
equality, this inferiority of position exists and the inequality that
prevails in democratic society is certainly one of the fertile sources
of evil in the world to-day. We have still to see to what extent the
workman, his lot ameliorated in many ways, and his position changed,
will himself become a new and different man, and thus make the world
itself a different place in which to live. All that is thus suggested
we have a right at least to hope for now. If it is also worked for
with intelligence and good will, why should it not come to pass?
The third idea which is beginning to make great changes in the whole
field of the industrial life and throughout all the practical life is
the _idea of economy_. This means that in many ways questions of the
values, the purposes, and the ways and means of what is done in the
world are being sharply examined. Labor has been uncritical of its
purposes, and lavish and wasteful of its energies, however watchful it
may have been of its rights. Production has been governed too much by
desire, too little by careful consideration of need. Distribution has
been carelessly conducted, allowing large losses of time and material.
Consumption has been quite as careless as the rest, and has been
thoroughly selfish as well. The war has changed many of our ideas.
Thrift has become a word with a new meaning. We see what industry at
its worst might do in the world, and on the other hand what wise
control of all the motives and processes that enter into labor and all
the economic life might accomplish.
Some of these changes are coming from readjustment in the coördination
of industrial processes themselves. We hear much of standardization
and stabilization. An economic technique and the control of
fluctuating conditions might do much to increase the efficiency of
industry in every way. This idea of the application of scientific
procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of
the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the
spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of
unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most
advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of
mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual
details of movement and the whole process of expenditure of energy,
counting costs in terms of time and energy, in much the same way as
all the items of value that enter into production are estimated. Some
writers, for example Gilbreth, see in this movement a great advance.
It is a way of giving equal opportunity to all. Economy becomes a
factor in freedom, since it helps to eliminate the drudgery and
depression of toil.
Plainly, then, economy or thrift has a much wider meaning than mere
saving. It is many-sided, and the study of economy in the use of
essentials is but a part of it. The war has, of course, emphasized
this, and this idea of saving has served the purpose of awakening an
interest in the whole theory and purpose of work. There is a better
understanding of values, and of the difference between the essential
and the unessential, and we see that not all labor that commands pay
is useful labor. Many things that the public knew but little about
before are becoming better understood. Industry, finance, business,
taxes, transportation, have all to some extent become popular
subjects. The present high cost of living raises questions in the
theory of the economic aspect of life that have compelled the
attention of the public. The theory of money, interest, savings,
foreign investments, the place of gold in the world's economy is
carried a step further and is popularly more extended. We hear all
sorts of proposals about the production, the distribution and the
consumption of goods, which are intended to make living easier and
less expensive. Increased production of staples and more direct route
from producer to consumer are urged upon all, and the economists have
many suggestions for increasing our prosperity: while financiers try
to direct to the best purpose our investments at home and abroad.
Fisher attacks the whole theory of costs at what he believes its root,
suggesting a plan of "stabilizing the dollar itself" by using the
index numbers of standard articles as units of value, and regulating
the weight of gold in the dollar according to the fluctuations of
these. All these plans, hasty and narrowly conceived as many of them
seem to be, are of interest and have value, for they indicate a
serious determination to solve the fundamental problems of the
practical life.
Any educational theory that could hope to deal adequately with the
needs and the impending changes in the industrial situation of to-day
must take into consideration the basic facts both of the individual
and the social life. Teaching of industry and all attempts to teach
vocation must be seen by all now to be but a small part of education
with reference to the industrial life. We must do much more
fundamental things than these. We must plan far ahead and seek to lay
a firm foundation for the idea of coöperation which appears to be the
leading thought of industrialism to-day. Every individual, we should
say, ought to be educated in the fundamentals of labor, so that he may
understand for himself what labor means. Finally the idea of thrift in
all its implications must be made a part of the educational program.
All this may seem too ideal and impracticable to think of in
connection with industrial education, but if we consider industry and
industrialism as the center of our whole civilization, as it appears
to be now, what less ideal educational foundation will be sufficient
as preparation for and control of the industrial life? No teaching of
trades, we assert, will be enough. We shall need to apply, in
industrial education or in an educational plan that takes industry
into account, all the methods of teaching: those that employ industry
itself, but also art, erudition, and play.
It is first with industrialism as a world condition that education is
concerned. Industrialism has been, as all must recognize, too
individualistic. It has motives and moods and products, and it grows
in social conditions, that are full of danger for society.
Industrialism lacks a soul, as Bergson would say. Yet it is a movement
that sweeps on with almost irresistible force. Its most characteristic
product is not what it turns out in shops, but city life itself. Many
would agree with Russell in saying that all the great cities are
centers of deterioration in the life of their nations. Education,
then, must undertake to control industrialism. This does not mean,
necessarily, that it must try to check it, but that the motives in
individual and social life that produce industrialism must in some way
be under the control of educational forces.
First of all it seems certain that no political arrangement, and no
change taking place entirely within the industrial system itself, and
no simple and direct educational procedure will give us control over
the forces of industrialism. It is mainly by preventing the city
spirit or mood from developing too fast and thus engulfing the
children of the nation that we can introduce a conscious factor strong
enough to hold industrial development within bounds. This means, we
must earnestly demand, turning back the flow of life from country to
city by educating all children in the environment of the country. This
would have a double effect upon the industrialism of the day. _It
would break up the present inevitable inheritance by the city child of
all the ideals and moods of the city, and it would give opportunity
for training in the activities that are basic to all industry, which
alone, in our view, can give to industry a solid and normal
foundation._ By such effects, in such a general way, upon the children
of an industrial nation, we might reasonably hope to prevent the evil
effects upon our national life from the fatigue, the routine, and the
deadening of the spirit which even under improved conditions cannot be
overcome in an industrial life that is left to its monotonous grind
and its morbid excitements and exaggerations.
Another work that education must in the end do for the industrial life
is to infuse into it an ideal and a purpose. Industry is too
individualistic, we say. It works for a living, for power, from
necessity. It lacks through and through as yet the spirit of free and
intelligent coöperation for common and remote ends. Coöperation in the
industrial world, we have seen reason to believe, is likely to be the
great word of the future. It is precisely the work of education to
make the future of industry an expression of free activity, to make it
democratic, and to such an extent, we might hope, that socialism,
whether as a governmental interference or as a class system, would not
be necessary--or possible. In trying to give industrialism an ideal,
we must presumably go back to elemental mental processes. We must, in
the beginning, present the world's work dramatically to the child. We
must give work interest, and it is certainly one of the chief purposes
of that nondescript subject we call geography thus to give the child a
deep appreciation of the world as a world of men and women engaged in
work. We must show industry as a world-wide purpose, not as something
essentially individual and competitive. We must show it as an
adventure on the part of man in which he goes forth to seek conquest
over the physical world; we must think of it as a means to an end, of
fulfilling purposes not all of which perhaps can as yet be foreseen,
but which certainly can be no mere satisfaction of the individual's
desires of the day. This is what we mean by putting a soul into
industry. Soul means purpose--purpose which includes more than the
desires of the individual, and in which the interests of the world as
a whole are involved. Industry that has thus a purpose, and that is
imbued with a spirit of freedom takes its place among the psychic
forces and becomes a part of the mechanism of mental evolution. It is
this idealism of industry, toward the production of which we must turn
every educational resource, that must offset its materialism. This is,
in part, the work of the æsthetic experiences, the dramatic
presentation of the day's work to the child; but art can of course
work only upon the soil of experience; the child must see the world
teeming with human activity, but he must observe it in a detached way,
rather than as a participant in its realism and its dull and its
unwholesome moods. Then we shall have a content upon which the
æsthetic motives can work. In this idealized industrial experience, we
try to make visible the real motives which in the future must dominate
the world's work.
All this may seem too general and too ideal, but if we do not begin
with broad plans, and if we do not take a far look ahead, we shall
fail now at a vital point of the social development of man. The result
at which we aim is _the socialisation of the motives of industry_. We
make work voluntary by bringing into it persuasively and insidiously
deep motives and interests which represent social purposes and ideals.
Given these motives and the beginning of a change from the relatively
more individualistic to the relatively more social spirit in industry,
the actual means of coöperation would not be far to seek. Work would
become by its own inner development under such conditions, something
different from an unwilling service of the individual, a compulsory
service to family or state. Everything we can do to give to children
and to all workers an intelligent appreciation of the social meaning
and purpose of work is both industrial training and an education in
basic social relations. This socialization of the moods of work and
the founding of them upon the necessary experiences, is as important
as anything education is at the present time called upon to do. Given
this foundation, precisely the form industrial education, in the
ordinary sense, shall take, seems to be of secondary importance.
Turning now to another phase of the industrial problem on its
educational side, one cannot escape the conviction that the rising
tide of the powers of labor presents urgent problems to the educator.
The common man, as we call him, is to take a greater part in the
affairs of business and state, and the education of the common man
with reference to the especial capacity, as worker, in which he seeks
this new position, becomes highly important. This education of the
people with specific reference to work is of course something more
than teaching vocation. Education, indeed, with any explicit attention
to labor itself, whether in its industrial or its political
implications, is but a part of the educational problem. All education
for the democratic life is involved in it. The whole problem of
specialization comes up, and indeed all questions of social education
in one form or another.
Specialization, in particular, can no longer be treated with the
indifference that has so far characterized our industrial education.
The ideal of fitting the boy for work is as naïve in one way as that
of our generalized education is in another. _If the war has taught us
anything beyond a doubt, it is that specialization must never be such
a differentiation as shall infringe upon the common ground of human
nature._ We must take this into consideration in all our vocational
training. We must preserve an identity in all the fundamental
experiences. In a democracy this appears to be wholly necessary, and
to outweigh all considerations of efficiency. The individual must be
kept whole and generic, so that each individual is an epitome, so to
speak, of the virtues and the ideals of the nation. The humanity of
the man must be first, and his special function secondary. This does
not imply that we must not give to all children individual and
vocational training. All must be directed towards life work. We may
even carry vocational training further than it has been extended
anywhere as yet, but we must see that industry occupies the right
place in the school, and in all educational processes. It is neither
the whole method and purpose of the school, nor something simply added
to the curriculum. It is a phase of the life of the school, both in
its active and its receptive states. The child must live in an
atmosphere in which both present and future usefulness are assumed and
provided for. The idea of a life of work must be made early an
accepted plan of the child, and it must be one of the entirely general
tasks of the school to see that the tendency of the child in the
school is toward occupation. Occupation must in fact be made to grow
naturally out of the life the child leads in the school.
