Part 20

All recorded history shows that society developing under the conditions that have obtained up {245} to the present time—developing, that is to say, spontaneously under the random influences of an uncontrolled environment of the individual—does not permit to the average man that balanced instinctive expression which is indispensable for the formation of a rich, vigorous, and functionally active personality. It has been one of my chief efforts in this book to show that the social instinct, while in itself the very foundation of society, takes, when its action is undirected and uncontrolled, a principal part in restricting the completeness and efficacy of the social impulse. This instinct is doubly responsible for the defects which have always inhered in society through the personal impoverishment of its individual constituents. In the first place, it is the great agent by which the egoistic instincts are driven into dwarfed, distorted, and symbolic modes of expression without any regard for the objective social necessity of such oppressive regulation. In the second place, it is an instinct which, while it embodies one of the deepest and potentially most invigorating passions of the soul, tends automatically to fall out of vigorous and constant activity with the expansion of societies. It is the common character of large societies to suffer heavily from the restrictive effect on personality of the social instinct, and at the same time to suffer in the highest degree from the debilitation of the common social impulse. Only in the smallest groups, such as perhaps was early republican Rome, can the common impulse inform and invigorate the whole society. As the group expands and ceases to feel the constant pressure of an environment it no longer has to fear, the common impulse droops, and the society becomes segregated into classes, each of which a lesser herd within the main body and under the reciprocated pressure of its fellows, now yields to its members the social feeling which the main body {246} can no longer provide. The passage of the small, vigorous, homogeneous and fiercely patriotic group into the large, lax, segregated and ultimately decadent group is a commonplace of history. In highly segregated peoples the restrictive effect of the social instinct upon personality has usually been to some extent relaxed, and a relatively rich personal development has been possible. Such an amplification has always, however, been limited to privileged classes, has always been accompanied by a weakening of the national bond, and a tendency of the privileged class to the sincere conviction that its interests are identical with those of the nation. No nation has ever succeeded in liberating the personality of its citizens from the restrictive action of the social instinct and at the same time in maintaining national homogeneity and common impulse. In a small community intercommunication among its individual members is free enough to keep common feeling intense and vigorous. As the community increases in size the general intercommunication becomes attenuated, and with this common feeling is correspondingly weakened. If there were no other mechanism capable of inducing common action than the faint social stimulus coming from the nation at large, a segregated society would be incapable of national enterprise. There is, however, another mechanism which we may call leadership, using the word in a certain special sense. All social groups are more or less capable of being led, and it is manifest that the leadership of individuals, or perhaps more usually of classes, has been a dominant influence in the expansion and enterprise of all civilizations of which we have any knowledge. It is only in the small communities that we can detect evidence of a true common impulse shared alike by all the members acting as the cause of expansion. In larger groups, {247} autocracies and dynasties, Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars have imposed the impulse of expansion upon the people, and by virtue of human susceptibility to leadership have secured a virtual, though only a secondary, common purpose.

Now leadership, potent as it undoubtedly is in calling forth the energy of the social instinct, is essentially a limited and therefore an exhaustible force. It depends for continued vigour upon successful enterprise. While it is succeeding there are only wide limits to the moral power it can set free and command, but in the face of misfortune and disaster its limitations become obvious, and its power inevitably declines. On the other hand, the moral power yielded by a true community of feeling, and not imposed by leadership, is enormously more resistant and even indestructible by failure and defeat. History gives many examples of the encounters of communities of these two types—the led society and the homogeneous society—and in spite of the invariably greater size and physical power of the former, frequently records the astoundingly successful resistance its greater moral vigour has given to the latter. This is perhaps why Carthage beat in vain against little Rome, and certainly why Austria failed to subdue Switzerland.

All large societies that have had their day and have fallen from their zenith by internal dissolution or outward attack have been given their impulse to expansion by leadership and have depended on it for their moral power. If society is to continue to depend for its enterprise and expansion upon leadership, and can find no more satisfactory source of moral power, it is, to say the least, highly probable that civilizations will continue to rise and fall in a dreadful sameness of alternating aspiration and despair until perhaps some lucky accident of {248} confusion finds for humanity in extinction the rest it could never win for itself in life.

