The Psychology of Nations Part 4

Another writer remarks that patriotism is the guise under which the instincts of tiger and wolf run riot.

Several writers, Powers (75), and especially Veblen, place questions of national honor among the main causes of war. Veblen would hold that wars never occur unless the questions involved are first converted into questions of national honor--and are then, but only then, supported as moral issues. Other writers are to be found who make the same claims for honor, saying that wars are always over questions of national honor--honor always meaning here, let us observe, not moral principle but prestige, dignity, a.n.a.logous to what we call personal pride in the individual.

Broadly speaking, we may say that such views of war base it upon the fact that nations are individuals, having personality and self-consciousness, and are moved by emotions such as dominate the individual, although such a.n.a.logies between individual and group are never free from objection. But that the consciousness of the group as an individual may be exceedingly intense, full of aggressiveness, intolerance and pride, of great sensitiveness to all outside the group, is, of course, obvious from the history of nations. Groups thus endowed with a sense of solidarity and sensitiveness become highly vitalized and persistent personalities which stalk through the pages of history with tremendous power and tenacity of purpose. Nations thus live intensely, and in their intense feelings and personal attributes there are expressed purposes and ideals, conscious and unconscious, a.n.a.logous to those which make the individual also an historical ent.i.ty.

There seem to be two aspects of group personality that need to be investigated in detail in any study of war, and which must be distinguished from one another, as they may be by referring to the primitive or central emotional quality which each has. These are patriotism and the sense of honor, the former, for our purposes, to be regarded as the sum of the affections a people has for that which is its own; the second a sum of those feelings and att.i.tudes, the emotional root of which is _pride_. These feelings are the affective basis of the idea of _nationalism_.

Patriotism, or love of country or feeling of loyalty toward country, is a highly complex emotion or mood, and its object, an ideal construction, is formed by a process of abstraction in which certain qualities of home, environment, social objects selected by those feelings are made over into a composite whole. Patriotism is immediately connected with the fact that men, by some biological or other necessity are formed into groups, in which the consciousness of the individual in regard to the group and its members and its habitat is different from the consciousness in regard to everything outside.

Patriotism is devotion to all that pertains to the group as a separate unit, and its form and intensity are dependent upon what the group as a unit does. The size and organization of the group to which the patriotic feeling may go out may, it is obvious, differ widely.

There appear to be five more or less distinct and different factors in patriotism; or, we might say, five or more objects of attachment, the love of which all together const.i.tutes patriotism. These objects are: home, as physical country; the group as collection of individuals; mores, the sum of the customs of a people; country as personality or historical object, and its various symbols; leaders or organized government or state, its conventions and representations.

The deepest of all strata in the very complex feeling of patriotism, one which is concerned in every relation among nations, is the devotion to, or habituation to--or we might say ident.i.ty with--the great complex of ideals, feelings, and the like which make up the customs, folkways, mores or ethos of a group. The individual as a conscious person is to such an extent created by these conscious factors that we find that the reality sense is in part produced by them. We have already referred to the belief on the part of many peoples that they alone are real. Foreigners with different mores probably always seem less real than our own people: they may even be looked upon as automata, as not being moved by the feelings and purposes that we ourselves have. The language of the foreigner, the uneducated man is inclined to think of as having no meaning. Every group has its own ways, and whatever else war may be, it is in every case an argument for the superiority of the ways of the group. Each group in war feels that its own most intimate possessions, its morality and its genius are attacked. It guards these instinctively, and a part of the purpose of aggression is the desire to make these things prevail in the world, because they are felt to be the only right, true and sensible ways. This preference for our own ways, and partic.i.p.ation in them, is the basic fact of nationality.

The feeling of patriotism is thus primarily an aesthetic appreciation (or at least an immediate and intuitive one) of the totality of the life of the group. Just as standards of normality and artistic form in regard to the human person and its adornment vary from group to group, and are produced in the consciousness of the group, so there is a reaction of pleasure to, and attachment for, the whole of the life that surrounds the individual. This appreciation is wider than moral feeling, which indeed is in part based upon it, and is a sense of the fitness of any act to belong to the whole of the conduct that promotes the welfare of the group.