All those disharmonies in our industrial countries such as the
prevalent discord between working and capitalistic classes seem, we
have said, to be social rather than economic in nature. Social
education, then, is the main cure for them, if we wish to attack them
at their root. The motives of pride and the sense of inferiority have
to be dealt with in a practical manner. We sometimes quite overlook
the importance of habitual moods or states of feeling in society and
in the school. These moods are powers which motivate conduct. Any form
of education in which the poorer and less favored are given an
opportunity to acquire the experiences, and through these the moods,
that especially distinguish the more favored class, strikes at the
general disparity in society which takes form in such antagonisms as
that between capital and labor. It is not difference in degree but
difference in kind of experience that appears to separate the classes
from one another. The difference seems to lie in those parts of life
which are sometimes believed to be the unessentials and which indeed
our whole educational policy assumes apparently to be trivial. _The
fundamental differences between the poor and the rich, the favored and
the common people, is in the sphere of the æsthetic._ Distinction of
manner and an environment rich in æsthetic qualities are the main
advantages of the few, as compared with the many. Social experience is
what is most needed by the many, but of course this experience can
never be gained by making the educational institutions merely
democratic, and especially social experience cannot be gained in a
school in which all situations are studiously avoided in which really
significant social relations are likely to be experienced. We gain no
social experience in the naïve and the highly special activities of
the school which for the most part is arranged in such a way as to
exclude organized social relations. This is a process in which such
leveling as there is tends to be downward, whereas what we need is for
all the truly aristocratic elements in our national life to have an
opportunity to propagate themselves and to extend to the many. Leaving
aside the need of a differently organized social life in the school,
we might say that there is hardly a greater need in democratic
countries now than that of recruiting the rank and file of teachers
from a socially superior class. These socially favored individuals
have given themselves loyally to the service of country in a time of
war, for two if no more of their deepest motives have been appealed
to--the dramatic interest and the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. There
are duties in times of peace which are quite as important, but which
as yet appeal to no strong motive, and have not even been presented in
the form of obligation. Once these common tasks were made to appear a
part of the fulfillment of duty to country, the way to finding deep
satisfaction in them might be opened. Social and dramatic elements
would be introduced as a matter of course.
Another need throughout our whole effort to educate all in and for a
life of work, one which has appealed to many writers in recent years,
is the need of making all the experience of work more creative or more
free and animated or joyous in mood. _This means, again, that in all
industrial education the mood must be social and the form æsthetic or
dramatic._ Social values must be felt through social activity, and the
sense of worth in labor and of value of the product which is felt in
the social mood must be enhanced by the dramatic form of the activity
and the artistic quality of the product. This is also the condition
for creative activity. Some writers apparently now see in this need of
making the activity of all those who work more creative, more free and
more joyous the crucial problem of education and of social adjustment.
This is Russell's constant theme. Helen Marot in "Creative Industry"
says that our problem is to develop an industrial system that shall
stimulate and satisfy the native impulse for creative production. It
is difficult to see how, by any other educational process than one
which is essentially æsthetic and social, we can make much headway
toward changing the conception of work from the now prevalent one of a
means of making a living, more or less under compulsion, to that of a
voluntary social act done both for its utility from the standpoint of
the individual and also because of its social value, and performed to
some extent, however humble the work, in the spirit of the creative
artist.
For the adult generation that now works (and for how many generations
to come we do not know), we cannot hope to make ideal conditions. Work
will still be work, with its evil implications, as toil without
complete inner satisfaction, and without sufficiently free motives.
But the direction in which practical changes should be made seems
clear. There must still be a lessening of the hours of routine labor,
until there are perhaps no longer more than six or five devoted to
vocation. The remainder of life is not for idleness but must be in
part productive or the lessened hours of routine will not be possible.
There must be possibility of both practical and recreational
activities outside the regular day's work, as well as for educational
work, all of these in part at least publicly provided for. This
activity may serve many purposes and accomplish a variety of results.
As educational it ought to open up new opportunities; it must fulfill
the desire for creative activity; it must be a socializing power; it
must lead to an appreciation of the nature and value of skill and
efficiency; it must introduce all to the higher world of art and the
intellectual life. Above all it must impress deeply the truth that
growth in the normal life is never ended.
The third phase of industrial education which is to be emphasized now
is the teaching of what we have called _thrift_. This idea of thrift,
for pedagogical purposes, is equivalent to the broad principle that
purposes in this world are achieved by the expenditure of force--by
the control of energies which are not unlimited in amount as now
controlled and which are subject to definite laws. Since objects which
are to be secured by the expenditure of energy differ in value it is a
part of this education in thrift, indeed an important and necessary
part, to give to all such knowledge and powers of appreciation as will
enable them to recognize that which is essential, and to give the
essential and the unessential their proper places in the whole economy
of life.
It will never be right of course to inspire a parsimonious spirit in
regard either to goods or to energies. Life itself and all its
energies must be given freely; material goods must not be evaluated
too minutely. The miserly life is not what we wish to teach. Still
there is a wise attitude toward all material things and toward all
values which recognizes goods as means to ends, which places true
values high and demands economy in the use of all things that must be
conserved in order to attain them.
It must be a part of the work of physiology, which thus branches out
into psychology, to teach to all the efficient use of human energies.
These energies are the precious things in the world; they must be
valued and respected as the source of all efficiency. The idea of
economy of movement, from this standpoint, has an important place in
all motor or industrial or manual training. Processes must be
regarded as definite series of acts in which we may approach
perfection. Technique in motor operations is not to be regarded
lightly as a mere finish applied to useful acts. It is the expression
of an ideal of efficiency and economy. Children recognize the value of
technique in games; its wider and more practical application needs to
be impressed.
In the same way knowledge of the precise values and uses of material
things ought to be imparted. The war has had the effect of showing all
of us the values of materials and the relations of materials to one
another. It has given us a sense of the great powers of natural
wealth, and also of its limitations and the weak points that exist now
in our economy. The war has proved to us how closely related the
things we use lavishly and wastefully may be to the most ideal
possessions. It has shown that the production, the distribution and
the use of wealth of all kinds are parts of the accomplishment of the
main purposes of life and that all these things belong to the sphere
of _duty_; and that no individual can escape obligations in regard to
economy.
Education, therefore, must lay foundations both for an understanding
of economy and for the practice of it. First of all, every individual,
we may assume, ought to have some experience in the production of the
elementary forms of material goods, and in the conversion of them into
higher values and in their conservation. We looked carefully to some
of these activities as a war measure. It is hardly less necessary in
times of peace. We should teach these things, not simply because the
practice of them is educational, but because the practice of them is
useful, and is a necessary service, on the part of every individual,
to the world. Adding to the world's store of goods and consciousness
of the need of doing this directly or indirectly should be regarded as
a fundamental duty and habit. To establish both the habit and the
sense of duty, we may suppose, a stage is necessary in which the
individual's contribution shall be direct and tangible. Hence the
value of those educational activities that deal with foods and their
conservation.
On a little higher plane, and in a little different way we can apply
the same thoughts to the whole cycle of material things. The
distribution of wealth is of course in part a technical and a
theoretical problem. It is also a practical and a general one. All at
least ought to be judges of the waste that now goes on in the
industrial life because the "middleman" has occupied such a place of
vantage in the economic order. In teaching occupation and in all
preparation for vocation ought we not to take this into consideration?
Occupations that are purely distributive and which involve a great
waste of human energies and of materials have been unduly emphasized,
at least by default of more positive preparation, by the school.
Because they are easy and untechnical and have a little elegance about
them, in some cases, they fit in very well with the generality and
bookishness and detachment from real life that the school sometimes
represents.
The occupations that are more creative, both in the field of material
things and of ideas, have, relatively speaking, been neglected.
Inventiveness especially seems to be a quality that we have supposed
to be a gift of the gods, and we have given but little attention to
producing it, or even giving it an opportunity to display itself. Have
we not gained from the war new impressions both about the powers of
the human mind in producing new thoughts and in controlling both
material and psychic forces, and also about the necessity for
developing originality and independence? Is it too much to expect now
that greater ingenuity be displayed in education itself to the end of
producing more originality? This is a hackneyed request to make of the
school, but it seems certain that we do not succeed in obtaining
through our educational processes the highest possible degree of
productiveness of mind, as regards either quantity or quality. It is
because indeed we seem to be very far from our limit in these
respects, and because better results might perhaps so easily be gained
that it seems necessary to make this plea so often. More activity,
more art, greater enrichment of the mind, ought to have the desired
result, especially if the environment of the school could be so
changed that its moods would be more joyous and intense. These changes
are at any rate demanded for so many other reasons that if they fail
to make the intellect more productive, they will not be completely a
failure.
Education in the use of wealth must now be regarded as a part of
_moral_ education. In America we have ignored the necessity of thrift,
and the idea of thrift has certainly had no part in education. The
proper use of everything we produce or own is a fundamental part of
conduct, and it ought to be a persistent theme in education. We have
now the interest and incentive that have come from the war, we say,
for we have felt, if only remotely, what poverty means, and we have
seen that no amount of natural wealth and no degree of civilization
can wholly insure us against famine and disaster. We need throughout
our national life now, again, something like the old New England
conscience in the uses of things, applied in a different way, of
course, and now made more effectual by our broader science. The
encouragement of this spirit will perhaps make the difference in the
end between having a world seriously engaged in progressive tasks with
its material forces well in hand, and a world which in all its
practical affairs, large and small, is operated according to the
principle or the lack of principle of a _laissez faire_ attitude
throughout life. Saving in a good cause, and with a clear conscience
and determined purpose, is one of the elements of the higher life and
is far removed from miserliness. It is a principle of _adaptation of
means to ends_, and that any school which trains this power is
reaching fundamental principles of the practical life needs hardly to
be said.
