THE NATIONAL CHARACTER SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMED: THE INTERNATIONAL
SOCIETY, OR THE ORGANIZATION OF MANKIND
There is such a thing as a national character.[91] The national
character is reflected in the language, literature, laws and customs,
arts, institutions and religion of a people. Even when the religion
professed by different peoples is the same in name it is strongly
tinctured in the different countries by the national differences.
Compare for example the Christianity of Prussia with that of France, or
that of England with that of Russia.
The national character, like that of the individual, has its plus and
minus qualities, its excellent and its repellent traits.
The national character is to be spiritualized by raising the plus
traits to the Nth degree.
To this end, as before, the three-fold reverence and especially the
third reverence is the means. _The backward peoples of the earth are
the paramount object of reverence._ The more advanced peoples are to
bring to light the spiritual life latent in the backward. In order
to do so, they are to carry out the principle of reverence toward
past civilization, to sift out what is vital in the work of previous
generations. And further, they are to conform to the second principle
of reverence, that toward contemporaries approximately on the same
level, _i.e._, toward the other civilized nations. No single nation is
really competent to undertake the great task of awaking the stationary
peoples of India and China, of educating the primitive peoples of
Africa. A union of the civilized nations should be formed in order
that together they may jointly accomplish _the pedagogy of the less
developed_. The educational point of view once again appears as the
ethical. The relation of the less developed to the more advanced
peoples should be analogous to that of the child towards the parents.
Just as neither the father singly nor the mother alone can release
spiritual life in the offspring, so the different civilized nations,
each of which has its own gift, its own plus traits, are to interact
for the purpose of jointly awakening the creative energies within the
slumbering souls of the undeveloped peoples.
It follows that a nation cannot even be defined ethically except as
a member of an international society, and we begin to see the help
afforded by the spiritual conception in solving at least ideally the
problem of right international relations. Whereas hitherto the notion
of the sovereignty of each nation has been a formidable impediment to
the formation of an overarching world society, the ethical conception
not only permits this expansion of sovereignty, but necessitates
it. A nation, ethically defined, is a unique member of the _corpus
internationale_ of mankind. As unique it maintains of right its
relative independence, as a member it is bound by intrinsic ties
to its fellow-members, and is subject to the greater sovereignty
including them all alike.[92] A nation indeed cannot even maintain
its independence against other nations except by sheer might if it
acknowledges none but capricious ties between itself and them, such
as treaties, or Hague Conference agreements which can be dissolved at
pleasure. There must be recognized an inner ethical tie between nation
and nation, and it must receive legal formulation. This ethical tie is
the true _vinculum societatis humanæ_ and supplies what has hitherto
been absolutely lacking,—an ethical basis for international law.
The ethical relation between nations is founded on the fact that each
nation represents a significant type of humanity, that each nation
has certain plus and minus qualities, that it is dependent on other
nations to supplement its defects; and more than this, that it can
expurgate, as it ought, its minus qualities only by striving to evoke
the spiritual life in other peoples.
One salient point I must emphasize. The national character with its
plus and minus traits is empirical, and the development of the
empirical character is not itself the highest aim of the state. The
spiritual transformation of this empirical character, as I must take
pains to repeat, is the aim.
And herein appears the difference between the point of view taken in
this chapter and the political doctrine of the eminent Swiss publicist
Bluntschli. He too recognizes the development of the national character
as the aim of the state; and in so far as he does this he is in advance
of writers who limit the state’s functions to the protection of life
and property, to defense against foreign aggression, promotion of
prosperity, and of power and prestige. Bluntschli has the insight to
perceive that a nation is a collective entity, having a certain defined
character, and the development of the distinctive national gifts
is in his eyes the supreme purpose of national life, the political
organization of the state being a means to this end. But he falls into
a grave error by identifying the empirical with the spiritual character
of the nation, and setting up the former as an end worthy on its own
account. The empirical character of a collective entity is in this
respect no more worthy of honor, and no more fit to be a ground of
obligation, than the empirical character of the individual. And the
conclusions at which Bluntschli arrives are a sufficient proof of the
ethical inadequacy of his vision. Some nations, a very few he thinks,
possess political capacity, and they are to rule other peoples. Here
we have the “White Man’s Burden”—an obvious violation of the ethical
principle of national independence. Further, the world state, which is
to include all nations, is to concern itself only with their common
interests. Bluntschli thus accepts the uniformity principle in ethics,
excluding the idea of the reaction of differences which is of the very
essence of the ethical relation; while the ideal future as he sees
it is that of nations coexisting peacefully side by side, competing
peacefully with each other, and doubtless borrowing from one another
the best fruits produced by each. But it is idle to expect peaceful
coexistence so long as the strong exist by the side of the weak without
there being acknowledged an _intrinsic_ spiritual tie between them;
and competition between peoples will result, like competition between
individuals, in strife and exploitation; while the mere borrowing by
each of the fruits produced by the rest omits the vital point, upon
which I lay the greatest stress, of the eliciting of the fruits in each
by the spiritualizing influence of the rest.