Patriotism is best known, or at least it is most celebrated, as an attachment to the native land as _place_. This is the poet's patriotism. It is, however, something more than a mere love of the homeland as landscape, and we cannot, indeed, separate out any pure love of physical country. The love of country seems to be an expansion of the attachment to home, as the place in which the family relations are experienced. The sense of place is the core of the love of home, but it is supplemented and reenforced by the personal affections. The attachment to place has also its biological roots, the sense of familiarity of place being, of course, as the basis of orientation, a deep element in consciousness. Fear of the unknown increases the attachment to the known. The land as the source of livelihood is loved, and there are also older elements in the love of the land as is shown by myths and folklore. There is in it the idea of ownership but also the idea of belonging to the land. So there is both the filial and the parental att.i.tude in patriotism. As fatherland or motherland country is superior to and antecedent to us; as possession it is something to hold and to transmit, to improve and to leave the impress of our work upon. As historic land there is the idea of sacred soil, of land which persists through all time. Ancestor worship enters; the soil as the resting place of forefathers acquires not only a religious meaning, but there is attached to it such feeling of an aesthetic nature as is attached to everything that is full of tradition. The protective att.i.tude is prominent in this patriotic love of land. There is in it the fear of invasion, a sense of the sacredness and inviolability of the body of a country when it has once been established as an historical ent.i.ty. A study of the psychology of invasion and of homesickness would no doubt throw further light upon the still unknown aspects of the intricate moods of home love.

A third element in patriotism is social feeling. This is primitive, but whether it is a herd consciousness or a radiation of the social feelings connected with blood relationship and community of immediate practical interests it is not especially important to decide in this connection, except that the a.s.sumption of a specific herd instinct as distinguished from social feeling or instinct appears to be unnecessary. Loyalty of the individual to the group, which is accompanied by or is based upon intensified or ecstatic feeling is one of the strongest elements of patriotism. Social feeling as an attachment to the widest group, the nation, is in general a latent feeling or an undeveloped one. We see it becoming active and intense only under circ.u.mstances in which the whole group is threatened or for some other reason is compelled to act as a unit. The recent psychology of the soldier shows us that absolute devotion to or absorption in the whole may be produced automatically by the proper stimuli, and may be controlled as the mechanism of morale, and that elementary sensations enter into it. The wider social consciousness as devotion to the whole group, the nation, is based upon such reactions, and can probably not be fully, developed without them.

This transformation of the individual is something desired and sought by the individual. It comes as a fulfillment of impulses that are latent in the social life, and these impulses are tendencies to seek exalted states of social feeling, rather than to perform specific social functions. War is seized upon by the social consciousness, so to speak, as an opportunity to extend itself and become more intense, and indeed in war we see the social consciousness performing a work of genius, overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and aversions.

Under such circ.u.mstances, social feeling becomes strongly fortified against many suggestions that tend to break it down. An intense ferocity is directed toward any disloyal member of the group, a fict.i.tious character may be attributed to the enemy, and there is an imaginative interpretation of all his acts in a manner favorable to uniting the sentiment of the group. This does not appear to be merely a defensive reaction or a result of fear, but an awareness of the precarious condition of the social feeling itself, when it is widely extended. In its moments of most extreme and fanatical intensity it is likely to be most unstable. It has been said that the surest way to break down social feeling is to make it include too much. The conditions of war always create that danger. Patriotism is greatly intensified, but it is in danger of collapse. The mild patriotism and yet secure cohesion of peace is replaced by a social consciousness increased in breadth and depth, but which is liable also to sudden contraction. All nations when at war appear to be quite as much afraid of themselves as they are of the enemy. It is in part this susceptibility of social feeling to rapid and extreme variation that makes patriotism so mysterious a force. It may be extended in a moment to unite supposed incompatibles, or again apparently strongly cemented groups may fall into disunion. This seems to be due to the fact that social feeling is plastic and is subject to control and is a force and not merely an instinctive reaction.

The fourth element of patriotism is devotion to leader, to government, or to the idea of state. Devotion to leader must have been one of the earliest forms of loyalty. The prestige of the leader is acquired as the result of any action of the group under stimuli that produce either fear or anger. Just as the necessity for strong action creates the leader out of average humanity, so continuation of this necessity, that is the whole historical movement of the life of the group such as a nation continues to add elements of prestige to leadership. The exaltation and typically to some extent the deification of the leader is a natural consequence or aspect of the dramatic life of the group.