The higher uses and appreciation of wealth which we are wont to call
plain living and high thinking, the moral idea of philanthropy, the
æsthetic values and hygienic implications of the right kind of
simplicity must not be omitted from the educational idea of thrift. To
impart something of the spirit of restraint and generosity, and to
make the child feel what living simply, and with definite purpose, and
making means serve one's real ends in life imply, to teach the joys of
the higher uses of common things, is no mean achievement. But can we
indeed do these things which after all have their main virtue in being
general and social, and a part of a program? All we can say is that if
we are to have a better order, and if we think education has any place
in it, economy in its broadest sense, but economy also as applied to
the details of daily life must also have a place in it. It is both
fatuous and insincere to talk about good things to come, and not be
willing to pay the price in labor and in sacrifice necessary to obtain
them honestly. Especially when the price of these things is in itself
no demand for the sacrificing of any real good, but quite to the
contrary is a summons to a more joyous life, we should be glad to pay
it.
CHAPTER IX
NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS
The social problems of education that have arisen because of our new
world relations and new internal conditions in our own country are of
course only special phases of social education as a whole, and social
education cannot indeed be separated sharply from other educational
questions. There are, however, new demands and new evidences, and new
points of view from which we see social education (or better,
education in its social aspects), in a somewhat new and different
light, as compared with our ideas of the school in the days before the
war. We have discussed some of these social problems. Now we must
consider them both in their general significance, and also in their
more specifically pedagogical aspects.
There appear to be two things that social education needs especially
to do now: create and sustain a firmer unity at home--a wider and
deeper loyalty on the part of the individual to all the causes and to
all the groups to which he is attached; and to make our
_world-consciousness_ a more productive state of mind. It is perhaps
because such educational proposals as these are generally left in the
form of ideals and things hoped for in a distant future, and are not
examined to see whether they may be made definite programs, and are
legitimate demands to be made now, that we are likely to regard all
suggestions of this nature as impracticable. And yet the production of
_morale_ at home and a social consciousness adequate for our new
relations abroad seems to be a proper demand to make even upon the
school. In part, of course, and perhaps largely, the need is first of
all for practical relations, but we must consider educationally also
the fundamental and creative factors of the psychic process itself
which must in the end sustain the relations that we have established
at such cost and shall now begin to elaborate as practical functions.
The greatest work of social education to-day is to infuse into all the
social relations a new and more ardent spirit. It is the elevation of
the social moods to a more productive level, we might say, that is
wanted. Æsthetic elements, imagination, and the harmonizing of
individual and social motives are needed. War has shown us the
possibilities of exalted social moods; what we ought to do now is to
consider how we may make our morale of peace equal in efficiency and
in power to our war morale. This is in great part a problem of social
education.
Every nation has its own especial social problems which must become
educational problems, and be dealt with in some way according to the
methods available in schools. In England the social questions seem to
be more in mind and to be better understood than here. They are more
conscious there of social disharmony and of living a socially divided
life than we are. They have seen at close range the dangers of class
interests and individual interests. Individualism, class distinction
and party politics and the independence of labor came near proving the
ruin of England. The Bishop of Oxford has expressed himself as
believing that the blank stupid conservatism of his country, as he
calls it, is really broken and that a new sense of service is actually
dawning in all directions. Trotter says (and he too is thinking of
England) that a very small amount of conscious and authoritative
direction, a little sacrifice of privilege, a slight relaxation in the
vast inhumanity of the social machine might at the right moment have
made a profound effect in the national spirit. Generalizing, and now
thinking of social phenomena in terms of the psychology of the herd, he
says that the trouble in modern society is that capacity for
individual reaction--that is for making different reactions to the same
stimulus--has far outstripped the capacity for intercommunication.
Society has grown in complexity and strength, but it has also grown in
disorder.
Such disharmony of the social life of course exists also in America.
We have not the sharp division of classes and interests and the
demonstrative and protesting individualism that are to be found in
England (our individual rights are taken more for granted perhaps) but
for that very reason, it may well be, our disharmonies are all the
more dangerous and difficult to overcome. The tension of the
individual and the social will (using MacCurdy's expression) is great.
We are highly individualistic in our mode of life, as is shown both in
domestic and in public affairs. Specialization and an intense interest
in occupations that bring individual distinction and large financial
returns have certainly taken precedence over the more fundamental and
common activities and interests.
It is these fundamental and common activities and interests and
sympathies that ought to be the chief concern of social education, or
perhaps we had better say that all our educational processes ought so
to be socialized as to broaden sympathies and make activities common.
Education must constantly strive to make the common background of our
national life more firm and strong. More important to-day than any
further education in the direction of specialization of life in
America is the securing of a strong cohesion throughout society by
means of common interests and moods. It is true that specialization
carried out in some ideal way may provide just the conditions needed
for the best social order, but this can be only in so far as
individuals become specialized within the whole of society, so to
speak, in which individuals continue to have a common life.
Individuals as wholes must not be differentiated and left to find
their own means of coördination and association, or be brought
together artificially by law or convention. Specialization must be
made the reverse side, as it were, of a social process in which at
every point coördination is also provided for. At the present time, it
is the latter rather than the former that is of most importance to us.
Social education in a democratic country must always be a matter of the
greatest concern. In autocratic societies the cohesive force exists in
traditions or can at any moment be generated executively. The
autocratic country can be held together in spite of social antagonism.
In a democracy this cannot be. We voluntarily accept some degree of
incoördination and confusion for the sake of our ideals of freedom. We
do not wish cohesion based upon any form of pessimism or fear--fear of
enemies without or of powers within. To secure unity in our own
national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be
willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any
price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that
we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad
enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of
the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a
morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from
slavery--neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and
enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague
and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism
with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical
simplicity. Both these ideas represent social life on a low plane.
Healthy individualism, even with its strong sense of tolerance and
comradeship and its respect for law and order, is not the kind of
social ideal that we should now cultivate, for it is too primitive a
state to fit into our already complex social life, or to be a basis for
the firm solidarity we need for the future. As for militarism, it may
become a mere shell, giving the appearance of social unity when its
bonds are mere shreds and the last drop of moral vitality has gone out
of it.
Our need and problem are plain enough. We wish to develop social
cohesion and unity upon a natural and permanent basis of social
feeling expressed in, and in turn produced by, social organization,
voluntarily entered into for practical and for ideal purposes. Such
solidarity can neither be made nor unmade by external forces. We must
form and sustain it by creating internal bonds. We live, in any great
society, always over smoldering fires, however highly civilized the
society, and we are always threatened with the eruption of volcanic
forces. It is fatuous to ignore this, and to make a fool's paradise of
our democracy. Our problem is to produce such a social life as shall
keep us safe through all dangers--dangers from enemies without, and
within, and underneath. A democracy, or indeed any society after all
and at its best, contains the makings of the crowd and the mob.
Organized as it is, it is always an order made of material units which
_may_ enter into disorder. Society is based upon social consciousness,
upon the consciousness of kind, but it also has _collective force_.
The crowd and the collective force are always contained in society.
However far human nature is removed from its primitive form, the
social order is always fragile. Mental operations that are not
intelligent and are not emotional in the ordinary sense, but which
consist, so to speak, of common factors among primitive feelings, may
gain and for a time hold the ascendancy. Eruptions in the social
consciousness are of the nature of morbid phenomena, and are rare and
exceptional expressions of the collective life, but we are never free
entirely from the menace of them. Social order, we say, is always
fragile. We must not overlook that fact. It is this characteristic of
the social life, the potentiality of mob spirit and the forces of
primitive anger and fear, that lead some writers to think, wrongly we
believe, that this is the psychological basis of wars in general. War
comes out of the order of society. The higher ecstatic states and the
ideals of man enter into them. These things we speak of are of the
nature of disorder, or are only the order of pure momentum. But
whatever the truth may be about the relation of instinct to war and
however remote the dangers to ourselves from the forces which in
society make for disorder, it is the work of social education to
control, transform and utilize all social and collective forces, the
primitive emotions and instincts, the moods of intoxication and all
the higher ecstasies of the social life, and it is only, we suppose,
by thus consciously and with premeditation controlling these forces
that in any real sense we can "make democracy safe for the world."
It is the idea of society coördinated by intelligence and by common
interests and moods that we must always hold before us. Trotter says
that civilization has never brought a well-coördinated society, and
that a gregarious unit consciously directed would be a new type of
biological organism. If this be so, the time seems peculiarly ripe to
make advance toward this better social solidarity. Both the promise
and the need seem greatest in the great English speaking countries
now. There is waiting, we may truly think, a larger sphere of life for
all democratic countries. If it be conscious direction alone that can
bring about the change, education has a long and a hard task before
it, to make the democratic peoples capable of such conscious
direction. This must come in part by the development of the idea of
leadership, and by the production of all the conditions that make
leadership possible. In part it must come by the clear perception of
definite tasks to be performed by nations and by all organizations
within nations--tasks which have all grown out of the relations
existing within society. In part it means cultivating intelligent
appreciation of social values, and developing in every possible way
all the social powers.
What we appear to need most in our social education just now is a
conception of what the individual is and what the social life is in
terms of the desires and the functions they embody. These are the raw
materials with which we work. We should then treat all our social
problems in a somewhat different way from that in which they are
mainly dealt with now. We should try especially to make harmony in
society not by maneuvering so that we might have peace and good
feeling for their own sakes, but by coordinating the functions which
are expressed in the life of the individual and in all social
relations. That is precisely what is not being done now, in our
present stage of society, either in the life of the individual, or in
the wider life of society. People live without deep continuity in
their lives, and we are not conscious enough of the ideal
relationships individuals should have with one another, in order to
make the social life productive. In a word we do not sufficiently take
account of the purposes to be achieved, but are too conscious of
states of feeling. We do not yet appear to see all the possibilities
contained in the social life, what voluntary unions are necessary, and
what kind of community life must be developed before we can have a
really democratic order.
