Human Nature in Politics Part 3

CHAPTER II

POLITICAL ENt.i.tIES

Man's impulses and thoughts and acts result from the relation between his nature and the environment into which he is born. The last chapter approached that relation (in so far as it affects politics) from the side of man's nature. This chapter will approach the same relation from the side of man's political environment.

The two lines of approach have this important difference, that the nature with which man is born is looked on by the politician as fixed, while the environment into which man is born is rapidly and indefinitely changing. It is not to changes in our nature, but to changes in our environment only--using the word to include the traditions and expedients which we acquire after birth as well as our material surroundings--that all our political development from the tribal organisation of the Stone Ages to the modern nation has apparently been due.

The biologist looks on human nature itself as changing, but to him the period of a few thousands or tens of thousands of years which const.i.tute the past of politics is quite insignificant. Important changes in biological types may perhaps have occurred in the history of the world during comparatively short periods, but they must have resulted either from a sudden biological 'sport' or from a process of selection fiercer and more discriminating than we believe to have taken place in the immediate past of our own species. The present descendants of those races which are pictured in early Egyptian tombs show no perceptible change in their bodily appearance, and there is no reason to believe that the mental faculties and tendencies with which they are born have changed to any greater degree.

The numerical proportions of different races in the world have, indeed, altered during that period, as one race proved weaker in war or less able to resist disease than another; and races have been mingled by marriage following upon conquest. But if a baby could now be exchanged at birth with one born of the same breeding-stock even a hundred thousand years ago, one may suppose that neither the ancient nor the modern mother would notice any startling difference. The child from the Stone Age would perhaps suffer more seriously than our children if he caught measles, or might show somewhat keener instincts in quarrelling and hunting, or as he grew up be rather more conscious than his fellows of the 'will to live' and 'the joy of life.' Conversely, a transplanted twentieth-century child would resist infectious disease better than the other children in the Stone Age, and might, as he grew up, be found to have a rather exceptionally colourless and adaptable character. But there apparently the difference would end. In essentials the type of each human stock may be supposed to have remained unchanged throughout the whole period. In the politics of the distant future that science of eugenics, which aims at rapidly improving our type by consciously directed selective breeding, may become a dominant factor, but it has had little influence on the politics of the present or the past.

Those new facts in our environment which have produced the enormous political changes which separate us from our ancestors have been partly new habits of thought and feeling, and partly new ent.i.ties about which we can think and feel.

It is of these new political ent.i.ties that this chapter will treat. They must have first reached us through our senses, and in this case almost entirely through the senses of seeing and hearing. But man, like other animals, lives in an unending stream of sense impressions, of innumerable sights and sounds and feelings, and is only stirred to deed or thought by those which he recognises as significant to him. How then did the new impressions separate themselves from the rest and become sufficiently significant to produce political results?

The first requisite in anything which is to stimulate us toward impulse or action is that it should be recognisable--that it should be like itself when we met it before, or like something else which we have met before. If the world consisted of things which constantly and arbitrarily varied their appearance, if nothing was ever like anything else, or like itself for more than a moment at a time, living beings as at present const.i.tuted would not act at all. They would drift like seaweed among the waves.

The new-born chicken cowers beneath the shadow of the hawk, because one hawk is like another. Animals wake at sunrise, because one sunrise is like another; and find nuts or gra.s.s for food, because each nut and blade of gra.s.s is like the rest.

But the recognition of likeness is not in itself a sufficient stimulus to action. The thing recognised must also be _significant_, must be felt in some way to matter to us. The stars reappear nightly in the heavens, but, as far as we can tell, no animals but men are stimulated to action by recognising them. The moth is not stimulated by recognising a tortoise, nor the cow by a cobweb.

Sometimes this significance is automatically indicated to us by nature.

The growl of a wild beast, the sight of blood, the cry of a child in distress, stand out, without need of experience or teaching, from the stream of human sensations, just as, to a hungry fox-cub, the movement or glimpse of a rabbit among the undergrowth separates itself at once from the sounds of the wind and the colours of the leaves and flowers.

Sometimes the significance of a sensation has to be learned by the individual animal during its own life, as when a dog, who recognises the significance of a rat by instinct, learns to recognise that of a whip (provided it looks like the whip which he saw and felt before) by experience and a.s.sociation.