The leader becomes symbolic of the group, and of its purposes and meaning, so that in devoting itself to a leader the people do more than sustain an emotional relation to a superior person. They transfer their own individual nature, so to speak, to the leader so that he becomes the essence or the spirit of the people.

The dynasty is the connecting link between the leader as the object of devotion of a people and the abstract idea of the state as an ent.i.ty.

The prestige and all the supernaturalism contained in the ideas of divine rights and divine descent that have become attached to the idea of kings are transferred to the government, or extended to the government or state. The illusion of superiority and remoteness is kept up by various forms and ceremonials. Becoming an abstract form, the organization or the office remaining while its personnel changes, the state acquires the character of a religious object. It takes on the character of the eternal, while still it retains all the persuasive and suggestive qualities that belong to individuals. The idea of state thus commands a very high degree of loyalty, and is in a sense itself a product of the feeling of loyalty. Once established the state becomes a medium through which patriotism may be subjected to control and also be manipulated for political ends. It can be extended, transferred, contracted according to what at any time may be subsumed under the government that has thus come to be the central and coordinating factor in the object of patriotism.

Another element of patriotism appears in the form of a deep reaction of the mind of the individual, usually under the influence of social stimuli that take the form of artistic or dramatic situations, to the idea of country as a historical personage. This stimulus may be symbolic--the flag or any other emblem signifying the life or the spirit of a country; or it may be concrete, historic, a story, and this story, which is the content of the idea of country, is in general a narrative a.s.suming a certain artistic form in which facts are treated at least selectively, and usually imaginatively. This work of portrayal of the life of a nation by its story is consciously or unconsciously an appeal to the will; it is given artistic rather than scientific form for this reason. Its purpose is to present a national spirit, or ideal, or principle, and also to persuade the mind to become loyal to this spirit of country.

All countries, as the object of the feeling of patriotism, tend to be personified, and it is thus as a person that country commands the deepest loyalty of the individual. Hence the personified representation of country whenever the will of the individual is appealed to most strongly. Redier (30), a French writer, ill.u.s.trates this very clearly when he pleads that the interest of the motherland must be placed first. It is not for liberty, or for the civilization of the world that the French are fighting, he says, but for France, "that most saintly, animated and tragic of figures." It is by this process of personification of country that the patriotism of the individual becomes most complete. He thus becomes loyal to a living reality representing an idea, a spirit. To defend the honor and the integrity of this person, one is willing to sacrifice everything that is individually possessed, in causes that can affect one materially in no important way. The desire for personal ident.i.ty and immortality may be transferred to country as thus idealized, and the individual is satisfied to lose himself that country may live. The common man realizes in a simple and concrete way, in regard to country, the Hegelian conception of state as the reality of mind in the world.

About this idea of country held by the truly patriotic mind, as we find it expressed in history and in literature, there grows up a religious sentiment, which protects from criticism the qualities of the ideal personage. A certain pathos of country attaches itself to all who as great individuals represent country, and to all its portrayals and symbols. All these symbols acquire a high degree of suggestive force because of the depth of sentiment and the richness of the content of the ideas that have produced them.

Patriotism, then, is a very complex idea and feeling which we realize as love of country--or, as we might better say, it is an animation by the idea of a very complex object which is country. It is a profound attachment, rooted in the most original and essential relations, and appears to be natural and necessary to every normal mind. The individual consciousness is complete only by including the attachments, in narrower and broader relations, to precisely the elements that enter into patriotism--to place, to the fundamental ways and appreciations of the social surroundings, to persons, to authority, to traditions. The composite effects of these attachments may be greater or smaller, as determined by a totality of conditions, but the foundations of patriotism, whatever its object, are deep in consciousness.

The presence and persistence of patriotism in the world as a deep and intense feeling raises questions that are of both theoretical and practical importance. Here we are interested mainly in the relation of patriotism to war. There is a widespread view that may be expressed somewhat as follows. Patriotism and internationalism or cosmopolitanism are two _opposites_. Patriotism delimits groups, whether rightly or wrongly, and therefore produces antagonism in the world, and either causes wars directly or maintains a continual threat of wars. On the other hand there is cosmopolitanism, a very little too much of which might destroy civilization by removing the inspiration that country gives. Patriotism, standing for the integrity of historic ent.i.ties, makes the world a world of nations having separate and conflicting wills. Thus we have a choice of evils--between a world of ardent, quarrelsome, but efficient groups and a world in which the chief motive of progress, the vital principle of national growth, is left out.