We must not be content, certainly, with a merely superficial and
external solidarity or the purely practical gregariousness of the
shops or the artificial forms of the conventional social life. Society
must more and more accomplish results by the social life. Coordination
in the performance of a few obvious functions, and enthusiasm for a
few partisan causes, will not be enough. Nor will such order as
militarism represents suffice. Is it not plain, indeed, that democracy
must rest upon deeper and far more complex coördinations than we have
now, and that social feelings or moods must be made more creative? It
is the desire to accomplish ends through social organization, rather
than the desire to possess and enjoy, that must be made to dominate
it. To effect such changes in the social life must be in great part
the work of education.
Social education in our present time and conditions might very well be
considered in terms of the antinomies which exist in society. These
antinomies represent the obstacles to national unity. They stand for
inhibitions which are expressed in feelings that are wholly
unproductive. Each one of them is a measure of so much waste, so much
failure and lack of momentum, so much disorder and disorganization. A
program of social education, we say, might be based upon a
consideration of these antinomies. It would consider mainly how the
waste and obstruction of these conflicting purposes of the social life
might be overcome by giving desires more harmonious and more positive
direction. A complete account of social education from this standpoint
would need to take notice of many disharmonies now very evident in our
life as a nation. Among them would be found sectional antagonisms,
party opposition, frictions of social classes and industrial classes,
religious differences, disharmony between the sexes, racial
antipathies. Some of these we have already touched upon briefly. Some
others seem to require further mention in the present connection.
The lack of understanding and sympathy between lower and upper classes
in society plays a larger part in democratic America than we are
usually inclined to admit. There are divided interests, divergent
mores, lack of unity and coördination in some of the most urgent
duties because of the antagonism of classes and the lack of
understanding, on the part of one, of the ways of another. Especially
in civic life the unproductiveness of the situation is very apparent.
What money and advantage on one side combined with willing hands on
the other might do is left undone.
In part this antagonism of classes is merely the result of difference
in manners. There are manners and forms that constitute a common bond
among the members of a class everywhere. Ought we not to take
advantage of this example and use the suggestion it offers for
bridging over the differences that we complain of? We have seen during
the war, also, how well common tasks can unite all classes. Does not
our educational institution afford us opportunity to continue this
advantage, and make common service lead more directly to understanding
and appreciation, not for the sake of the sympathy alone, but because
of all the practical consequences and the opportunities for the future
that are thus opened up? We assume that social feeling may be created
through social organization. Mabie says that America is distinguished
by its capacities for forming helpful organizations. We must make the
most of this habit, which presumably is derived from the
neighborliness and comradeship of our original colonial life. We need
many group causes, not artificially planned as trellises upon which to
grow social feelings, but, first of all certainly, in order to
accomplish those things that can be done effectively only socially.
The secret of harmony among classes is presumably not to allow any
class to have vital interests which are exclusively its own, since to
have an exclusive vital interest means of course to live defensively
or to carry on offensive strategy. The chief interest of the great
working class at the present time is plainly to secure a living, and
it is the sense of isolation in this struggle which in part at least
is the cause of many unfavorable conditions in our present social
order. Ought not education to prepare the way for a different attitude
in which all should become vitally interested in the economic problems
of all? This does not mean an education directed toward enlarging the
spirit of philanthropy; it means mainly organization to serve common
purposes.
These social problems are very numerous. They are both national and
local. Any city which will undertake to solve in its civic relations
this problem of securing greater social unity in social causes will
provide an object lesson which will be of the greatest value. It is in
these local groups perhaps that some of the best experimental social
work may be done. Here the educational and the political modes of
attack can best be coördinated, results can be made most tangible, and
the primitive and simple forms of solidarity most nearly realized. It
is indeed by going back to these simpler forms of social life and
seeking means of coordinating the group in fundamental activities that
the greatest headway will be made in the solution of wider social
problems.
Another of the disharmonies which social education must from now on
undertake to control is the disharmony and the inequality of the
sexes, not so much as this appears in the domestic life as in the
broader relations of the social life. Brinton says that the ethnic
psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by Steinthal, that
the position of women is the cardinal point of all social relations.
Every one, of course, now recognizes the fact that the position of
women is to-day in a transitional and experimental stage. Conflicting
motives are at work, and on the part of neither sex do the highest
motives seem to prevail, nor is there a full realization anywhere of
the values that are at stake. Men are thinking of the question of the
position of women too much from the standpoint of expediency, and are
scrutinizing too closely the immediate future. Women perhaps are
thinking too much just now of their _rights_. There is a decadent form
of chivalry or at least a sexuality that perpetuates conventions and
interests that on the whole seem to interfere with progress. Jealousy
and in general the tense emotional relations between the sexes obscure
larger issues. Thus misunderstanding or antagonism, or at least
disharmony, prevails in relations in which there should be perfect
harmony of ideals and purposes, and productive activities of the
highest nature. The education of women, whether for the domestic life
or for the life outside the home is plainly but a part of the
educational problem. The sexes have different desires, and it is
precisely the work of harmonizing these desires, and regulating and
coordinating activities and functions, that is the most important part
of social education in regard to the sexes.
It is not at all difficult to see what the basic need is. It is not so
easy to find practical means of applying the remedy in the form of
education, because the whole system of living of the sexes must in some
way be affected. The generalized principle on the practical side seems
clear. All classes or groups in society must learn to think and to act
not in terms of and with reference to the desires of their class alone,
but with regard to wider tasks and values that are not fully realized by
the most natural and the conventional activities of the class. The
question is not one of making a moral change--converting individuals or
classes from a spirit of selfishness to that of altruism. What we need
is an educational process and a social life in which the nature of the
individual and of the class is revealed as social, as best represented
and satisfied in situations in which both the individual and the wider
social idea work together.
Practically, we should say, the problem of education of the sexes with
reference to one another and to a wider social life consists first of
all in actually educating them together not merely in juxtaposition
but in relations of a practical character. The relations of the sexes
have evidently been mainly domestic and emotional, or in cases where
they are practical the position of women has been little better than
servitude. Of social coördination there has been little. _Education of
the sexes through situations in which the special abilities of each
sex are brought into action_, doing for the wider social life what the
natural and instinctive differentiation of activities has accomplished
in its way for the domestic life seems to be the main principle now to
be employed in the education of the sexes. Women must be made to see
that the ideal of independence which is uppermost at the present time
is only the mark of a transitional stage, and that coördination in
which of course competition of various kinds cannot be entirely
eliminated will be the final adjustment. We should have no fear of
placing the sexes, in their educational situations, in positions where
competition is necessary, since through competition fundamental
desires may be brought to the surface and regulated. Provided we admit
at all that a new social adjustment is needed between the sexes, we
can hardly fail to see that it is primarily in a practical life lived
together that both education for the new order will best be conducted
and the new order itself realized.
The details of method of what we have called social education for
democracy we can only suggest here and of course in a very imperfect
and tentative way. All aspects of education and every department of
the school are involved; and every available method employed in
education must in some way be turned to the purpose of developing
social relations. In a very general way we think of these specific
processes of the school as methods of learning, methods of art, and
methods of activity, although of course in reality there can be no
such sharp separation of them as this might imply.
There must be some place in the school now for a subject which in a
general way might be designated as social history. We must teach the
whole story of the social life of our country in such a way as to
reveal the motives of classes, parties, sections, and of all
organizations, institutions and principles. Such teaching should have
the effect of bringing to light the causes of the disharmonies of
society, and it should also be a means of conveying the feelings and
moods as well as the ideas that govern the conduct of all groups that
make up our national life. We must teach _sympathetically_ what the
desires and intentions of all are, on the assumption that behind all
conduct there are natural causes and essentially sound instincts. By
showing the desires of groups in their relation to one another, their
disharmony and their possible harmony, we indicate what society as a
functioning whole may be, and we may say that it is the chief end to
be gained by the intellectual treatment of the social life to make
clear what the ideal of social unity for practical life is, and what
the main obstacles are that now stand in the way of it. By this social
history we do not mean, moreover, something abstruse and academic
suited for the college alone. Wherever the social antagonism is
experienced, at whatever age, there is the opportunity to begin to set
the mind at work about it, and to prevent the formation of prejudice
and resentment. These states of mind begin very early indeed, and they
are hard to eradicate.
A very large part in the work of social education is played by methods
of education that we may call æsthetic. This must mean not only the
inclusion of the methods of art in presenting facts, but we must bring
to bear all kinds of æsthetic influences upon the social life. Social
life in which there is introduced the dramatic moment is one of the
main objectives of all education. It is in the recreational life that
some of the best conditions for the realization of social moods in
dramatic or æsthetic form are obtained. In the recreational experience
the social states must be made productive of social harmony, as they
themselves tend to be. In these experiences the conflicting motives of
the individual and society, and of individual with individual, and the
opposing desires of the individual are harmonized by means of ideal
experiences in which the desires are exploited. Since we here touch
upon the whole theory of the æsthetic in its practical application, we
cannot be very explicit and clear, but the main service of the
æsthetic social life experienced typically in the form of recreational
activities, ought to be plain. Recreation is a means of giving the
common experience so much needed in democratic countries like our
own--common feelings, common activities and interests. This store of
common life, containing exalted social feelings, expressed in play and
art--languages which all nationalities can understand--must constantly
be increased. All institutions that control the leisure hours of the
people must be made educational as means of raising the social life to
a higher level and making it more harmonious and productive of common
interests. It is indeed one of the functions of the recreational
activities and institutions to create and sustain public morale.
In the recreational experiences under control of the school we have
the opportunity to educate the deepest and most powerful of motives.
Play and art we should suppose, therefore, ought to have a greater
part and more serious recognition in the school. We cannot of course
accomplish much merely by crowding more arts and plays and games into
the curriculum. It is something larger and more transforming that is
wanted. We need to make the school take a greater place in the life of
the child; it must reach a deeper level of human nature, in which the
motives of play and art lie, and there must be a broader exposure of
all young life to those influences of the social life everywhere which
contain our highest social ideals. The place of art and to some extent
of play as the methods and the spirit of the school is to convey
persuasively to the child this larger and better life in which we
expect him to take part.
Neither erudition nor art nor both together can, of course, fulfill
all the requirements for a social education suited to our present
needs. It is presumably in the social life itself, in the form of a
practical activity, that social education will in great part be
gained. This educational social life, which is also practical, will,
however, be one in which every opportunity is taken to show the social
life in its historical perspective, and to make clear its purposes
and meaning; and in which sympathetic moods and intense social states
are realized by conducting this social life, so far as possible, so
that it will be subjected to the influences of what we may call in a
broad way _art_.