Surveying Bluntschli’s doctrine as a whole, it is clear that his
empirical conception of the state leaves it a purely secular
institution concerned with externals, and not really related to the
inner life, certainly not a station in the development of personality.
He practically acknowledges as much when he says that the state is man
writ large, and the church woman writ large; that the state represents
the masculine principle, the church the feminine principle. For the
feminine, according to him, is the spiritual principle. The state deals
with externals; to the church is reserved the prerogative of entering
into and transforming the inner life.[93]
But what shall be the motive force for the creation of an international
society? I hold that the sense of national sin, or of national guilt,
must supply the motive force. At present all the more advanced nations
are to be censured because of their pride. Germany prides itself on
its science and its efficiency, England on its political liberalism,
France on its logical conception of equality, America on its democratic
individualism. Each of the great nations dwells complacently upon
its fair traits, and vaunts its special type of civilization as that
which should rightfully prevail among mankind generally. The national
defects, acknowledged perhaps by the critical few, are glozed over.
Indeed the consciousness of a collective national character though
latent is not yet distinct. It must be evoked. National self-knowledge
must be promoted by the leaders and teachers of mankind, and with it
must come, as in the case of the individual, the conscious recognition
of deep defects—in the case of Germany the narrowness of the conception
of the expert:[94] in the case of England the discrepancy between
political liberalism as applied to the white inhabitants of the British
Isles and of the self-governing dominions on the one hand, and the
“benevolent despotism” exercised over the subject millions of India on
the other; in America the effacement of true individualism under the
crushing pressure of mass opinion, etc.
Moreover not only will the defects be admitted, but their detrimental
influence on other peoples will have to be frankly avowed—every nation
must cry its _Peccavi_—the effect for instance on Europe of the French
love of glory, the effect of the efficiency notion of the Germans
as it is at present penetrating all other nations,[95] and in the
still wider view the effect of Western civilization as a whole on the
stationary civilization of China, on Egypt, on the myriads of Africa.
The civilized peoples of the earth have sinned their sins and are best
seen when we consider:
A. The spoliation and outrages perpetrated by the Western nations, for
instance at the time of the entrance of the Allies into Pekin, the
wholesale destruction of human life and the mutilations of the natives
on the Congo. It has been stated that some ten millions of the natives
of Africa perished as victims of the white race. If these acts do not
warrant our speaking of the sins of the civilized nations, what kind of
human behavior does deserve that name?
B. The effect of European example in practically forcing the peoples of
the Orient to adopt militarism and navalism.
C. The effect of Western individualism in undermining the religious
foundation in Eastern civilization.[96] The spreading of Christianity
itself, despite the exemplary influence of the higher type of
missionary, must yet be classed, in one important respect, among
the detrimental influences exercised by the West upon the East. For
Christianity, in the form in which it is usually taught, tends to
break up the sense of solidarity which is often strong among the less
civilized peoples, without supplying an adequate principle upon which
solidarity might be reëstablished on a higher plane. Hence Christian
teaching in the Orient and in Africa, however friendly and merciful in
intention, and however beneficent in many ways, is yet a disintegrating
influence.
The great problem of the spiritual education of the lower races
will have to be taken up anew. Not only are individual missionaries
of broader mental and moral horizons needed, the civilized nations
as such must reach a common understanding and establish a union
among themselves, the keynote of which shall be reverence for the
undeveloped, that is to say divination of what, under right educational
influence, they, the undeveloped, may come to mean for humanity. And
a union of this kind, consecrated to a noble object, will at the same
time be the means of leading the Western world out of the chaotic
condition in which it is at present weltering. The object for which
nations combine may not be their own peace, their own prosperity.