What is the truth about this? What is the relation of patriotism to war? Confusion and difference of views are likely to arise from a failure to distinguish in the idea of nationalism as a whole, between two very different emotions and purposes. Psychologically, patriotism is a sum of affections. As such, it has a distinct character, const.i.tutes a mood, the possession of which may characterize an individual, and dominance by which may be the main fact in life. As a devotion to certain objects, this motive of patriotism enters into the sphere of motives of war, but it does so mainly, in our view, as a powerful and highly suggestible energy which becomes aggressive only under the stimulus of threat to its objects. Patriotism is indeed tolerant by nature, and one may well doubt whether a genuine love of country is possible without a profound realization of the value of other countries as objects of devotion, and of the validity of the patriotism of every group. True patriotism must always be to some extent devotion to patriotism itself as a progressive force in the world, and it is, therefore, by the very fact of becoming intense and pure, a motive of internationalism.

Such patriotism seems to be free from most of the delusions of greatness that affect national consciousness. Its mood is optimistic and its spirit tolerant and just. We should say that, instead of causing wars, by any initiative of its own, it is itself caused by wars. It grows in a medium of defensive att.i.tudes. It may, of course, play into the hands of all the aggressive motives of war; there are always circ.u.mstances creating the illusion of danger, and it is possible, even, that there would be little war if there were no patriotism as love of country to support it. But on the other hand patriotism itself does not seem to be a cause of war. We should say, indeed, that patriotism, to the extent that it becomes intelligent and is a devotion to an ideal of country, and so is not dominated and influenced by other motives is a factor of peace in the world, and is moral in its principles and its nature. This is not the place in which to speak of internationalism as an ideal, but we may at least observe how, conceivably, patriotism may be cultivated, be greatly deepened and intensified, while at the same time and indeed because of this deepening of patriotism all international causes are also served. Such patriotism may leave us with the danger of wars, since it leaves us with a world of individuals having wills and self-interests. But this world, with such a danger of wars, would be better after all than a certain kind of cosmopolitanism in a world such as, for example, might be arranged by an unintelligent socialism.

_National Honor_

There is another aspect of nationalism, which is psychologically distinct from patriotism as love of country, because primitively it is based upon a different motive. Emotionally it is expressed finally as national pride, as we use the word mainly with a derogatory implication. Just as patriotic feeling is intensified and crystallized by fear, and is in a sense an overcoming of fear, by devotion, so this motive of pride rests upon a basis of jealousy and of hatred, and is essentially a movement in which display is used to obtain prestige, to overcome opposition and to defend consciousness against a sense of inferiority. As a display motive it contains the feeling of anger, and the impulses of combat, and its relation to the reproductive motive is obvious. It is as an aspect of a deeply pessimistic strain in national life, as a process in which an original and nave sense of reality and superiority, challenged and attacked and brought into the field of opposition and criticism and thus negated by a feeling of inferiority, that this motive becomes of special interest to the psychology of nations and of war.

The roots of this pride and honor process we can find in the impulses which lead groups to demonstrate power and prowess to one another, and in the original feeling of reality which is accompanied by the belief on the part of the group that its own ways are normal and right. We might mention as significant the widespread belief on the part of very primitive peoples that they alone are real people, or are the superior people of the world. The Lapps, Sumner (70) says, regard themselves as "men" as distinguished from all other peoples, a form of self-consciousness which lingers in all such ant.i.theses as Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, and the like. This basic idea of difference in reality is not confined to a few peoples, but there is a tendency for every group to divide the world into two parties: selves and outsiders, and this feeling of difference readily develops into the moods in which there is a mystic sense on the part of a people of being the chosen people, and into those specific theories of superiority that run through the history of most if not of all nations. It belongs to the psychology of Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chinese, j.a.panese, and also to Americans as well as Germans; and we learn that Russian books and newspapers sometimes discuss the _civilizing mission of Russia_.

That the motives of display and pride have been peculiarly active in Germany in the last few decades has been maintained by many writers.