In politics man has to make like things as well as to learn their significance. Political tactics would indeed be a much simpler matter if ballot-papers were a natural product, and if on beholding a ballot-paper at about the age of twenty-one a youth who had never heard of one before were invariably seized with a desire to vote.

The whole ritual of social and political organisation among savages, therefore, ill.u.s.trates the process of creating artificial and easily recognisable political likenesses. If the chief is to be recognised as a chief he must, like the ghost of Patroclus, 'be exceedingly like unto himself.' He must live in the same house, wear the same clothes, and do the same things year by year; and his successor must imitate him. If a marriage or an act of sale is to be recognised as a contract, it must be carried out in the customary place and with the customary gestures. In some few cases the thing thus artificially brought into existence and made recognisable still produces its impulsive effect by acting on those biologically inherited a.s.sociations which enable man and other animals to interpret sensations without experience. The scarlet paint and wolfskin headdress of a warrior, or the dragon-mask of a medicine man, appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate, directly to our instinctive nature. But even in very early societies the recognition of artificial political ent.i.ties must generally have owed its power of stimulating impulse to a.s.sociations acquired during life. A child who had been beaten by the herald's rod, or had seen his father bow down before the king, or a sacred stone, learned to fear the rod, or the king, or the stone by a.s.sociation.

Recognition often attaches itself to certain special points (whether naturally developed or artificially made) in the thing recognised. Such points then become symbols of the thing as a whole. The evolutionary facts of mimicry in the lower animals show that to some flesh-eating insects a putrid smell is a sufficiently convincing symbol of carrion to induce them to lay their eggs in a flower, and that the black and yellow bands of the wasp if imitated by a fly are a sufficient symbol to keep off birds.[11] In early political society most recognition is guided by such symbols. One cannot make a new king, who may be a boy, in all respects like his predecessor, who may have been an old man. But one can tattoo both of them with the same pattern. It is even more easy and less painful to attach a symbol to a king which is not a part of the man himself, a royal staff for instance, which may be decorated and enlarged until it is useless as a staff, but unmistakable as a symbol. The king is then recognised as king because he is the 'staff-bearer' ([Greek: skeptouchos basileus]). Such a staff is very like a name, and there may, perhaps, have been an early Mexican system of sign-writing in which a model of a staff stood for a king.

[11] Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii. p.

392:--'The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking advantage of the ways in which they judge of everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them.'

At this point it is already difficult not to intellectualise the whole process. Our own 'common-sense' and the systematised common-sense of the eighteenth-century philosophers would alike explain the fear of tribal man for a royal staff by saying that he was reminded thereby of the original social contract between ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language, it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional a.s.sociation with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of sensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection of a single quality--kingship, for instance--shared by other such bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a description of that which actually happens when language is used for the purpose of stimulating us to action.

Indeed the 'bra.s.s-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the a.s.sociations which successively enter his consciousness. The first a.s.sociations revealed will be automatic and obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be a.s.sociated. I am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows about England, which are presented to the memory by a process semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.

A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language.

If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be subst.i.tuted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go on--the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional a.s.sociation, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I have been discussing:--

'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums, That beat to battle where he stands.

Thy face across his fancy comes, And gives the battle to his hands: A moment, while the trumpets blow, He sees his brood about thy knee; The next, like fire he meets the foe, And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'

'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised.

But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again, as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits in one's chair one can feel that that is so.

Still more clearly can one feel it if one thinks of the phenomena of religion. The only religion of any importance which has ever been consciously constructed by a psychologist is the Positivism of Auguste Comte. In order to produce a sufficiently powerful stimulus to ensure moral action among the distractions and temptations of daily life, he required each of his disciples to make for himself a visual image of Humanity. The disciple was to practice mental contemplation for a definite period each morning of the remembered figure of some known and loved woman--his mother, or wife, or sister. He was to keep the figure always in the same att.i.tude and dress, so that it should always present itself automatically as a definite mental image in immediate a.s.sociation with the word Humanite.[12] With that would be automatically a.s.sociated the original impulse of affection for the person imaged. As soon as possible after that would come the meaning of the word, and the fuller but less cogent emotional a.s.sociations connected with that meaning. This invention was partly borrowed from certain forms of mental discipline in the Roman Catholic Church and partly suggested by Comte's own experiences of the effect on him of the image of Madame de Vaux. One of the reasons that it has not come into greater use may have been that men in general are not quite such good 'visualisers' as Comte found himself to be.

