Government that the psychologist might perhaps differ to some extent
from the popular guides of opinion. In getting work out of a living
organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient
stimulus. One can make a man’s muscles contract by stimulating them
with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a
contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural
stimulus sent out from the man’s brain. Rising to a more complex level,
we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly
as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get
our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent
and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the
man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the
maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield
this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the
use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal,
or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their
souls full of a burning passion of service. Such a supply of mental
energy can issue only from a {151} truly homogeneous herd, and it is
therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we
come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian.
We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively
favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the
early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result
at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of
disturbance to the social structure.
The simplest basis of unity is equality, and this has been an
important factor in the unity which in the past has produced the
classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as
for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France.
Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral
rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality
of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more
efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The
fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a
week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence
as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the
imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of
education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance
to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be
possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality
without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material
inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.
A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the
nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state
to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but
also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as
satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting
the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its
moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the
nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good
soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern
himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be
similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he
belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and
they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself
steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding
material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond
with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at
all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value,
and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential
propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through
their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but
through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that
there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of
inferior station, equally arbitrary. To a gregarious species at war
the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on
leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based
on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or
on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value
to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however
blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to
true national unity.
Psychological considerations thus appear to indicate a very plain duty
for a large class of civilians who have complained of and suffered
patriotically {153} from the fact that the Government has found
nothing for them to do. Let all those of superior and assured station
make it a point of honour and duty to abrogate the privileges of
consideration and prestige with which they are arbitrarily endowed.
Let them persuade the common man that they also are, in the face of
national necessity, common men. The searching test of war has shown
that a proportion of the population, serious enough in mere numbers,
but doubly serious in view of its power and influence, has led an
existence which may fairly be described as in some degree parasitic.
That is to say, what they have drawn from the common stock in wealth
and prestige has been immensely larger than what they have contributed
of useful activity in return. Now, in time of war, they have still less
to give proportionally to what they have received. Their deplorably
good bargain was in no way of their making; no one has the slightest
right to attack their honour or good faith; they are as patriotically
minded as any class, and have contributed their fighting men to the
Army as generously as the day labourer and the tradesman. It is
therefore not altogether impossible that they might come to understand
the immense opportunity that is given them by fate to promote a true,
deep, and irresistibly potent national unity.
* * * * *
A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this
truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards
his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased
kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations
with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability,
impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of
cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. All these would be tasks for
the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be
no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals. Towards the
Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the
question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the
attempt to make himself so.
That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard
more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little
doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no
way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness
in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and
demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however
conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated
inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the
Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a
holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the
justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and
statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed
in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying
to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the
self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting
by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is concerned
with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life
has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more
perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this
people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make
themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid.
If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make
himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the
sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}
Of all the influences which tend to rob the citizen of the sense of his
birthright, perhaps one of the strongest, and yet the most subtle, is
that of officialism. It seems inevitable that the enormously complex
public services which are necessary in the modern State should set up
a barrier between the private citizen and the official, whereby the
true relation between them is obscured. The official loses his grasp
of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the
interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a
hostile institution, against which he has to defend himself, although
it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State
in the matter of tax-paying, it is no crime for the State to defraud
him in excessive charges. Considered in the light of the fundamental
relation of citizen and State, it seems incredible that in a democratic
country it is possible for flourishing establishments to exist the
sole business of which is to save the private individual from being
defrauded by the tax-gathering bureaucracy. This is but a single and
rather extreme example of the far-stretching segregation effected by
the official machine. The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman
etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the
individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful
agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in
his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity.
If the official machine through its utmost parts were animated by an
even moderately human spirit and used as a means of binding together
the people, instead of as an engine of moral disruption, it might be of
incalculable value in the strengthening of morale. {156}
ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—GERMANY.
In an earlier part of this book the statement was made that the present
juncture in human affairs probably forms one of those rare nodes of
circumstance in which the making of an epoch in history corresponds
with a perceptible change in the secular progress of biological
evolution. It remains to attempt some justification of this opinion.
England and Germany face one another as perhaps the two most typical
antagonists of the war. It may seem but a partial way of examining
events if we limit our consideration to them. Nevertheless, it is in
this duel that the material we are concerned with is chiefly to be
found, and it may be added Germany herself has abundantly distinguished
this country as her typical foe—an instinctive judgment not without
value.
