malcontents. Irritation at things as they are, disgust at the continual
frustrations and aridities of American life, deep dissatisfaction with
self and with the groups that give themselves forth as hopeful,--out of
such moods there might be hammered new values. The malcontents would
be men and women who could not stomach the war, or the reactionary
idealism that has followed in its train. They are quite through with
the professional critics and classicists who have let cultural values
die through their own personal ineptitude. Yet these malcontents
have no intention of being cultural vandals, only to slay. They are
not barbarians, but seek the vital and the sincere everywhere. All
they want is a new orientation of the spirit that shall be modern,
an orientation to accompany that technical orientation which is fast
coming, and which the war accelerates. They will be harsh and often
bad-tempered, and they will feel that the break-up of things is no
time for mellowness. They will have a taste for spiritual adventure,
and for sinister imaginative excursions. It will not be Puritanism so
much as complacency that they will fight. A tang, a bitterness, an
intellectual fiber, a verve, they will look for in literature, and
their most virulent enemies will be those unaccountable radicals who
are still morally servile, and are now trying to suppress all free
speculation in the interests of nationalism. Something more mocking,
more irreverent, they will constantly want. They will take institutions
very lightly, indeed will never fail to be surprised at the seriousness
with which good radicals take the stated offices and systems. Their
own contempt will be scarcely veiled, and they will be glad if they
can tease, provoke, irritate thought on any subject. These malcontents
will be more or less of the American tribe of talent who used either
to go immediately to Europe, or starved submissively at home. But
these people will neither go to Europe, nor starve submissively. They
are too much entangled emotionally in the possibilities of American
life to leave it, and they have no desire whatever to starve. So they
are likely to go ahead beating their heads at the wall until they
are either bloody or light appears. They will give offense to their
elders who cannot see what all the concern is about, and they will
hurt the more middle-aged sense of adventure upon which the better
integrated minds of the younger generation will have compromised.
Optimism is often compensatory, and the optimistic mood in American
thought may mean merely that American life is too terrible to face. A
more skeptical, malicious, desperate, ironical mood may actually be the
sign of more vivid and more stirring life fermenting in America to-day.
It may be a sign of hope. That thirst for more of the intellectual
“war and laughter” that we find Nietzsche calling us to may bring us
satisfactions that optimism-haunted philosophies could never bring.
Malcontentedness may be the beginning of promise. That is why I evoked
the spirit of William James, with its gay passion for ideas, and its
freedom of speculation, when I felt the slightly pedestrian gait into
which the war had brought pragmatism. It is the creative desire more
than the creative intelligence that we shall need if we are ever to
fly.
VII
UNFINISHED FRAGMENT ON THE STATE
(Winter, 1918)
Government is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the
machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its
State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of
laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea
of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite,
concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace.
It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations
inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we
can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That
the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be
forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework
of Government and direct its activities.
Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and
reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace
the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.
For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the
State is that within its territory its power and influence should be
universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation
of men, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political
salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members
of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency
for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems
most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act
offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.
The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become
the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member
of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing
down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches.
All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible
to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military
defense, and the State becomes what in peace times it has vainly
struggled to become--the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s
businesses and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the
cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly,
but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end,
towards that “peacefulness of being at war,” of which L. P. Jacks has
so unforgettably spoken.
The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a
passive rôle in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation
of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old
routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new
techniques must be learnt. Wearing home ties are broken and women
who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated
for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the
significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old
national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as
universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every
individual citizen who in peace times had no function to perform by
which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the
State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting
spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating
such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority
opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be
dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes,
with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State,
objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the
beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far
exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public
opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the
schools, becomes one solid block. “Loyalty,” or rather war orthodoxy,
becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations.
Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There
the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a
professor of physics is _ipso facto_ disqualified to teach physics or
to hold honorable place in a university--the republic of learning--if
he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons
thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining
to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible,
his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to
convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul
that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and
energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic
consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The
rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric
opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities, or even
ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex
perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking more or
less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are
sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue
that war is unscriptural.
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion
throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for
passionate coöperation with the Government in coercing into obedience
the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties,
the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly
around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them
really to be converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty,
perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the
amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often
their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their
resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual
opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime
attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating
at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly
be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as
artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life,
are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant
classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the
State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves
but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
War--or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against
a powerful enemy--seems to achieve for a nation almost all that
the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no
longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body
politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the
way to full realization of that collective community in which each
individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation
at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels
immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire
of the collective community live in each person who throws himself
whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction
between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the
individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a
superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas
and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is
invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective
community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved
almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the
American nation have been expected to show such devotion _en masse_,
such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as
universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured
forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern
coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its
money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense,
undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of “democracy,”
it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.
For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the
education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and
beauty in the nation’s communal living, are alien to our traditional
ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for
it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a
political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival
group has meant, throughout all history--war.
There is nothing invidious in the use of the term, “herd,” in
connection with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer
to first principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of
which we all live, move and have our being. Ethnologists are generally
agreed that human society made its first appearance as the human pack
and not as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in
fact the original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal
individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes of men
are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization
where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes
remain strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and
the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of
organization, and not of kind.
Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest
primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species
of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary
history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious
impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together,
and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with
attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most
conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness
of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength,
which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized
man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action
for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is
a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms
and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so
successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of
society that gregariousness works its havoc.
For just as in modern societies the sex-instinct is enormously
over-supplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the
gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work of
protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite
enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of
others, to be able to coöperate with them, and to feel a slight
malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not
content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that
like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life.
So that all human progress, all novelty, and non-conformity, must be
carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which
drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority.
Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows
little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand
out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more
fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes
to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.
The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because
when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this
feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly
feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual
organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and
you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the crowd. While even
if you do not get any access of power by thinking and feeling just as
everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of
obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection.
Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the
individual--the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience--this
gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates
it to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its
mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to
the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little
group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the
State--the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity--is
founded on and makes use of.
There is, of course, in the feeling towards the State a large element
of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for
protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with
whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for
nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland,
that one’s relation towards it is conceived in terms of family
affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger
have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves
again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense
Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in
Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in
the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the
more tender functions of war-service, the ruling organization is
conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most
literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full
of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who
takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them
and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this
recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain
influx of power. On most people the strain of being an independent
adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the
significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the
responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest of
symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic
satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden
of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and
all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their
own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are
turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal
servants of society, or something greater than they--the State. The
man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a
post in the war management industrial service in Washington does not
apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique.
But psychically, what a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not
only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly
proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may
be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his
industrial prerogatives and sense of command.
From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises
if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any
real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic
sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the
traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide,
as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction
for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it
gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to
an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you
draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed,
and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak and
act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a
truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal
symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of
your definite action and ideas.
The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does
not identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate
it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of
the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant
classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in
wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never
having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have
been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial régime of the last
century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but
they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without
that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their
“betters.” They live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which
though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a
system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own,
and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest
voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation
which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From such
serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the
military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant
classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same
apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.
From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class
sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations
of power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human
impulses--gregariousness and parent-regression--endow it with all
the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely
just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has
in the class-division of his society. A country at war--particularly
our own country at war--does not act as a purely homogeneous
herd. The significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its
primitive intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials
of intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without
impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents
a long historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd.
The nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of
groups representing the coöperation and similar feeling of men on all
sorts of planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises.
In every modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of
economic classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and
interests--bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions
according to power and function, and even their interweaving, such as
those more highly skilled workers who habitually identify themselves
with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise
themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards
and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite,
though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic
groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World,
clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their
herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols.
There are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small
sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci
for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, and the same person
may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes.
Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction
or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of
the necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail; in a political
campaign, that his party shall triumph.