[12] _The Catechism of Positive Religion_ (Tr. by Congreve), First Part, 'Explanation of the Worship,' e.g. p. 65: 'The Positivist shuts his eyes during his private prayers, the better to see the internal image.'

Cardinal Newman, in an illuminating pa.s.sage of his _Apologia_, explains how he made for himself images of personified nations, and hints that behind his belief in the real existence of such images was his sense of the convenience of creating them. He says that he identified the 'character and instinct' of 'states' and of those 'governments of religious communities,' from which he suffered so much, with spirits 'partially fallen, capricious, wayward; n.o.ble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might he.... My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead me to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of the "Prince of Persia" in the prophet Daniel: and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, when it introduced "the angels of the seven churches."'[13] In 1837 ... I said ... 'Take England with many high virtues and yet a low Catholicism. It seems to me that John Bull is a spirit neither of Heaven nor h.e.l.l.'

[13] Newman, _Apologia_ (1864), pp. 91, 92.

Harnack, in the same way, when describing the causes of the expansion of Christianity, lays stress on the use of the word 'church' and the 'possibilities of personification which it offered.'[14] This use may have owed its origin to a deliberate intellectual effort of abstraction applied by some Christian philosopher to the common qualities of all Christian congregations, though it more likely resulted from a half conscious process of adaptation in the employment of a current term. But when it was established the word owed its tremendous power over most men to the emotions automatically stimulated by the personification, and not to those which would follow on a full a.n.a.lysis of the meaning. Religious history affords innumerable such instances. The 'truth embodied in a tale' has more emotional power than the unembodied truth, and the visual realisation of the central figure of the tale more power than the tale itself. The sound-image of a sacred name at which 'every knee shall bow,' or even of one which may be formed in the mind but may not be uttered by the lips, has more power at the moment of intensest feeling than the realisation of its meaning. Things of the senses--the sacred food which one can taste, the Virgin of Kevlaar whom one can see and touch, are apt to be more real than their heavenly anti-types.

[14] Harnack, _Expansion of Christianity_ (Tr.), vol. ii. p. 11.

If we turn to politics for instances of the same fact, we again discover how much harder it is there than in religion, or morals, or education, to resist the habit of giving intellectual explanations of emotional experiences. For most men the central political ent.i.ty is their country.

When a man dies for his country, what does he die for? The reader in his chair thinks of the size and climate, the history and population, of some region in the atlas, and explains the action of the patriot by his relation to all these things. But what seems to happen in the crisis of battle is not the logical building up or a.n.a.lysing of the idea of one's country, but that automatic selection by the mind of some thing of sense accompanied by an equally automatic emotion of affection which I have already described. Throughout his life the conscript has lived in a stream of sensations, the printed pages of the geography book, the sight of streets and fields and faces, the sound of voices or of birds or rivers, all of which go to make up the infinity of facts from which he might abstract an idea of his country. What comes to him in the final charge? Perhaps the row of pollard elms behind his birth-place. More likely some personification of his country, some expedient of custom or imagination for enabling an ent.i.ty which one can love to stand out from the unrealised welter of experience. If he is an Italian it may be the name, the musical syllables, of Italia. If he is a Frenchman, it may be the marble figure of France with her broken sword, as he saw it in the market-square of his native town, or the maddening pulse of the 'Ma.r.s.eillaise.' Romans have died for a bronze eagle on a wreathed staff, Englishmen for a flag, Scotchmen for the sound of the pipes.

Once in a thousand years a man may stand in a funeral crowd after the fighting is over, and his heart may stir within him as he hears Pericles abstract from the million qualities of individual Athenians in the present and the past just those that make the meaning of Athens to the world. But afterwards all that he will remember may be the cadence of Pericles' voice, the movement of his hand, or the sobbing of some mother of the dead.