The key to peace between the adult peoples is a common, effectual
resolve to win new varieties of spiritual expression from the child
and adolescent peoples of the earth. Peace must come incidentally.
The common object must be disinterested, spiritual, because there is a
duty on the part of the civilized towards the uncivilized to exercise
a spiritual function. The task of humanity in general consists in
extending the web of spiritual relations so as to cover larger and
still larger areas of the finite world. The family is only partly
spiritualized. The vocations, the state, are not yet spiritualized. The
international society hardly exists. But what I here endeavor to sketch
is the human world as it would be in the light and under the influence
of the spiritual ideal. And I set down as the saving task of the
civilized nations that of extending the spiritual realm so as to cover
backward, undeveloped peoples, so as to embody them in the _corpus
spirituale_ of mankind.
_Some of the Principal Obstacles That Stand in the Way of the
Organization of Mankind._
The first obstacle is to be found in the inadequate theories that
underlie international law. Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinking
is still, strange to say, the theoretical foundation. Grotius and
Vattel remain the chief authorities. Grotius’s theory is a system of
empirical individualism with Christian individualism grafted upon it,
to mitigate its harsher features. The right of conquest is admitted.
A nation is allowed to punish another, punishment being taken in
the crude sense, while what has been permitted under natural law is
subsequently modified by counsels of perfection derived from Christian
individualism.
Vattel is the intellectual grandchild of Leibnitz. He derives from
Leibnitz through Wolff. Vattel envisages the various states as so many
individual entities without intrinsic ties. Peaceful coexistence and
unhindered pursuit by each people of its own perfection or welfare with
mutual aid to be voluntarily rendered are the ultimate conceptions
beyond which this thinker does not venture. And if the root principles
are thus infertile, small wonder that the fruit of the tree should be
what it is. In any handbook of international law, the preponderant
space is allotted to the laws of war, and yet international law has
proved impotent to restrain the passion of war, or even to prevent its
excesses. International law binds the Samson of war with green withes
which the giant snaps in derision. It is plain that we are still in
the earliest stages, not only of international practice, but even of
international thinking. The problem of the right ethical relations
between the nations has hardly been broached.
Another conspicuous obstacle in the way of international progress is to
be seen in false hopes. Among the false hopes I class:
A. The hope that increased facilities of intercourse will automatically
bring about more friendly relations. To expect this is to forget that
closeness accentuates repugnances as well as congenialities, increases
antipathy as well as amity. When nations come within short range of
each other they resemble antipathetical kinsmen who are compelled
to live together. The Czechs and Germans in Bohemia would not hate
each other as they do were they not such near neighbors. Spatial
rapprochement, for instance, between East and West will not of itself
guarantee moral rapprochement—far from it.
B. The hope that science may be relied on to bring the nations
together. Science is neutral. Science is subservient to evil as well
as good. Science is at present distilling the poisonous gases used on
the European battlefields as well as inventing the improved methods
of surgery. It has made possible instruments of destruction such as
savages might have shrunk from using. Moreover, scientific as well as
artistic interests are partial manifestations of a people’s life and
the ethical relation is between peoples as totalities or collective
entities—just as the ethical relation between man and man is between
the whole man and the whole man, and not between some partial aspect
of the man and of his fellows. Hence it is easy to explain why the
scientists and the scholars of the different belligerent peoples were
swept away by the war passion like the rest, and in their utterance
have even carried animosity to greater lengths, expressing it in
language calculated to wound more deeply and to leave more permanent
scars. They felt that they belonged to the people as a whole, and
when the occasion came for them to choose between their scientific
co-workers across the frontier and their fellow-nationals, they sided
with the latter.