CHAPTER X
RELIGION AND EDUCATION AFTER THE WAR
The war, which has left no field of human interest untouched, has
raised many questions about religion that must be dealt with in new
ways--about its validity, its power, its future. The impression the
whole experience of the war seems to convey is that religion has
failed to be either a great creative force or a great restraining
power, although to express this as a failure of religion may imply
more than we have a right to expect of it. Religion did not cause the
war, but it certainly did not prevent it. It had no power to make
peace. Yet we see that now religion is needed more than ever, and that
if the social life be not deeply infused with the religious spirit,
and if we do not live as a world more in the religious spirit,
something fundamental and necessary will be wanting which may be the
most essential factor of progress and civilization. The war leaves us
with the feeling, perhaps, that until now the world has had far too
many religions and too little religion. There has been too much of
creed and too little of deep and sustaining religious moods. Perhaps,
as Russell says, we are to be convinced that religion has been too
professional; there has been too much paid service, and too little
voluntary service.
Such conclusions of course have in them all the reservation that
personal reactions must have, but it is easy to believe that in the
life of such a nation as our own, and indeed in the world, no
practical unity will ever be permanently reached unless there be a
firm basis in a common religious foundation. This we might say is made
probable by the truth that religion is the most fundamental thing in
life, and if there be no unity and common understanding in that
sphere, there can be none in reality anywhere in life. Differences in
creed mean little, except in so far as they conceal basic agreement
and make artificial barriers; differences in the way of understanding
and valuing the world mean everything. We want a common religious
faith--common in the possession at least of the moods which make a
harmonious social life possible, and of the spirit in which the
world's work can, we may believe, alone be done.
Upon such grounds one might maintain that a very important part of the
work of education everywhere is to teach now more _natural religion_,
or rather perhaps _that the school must be everywhere conducted to a
greater extent in the spirit of religion_. Then we might hope to see
religion becoming actually a power in the social life, helping to
transform the crude forces and purposes of the day into higher ones.
With such a religious basis we might begin to see the working of God
in history and in the world as a whole, and we should feel in the
history of the world and in the world that is before us the presence
of reality. Then we should have a common ground for the sympathy and
understanding without which not even the most practical affairs can be
conducted efficiently. That ideal in education, often expressed by the
educator, which holds that the purpose of all teaching is to convey
the meaning of the world to the child, to make the world live in
epitome, so to speak, in the soul of every child, is religious and
nothing else, and quite satisfies the demands of our present day.
If such a standpoint be the right one, certainly the ambition of any
nation (or indeed of any group) to have a religion peculiar to itself
and an outgrowth of its own culture is unfortunate, and indeed comes
from the very essence of morbid nationalism. In such desires there is
thinly veiled the hope that through religion the old claim of nations
to the right to temporal supremacy may be vindicated. Lagarde, in
about 1874, was probably the first to say that Germany must have a
national religion, but during the war this hope has been expressed
again and again--Germany must have a new religion, befitting a great
independent people, and must no longer be dependent for its religion
upon an old and inferior race. Whether this longing for a new religion
has not been in reality a longing to be upheld again by the old pagan
faith, which was a fitting cult for the nationalistic temper, with its
ideal of force, may justly be asked. It is interesting to remember
that in Japan also, in recent times, there has been a demand for a
national religion that should unite all the creeds in one. That this
idea of a national religion, as contrasted with an universal religion,
is opposed to the spirit of Christianity is plain, and the claim that
Germany has not been able to understand the key-note of Christianity,
as it is revealed in humanity and justice, may therefore be said to
have some foundation in truth.
Can we say that the work of education, in the religious life, is that
of inculcating and extending Christianity? It might indeed so be
interpreted, and with a liberal enough understanding of Christianity
we should say that this is true. But after all, it is Christianity as
the vehicle of certain fundamental religious moods and ideals that,
from an educational point of view at least, is of the greatest
concern. It is the optimistic mood, the ideal of justice and humanity,
the recognition of the worth of the soul of the individual, the ideal
of service--it is these qualities of Christianity rather than its
specific doctrines that we must now emphasize in our wider social
life, and such religion is natural religion, or philosophy or
Christianity as we may choose to call it. Any experience, indeed, that
fosters such moods and ideals has a place in religious education. Who
can doubt that such religion must henceforth have a large place in the
world? It will be the test in the end of the possibility of sincere
internationalism. Unless we can have common religious moods we can
have no universal morality that is founded upon secure feeling and
principles, and unless we can include the whole world in our religion,
we shall certainly not be able to include it in any sincere way in our
politics.
No religion, finally, will be profound enough and have great enough
power to be thus a support of a future world-consciousness unless it
be a religion of feeling rather than primarily of ideas--_a religion
in fact capable of inspiring ecstatic moods_. And this ecstasy of
feeling can never in our modern world be a prevailing quality of the
religious life unless religion be something that extends over all life
and draws its power from all the energies and capacities of the
psychic life. The religion of our new era, we may be sure, if it be in
any real sense a religion of the world, will not be something apart
from and above other experiences. It will be a secular religion and a
democratic religion, a quality and spirit of life as a whole.
Experience referred to what we believe is real and universal, and
subjected sincerely to all the capacities and criteria of appreciation
that we possess is religious experience. Religion, educationally
considered, is a means of giving to life a sense of reality and of
value. That spirit should pervade and inspire all we do in the work of
education.
CHAPTER XI
HUMANISM
There has much been said during the war to the effect that the great
struggle was essentially a conflict between the spirit of humanism and
some principle or other which was conceived to be the opposite of
humanism. Humanism is said to be opposed to rationalism, or to
nationalism, or specialization, or paganism, or Germanism as a whole,
humanism often being thought of as the spirit of Greek or Christian
thought and philosophy.
There is truth, we should say, in these views. Humanism in a broad
sense emerged from all the purposes of the war as the principle of the
greater part of the world, as opposed to the idea of Germanism. This
spirit of humanism, however, is no single motive or feeling. It is a
complex mood, so to speak, and it is not to be regarded as strange
that it has been felt and described in various ways, and that it is
not yet clearly understood. _Humanism appears to be most deeply felt
as the appreciation of the common and fundamental things in human
nature._ It inclines toward the employment of feeling, or at least to
subjective rather than to purely objective principles in the
determination of fundamental values in life. Humanism includes an
interest in personality, which is of course the most basic of the
common possessions of man, and it is therefore interested in justice
and in freedom. Humanism as thus an appreciation of fundamental values
in life by feeling rather than by principle, belongs to the deeper
currents of life, those that flow in the subconscious--it is close to
instinct, to moods, and the religious and the aesthetic experiences.
The later German philosophy of life we might mention as a denial of
much that humanism asserts. Here we see a doctrine of force, an ideal
of life based upon the elevation of conscious will to its first
principle. If we seek concrete contrasts to this anti-humanism we
might mention our own national life, governed by an idea of free
living, which has made possible the assimilation of many stocks, in a
life in which common human nature is regarded as the supreme value.
Extreme specialization, rational principles, objective standards are
watchwords of the plan of life that is most opposed to humanism. In
this life instincts and values determined by feelings are brought out
into the clear light of consciousness and are there judged with
reference to their fitness to serve ends determined by reason. It is
all noon-day glare in this rational consciousness. Collectivism is
based upon coercion and upon calculation of the value of order in
serving practical purposes, themselves determined by a theory of
society, instead of upon social feeling or upon a natural process of
assimilation of the different and the individual into a common life.
Specialization also, in this philosophy, is a result of calculation
rather than of a belief in the value of the individual, and is gained
by the sacrifice of those experiences which, if we hold to the
humanistic ideal, we regard as essential to the life of the individual
and to society. This calculus of values extends, of course, into the
field of international life. Here too conduct is based upon estimation
of effects, freedom is relative to and subordinate to economic values.
A theory of the state takes precedence over all subjective ethical
principles, and there must be a disavowal of all native sentiments and
judgments as regards justice which issue from an appreciation of the
worth of personality and other fundamental human values and
possessions; and all common human sentiments which would stand in the
way of carrying out the decisions of reason and state-theory or any
political policy must of course also be denied.
This contrast, however inadequate our analysis of the spirit of
humanism and its opposite may be, will at least show that the idea of
justice, which in the humanistic ideal grows directly out of the
appreciation of the value of personality is the central practical
principle of humanism, and it is exactly as an opponent of the idea of
justice on the ground of its alleged weakness, that the rationalistic
or the nationalistic philosophy is best conceived.
It is upon this question of justice that we must take our stand for or
against humanism. If we are humanists we believe in the rights of
individuals, whether men or nations, to their own life and
independence, which they are entitled to preserve through all forms of
social processes. Justice means recognition of the right of
individuals to perform all their functions as individuals, and
humanism is precisely an appreciation of the values of the individual
as such a functioning whole. If we are humanists we believe that this
principle of justice, and this feeling of justice ought to be
cultivated and made world-wide. This is the ideal of equal rights to
all human values. Hence it is the mortal enemy of all philosophies of
life which place any principle above that of justice and its moral
implications, Whether in the narrower or the wider social life. This
is humanism.
There are various ways of interpreting humanism as a practical
philosophy or principle of education. Burnet says, perhaps not very
completely expressing what he means, that the humanistic ideal of
education, as contrasted with the merely formal, is that the pupils
should above all be led to feel the meaning and worth of what they are
studying. We should say that the meaning of humanism in education is
that _the child should understand and appreciate the meaning and worth
of all human life_. This requires that education should so be
conducted that the child may learn to see--rather to feel and
appreciate--the inner rather than the merely external nature of all
life that is presented to him, and in which he participates. Not
language, but thought; not history, but experience, is his field.
Justice depends wholly upon an ability to come upon reality in the
realm of human nature. This implies not only intellectual penetration,
but a form of sympathy which consists of putting oneself as completely
as possible into the life of that which is studied.
All this means, it is plain, a power in the educational process, a
spirit and a mood in all education which we have not yet in any very
large measure attained. What is required is indeed that children
should live more intimately with reality, so to speak, and that we
should not be satisfied when they have merely learned about it. We
shall not be content, however, with an educational process which, in
fulfilling these requirements for more life, becomes merely _active_.