German writers are inclined to believe that the motive for the "attack upon Germany" was jealousy on the part of her enemies, that Germany was supreme in everything and other countries could tolerate this no longer. Germany has talked about her virtues, her rank, her coming place in the world. Bergson says that Germany's energy comes from pride. Some see the source of this alleged conceit of Germany and her excessive self-consciousness in Germany's hard experiences--the recent slavery, Germany's position as the battle ground of Europe, her late arrival among the great nations. Germany still lacks, they say, the quiet a.s.surance that an old culture gives. Some call Germany morbid and quarrelsome. Again we hear the pride of Germany called an adolescent phenomenon, and they say that Germany is fighting not for principle but to see who is superior. Bosanquet (91) thinks that the lack of political liberty in Germany has had the effect of producing self-consciousness, and a morbid interest in small distinctions of t.i.tle and rank, and that it is thwarted national ambition that has expressed itself in such writers as Treitschke and Bernhardi. Bourdon (67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of the Germans, others think, is an indication that Germany takes _herself_ too seriously.

But national vanity, we see, is certainly not confined to Germany. The Germans at least think France is highly self-conscious, always thinking of her dignity, glory, prestige and of revenge. Wundt (85) feels much the same about the English. He says they always want to be first in everything, and to dominate the earth. We know that the Confederacy of the United States, at the outbreak of the Civil War, appealed to the world on the ground that it had reached the most n.o.ble civilization the world had ever seen. The j.a.panese (73), we have heard, believe that they are of divine descent, and that they are supreme in manliness, loyalty and virtue. Every nation presumably has somewhere in the back of its mind a belief in its own supremacy in something, and has a sense of being or having something that makes it unique in the world.

We can now see in part how the idea of national honor arises out of the pride of nations. Certain fundamental feelings issue in the form of claims of superiority or supremacy, which may be either vague and unclear or very definite and self-conscious. This claim to superiority is precisely what we mean by national vanity. With this consciousness there goes a knowledge that these claims are in general not recognized by other nations, or that the prestige which the recognition of this superiority presupposes is at least insecure. Since, of course, these claims to supremacy cannot all be valid, there must be a great amount of inferiority parading in the world as superiority, many fict.i.tious and presumably half-hearted a.s.sumptions that must not only be defended against outsiders, but must also be _internally fortified_. The pride and the conceit must be justified by the creation of a fict.i.tious past, and of an impossible future. The motive of these falsifications on the part of race consciousness is clear. A nation is defending its claim to superiority by first establishing the claim in its own mind.

These claims being really unfounded must be placed beyond criticism.

They must be given a religious form. But also external forms and relations of an artificial nature must be established. Nations always hide behind barriers of formality. They make displays to one another.

In this way the feeling and the appearance of superiority are kept up.

Everything external to the group and not partic.i.p.ating in its illusion of supremacy must be _kept_ external to it. The belief which the nation itself a.s.sumes in regard to its virtue must be demanded from all outsiders with whom the nation has relations of any kind. At least the forms of the recognition of the claim must be insisted upon. This is the principle of national honor. It is a defense of certain ideal or fict.i.tious values in which nations insist that others should recognize these claims and values. National honor is an artifice for defending a claim to superiority and concealing an actual inferiority, and it relates to values which, in general, do not exist. Its work is concerned with the maintenance of prestige.

These ideal values and the integrity of the appearance of supremacy, are sustained by the a.s.sumption of the forms of empire or the imperialistic att.i.tude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the forms which nations a.s.sume, and this dramatization of imperial form is the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the supremacy a nation a.s.sumes, becomes more important than even the securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the a.s.sertion that its own mores are supreme and ent.i.tled to be universal.

To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal, and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore, there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is their flag, the symbol of their place in the world and of their military prowess and courage; their amba.s.sadors, the representatives of their dignity and the symbol of their pretended friendliness; their display of royal forms, which is the sign of their prestige and their imperial nature, about which they are most sensitive. Offenses to these symbols of what a nation a.s.sumes itself to be and demands that others should think it, tend to be _mortal_ offenses, because they invade the sphere of what nations hold to be their reality. So the relations of nations to one another must, as we say, always be formal.

Nations can allow no intimacy. Why they cannot one can readily see, for it is not difficult to detect the fear, the jealousy, and the inferiority motive behind all this a.s.sumption and display. Treitschke shows us what national honor may mean when it is carried out into a philosophy of state. Here is the idea of national self-consciousness at its greatest height. The state must not tolerate equals, or at least it must reduce the number of equals as much as possible. The state must be absolutely independent. The state, furthermore, cannot have too keen a sense of its dignity and position. A state must declare war if its flag is insulted, however slight the circ.u.mstances may be.