C. The hope that reliance can be placed on international trade to bring
about ethical relations between nations. But trade, like science,
is ethically neutral. In its own interest it is favorable to order
and security in colonies and dependencies, and when, sufficiently
enlightened, to the impartial administration of justice. The European
nations abolished the slave trade in Africa because it decimated the
native population, and decreased the supply of labor.[97] On the other
hand England in the eighteenth century, even at that time the most
liberal country of Europe, did not hesitate to wage war with Spain for
the maintenance of the monopoly of the hideous slave-trade, and the
Opium War occurred in the “full light” of the nineteenth century. But
the most striking example of the ethical neutrality of the commercial
mind is to be found in the recent partition of Africa between England,
France, the Congo Free State and Germany. The methods which these four
nations adopted in the “scramble for Africa” were marked by a perfect
disregard of the rights of the native populations of the African
continent. Two devices were used—proclamations, and treaties with
native chiefs. The Queen of England proclaimed that a certain territory
would thenceforth be a British possession, as if proclamation could
convey a right to the territory. The German emperor indulged in the
same fiction. And there was a veritable race between French and English
in the West; between Germans and English in the East, as to which of
the two could outdistance or outwit the other in treaty-making. Karl
Peters came in disguise with a stock of blank treaties in his pocket.
Forty or fifty treaties were concluded by the French annually for
several years in the West—as if a treaty with a native chief, who
might be bribed or coerced into lending his signature, could be the
foundation of moral right to the territory occupied by his tribe. The
European nations artfully employed the fictions of sovereignty in
order to varnish their acts of plunder with a semblance of legality.
Of course these proclamations and treaties were not intended to
justify exploitation in the eyes of the natives—the natives were not
consulted or regarded—but rather to base thereon the division of the
spoils between the exploiters. A proclamation or the conclusion of a
treaty with a chief was notice given to rivals not to interfere with
the spoils reserved for the nation that had issued the proclamation or
secured the treaty. It meant “hands off” to competing exploiters.
If it be asked whether this picture is not too dark? Whether the
civilized nations of the twentieth century in their dealings with the
helpless natives were merely selfish? Whether their motives are so
sinister? Whether they are not animated by better, more moral aims?
the answer is that the commercial mind, and it is the commercial
mind that chiefly rules the world today, allays its scruples and
justifies its aggressions by the fallacy that to extend trade is to
spread civilization, and to spread civilization is to contribute to
the advancement of the human race. The interests of trade and of
civilization are simply identified. To build railroads, to stretch
telegraph lines across the Dark Continent, to launch steamboats on
lakes that never heard the whistle of a steam engine before, these
are assumed to be the evidences of “progress.” Besides are not the
natives disciplined in habits of industry, are they not encouraged to
cultivate the raw products needed by Europe, and in return to receive
the overflow of European markets? The instruments of civilization are
thus confounded with civilization itself; the means with the end; while
the real object, veiled by sophistry, is nevertheless the material
benefit to be secured by the white race. Even the humane treatment of
the natives, where it is humane, resembles somewhat too unpleasantly
the fattening of the calf prior to its consumption by the owner.
Furthermore, the interests of Trade being supposed to be paramount,
it is held that any country the people of which do not sufficiently
cultivate the products desired by other peoples, or who close their
doors against the industrial surplus of Europe, may be annexed, the
land forcibly seized, and the inhabitants subjugated, and moreover
that such action is right and proper and in the interests of humanity.
So long as this view obtains, there will be no peace on earth. The
competition for foreign territories and foreign markets, the scramble
between the “civilized” exploiters, will be indefinitely provocative of
new wars.
The root disease that afflicts the world at the present day is the
supremacy of the commercial point of view. Intercourse and exchange
of products is no doubt desirable. The education of backward peoples
in agriculture and in industry for their own good and along their own
line is indispensable. The fallacy of the commercial mind consists
in erecting the means into the paramount end, in brusquing the love
of independence which is so strongly entrenched, even among many
primitive peoples, and in preventing their development in the direction
prescribed by their own natures. All this for the sake of the
immediate increase of material wealth. The white race shall have the
lion’s share of the wealth; the native population are to be accorded a
lesser share, with which they must be content. This is the extent of
the concession to humanity. This is, in plain words, what is signified
by the haughty phrase—“the spread of civilization.”
The commercial mind is neither benevolent nor malevolent—as little as
science is. It seems at times to be beneficent; at other times it seems
to be almost fiendish—as in the case of the atrocities perpetrated on
the Congo. It is not fiendish, it is simply ethically neutral or blind.
From this series of reflections, certain conclusions may be drawn as
to fundamental points of view relating to international law. The main
principle is respect for the total personality of peoples, recognition
of them as potential members of the spiritual body of mankind.
The territory of a people is to be regarded as the body of that
people’s soul. Their independence is to be strictly respected.
Expropriation or annexation is to be characterized as outrage.