There is, however, reason to suppose that susceptibility to leadership is a characteristic of relatively primitive social types, and tends to diminish with increasing social complexity. I have already called attention to and attempted to define the apparently specific psychological differences between Germany and England before and during the war. These differences I attributed to variations in the type of reaction to herd instinct shown by the two peoples. The aggressive social type represented by Germany and analogous with that characteristic of the predaceous social animals I regarded as being relatively primitive and simple. The socialized type represented by England and presenting analogies with that characteristic of many social insects I regarded as being, though imperfect as are all the human examples available for study up to the present time, more complex and less primitive, and representing at any rate a tendency towards a satisfactory solution of the problems with which man as a gregarious animal is surrounded. Now, it is a very obvious fact that the susceptibility to leadership shown by Germany and by England before the war was remarkably different. The common citizen of Germany was strikingly open to and dependent upon discipline and leadership, and seemed to have a positive satisfaction in leaving to his masters the management of his social problems and accepting with alacrity the solutions that were imposed upon him. The nation consequently presented a close knit uniformity of purpose, a singleness of national consciousness and effort that gave it an aspect of moral power of the most formidable kind. In England a very different state of affairs prevailed. The common citizen was apt to meet with indifference or resentment all efforts to change the social {249} structure, and it had long been a political axiom that “reform” should always await an irresistible demand for it. Instances will be within every one’s memory of politicians who met with crushing rebuffs through regarding the supposed desirability of a reform as a justification for imposing it. This almost sullen indifference to great projects and ideals, this unwillingness to take thought in the interests of the nation and the empire in spite of the apostolic zeal of the most eloquent political prophets, was generally regarded as evidence of a weakness and slackness in the body politic that could not but threaten disaster. And yet in the trials of the war the moral stability of England showed itself to be superior to that of Germany, which, in those rough waters, it jostled as mercilessly and as effectually as did the brass pot the earthen crock in the fable.

During the war itself the submission to leadership that England showed was characteristic of the socialized type. It was to a great extent spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined, and gave repeated evidence that the passage of inspiration was essentially from the common people to its leaders rather than from the leaders to the common people. When the current of inspiration sets persistently in this direction, as it unquestionably did in England, it is very plain that the primitive type of leadership that has led so many civilizations to disaster is no longer in unmodified action.

Germany has provided the most complete example of a culture of leadership that has ever been recorded, and has gone through the phases of her evolution with a precision which should make her case an illustration classical for all history. With a people showing strongly the characteristics of the aggressive social type, and a social structure deeply and rigidly segregated, the nation was ideally {250} susceptible to discipline and leadership, and a leading class was available which possessed an almost superhuman prestige. The opportunity given to leadership was exploited with great energy and thoroughness and with an intelligence that by its intensity almost made up for being nowhere really profound. With all these advantages and the full uses of the huge resources science has made available to intelligently concerted effort, an extremely formidable power was created. The peoples of the socialized type towards whom from the first its hostility was scarcely veiled were under obvious disadvantages in rivalry with it. Their social type made it impossible for them to combine and organize themselves against what was to them no more than a vaguely hypothetical danger. Against peaceful conquest by Germany in the industrial sphere England was therefore practically helpless, and to it would probably in time have succumbed. Paradox as it may seem, there can be no doubt that it was in war only that England could contend with Germany on equal terms. Paradoxically again, it was war for which England was reluctant and Germany was eager.

War brought Germany into contact with the, to her, inexplicable ferocity of peoples of the socialized type under attack, and it was by this disappointment that the first blow to her morale was struck. The wastage of modern warfare must very soon have begun to impair the isolation and prestige of the officer class through increasingly free importation from without the pale. With this necessarily began to be sapped the absolute and rigid segregation on which leadership of the type we are considering so largely depends. At the same time, the general tendency of the increasing pressure of war is to wear down class segregation over the whole social field. This tendency which intensified {251} and invigorated the morale of her enemies would work steadily against the leadership morale of Germany. These factors must no doubt be added to the moral need for aggression, the exhaustion consequent upon forced offensives, and the specific intolerance of failure and retreat that combined to bring down the strongest example of the predaceous led society that history records.