In the evolution of politics, among the most important events have been the successive creations of new moral ent.i.ties--of such ideals as justice, freedom, right. In their origin that process of conscious logical abstraction, which we are tempted to accept as the explanation of all mental phenomena, must have corresponded in great part to the historical fact. We have, for instance, contemporary accounts of the conversations in which Socrates compared and a.n.a.lysed the unwilling answers of jurymen and statesmen, and we know that the word Justice was made by his work an infinitely more effective political term. It is certain too that for many centuries before Socrates the slow adaptation of the same word by common use was from time to time quickened by some forgotten wise man who brought to bear upon it the intolerable effort of conscious thought. But as soon as, at each stage, the work was done, and Justice, like a rock statue on whom successive generations of artists have toiled, stood out in compelling beauty, she was seen not as an abstraction but as a direct revelation. It is true that this revelation made the older symbols mean and dead, but that which overcame them seemed a real and visible thing, not a difficult process of comparison and a.n.a.lysis. Antigone in the play defied in the name of Justice the command which the sceptre-bearing king had sent through the sacred person of his herald. But Justice to her was a G.o.ddess, 'housemate of the nether G.o.ds'--and the sons of those Athenian citizens who applauded the Antigone condemned Socrates to death because his dialectic turned the G.o.ds back into abstractions.

The great Jewish prophets owed much of their spiritual supremacy to the fact that they were able to present a moral idea with intense emotional force without stiffening it into a personification; but that was because they saw it always in relation to the most personal of all G.o.ds. Amos wrote, 'I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will not smell the savour of your a.s.semblies.... Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.'[15] 'Judgment'

and 'righteousness' are not G.o.ddesses, but the voice which Amos heard was not the voice of an abstraction.

[15] Amos, ch. v., vv. 21, 23, 24 (R.V.M.).

Sometimes a new moral or political ent.i.ty is created rather by immediate insight than by the slow process of deliberate a.n.a.lysis. Some seer of genius perceives in a flash the essential likeness of things. .h.i.therto kept apart in men's minds--the impulse which leads to anger with one's brother, and that which leads to murder, the charity of the widow's mite and of the rich man's gold, the intemperance of the debauchee and of the party leader. But when the master dies the vision too often dies with him. Plato's 'ideas' became the formulae of a system of magic, and the command of Jesus that one should give all that one had to the poor handed over one-third of the land of Europe to be the untaxed property of wealthy ecclesiastics.

It is this last relation between words and things which makes the central difficulty of thought about politics. The words are so rigid, so easily personified, so a.s.sociated with affection and prejudice; the things symbolised by the words are so unstable. The moralist or the teacher deals, as a Greek would say, for the most part, with 'natural,'

the politician always with 'conventional' species. If one forgets the meaning of motherhood or childhood, Nature has yet made for us unmistakable mothers and children who reappear, true to type, in each generation. The chemist can make sure whether he is using a word in precisely the same sense as his predecessor by a few minutes' work in his laboratory. But in politics the thing named is always changing, may indeed disappear and may require hundreds of years to restore. Aristotle defined the word 'polity' to mean a state where 'the citizens as a body govern in accordance with the general good.'[16] As he wrote, self-government in those States from which he abstracted the idea was already withering beneath the power of Macedonia. Soon there were no such States at all, and, now that we are struggling back to Aristotle's conception, the name which he defined is borne by the 'police' of Odessa. It is no mere accident of philology that makes 'Justices'

Justice' a paradox. From the time that the Roman jurisconsults resumed the work of the Greek philosophers, and by laborious question and answer built up the conception of 'natural justice, it, like all other political conceptions, was exposed to the two dangers. On the one hand, since the original effort of abstraction was in its completeness incommunicable, each generation of users of the word subtly changed its use. On the other hand, the actions and inst.i.tutions of mankind, from which the conception was abstracted, were as subtly changing. Even although the ma.n.u.scripts of the Roman lawyers survived, Roman law and Roman inst.i.tutions had both ceased to be. When the phrases of Justinian were used by a Merovingian king or a Spanish Inquisitor not only was the meaning of the words changed, but the facts to which the words could have applied in their old sense were gone. Yet the emotional power of the bare words remained. The civil law and canon law of the Middle Ages were able to enforce all kinds of abuses because the tradition of reverence still attached itself to the sound of 'Rome.' For hundreds of years, one among the German princes was made somewhat more powerful than his neighbours by the fact that he was 'Roman Emperor,' and was called by the name of Caesar.

[16] _Politics_, ch. vii., [Greek: hotan t plethos prs t koinn politeue tai sympheron.]