By the end of September 1914 it had become reasonably clear that the
war would be one of endurance, and the comparatively equal though
fluctuating strength of the two groups of adversaries has since shown
that in such endurance the main factor will be the moral factor rather
than the material. An examination of the moral strength of the two
arch-enemies will therefore have the interest of life and death behind
it, as well as such as may belong to the thesis which stands at the
head of this chapter.
Germany affords a profoundly interesting study for the biological
psychologist, and it is very important that we should not allow what
clearness of representation we can get into our picture of her mind to
be clouded by the heated atmosphere of national feeling in which our
work must be done. As I have said elsewhere, it is merely to encourage
fallacy to allow oneself to believe that one is without prejudices. The
most one can do is to recognize {157} what prejudices are likely to
exist and liberally to allow for them.
If I were to say that at the present moment I can induce myself to
believe that it will ever be possible for Europe to contain a strong
Germany of the current type and remain habitable by free peoples, the
apparent absence of national bias in the statement would be a mere
affectation, and by no means an evidence of freedom from prejudice. I
am much more likely to get into reasonable relations with the truth
if I admit to myself, quite frankly, my innermost conviction that
the destruction of the German Empire is an indispensable preliminary
to the making of a civilization tolerable by rational beings. Having
recognized the existence of that belief as a necessary obstacle to
complete freedom of thought, it may be possible to allow for it and to
counteract what aberrations of judgment it may be likely to produce.
* * * * *
In making an attempt to estimate the relative moral resources of
England and Germany at the present time it is necessary to consider
them as biological entities or major units of the human species in
the sense of that term we have already repeatedly used. We shall have
to examine the evolutionary tendencies which each of these units has
shown, and if possible to decide how far they have followed the lines
of development which psychological theory indicates to be those of
healthy and progressive development for a gregarious animal.
I have already tried to show that the acquirement of the social habit
by man—though in fact there is reason to believe that the social habit
preceded and made possible his distinctively human characters—has
committed him to an evolutionary process which is far from being
completed yet, but which {158} nevertheless must be carried out to
its consummation if he is to escape increasingly severe disadvantages
inherent in that biological type. In other words, the gregarious
habit in an animal of large individual mental capacity is capable
of becoming, and indeed must become a handicap rather than a bounty
unless the society of the species undergoes a continuously progressive
co-ordination which will enable it to attract and absorb the energy and
activities of its individual members. We have seen that in a species
such as man, owing to the freedom from the direct action of natural
selection within the major unit, the individual’s capacity for varied
reaction to his environment has undergone an enormous development,
while at the same time the capacity for intercommunication—upon which
the co-ordination of the major unit into a potent and frictionless
mechanism depends—has lagged far behind. The term “intercommunication”
is here used in the very widest sense to indicate the ties that bind
the individual to his fellows and them to him. It is not a very
satisfactory word; but as might be expected in attempting to express
a series of functions so complex and so unfamiliar to generalization,
it is not easy to find an exact expression ready made. Another phrase
applicable to a slightly different aspect of the same function is “herd
accessibility,” which has the advantage of suggesting by its first
constituent the limitation, primitively at any rate, an essential part
of the capacities it is desired to denote. The conception of herd
accessibility includes the specific sensitiveness of the individual to
the existence, presence, thought, and feelings of his fellow-members
of the major unit; the power he possesses of reacting in an altruistic
and social mode to stimuli which would necessarily evoke a merely
egoistic response from a non-social animal—that is to say, the power to
deflect and modify egoistic {159} impulses into a social form without
emotional loss or dissatisfaction; the capacity to derive from the
impulses of the herd a moral power in excess of any similar energy he
may be able to develop from purely egoistic sources.
Intercommunication, the development of which of course depends upon
herd-accessibility, enables the herd to act as a single creature whose
power is greatly in excess of the sum of the powers of its individual
members.
Intercommunication in the biological sense has, however, never been
systematically cultivated by man, but has been allowed to develop
haphazard and subject to all the hostile influences which must infest a
society in which unregulated competition and selection are allowed to
prevail. The extravagance of human life and labour, the indifference
to suffering, the harshness and the infinite class segregation of
human society are the result. The use of what I have called conscious
direction is apparently the only means whereby this chaos can be
converted into organized structure.