SOME CHARACTERS OF A RATIONAL STATECRAFT.

If the foregoing discussion has been sound, we may attribute the impermanence of all civilizations of which we have knowledge to the failure of society to preserve with increasing magnitude of its communities a true homogeneity and a progressive integration of its elements. We have seen that there is a type of society—distinguished here as the socialized type—in which a trace of this integrative tendency can be detected at work. Under the threat of war this tendency is accelerated in its action, and can attain a moderate, though very far indeed from a complete, degree of development. In the absence of such a powerful stimulus to homogeneity, however, segregation reasserts itself, and the society, necessarily deprived by its type of the advantages of leadership, becomes confused, disunited, and threatened with disruption. It seems probable, indeed, that the integrative tendency unaided and uncontrolled is too weak to surmount the obstacles with which it has to contend, and to anticipate disruption by welding the elements of society into a common life and common purpose. It has already been repeatedly suggested that these difficulties, due as they are to the human power of various reaction, can be met only by the interposition of the intellect as an active factor in the problem of the direction of society. In other words, the progressive evolution of society has reached a point where the {252} construction and use of a scientific statecraft will become an indispensable factor in further development and the only means of arresting the dreary oscillations between progress and relapse which have been so ominous a feature in human history. We are perhaps in a position to-day to suggest tentatively some of the principles on which such a statecraft might be built.

It would have to be based on a full recognition of the biological status of man, and to work out the tendencies which as an animal he is pursuing and must pursue. If we have evidence of the only course evolution can follow satisfactorily, then it is clear that any social and legislative effort not in line with that course must be entirely wasted. Moreover, since we are proceeding on the hypothesis that direct conscious effort is now a necessary factor in the process, we must clear our minds of the optimistic determinism which regards man as a special pet of nature and the pessimistic determinism which would reduce him to a mere spectator of his destiny. The trained and conscious mind must come to be regarded as a definite factor in man’s environment, capable of occupying there a larger and larger area.

Such a statecraft would recognize how fully man is an instinctive being and how his mental vigour and stability depend entirely upon instinctive expression being adequate. The tyrannous power of the social instinct in repressing and distorting instinctive expression would have to be controlled and directed with the purpose of enlarging the personal and social effectiveness of the individual to the maximum extent; the social instinct would no longer be left to operate on the individual under the random direction of custom and habit, of fashion and social whim, or for the satisfaction of the jealousy of age. {253}

Perhaps most important of all, a scientific statecraft would understand that the social instinct itself is as deep and powerful as any, and hungrily demands intense and positive gratification and expression. The social instinct drives the individual to seek union with some community of his fellows. The whole national body is in the present state of society the smallest unit in which the individual can find complete and permanent satisfaction. As long as the average man’s sense of possession in the state is kept so low as it is at present, as long as the sense of moral inequality between himself and his fellows is so vigorously maintained, so long will he continue to make his class rather than his nation the object of social passion, and so long will society continue to breed within itself a principle of death.

The exploration of the psychology of man’s social relations has been left almost exclusively to the operation of what we may call the method of prophetic intuition, and there is no branch of knowledge where the fumbling methods of unclarified intuition have introduced more confusion. Intuitions in the sphere of feeling—moral intuitions—have more than the usual tendency of intuitions to appear as half-truths surrounded and corrupted by fantasies of the seer and isolated from correlation with the rest of knowledge. Let us consider, for example, the intuitional doctrine of philosophic anarchism. The nucleus of truth in this is the series of perfectly sound psychological conceptions that all social discipline should be, as experienced by the individual, spontaneous and voluntary, that man possesses the instinctive endowment which renders possible a voluntary organization of society, and that in such a society order would be more effectively maintained than under our present partially compulsory system. This nucleus, which of course is not understood or expressed in these {254} definite psychological terms by the anarchist, is apt to be associated with dogmas which altogether obscure its strictly unassailable truth. Communism, again, is another doctrine which contains its core of psychological truth, namely, that individual property is an economic convention rather than a psychological necessity, and that social inequality is an infirmity of the state rather than its foundation stone. As it is exemplified in practice, however, communism is so deeply tainted by the belief in an inverted class segregation of its own, and by a horror of knowledge, that its elements of reality are wholly obscured and rendered useless.