Intrusion, except for purposes of education, is to be forbidden. The
conception which underlies the scramble for Africa and for the Far
East—that the material interests of the advanced nations entitle them
to force the backward to become receptacles of the industrial overflow
of the West, the producers of raw material for the factories of the
West must be abandoned.[98]
And now the main point may once more be stated. The salvation of the
civilized peoples, their spiritualization in the effort to spiritualize
the less advanced demands a new turn in the history of humanity. _Union
in a common sublime object will overcome the antagonisms and discords
that prevail among the civilized nations themselves._ The sword will
never be turned into a plow-share until the nations come to love the
work of the plow—the work of spiritual _tilth in the human_ field. The
strong peoples will never cease to harm the weak, and in so doing to
harm themselves, until they see in the weak, members of the _corpus
spirituale_ of mankind, depositaries of potential spiritual life in
liberating which they the strong themselves will find increased life.
And the task of uplifting the lower peoples will never be successfully
prosecuted until it is seen to be part of the task of humanity in
general, which is to spread the web of spiritual relations over larger
and ever larger provinces of the finite realm.[99]
FOOTNOTES:
[91] See Fouillée’s _Esquisse psychologique des Peuples européens_,
also the Chapter on German, English and American Ideals in _The World
Crisis_.
[92] Each term in the series of social institutions is ethically
defined by referring to the succeeding terms. The family prepares for
the vocation, the vocation for the state or nation, the nation for
the international society, and all the successive terms receive their
ultimate definition from the infinite spiritual universe which includes
them, and broods over them and dwells in each, so that the expanding
ethical experience gained at the successive stations is spiritually the
_ratio cognoscendi_, not the _ratio essendi_.
[93] It is true that the state is concerned with those conditions of
the spiritual reactions that are capable of being enforced, but in
instituting such conditions the spiritual content is inevitably kept in
view. And in the very process of fitting the body to the spirit, the
form to the content, the content itself will be discerned more clearly
and explicitly.
[94] See the chapter in _The World Crisis_.
[95] To myself as an individual I say: look to your radiations,
consider the effects you produce on others; if the effects are
harmful trace them to faults in your character, and let your desire
and obligation to influence others beneficently be the spur to lead
you to transform your own character. The same each people should
say to itself. For instance the obvious faults of our democracy
have retarded the progress of democracy in Europe. Our failure in
municipal government is constantly quoted abroad as an argument against
democracy. This should be a real incentive to rouse us out of our
self-complacency.
[96] Cf. Lord Cromer’s remarks on this subject in his book on Egypt.
[97] See, however, the importation of Indian and Chinese coolies, and
the surreptitious resurrection of the slave trade mentioned by Sir
Charles Dilke in his _Problems of Greater Britain_.
[98] As to practical steps that might be taken to give effect to
this conception of international law, see my published address “The
Great Rôle of the United States After the War,” in which is discussed
the creation of an international law-making body or a Parliament of
Parliaments. In connection with the latter, I should attach particular
importance to the institution of commissions which may serve as a
link between the international legislature and the less civilized
peoples—the commissions to study the needs and gifts of those peoples
with a view to securing their development along their own lines. In the
case of civilized peoples that have until recently been stationary,
like the Chinese, the commission representing the Western nations would
sit in consultation with the most enlightened leaders of the Chinese
people themselves, the common object being to discover the points
of attachment in Chinese civilization which may wisely be made the
starting point of a more modern and progressive evolution. For instance
the filial piety of the Chinese, the rectitude of their merchants, the
absence of an aristocracy, and their civil service resting on education
(despite its defects). In this manner it may become possible to avoid
the abrupt, superficial, and infinitely destructive substitution
of modern ideas for the system at present existing, and gradual
development will take the place of intrusive and uncongenial change.
[99] I add that this conception will react on the internal life of
democracy. Democracy is at present regarded as a relation between
equals. In fact, we have in America the negro population, the
illiterate and backward immigrants. A truer conception of democracy
depends on our realizing that within each people as well as between
people and people there is the distinction of the more advanced and
the less advanced groups. Democracy rightly conceived will be found to
consist in the effort spent by the more advanced in each vocational
group to uplift the less advanced, the more advanced themselves coming
into possession of their spiritual worth in the degree that they
realize this their task of leadership and its great responsibilities.