National honor, its codes and standards and its justification and vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of dueling and the idea of personal honor once so generally held by the upper cla.s.s, and still existent where the military spirit prevails, that we ought to study the dueling code with reference to the psychology of war. There are psychological features that appear to be identical. The idea of personal honor is a.s.sociated with a feeling of superiority that must be defended. Any offense or affront to the individual was a mortal offense. The superiority in question was first of all superiority of ancestry; it was this that const.i.tuted the value of the individual and set the standards that he must maintain. This superiority was to be judged not so much by conduct as by an a.s.sertion of it represented by certain external forms. The individual by his manners declared himself a gentleman, and laid claim to forms and considerations that must not be omitted in relations with him. The virtues he defended so rigorously did not exist as a rule in calculable or practical form, since they did nothing objective. They might be ornamental or purely fict.i.tious. They existed in the form of claims, and the values a.s.signed to them were arbitrary. The man declared himself possessed of superiority, and was ready uniformly to prove this claim by acts purporting to indicate willingness to die.

This code and belief belonged to a day when relations among individuals were simple and, so to speak, external. They were relations that were readily codified and made invariable, since they had no essential practical content or function. Manners were significant as subst.i.tutes for friendly relations, since the system was lacking in moral and social sentiments. Manners were a means of fitting together individuals who really belonged to no functioning whole, except when, for example, they might be united in military exploits. Everything was unitary and independent of everything else in this society.

Now this code and this philosophy of life have declined precisely to the extent that the conception of ideal human life has changed, from that of something ornamental and personal to that of something useful and moral. Life has become organized, and relations have become more practical, so that the values of conduct may now be estimated, and one no longer may maintain a claim to virtue based upon forms expressing intangible or subjective or unreal virtues. The virtues of a man in a democratic society are, indeed, more or less obvious and open. Pride of family, an ornamental mode of life, and a scorn of death are no longer necessary and sufficient guarantees of worth. Evidence of value is both possible and required; before value is admitted it must be shown. Self-defense in a legal and moral society are in the main superfluous, and the values of individuals are so changed that to justify them by the duel would seem out of place. Its service being to defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to have nothing but anti-social elements in it.

That nations exhibit the same type of relation toward one another that we find in dueling and its code seems to be clear, although we must always avoid pressing any a.n.a.logy between individual and nation too far. A claim to superiority that is deep and irrational, and which appears on the surface as sensitiveness in regard to honor and vanity, keeps nations always in defensive att.i.tudes, quite apart from the actual fear of aggression. This superficiality or at least externality of relations is the source of actual conflict. The forms employed to maintain these relations are obviously ornamental, are elaborations of the forms of courtesy among individuals, are little dramas of friendship, so to speak, little plays representing friendliness, while the diplomatic motives are simply to obtain everything possible, each nation for itself, without war, and to maintain prestige. These relations are subst.i.tutes for social feelings that do not exist. Generally speaking, nations are never friends. They never really share in anything. They are all highly conscious of their own prestige and dignity, and they always communicate with one another in a formal way. In it all, we see the signs of emotions and habits that extend far back to the beginnings of social life and indeed into animal life. The display which takes the form of social relations among nations, represented well by uniformed diplomats, is so plainly archaic and its real meaning so obvious that we can hardly fail to understand what it is all about. That the att.i.tude is really defensive, and the purpose to keep up appearances before strangers, so to speak, can hardly be doubted.

The fact that these questions of national honor are in some respects detached from the main realities of _political relations_, and are, indeed, fict.i.tious and exist in the region of the imagination, that they pertain to the conventional and ornamental sides of national life, might be supposed to indicate that they could easily be done away with, and all these fertile causes of war be eliminated. That must not be a.s.sumed. Vanity has deep roots. The ornamental in life symbolizes the real. It is the point of entrance to the deepest motives. Conventional and archaic forms do not die out, just because we discover that they are irrational and harmful, and the causes they serve seem to us to be unreal. This kind of unreality in the consciousness of nations is in fact the ideal for which nations live.

Nations play at being great, and fight to defend their prestige--but this play, as we know, is oftentimes terribly real.

CHAPTER VI

"CAUSES" AS PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES IN WAR

The causes for which wars are fought, or which are a.s.serted to be the causes, make one of the important psychological problems of war.