Every doctrine that makes disciples freely must contain in it some embodiment of psychological reality, however exiguous; but where it has been arrived at by the methods of the prophet, there is no reason to expect that stress will be laid on the true more than on the false elements of the doctrinal scheme, and experience shows that the inessential falsity has for the expositor as many, if not more, attractions than the essential truth. An expert statecraft would be able to identify the real elements of discovery that were present in any fresh prophetic appeal to public belief, and would be able at any rate to save the state from the condition of petrified embarrassment into which it now falls when faced by social dogmas and experiments which win attention and adhesion while at the same time they outrage convention and common sense.

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The examination of the functional satisfactoriness of society, which has been a chief object of this book, has yielded a certain general body of conclusions. An attempt will now be made to summarize these in a compact and even dogmatic form, and to add what further element of definition seems indispensable for clearness. {255}

1. All societies of which we have any knowledge have shown two general defects—they have proved unable to develop and direct more than a small fraction of the resources they theoretically possess, and they have been impermanent, so that time after time laborious accumulations of constructive effort have been wasted. According to our analysis these defects are due to the drift of power into the hands of the stable-minded class, and to the derivation of moral power and enterprise from the mechanisms of leadership and class segregation.

2. A society, in order to have stability and full functional effectiveness, must be capable of a continually progressive absorption of its individual members into the general body—an uninterrupted movement towards a complete moral homogeneity.

3. A tendency towards a progressive integration of this kind can be detected in society to-day by direct observation. It is weak and its effects are fluctuating, so that there is doubt whether it can, unless directly encouraged by human effort, counteract the forces which up till now have always limited social evolution to movements of oscillation rather than of true progress.

4. The only way in which society can be made safe from disruption or decay is by the intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect as a factor among the forces ruling its development.

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This last doctrine has been repeatedly stated, but we have perhaps scarcely defined it precisely enough to avoid misunderstanding. Some such definition is our concluding task. Of all the elements we find in a general examination of the whole biological series the human intellect is the one that most clearly gives the impression of a new and intrusive factor. The instinctive side of man, with its derivatives, such as his morals, his altruism, and his aspirations, {256} falls very easily into line with the rest of the natural order, and is seen to be at work in modes which nowhere show any essential new departure. The intellect, however, brings with it a capacity for purpose as distinct from and additional to desire, and this does apparently introduce a factor virtually new to the biological series. The part that the purposive foresight of the intellect has been allowed to take in human affairs has always been limited by instinctive inhibitions. This limitation has effectually prevented man from defining his situation in the world, and he remains a captive in the house of circumstance, restrained as effectually by the mere painted canvas of habit, convention, and fear as by the solid masonry of essential instinctive needs. Being denied the freedom, which is its indispensable source of vigour, the intellect has necessarily failed to get a clear, comprehensive, and temperate view of man’s status and prospects, and has, of course, shrunk from the yet more exacting task of making itself responsible for his destiny. Nowhere has been and is the domination of the herd more absolute than in the field of speculation concerning man’s general position and fate, and in consequence prodigies of genius have been expended in obscuring the simple truth that there is no responsibility for man’s destiny anywhere at all outside his own responsibility, and that there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts. Western civilization has recently lost ten millions of its best lives as a result of the exclusion of the intellect from the general direction of society. So terrific an object lesson has made it plain enough how easy it is for man, all undirected and unwarned as he is, to sink to the irresponsible destructiveness of the monkey.

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