The same difficulties and uncertainties as those which influence the history of a political ent.i.ty when once formed confront the statesman who is engaged in making a new one. The great men, Stein, Bismarck, Cavour, or Metternich, who throughout the nineteenth century worked at the reconstruction of the Europe which Napoleon's conquests shattered, had to build up new States which men should respect and love, whose governments they should willingly obey, and for whose continued existence they should be prepared to die in battle. Races and languages and religions were intermingled throughout central Europe, and the historical memories of the kingdoms and dukedoms and bishoprics into which the map was divided were confused and unexciting. Nothing was easier than to produce and distribute new flags and coins and national names. But the emotional effect of such things depends upon a.s.sociations which require time to produce, and which may have to contend against a.s.sociations already existing. The boy in Lombardy or Galicia saw the soldiers and the schoolmaster salute the Austrian flag, but the real thrill came when he heard his father or mother whisper the name of Italy or Poland. Perhaps, as in the case of Hanover, the old a.s.sociations and the new are for many years almost equally balanced.

In such times men fall back from the immediate emotional a.s.sociations of the national name and search for its meaning. They ask what _is_ the Austrian or the German Empire. As long as there was only one Pope men handed on unexamined the old reverence from father to son. When for forty years there had been two Popes, at Rome and at Avignon, men began to ask what const.i.tuted a Pope. And in such times some men go further still. They may ask not only what is the meaning of the word Austrian Empire, or Pope, but what in the nature of things is the ultimate reason why the Austrian Empire or the Papacy should exist.

The work therefore of nation-building must be carried forward on each plane. The national name and flag and anthem and coinage all have their entirely non-logical effect based on habitual a.s.sociation. Meanwhile the statesmen strive to create as much meaning as possible for such symbols.

If all the subjects of a State serve in one army and speak, or understand, one language, or even use a black-letter alphabet which has been abandoned elsewhere, the national name will mean more to them. The Saxon or the Savoyard will have a fuller answer to give himself when he asks 'What does it mean, that I am a German or a Frenchman?' A single successful war waged in common will create not only a common history, but a common inheritance of pa.s.sionate feeling. 'Nationalists,'

meanwhile, may be striving, by songs and pictures and appeals to the past, to revive and intensify the emotional a.s.sociations connected with older national areas--and behind all this will go on the deliberate philosophical discussion of the advantages to be derived from large or small, racial or regional States, which will reach the statesman at second-hand and the citizen at third-hand. As a result, Italy, Belgium, and the German Empire succeed in establishing themselves as States resting upon a sufficient basis of patriotism, and Austria-Hungary may, when the time of stress comes, be found to have failed.

But if the task of State building in Europe during the nineteenth century was difficult, still more difficult is the task before the English statesmen of the twentieth century of creating an imperial patriotism. We have not even a name, with any emotional a.s.sociations, for the United Kingdom itself. No Englishman is stirred by the name 'British,' the name 'English' irritates all Scotchmen, and the Irish are irritated by both alike. Our national anthem is a peculiarly flat and uninspiring specimen of eighteenth-century opera libretto and opera music. The little naked St. George on the gold coins, or the armorial pattern on the silver coins never inspired any one. The new copper coinage bears, it is true, a graceful figure of Miss Hicks Beach. But we have made it so small and ladylike that it has none of the emotional force of the glorious portrait heads of France or Switzerland.

The only personification of his nation which the artisan of Oldham or Middlesbrough can recognise is the picture of John Bull as a fat, brutal, early nineteenth-century Midland farmer. One of our national symbols alone, the 'Union Jack,' though it is as dest.i.tute of beauty as a patchwork quilt, is fairly satisfactory. But all its a.s.sociations so far are with naval warfare.

When we go outside the United Kingdom we are in still worse case. 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together with its Colonies and Dependencies' has no shorter or more inspiring name. Throughout the Colonial Conference of 1907 statesmen and leader writers tried every expedient of periphrasis and allusion to avoid hurting any one's feelings even by using such a term as 'British Empire.' To the _Sydney Bulletin_, and to the caricaturists of Europe, the fact that any territory on the map of the world is coloured red still recalls nothing but the little greedy eyes, huge mouth, and gorilla hands of 'John Bull.'

If, again, the young Boer or Hindoo or ex-American Canadian asks himself what is the meaning of membership ('citizenship,' as applied to five-sixths of the inhabitants of the Empire, would be misleading) of the Empire, he finds it extraordinarily difficult to give an answer.