Outside the gregarious unit, the forms of organic life at any given
time seem to be to some considerable extent determined by the fact that
the pressure of environmental conditions and of competition tends to
eliminate selectively the types which are comparatively unsuited to the
conditions in which they find themselves. However much or little this
process of natural selection has decided the course which the general
evolutionary process has taken, there can be no doubt that it is a
condition of animal life, and has an active influence. The suggestion
may be hazarded that under circumstances natural selection tends rather
to restrict variation instead of encouraging it as it has sometimes
been supposed to do. When the external pressure is very severe it
might be supposed that anything like free variation {160} would be a
serious disadvantage to a species, and if it persisted might result
in actual extermination. It is conceivable, therefore, that natural
selection is capable of favouring stable and non-progressive types at
the expense of the variable and possibly “progressive,” if such a term
can be applied to species advancing towards extinction. Such a possible
fixative action of natural selection is suggested by the fact that the
appearance of mechanisms whereby the individual is protected from the
direct action of natural selection seems to have led to an outburst of
variation. In the multicellular animal the individual cells passing
from under the direct pressure of natural selection become variable,
and so capable of a very great specialization. In the gregarious unit
the same thing happens, the individual member gaining freedom to vary
and to become specialized without the risk that would have accompanied
such an endowment in the solitary state.
Within the gregarious unit, then, natural selection in the strict
sense is in abeyance, and the consequent freedom has allowed of a
rich variety among the individual members. This variety provides the
material from which an elaborate and satisfactory society might be
constructed if there were any constant and discriminating influence
acting upon it. Unfortunately, the forces at work in human society
to-day are not of this kind, but are irregular in direction and
fluctuating in strength, so that the material richness which would
have been so valuable, had it been subject to a systematic and
co-ordinate selection, has merely contributed to the confusion of the
product. The actual mechanism by which society, while it has grown in
strength and complexity, has also grown in confusion and disorder, is
that peculiarity of the gregarious mind which automatically brings
into the monopoly of power the mental type which I have called the
{161} stable and common opinion calls normal. This type supplies our
most trusted politicians and officials, our bishops and headmasters,
our successful lawyers and doctors, and all their trusty deputies,
assistants, retainers, and faithful servants. Mental stability is their
leading characteristic, they “know where they stand” as we say, they
have a confidence in the reality of their aims and their position,
an inaccessibility to new and strange phenomena, a belief in the
established and customary, a capacity for ignoring what they regard as
the unpleasant, the undesirable, and the improper, and a conviction
that on the whole a sound moral order is perceptible in the universe
and manifested in the progress of civilization. Such characteristics
are not in the least inconsistent with the highest intellectual
capacity, great energy and perseverance as well as kindliness,
generosity, and patience, but they are in no way redeemed in social
value by them.
In the year 1915 it is, unfortunately, in no way necessary to enumerate
evidences of the confusion, the cruelty, the waste, and the weaknesses
with which human society, under the guidance of minds of this type,
has been brought to abound. Civilization through all its secular
development under their rule has never acquired an organic unity of
structure; its defects have received no rational treatment, but have
been concealed, ignored, and denied; instead of being drastically
rebuilt, it has been kept presentable by patches and buttresses, by
paint, and putty, and whitewash. The building was already insecure, and
now the storm has burst upon it, threatens incontinently to collapse.
The fact that European civilization, approaching what appeared to
be the very meridian of its strength, could culminate in a disaster
so frightful as the present war is proof that its development was
radically unsound. This is by no means to say that {162} the war
could have been avoided by those immediately concerned. That is almost
certainly not the case. The war was the consequence of inherent
defects in the evolution of civilized life; it was the consequence of
human progress being left to chance, and to the interaction of the
heterogeneous influences which necessarily arise within a gregarious
unit whose individual members have a large power of varied reaction.
In such an atmosphere minds essentially resistive alone can flourish
and attain to power, and they are by their very qualities incapable of
grasping the necessities of government or translating them into action.
The method of leaving the development of society to the confused welter
of forces which prevail within it is now at last reduced to absurdity
by the unmistakable teaching of events, and the conscious direction of
man’s destiny is plainly indicated by Nature as the only mechanism by
which the social life of so complex an animal can be guaranteed against
disaster and brought to yield its full possibilities.
A gregarious unit informed by conscious direction represents a
biological mechanism of a wholly new type, a stage of advance in the
evolutionary process capable of consolidating the supremacy of man and
carrying to its full extent the development of his social instincts.