Chapter 7

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.