Sometimes these causes are elusive, sometimes they may give occasion for cynicism and a pessimistic view of national morals; again we see self-deception, again ideals seeking for light, peoples trying to find something to live for or to die for. We see in the recent great war as in other wars, a great variety of causes for which men are said to be fighting. Some would say that the war was entirely a war of principles; some take a purely political point of view and say that principles are not involved at all, and others that nothing was displayed at all of motives except primitive pa.s.sions which are equally devoid of moral issues or any principles.

It would be interesting from the psychological point of view to make, if possible, a complete collection and cla.s.sification of the causes that have been brought forward as the fundamental things fought for in the late war. Many widely different and divergent views are held. The forms in which the issues of the war have been stated are almost innumerable. New definitions and new statements of old conventional ideas appear continuously. Every writer seems to see the war from a different point of view from all others. Eventually, we may suppose, all this will be clear, since these "causes" of the war will be one of the great themes of future philosophical history. At present we can only formulate such a view as may be suggestive with reference to general interpretations of the place of principles and causes in war.

Let us examine a few of the opinions about the issues fought for in the recent war. MacFall (56) says that the whole strategy of the civilized world is bent upon creating permanent peace. Many speak of the war as a war to overcome war; we are told that one of the most conscious motives of the soldiers in the field has been to make the great war the last war the world should ever see. Something of the same idea is involved in the view each nation has that it was attacked, and that the purpose of the war was to defeat and punish aggressors. Apparently every nation and every army engaged in the war has had the feeling that it was fighting in the interests of world peace.

The German explanations of the war and of its issues have been very numerous and widely varied. The German has had his own interpretation of the "white man's burden," Tower (57) calls attention to the German hybrid word "Sahibthum," expressing the mission of a people. Each nation has its essence, which becomes a deep impulse. The German's impulse is translatable in the words "Be organized." The German has been eager to organize the world. He-believed in all seriousness that he was fighting the fight of order against chaos. It was the fight of the spirit against that which is dead and inefficient. The German believed that the systematic exploitation of the world was his peculiar mission. Ostwald is the great apostle of this view. He said that the war was a battle of the higher life against the lower instincts. Germany represents European civilization. The German emperor said that Germany should do for Europe what Prussia had done for Germany--organize it. In the German philosophy of life this principle of order had become a serious principle. An inefficient and disorderly world had need of Germany. Everywhere there was waste and stupidity, and a want of reason in the world. System was to be the cure. The fundamental fault in all this disorder the German mind recognized as an excessive individualism. Individual instinct and the social order were in eternal conflict, as Dietzel expressed the issue, and Germany stood for the social order, for reason, since reason is precisely the denial of the instincts and the desires of the individual in the interest of a foreseen result.

Shortly after the beginning of the war, we remember, a manifesto appeared signed by three thousand German university professors and other teachers, saying that they, the signers, firmly believed that the salvation of the whole of European civilization depended upon the victory of German militarism. Hintze (49) said that Germany was fighting for the freedom of everybody, meaning presumably according to the German principle that freedom consists in voluntarily submitting to order. This freedom is also in Hintze's view a principle of freedom and equal rights for all nations, in so far as these nations have reached the necessary stage of civilization. The mission of the coming central management of mankind (_Menschheitzentralverwaltung_) implied in the most ideal theory of Germany's mission is the true German burden. Haeckel says that the work of the German people to a.s.sure and develop civilization gives Germany the right to occupy the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and to exclude from those countries the races that occupy them. Sch.e.l.lendorf says that Germany must not forget her civilizing task, which is to become the nucleus of a future empire of the west. Koenig says that the spiritual life of Europe is at stake, Germany's fight is the fight of civilization against barbarism--against Russian barbarism he means. This ought to be the cause of all Western Europe, but England and France have betrayed the western civilization into the hands of the East. This belief gave to Germany's cause a deep impulsion (12).

Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the older civilizations of the world. Vigor was a.s.sured of victory in any case, but young life had a duty to perform--that of clearing the way for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the male and the female, a.s.suming that the German is the male among the national spirits.

With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and principles of other nations. In general other nations had no principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy, but each country a.s.sumed that it itself must be the controller of that democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and material gain.

Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs through many fields of German thought--that values are something to be determined objectively. It is a scientific principle. Its conclusions rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation.