Part 17

If we are correct in our analogy of the bee and the wolf, England has one great moral advantage over Germany, namely, that there is in the structure of her society no inherent obstacle to perfect unity among her people. The utmost unity Germany can compass is that of the aggressive type, which brings with it a harsh, non-altruistic relation among individuals, and can yield its full moral value only during the maintenance of successful attack. England, on the other hand, having followed the socialized type of gregariousness, is free to integrate her society to an indefinite extent. The development of the altruistic relation among her individuals lies in her natural path. Her system of social segregation is not necessarily a rigid one, and if she can bring about an adequate acceleration of the perfectly natural consolidation towards which she is, and has slowly been, tending, she will {208} attain access to a store of moral power literally inexhaustible, and will reach a moral cohesion which no hardship can shake, and an endurance which no power on earth can overcome.

These are no figures of speech, but plain biological fact, capable of immediate practical application and yielding an immediate result. It must be admitted that she has made little progress towards this consummation since the beginning of the war. Leaders, including not only governing politicians but also those who in any way have access to public notice, tend to enjoin a merely conventional unity, which is almost functionless in the promotion of moral strength. It is not much more than an agreement to say we are united; it produces no true unity of spirit and no power in the individual to deny himself the indulgence of his egoistic impulses in action and in speech, and is therefore as irritating as it is useless. It is unfortunate that the education and circumstances of many public men deny them any opportunity of learning the very elementary principles which are necessary for the development of a nation’s moral resources. Occasionally one or another catches an intuitive glimpse of some fragment of the required knowledge, but never enough to enable him to develop any effective influence. For the most part their impulses are as likely to be destructive of the desired effect as favourable to it. In the past England’s wars have always been conducted in an atmosphere of disunion, of acrimony, and of criticism designed to embarrass the Government rather than, as it professes, to strengthen the country. It is a testimony to the moral sturdiness of the people, and to the power and subtlety of the spirit of the hive, that success has been possible in such conditions. When one remembers how England has flourished on domestic discord in {209} critical times, one is tempted to believe that she derives some mysterious power from such a state, and that the abolition of discord might not be for her the advantageous change it appears so evidently to be. Consideration, however, must show that this hypothesis is inadmissible, and that England has won through on these occasions in spite of the handicap discord has put upon her. In the present war, tough and hard as is her moral fibre, she will need every element of her power to avoid the weariness and enfeeblement that will otherwise come upon her before her task is done.

Throughout the months of warfare that have already passed no evidence has become public of any recognition that the moral power of a nation depends upon causes which can be identified, formulated, and controlled. It seems to be unknown that that domination of egoistic impulses by social impulses which we call a satisfactory morale is capable of direct cultivation as such, that by it the resources of the nation are made completely available to the nation’s leaders, that without it every demand upon the citizen is liable to be grudgingly met or altogether repudiated.

We are told by physicians that uninstructed patients are apt to insist upon the relief of their symptoms, and to care nothing for the cure of their diseases, that a man will demand a bottle of medicine to stop the pain of an ulcer in his stomach, but will refuse to allow the examination that would establish the nature of his disease. The statesman embarrassed by the manifestations of an imperfect morale seems to incline to a similar method. When he finds he cannot get soldiers at the necessary rate, he would invent a remedy for that particular symptom. When he has difficulties in getting one or another industrial class to suspend its charters in the interests of the State, he must have a new {210} and special nostrum for that. When he would relax the caution of the capitalist or restrain the wastefulness of the self-indulgent, again other remedies must be found. And so he passes from crisis to crisis, never knowing from moment to moment what trouble will break out next, harassed, it is to be supposed, by the doubt whether his stock of potions and pills will hold out, and how long their very moderate efficiency will continue.

None of these troubles is a disease in itself; all are evidences of an imperfect national morale, and any attempt to deal with them that does not reach their common cause will necessarily therefore be unsatisfactory and impermanent.

The sole basis of a satisfactory morale in a people of the social type that obtains in England is a true national unity, which is therefore the singular and complete remedy for all the civil difficulties incident upon a great and dangerous war.

* * * * *

It is impossible to form any guess whether England will keep to her traditional methods or will depart so far from them as to take a bold and comprehensive view of her present and her growing moral needs. A carefully conceived and daringly carried out organization of a real national unity would have no great difficulty in a country so rich in practical genius; it would make an end once for all of every internal difficulty of the State, and would convert the nation into an engine of war which nothing could resist.

The more probable and the characteristic event will be a mere continuation in the old way. It will exemplify our usual and often admirable enough contempt for theoretical considerations and dreams, our want of interest in knowledge and foresight, our willingness to take any risk rather than endure the horrid pains of thought. {211}

When we remember how costly is our traditional method, how long and painful it makes the way, how doubtful it even makes the goal, it is impossible for the most philosophic to restrain a sigh for the needless suffering it entails, and a thrill of alarm for the dangers it gives our path, the darkness around us and ahead, the unimaginable end.