Life must also be dramatic and intense and abundant. All the mental
processes--the feelings, the intellectual functions and not the will
alone must participate in this active life.
We shall soon see, no doubt, and in fact we are beginning already to
see a renewed interest in all the arguments for and against a
humanistic as opposed to a scientific culture and curriculum for our
schools. It is the humanistic side from which, it is likely, we shall
now hear the most pleas, for the war has ended, they say, in victory
for humanity and for humanism--hence for the humanities. It is the
Christian and the Græco-Roman civilization that has prevailed.
Victorious France, whose culture is founded upon that of the Greek and
the Roman, has vindicated the supreme value of that culture. On the
other hand we hear that our present age has become an age of science.
If science has been a factor in causing the war, science has also won
it. If industrialism involved the world in disaster, the world will be
saved by more and better work, more practical living, wider
organization for the production of goods and of wealth. Therefore our
curriculum must become more practical. We must have more of business
and industry, more vocational training, more training that sharpens
the intelligence.
There is a truth which cannot be overlooked in the claim of the
humanists, but the acceptance of it as it stands as a philosophy of
education is not without its serious dangers. What we may well
apprehend is a reactionary philosophy of education, and of all
culture. We begin to hear very strong pleas, for example, for a school
in which language, literature, and perhaps history become the center.
West[1] asks for a wider recognition of the humanities after the war.
Moore[2] says that the war is a victory of the civilization finally
established by the Romans on the basis of law, over the barbaric ideas
of power. Seeing this he is led to plead for a closer union now
between Latin and modern studies, binding civilization of to-day with
the thought and feeling of old Rome. Butler[3] says that we are surely
coming back to the classical languages and literature.
Such conclusions as these raise many questions and perhaps doubts and
apprehension. The ideal they express of penetrating the heart of
civilization and experiencing in the educational process the inner
life rather than the outer form of life, must indeed appeal to all,
and we should all as humanists agree that this ideal expresses what
humanism means and is the center of a true philosophy of
education--but whether this ideal can be realized by any school that
clings to the old classical learning, even in spirit, is quite another
matter. To-day, if ever, we need to go forward in education. Our
spirit must be that of the searcher for new truth, and for a better
life. The old will not satisfy us either as a model and ideal or as a
method. No already accumulated culture material will be adequate for
our new school.
_Our schools of to-morrow, we should conclude, must still be inspired
by the scientific spirit, but what we need is science humanised, and
science in the service of moral principles._ One may well ask whether
it is not now the most opportune time to leave our classical learning
behind, and try to find a more adequate culture in which to convey the
spirit of our new humanism. If we have won a victory for humanity, as
we think, and have kept alive the Christian spirit by means of a
meager culture, we need not still cling to that culture if we can find
something better. Even if modern Germany has misused science and
brought it to reproach, we need not be prejudiced against science. We
need more science but we need to bring science into closer relation to
the whole of human life. We need more of all the psychological
sciences as an aid to our appreciation of history as the story and a
revelation of the meaning of spirit in the world--and it is this way
rather than through _language_ that we must undertake to know and to
explain life. On the other hand, it is for the business of practical,
social living that the material sciences should have most significance
in education. There is no science, not even mathematics, that cannot
be taught as a phase of the adventure of spirit in the world, and none
that cannot in some way be made to aid spirit in finding and keeping
its true course in the future. Such use of all culture is what we mean
by humanism. The secret of the difference in the educational ideals of
those whom we may call the old humanists and the new is that to one
education means predominantly _learning_, and to the other it means
mainly _living_. Living, for the child, means growing into the life of
the world by participating in spirit and in body, according to the
child's needs and capacities, in the activities of the world. To gain
a consciousness of the meaning of those activities through a knowledge
of their history and by an appreciation of their purpose is indeed the
main purpose of learning.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Educational Review_, February, 1919.]
[Footnote 2: _Educational Review_, February, 1919.]
[Footnote 3: _Teachers College Record_, January, 1919.]
CHAPTER XII
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN EDUCATION
Throughout this study we have again and again been led to consider the
relations of the aesthetic experiences to the practical life. It is as
the repository of deep desires and as the appreciation of values that
the aesthetic may be most readily seen to be practical, but it
performs other functions. As ecstatic experience it is the source of
_power_ in the conscious life, and it was indeed the belief in art as
a means of attaining power that has given art its place in the world.
The aesthetic experience is the form also in which desires are brought
into relation to one another, harmonized and transformed, or
transferred to new objects. So the aesthetic is the type of adaptation
in the inner life.
We have asserted that all life, and certainly the educational process,
must have its dramatic moments, since the dramatic experience, as
ecstasy of the social life, is the expression of social feeling in its
highest form. The aesthetic experience is the central point of
experience, so to speak, at which social ideals impinge upon and
influence and mold pure nature. Art is the form in which play,
representing biological forces, is carried to a higher stage, and made
a factor in conscious evolution. The aesthetic experience is a
practical attitude in another way. It is by our aesthetic
appreciation, more than we commonly understand, that we judge life as
a totality, that we estimate the fitness of its parts to belong to the
whole, and that indeed we guide life when we judge it not according to
principles which so often are seen to be inadequate, but when we try
to bring to bear our utmost of powers of appreciation and to find
ultimate values.
Such a recognition of the relation of art or the aesthetic to life we
see often expressed in the literature of the day. It is a sign of the
times--of an effort to attain higher powers, to take more
comprehensive views of life, and to gain deeper insight into it. It is
a phase of the seriousness of purpose which the war has aroused in us.
Dide speaks of a deep but obscure need that drives all human beings to
put themselves in harmony with the universal, and says that this is
the end and purpose of the aesthetic tendencies. This phase of the
place of the aesthetic is seen and expressed in various ways. Some
think of it as a significant change in the attitude of life which is
to bring about an era of peace. Clutton-Brook, an English writer, says
that unless we attain to some kind of beauty and art, we shall have no
lasting peace. We shall never have freedom from war until we have a
peace that is worth living. Some see in the humanistic spirit an
essentially aesthetic principle. The fairness and justice of the
French, the spirit of the English that expresses itself in their ideal
of sportsmanship, some attribute to the aesthetic spirit.
All this is in keeping with our new experiences of life in all its
dynamic expressions. It becomes easier for us to see the truth about
the nature of the aesthetic and of all other powers of consciousness,
since consciousness has revealed itself to us as itself so great a
power. The aesthetic experience may no longer appear to be only a joy,
something subjective, but, indeed, as a practical force in the world.
The aesthetic is a feeling of power, but it is also an experience in
which mental power is generated, and it must be employed to such an
end. The aesthetic mood is a mood of happiness, but it is also a mood
of persuasion, in which something is being done to the will, and in
which desires are being turned continually toward new objects, and
composite feelings are being formed which will direct the course of
future experience. So art and the aesthetic experience are not things
apart from life, but may even be thought of as the method and the
quality of life in some of its most dynamic forms. They are not added
to life as an ornament or a luxury, but are the spirit in which life
is lived when it is indeed most productive.
When we make specific analyses of aesthetic experience we find
represented in it all the deep motives and tendencies, of life. This
gives us our clew to the practical application of the aesthetic in the
business of life. All it contains, all the art and the play of the
world must be put to work, although this is a conclusion that might
readily be misunderstood. We do not expect to harness the powers of
childhood to the world's tasks, or expect industry to become fine art,
but we do expect art and play to be something more than passive and
unproductive states. We expect them to sustain and to create the
energies by which the world's work is to be carried on. We would
utilize them to give more power to life at every point, and to make
all activities of the practical life more free and creative. And was
there ever a time when power was more greatly needed--in industry, in
political life and in every phase of life both of the individual and
of society?
But it is not only in creating and doing that the world needs art
to-day, in the sense in which we mean to define it. An aroused world
is called upon to feel to the depths of reality, and to draw from
these depths new and more profound valuations. We stand at a point
where many things in life must be tested and judged anew, where the
danger of perverting and misjudging many things is great. It is by the
powers of appreciation gained in dynamic states of consciousness, we
may believe, rather than by discoveries and an accumulation of data
that we shall be most certain of finding true values, and the way of
extrication from our present grave doubts.
Can one hesitate to conclude, then, that in all our educational
experiences, we must try not only to train these powers that we call
aesthetic, but to give opportunity at every point for the exercise of
them as selective functions, and as a means of creating and expressing
power in the mental life?
CHAPTER XIII
MOODS AND EDUCATION: A REVIEW
In the philosophy of education it is with moods that in our view, we
have most of all to deal. Man, we have a right to say, is a creature
of _feeling_, not of instinct or of reason. It is not the instinct as
a definite reaction to stimulus or as an inner necessity, nor emotion
as a subjective response to this stimulus that is the driving force of
conduct, but rather the more lasting and deeper and more complex
states or processes that we can call by no other name than moods.
Since it is in the moods that the most profound longing or tendency or
desire is represented, we say that moods are the object of chief
concern in a practical philosophy of life. These moods are the
repositories, so to speak, of instinct, impulse, tendency, desire, and
it is therefore by the control and education of moods that the
individual in all his social and in all his personal aspects will be
most fundamentally educable if he is educable at all.
It is as the seat of the will to power, we might say, that the moods
which are the main sources of human energy are to be conceived. The
craving for power, as a generalization of more primitive desires,
comes to take the position of the main motive in life. The craving for
power is a desire, as we see when we analyze it, that expresses itself
as a longing for ecstatic or intense states of consciousness, and an
abundant life. It is a craving to be possessed by strong desire and
also for the satisfaction of many desires--often vicariously, since
the objects desired may be confused and general. So this motive of
power and the ecstatic states in which it is expressed or realized is
no instinct and no pure emotion. It is an outgrowth and culmination
of instincts, a fusion of them into a new product.
It would be going too far afield to try to summarize here the
psychology of moods or of the motive of power in the individual and in
society, but the main fact needed for the moment seems plain. In this
motive and its expression in feeling and conduct there is a very
general tendency which is the source of many forms of interest and
enthusiasm, of ambition, of the spirit of war, of various kinds of
excitement, and to some extent of morbid and criminal tendencies. The
spirit of war we think of as a summation of the same forces as those
which in other ways appear as the energies behind various enterprises
having quite different objectives. War is an anachronism, we may
believe, a wrong direction taken by the forces of the social life, an
archaic expression now, let us say, of the will to power which might
and ought to have different objectives. In the life and the mood of
the great city we see a very varied expression of the motive of power.
The city life is still a crude life. It satisfies deep desires, but in
it desires for we know not what are aroused. It is indeed as the seat
of eager, unsatisfied desire that the city is best of all
characterized. These desires readily take shape in the city as the
spirit of war and as a craving for excitement of various kinds.
These same forces re-directed or finding different objects and working
under different conditions appear in moral, religious, or aesthetic
forms. In these higher experiences and more progressive moments in
history or in the life of the individual, the forces which at other
levels emerge in different forms and in search of different objects we
may think of as transformed, or given new direction; but to suppose
them annihilated or suppressed is to misunderstand, according to our
view, the whole process of the development of spirit. Life is not a
process in which instincts are balanced, or in which good motives
stand in sharp contrast to bad motives, or in which an original
selfishness is opposed and gradually overcome by an altruistic
motive. We think rather of very complex processes in which many
desires, gathered into moods, find many forms of expression. There are
prevailing moods--of war and of peace--and these moods are deep
forces, containing both the desires and the sources of energy, so to
speak, out of which our future will be made. The ecstatic states of
the social life, the moods of war and the enthusiasm of the periods of
rapid change are conditions in which energies and purposes are deeply
stirred. These are the moods of _intoxication_, if we wish to describe
them by pointing out one of their chief common characteristics. Peace
is a _reverie_, we may say, in which the purposes and the results
expressed and attained in the more dramatic moments are elaborated and
fulfilled, and in which new impulse is gathered of which the dramatic
moment is itself the expression. But throughout the whole course of
history and through all the life of the individual, the same motives
are at work. Life in its fundamental movements and motives, we should
argue, is both simple and continuous. It is fragmentary and complex
only on its surface.
The whole problem of the nature of education of course resolves
itself, from this point of view, into the question whether progress is
something inherent in nature, or is something controlled by man. Or if
we cannot make so sharp a contrast between nature and will, shall we
say that progress is in the main and in all essential ways one or the
other? Does conscious effort, the having of ideals, exert any profound
effect upon the history of spirit? Does it accelerate, give direction,
provide energy? Is the course of history inevitable or is the making
of it in our hands? We can see what, in a general way, so far as
regards the transformation of the fundamental motives of life, the
order of development has been--how the original and basic desires or
instincts have become merged and confused in the more general desires
and moods, how the motive of power has emerged, finding so varied
expression as we see in the whole movement of art and play in the
world, how out of these motives of art and play more controlled
enthusiasms have arisen. But the part in this movement played by
conscious direction does not thus far appear to have been great. A
movement of and within consciousness it has been, and no mere
biological or physical development, but when we speak of conscious
will or any ideals controlling the course of spirit in essential ways,
we find as yet only a beginning. And yet, this does not indicate that
in the future conscious direction may not be even the greatest factor
in evolution. It is difficult to see how we can _know_ with certainty
that we have such powers; but to refrain from acting as though we had
is also difficult, and indeed impossible.
As a working hypothesis, at least, we seem to be allowed to assume
that much will depend, in the future, upon the extent to which
conscious factors are brought to bear upon the world's progress as a
whole, upon the form in which the world-idea shapes itself, and the
power which is put behind that world idea by the educational forces of
the world. The world appears now to stand balanced at a critical
moment, its future depending upon whether old ideals and primitive
emotions shall prevail, or whether a new spirit which is perhaps after
all but a sense of direction growing out of the old order shall become
the dominating influences. Whether the consciousness of nations shall
be creative and progressive seems to depend now upon the extent to
which the whole life of feeling is influenced by ideas which, although
they are products, as we say, of the primitive biological processes
that underlie history, are also outside these processes, as definite
purposes, desires, visions, ideals. At least we seem to depend now
upon these superior influences for many things that we regard as
good--for the rate at which we shall make progress, and for the
certainty of making progress at all. Upon these conscious factors
directing and shaping the plastic forces represented in the moods of
our time, we shall assume, the course of history will depend.
We are no longer to be satisfied with _natural progress_. We have gone
too far and too long, let us say, upon a rising tide of biological
forces, and we have not yet realized what conscious evolution might
mean. We have been too well satisfied with the physical resources and
the psychic energies that seemed sufficient for the need of the day. A
world in which democracy is going to prevail can no longer live in
this way. It will not grow of itself in a state of nature. Its
principle, on the other hand, forbids program-making after the manner
of autocratic societies. Democracy, as the form in which the youthful
and exuberant spirit of the world now makes ready for creating the
next stage of civilization, will advance, we may suppose, neither by
nature nor by force. It is the main work of our day to find for
ourselves a new and better mode of shaping history, by bringing to
bear upon all the social motives of the day the best and strongest
influences. Our whole situation is from this point of view an
educational problem. Probably there was never a greater need than that
the democratic forces of the world now have great leadership. It is a
practical world, a world of politics and of business, but it is also a
world exceedingly sensitive to many influences, good and bad, a world
in which, we may think, nothing great and permanent can be
accomplished unless moral, religious and æsthetic influences prevail
and give to our civilization its new dominant.
It will depend upon these conscious forces--upon our efforts to make
progress and upon the clarity of our vision--it must depend upon
these--whether in the future our great war shall be looked back upon
as after all an upheaval of primitive forces and a debauch of
instincts, or as the beginning of a new life. It is for us to create
out of the war the foundation of a better order. We cannot go back to
the old régime. Our enthusiasms will either be directed to better
things, or the emotions aroused by the war will run riot and finally
settle into habits on a low plane, and destroy, it may be, all that
civilization has thus far gained. All things seem possible, in this
critical time.
Stated in the broadest possible way, the educational problem of our
times seems plain. We must lay hold upon and set to work for a higher
civilization the motives and purposes that in the past have worked
obstructively, and now destructively. A great work of our day is to
understand these motives and forces that were the main factors in the
cause of the war, and make them count for progress. That they are
powerful forces we can have no doubt. They are not for that reason
hard to direct, at least not necessarily so. We see that, whether in
war or in peace, we need greater power in the social life. Life must
be made to satisfy the longing for intensity and abundance of
experience. But this abundant life that we now seek cannot be
something merely subjective and emotional. To see this is indeed the
crucial test. This subjective life cannot remain an ideal in a world
determined to become democratic, to make progress, to be a practical
and well-coördinated world. Abundant life must now be sought in the
performance of functions which express themselves in practical aims
and consequences. The prevailing mood and form of this life may still
be dramatic, and indeed it must be dramatic. The possession of this
quality is the test of its power.
Such views, of course, imply that our practical educational problem is
something very different from that of finding an _outlet for
emotions_. For example, to search for a substitute for war now is a
superficial way of looking at the problem of the control and education
of the social consciousness. We think of the motives that have caused
the war, according to these older views, as bad instincts or evil
emotions, as we are usually asked to think of the motives behind
intemperance, and the habits of gambling and the like. By some form of
katharsis we hope to drain off these emotions (unless we undertake
merely to suppress them). This we say is a narrow view of the problem,
merely because the motives that underlie the conduct we deplore are
not _bad instincts_, or indeed instincts as such at all, but rather
feelings or moods which are variable in their expression, complex, and
educable. They have no definite object of which they are in search, so
that we may think the only way to thwart them is to find some object
closely resembling theirs which may surreptitiously be substituted for
them. These motives are indeed broad and general. We must do with them
what education must do all along the line, find the fundamental
desires they contain and utilize the energies expressed in these
desires in the performance of functions--these functions being the
purposes most fundamentally at work in the social life or representing
our social ideals.
Such an ideal of education invites us to work beneath the political
and all formal, institutional and merely practical affairs and to lay
our foundations in the depths of human nature. There we shall begin to
establish or to lay hold upon continuity, and there bring together the
fragments of purpose which we find in the life we seek to direct. This
which one can so easily say in a sentence is, of course, the whole
problem of education. These things are what we must work for in
establishing and sustaining our democracy, for we must, to this end,
make forces work together, instead of separately and antagonistically
as they themselves tend to do. It is the same problem, at heart, in
the education of the individual--to harmonize desires, and to create a
higher synthesis of energies than nature itself will yield. And in the
new and wider field of international life that opens up before us, the
problem is still educational. The educational forces of the world must
begin now the gigantic task of national character building. The spirit
of the nations, the divergent motives of power, of glory, of comfort
and pleasure-seeking that are said to dominate nations, the justice,
and loyalty, and steadfastness and truth which at least they put upon
their banners and into their songs must be made to work together in a
practical and progressive world, or to make such a world possible.
The Germans like to interpret the tricolor of their flag as signifying
_Durch Nacht und Blut zur Licht_. But plainly the night and bloodshed
do not always lead to light, and of themselves they cannot. Nor, must
we think, need the world continue always to seek its way toward light
only through the blackness and guilt of wars and revolutions. In some
distant day, let us think, justice and morality will have been bred
into all the social life, and life will be lived more in the spirit of
art and religion. Then they will see that, under the influence of
these forces we call now educational, an old order will have given way
to a new by imperceptible degrees, and it will be no longer through
darkness and bloodshed that the world must make its way to light, but
need only go through light to greater light.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The following list contains the titles of a few books and articles
that have contributed data or suggestions to this study. It is neither
complete nor systematic. Numbers in the text refer to this list.
1. A.W. Small, General Sociology.
2. C. Andler, Frightfulness in Theory and Practice.
3. W.E. Walling, The Sociologists and the War.
4. H. Hauser, Germany's Commercial Grip of the World.
5. J.F. O'Ryan and W.D.A. Anderson, The Modern Army in Action.
6. R. Dunn, Five Fronts.
7. Mrs. Henry Hobhouse, I Appeal Unto Cæsar.
8. F.H. Giddings, The Western Hemisphere in the World of
To-morrow.
9. O.H. Kahn, Prussianized Germany.
10. C. Mitchell, Evolution, and the War.
11. A. Wehrmann, Deutsche Aufsaetze Ueber den Weltkrieg, etc.
12. J.P. Bang, Hurrah and Hallelujah.
13. E. Boutroux, Philosophy and the War.
14. M.A. Morrison, Sidelights on Germany.
15. R. Lehmann, Was Ist Deutsch? (In Vom kommenden Frieden.)
16. Durkheim, Germany Over All.
17. H. Bergson, The Meaning of the War.
18. J. Burnet, Higher Education and the War.
19. C.L. Drawbridge, The War and Religious Ideals.
20. M. Dide, Les Emotions et la Guerre.
21. D.G. Brinton, The Basis of Social Relations.
22. Ernesta R. Bullitt, An Uncensored Diary from the Central
Empires.
23. Hundert Briefe Aus dem Felde.
24. Mrs. Denis O'Sullivan, Harry Butters "An American Citizen."
25. W. Irwin, Men, Women and War.
26. G. Roethe, Von Deutscher Art and Kultur.
27. J.W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany.
28. W.R. Roberts, Patriotic Poetry: Greek and English.
29. Schmitz, Das Wirkliche Deutschland.
30. Redier, Comrades in Courage.
31. Igglesden, Out There.
32. Madame Lucy Hoesch-Ernst, Patriotismus und Patriotitis.
33. W.E. Ritter, War, Science and Civilization.
34. Hobhouse, The World in Conflict.
35. G.S. Fullerton, Germany of To-day.
36. A. Pinchot, War and the King Trust.
37. J.T. MacCurdy, The Psychology of War.
38. E.L. Fox, Behind the Scenes in Warring Germany.
39. J. Chapman, Deutschland Ueber Alles.
40. G. Blondel, Les Embarras de l'Allemagne.
41. P. Bigelow, The German Emperor and His Eastern Neighbors.
42. G. Le Bon, The Psychology of the Great War.
43. T.A. Cook, Kultur and Catastrophe.
44. Cheradame, The German Plot Unmasked.
45. J.B. Booth, The Gentle Cultured German.
46. J. Claes, The German Mole.
47. T.F.A. Smith, The Soul of Germany.
48. W.N. Willis, What Germany Wants.
49. Hintze, The Meaning of the War. (Modern Germany.)
50. Zitelmann, The War and International Law. (Modern Germany.)
51. Schmoller, Origin and Nature of German Institutions. (Modern
Germany.)
52. Hintze, Germany and the World Powers. (Modern Germany.)
53. F. Meinecke, Kultur Policy of Power and Militarism. (Modern
Germany.)
54. O.G. Villard, Germany Embattled.
55. E.J. Dillon, Ourselves and Germany.
56. R. MacFall, Germany at Bay.
57. C. Tower, Changing Germany.
58. W.R. Thayer, Germany vs. Civilization.
59. Lamprecht, What Is History?
60. B.T. Curtin, The Land of Deepening Shadows.
61. P. Bigelow, Prussian Memories.
62. E. Troeltsch, The Spirit of German Kultur. (Modern Germany.)
63. A. Guilland, Modern Germany and Her Historians.
64. T.F.A. Smith, What Germany Thinks.
65. Von Bülow, Imperial Germany.
66. J.A. Cramb, Germany and England.
67. G. Bourdon, The German Enigma.
68. P. Collier, Germany and Germans.
69. H.B. Swope, Inside the German Empire.
70. Sumner, Folkways.
71. J. Novicow, Les Luttes Entre Sociétes Humaines en Leur Phases
Successives.
72. H. Gibson, A Journal from Our Legation in Belgium.
73. A.M. Pooley, Japan at the Cross-Roads.
74. F.J. Adkins, The War.
75. H.E. Powers, The Things Men Fight For.
76. J. M'Cabe, The Soul of Europe.
77. Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg.
78. S. Freud, Reflections on War and Death.
79. Nicolai, Die Biologie des Krieges.
80. P. Gibbs, The Soul of the War.
81. T. Roosevelt, America and the World War.
82. W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.
83. J. Novicow, Der Krieg und Seine Angeblichen Wohltaten.
84. G.R.S. Taylor, The Psychology of the Great War.
85. W. Wundt, Die Nationen und Ihre Philosophie.
86. Nusbaum, Der Krieg im Lichte der Biologie.
87. Edith Wharton, Fighting France.
88. Crile, A Mechanistic View of War and Peace.
89. Eleanor M. Sidgwick, The Morality of Strife in Relation to the
War. (The International Crisis.)
90. G. Murray, Herd Instinct and the War. (The International
Crisis.)
91. Bosanquet, Patriotism in the Perfect State. (The International
Crisis.)
92. A.G. Bradley, International Morality. (The International
Crisis.)
93. L.P. Jacks, The Changing Mind of a Nation at War. (The
International Crisis.)
94. G.F. Stout, War and Hatred. (The International Crisis.)
95. E. Mach, What Germany Wants.
96. F. Peil, Der Weltkrieg.
97. T. Veblen, The Nature of Peace.
98. Hirschfeld, Kriegsbiologisches.
99. H.A. Gibbons, The New Map of Europe.
100. F.C. Howe, Why War?
INDEX
Æsthetic, elements in war, 70-77;
in education, 230, 315-318
Aggressive instinct, 40-45
American life, 248;
mores, 221
Anger, 14
Autocracy and democracy, 104
Bergson, 36, 101, 110
Biological principles, 3 ff.
Bourdon, 90, 129
Boutroux, 55, 101, 236
Boy Scouts, 198
British Labor Party, 273
Burnet, 311
Cannibalism, 13-14
Causes in war, 97-109
Chapman, 52
Christianity, 307
City, moods, 188, 278;
school, 190
Civics, 264
Claes, 129
Cleveland, 260
Cobden, 137
Collier, 90
Colonies, 129
Combat, instinct of, 53-58
Conscientious objectors, 200
Consciousness of kind, 8
Cramb, 75, 256
Creative activity, 283
Darwin, 111
Death, 71
Democracy, 232, 253 ff.;
spirit of, 185-191
Dickinson, 261
Dide, 52
Dillon, 102, 272
Display, 74
Dominant, 35
Drawbridge, 102
Duelling, 93
Durkheim, 115
Economic factors, 128-141
Economy, 275
Ecstasy, 23, 64
Educational problems, 161-167
Empire, 148
England, 123, 244
Fear, 14, 41
Ferrero, 52
Feudalism, 35
Finance, 134
French, The, 24, 55, 244
Freudians, 20
Future, The, viii
Germany, 34, 43, 50, 55, 89, 98, 106, 115, 124, 126, 198, 239, 245
Gibbs, 54
Government, 242 ff.;
functions of, 251
Hatred, 46-52
Herd, The, 4, 10, 18, 57, 62
Heroes, 234
Hintze, 99
Hirschfeld, 23
Historical causes in war, 149
History, teaching of, 173, 266
Hobhouse, 101
Hobson, 260
Hocking, 167
Home-love, 81, 216
Homogeneity of species, 60
Howe, 135, 136
Hullquist, 137
Humanism, 309, 314
Humanities, 312
Industrialism, 33, 134, 220
Industry, and education, 269-289;
the higher, 184
Instincts, 4-5, 28, 38-69
Institutional factors in war, 125
International law, 192
Internationalism, 168-196
Intoxication motive, 31
James, 266
Japanese, 90, 119
Jones, 21
Justice, 205, 311
Lamprecht, 34
Land hunger, 131
Leadership, 84, 142, 176
Le Bon, 3, 18, 102, 111, 119, 129, 135, 244
Lehmann, 237
Loyalty, 228;
to leaders, 231
M'Cabe, 9
MacCurdy, 48, 56, 58, 201
Mach, 135
Marot, 284
Militarism, 197 ff.
Military training, 208-210
Mitchell, 9
Moods, in education, 319
Moral influences in war, 117-127
Murray, 18
Mysticism, 120
Napoleon, 113
National, character study, 224;
desires, 175;
honor, 88-96
Nationalism, 79-96;
and internationalism, 105
Nicolai, 3, 19, 56, 70, 78, 129, 217
Nietzsche, 110
Novicow, 19, 137
Noyes, 271
Nusbaum, 45
Nutritional motive, 38
Objectives, 140, 143
O'Ryan and Anderson, 45
Ostwald, 98
Pacifists, 200
Patriotism, 79-96, 211-241;
elements of, 80, 215
Patten, 115
Peace, 197 ff.;
ideals of, vi, 205
Pessimism, 43
Pfister, 45
Philosophical, attitude, 194;
influences in war, 110-116
Political, education, 242-268;
factors, 142-152;
ideals, 235
Power, motive of, 29, 130
Powers, 130
Practical interests, 180-183
Praise of war, 199
Preparedness, 208-210
President of the United States, 102
Pressure of population, 129
Preventive wars, 44
Primitive tendencies, 38
Progress, v, 321
Property, 138
Prophets, viii-ix
Psycho-analysis, 179
Race patriotism, 226
Rationalism and humanism, 107
Recreational life, 303
Redier, 85
Religion and education, 305-308
Religious influences in war, 117-127
Reproductive motive, 38, 66, 73, 76
Reuter, Frau, 51
Reversion theories of war, 17-23
Russell, 17, 167, 246, 305
Savorgnan, 201
Scheler, 7, 47
Sciences, 314
Scientific movement, 112
Selection, 5 ff.
Sexes, 299
Smith, 51
Social, education, 282 ff. 290-304;
feeling, 82;
history, 301;
instincts, 58;
solidarity, 63
Socialism, 259
Specialization, 281
Stevens, 138
Sumner, 121, 132
Synthesis of causes, 153-157
Thayer, 56
Thrift, 285
Tower, 98
Tragedy, 71
Trotter, 9, 18, 58, 233, 291, 295
Unconscious motives, 17 ff.
Universal language, 193
Veblen, 46, 78, 137
Venezelos, 151
Von Bülow, 115
War, as dramatic story, 22;
motives of, vii, 13, 15;
moods, 25 ff., 70 ff.;
origin of, 3 ff.
World, idea, 170;
organization, 191
Wundt, 90
* * * * *
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