* * * * *

To the student, the end of the chapter is a chance to turn from the study of detail and allow his mind to range through a larger atmosphere and over a longer sequence. Closing our small chapter, we also may look at large over the great expanse of the biological series in whose illimitable panorama the war that covers our nearer skies with its blood-red cloud is no bigger than a pin point. As we contemplate in imagination the first minute spot of living jelly that crept and hungered in the mud, we can see the interplay of its necessities and its powers already pushing it along the path at the end of which we stand. Inherent in the dot of magic substance that was no longer mere carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and a little phosphorus, was the capacity to combine with its fellows and to profit by the fellowship, however loose. In the slow process of time combination brought freedom which, just like ours, was freedom to vary and, varying, to specialize. So in time great States of cells grew up, their individual citizen cells specialized to the finest pitch, perfect in communion with one another, co-ordinate in all their activities, incorporated with the State.

These new and splendid organizations, by the very fact of giving freedom to the individual cells, had lost it themselves. Still, they retained their capacity for combination, and where the need of {212} freedom was greatest they found it again in a new combination on a bigger scale. Thus again was obtained freedom to vary, to specialize, to react. Over the world fellowships of all grades and almost all types of creatures sprang up. Specialization, communion, co-ordination again appeared on the new plane. It was as if Nature, to protect her children against herself, was trying to crowd as much living matter into one unit as she could. She had failed with her giant lizards, with the mammoth and the mastodon. She would try a new method which should dispense with gross physical aggregations, but should minister to the same needs and afford the same powers. The body should be left free, the mind alone should be incorporated in the new unit. The non-material nexus proved as efficient as the physical one had been. The flock, the herd, the pack, the swarm, new creatures all, flourished and ranged the world. Their power depended on the capacity for intercommunication amongst their members and expanded until the limits of this were reached. As long as intercommunication was limited the full possibilities of the new experiment were concealed, but at length appeared a creature in whom this capacity could develop indefinitely. At once a power of a new magnitude was manifest. Puny as were his individuals, man’s capacity for communication soon made him master of the world. The very quality, however, which gave him success introduced a new complication of his fate. His brain power allowed him to speak and understand and so to communicate and combine more effectively than any other animal; his brain power gave him individuality and egoism, and the possibility of varied reaction which enabled him to obey the voice of instinct after the fashion of his own heart. All combination therefore was irregular, inco-ordinate, and only very slowly progressive. He has even at {213} times wandered into blind paths where the possibility of progressive combination is lost.

Nevertheless the needs and capacities that were at work in the primeval amœba are at work in him. In his very flesh and bones is the impulse towards closer and closer union in larger and larger fellowships. To-day he is fighting his way towards that goal, fighting for the perfect unit which Nature has so long foreshadowed, in which there shall be a complete communion of its members, unobstructed by egoism or hatred, by harshness or arrogance or the wolfish lust for blood. That perfect unit will be a new creature, recognizable as a single entity; to its million-minded power and knowledge no barrier will be insurmountable, no gulf impassable, no task too great.

{214} POSTSCRIPT OF 1919

PREJUDICE IN TIME OF WAR.

With the exception of the two preliminary essays, the foregoing chapters were written in the autumn of 1915. As the chief purpose of the book was to expound the conception that psychology is a science practically useful in actual affairs, it was inevitable that a great deal of the exemplary matter by which it was attempted to illustrate the theoretical discussion should be related to the war of 1914–1918. Rich, however, as this subject was in material with which to illustrate a psychological inquiry, it presented also the great difficulty of being surrounded and permeated by prejudices of the most deeply impassioned kind, prejudices, moreover, in one direction or another from which no inhabitant of one of the belligerent countries could have the least expectation of being free. To yield to the temptation offered by the psychological richness of war themes might thus be to sacrifice the detachment of mind and coolness of judgment without which scientific investigation is impossible. It had to be admitted, in fact, that there were strong grounds for such epistemological pessimism, and it will perhaps be useful in a broad way to define some of these here.

In normal times a modern nation is made up of a society in which no regard is paid to moral unity, and in which therefore common feeling is to {215} a great extent unorganized and inco-ordinate. In such a society the individual citizen cannot derive from the nation as a whole the full satisfaction of the needs special to him as a gregarious animal. The national feeling he experiences when at home among his fellows is too vague and remote to call forth the sense of moral vigour and security that his nature demands. As has already been pointed out[S] the necessary consequence is the segregation of society into innumerable minor groups, each constituting in itself a small herd, and dispensing to its members the moral energy that in a fully organized society would come from the nation as a whole. Of such minor herds some are much more distinct from the common body than others. Some engage a part only of the life of their members, so that the individual citizen may belong to a number of groups and derive such moral energy as he possesses from a variety of sources. Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his professional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly from the nation in which he is a unit. Indeed, so far from looking to the nation at large for the fulfilment of its natural function of providing “all hope, all sustainment, all reward,” he is apt to regard it as embodied by the tax-gatherer, the policeman, and the bureaucrat, at its best remote and indifferent, at its worst hostile and oppressive.

[S] Pp. 137, 138 _supra_.

The more distinct of these intra-national groups may not only be very fully isolated from the common body, but may be the seat of an actual corporate hostility to it, or rather to the aggregated minor groups which have come officially to represent it. When war breaks upon a society thus constituted {216} the intense stimulation of herd instinct that results tends to break down the moral restrictions set up by segregation, to throw back the individual citizen on to the nation at large for the satisfaction of his moral needs, and to replace class feeling by national feeling. The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted. If a minor group has already developed a certain hostility to the common body and resists the solvent effect of the outbreak of war, it becomes a potential source of anti-national feeling and of opposition to the national policy. Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness a herd can give. Thus we may say, that in a country at war _every_ citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state. In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellows, and in him who belongs to a dissentient minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more—if no less—liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war _all_ opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to {217} bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.

It is undoubtedly depressing to have to recognize this universality of prejudice and to have to abandon the opinion sometimes held that the characteristics of herd belief are limited to the judgments of the vulgar. The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against the fallacies of the mob. A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density. The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is a necessary accompaniment. We may lay it down, then, as fundamental that all opinion among the members of a nation at war is liable to prejudice, and when we remember with what vehemence such opinion is pronounced and with what fortitude it is defended we may regard as at least highly probable that such opinion always actually is prejudiced—rests, that is to say, on instinct rather than reason. Now, it is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war. All of it sharing the common characteristic of war opinion in being prejudiced, some will pronounce more or less clearly that the war is just and necessary, some will pronounce more or less clearly against that view; there will be a division into what we may call pro-national and anti-national currents of opinion, each accompanied respectively by its counterpart of what we may call anti-hostile and pro-hostile opinion. It is a significant fact that the relative development of pro-national and anti-national feeling varies according to the degree in which the given war is apprehended as dangerous. A {218} war apprehended as dangerous produces a more complete solution of the minor herds of society into the common body than does a war not so regarded; in consequence there is a nearer approach to homogeneity, and pro-national opinion is far in excess of anti-national opinion, which, if recognizable, is confined to insignificant minorities. A war regarded as not dangerous produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion, that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899–1902 was not apprehended as dangerous in this country, and in consequence, though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914–1918, regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made the conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a further point is illustrated. The essential factor in the stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it. The Prussians were dangerous enough to France, but were not generally regarded as such by the French, and in consequence national {219} homogeneity did not develop as it did on a later occasion in face of the same menace.

If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor—the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question—it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people’s response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914–1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. The fact that such a sense of rectitude is a universal and inevitable accompaniment of war, and as strong in a predatory and {220} criminal belligerent as in a generally pacific one, gives us a convenient measure of the extent to which prejudice must prevail in warfare.[T]

[T] It is important that it should be quite clear that we have been speaking here of the reaction of the general body of a nation to the occurrence of war, and not of the reasons for which a given war was undertaken. In England and in Germany the feeling of the people that the late war was just and necessary was equally intense and equally a direct consequence of the danger to the herd it represented. It was therefore a non-rational instinctive response without reference to objective justice in either case. Had the threat to the herd on either side seemed less grave, opinion as to the justice of the war would in that country have been correspondingly more divided. By her calculated truculence in the years before the war Germany—intending doubtless to intimidate a decaying people—had made it certain that when the threat to this country did come it should be apprehended at once as dangerous to the last degree, and had thus herself organized the practical unanimity of her chief enemy. All such reactions upon the outbreak of war are instinctively determined. It is the burden of the statesman that his decision in a crisis in favour of war _automatically_ renders impossible _rational_ confirmation by the people.

We thus arrive at the discouraging conclusion that in a belligerent country all opinion in any way connected with the war is subject to prejudice, either pro-national or anti-national, and is very likely in consequence to be of impaired validity. Must we then conclude further that speculation upon war themes is so liable to distortion that reasoned judgments of any practical value are impossible? Now, it is guidance in just such a difficulty as this that a psychology having any pretensions to be called practical may fairly be expected to yield, and psychology does in fact provide certain broad precautionary principles, which, although by no means infallible guides, do profess to be able to keep within bounds the disturbing effects of prejudice on judgment and so render possible the not wholly unprofitable discussion even of matters the most deeply implicated by war-time passion.