The Psychology of Nations Part 9

CHAPTER III

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL (_continued_)

_IV. The Higher Industry_

It is in the higher forms of practical cooperative activity and in the intellectual processes, the interests and social feelings accompanying them that we should expect to see elaborated and made more ideal the internationalism that has first been put to work in the service of the world at a lower level. There is work to do that appeals to profound motives and feelings. The great engineering projects that await us, the work of exploring, colonizing and the like in which universal interest and cooperation are necessary fascinate the mind. These things satisfy the dramatic instinct, and they may prove to be in the future an actual subst.i.tute for war, as James hoped. The educational opportunities of this theme, at least, are great. Any nation that expects to play a great part in the world's politics must expect to do much in the world's service. These nations must be prepared in every possible way to contribute greatly to the material improvement of the earth. To this end technical education, all along the line, must be kept at a high point of efficiency. Inventive thought in all mechanical fields will certainly be a large factor in the culture values of peoples in the future. When we see what four years of war have accomplished in the way of giving us control over material forces, we may realize what, with the continuation of a powerful incentive, might be done in the arts of peace. These great practical needs have also, as we say, their power of appeal to all the profound motives of the social life. We must make use of this appeal. All the power of the strong story of the day's work must be turned upon this educational problem. All industry, indeed, must be made more dramatic, as it can be under the inspiration of the larger industrial life which the idea of internationalism opens up before us. Industry must be made more satisfying to the fundamental motives of the individual, while at the same time it is made more efficient, and more social. The new generation must be filled with the romance of the world's work. Only by presenting to young and plastic minds the ideal features of work shall we be able to harmonize the individual and the social will. Only so, perhaps, in an industrial age shall we be able to escape from being destroyed by industrialism. Anything that will introduce art and imagination into work, anything that will even brighten a little the dull moods of toil will help both to prepare the way for the wider world relations we talk about, and to prevent the most destructive elements and moods of industrialism gaining the upper hand.

_V. The Democratic Spirit_

We must eventually think of internationalism on its educational side as most fundamentally a question of developing in the world the _international spirit_. We might quite naturally think of this as the education of social feeling or of the social instinct. This is, however, not the most productive att.i.tude toward the situation, in our view, simply because when we think of the education of the feelings we are likely to be satisfied with the principles of an old static philosophy of life and of the school. Moral and social feelings, we believe, grow best in a practical medium. We cannot expand social feeling at will, or produce a democratic spirit by some simple process of education. When we try to extend social feeling too far we make the moral life insincere. To try to expand social feeling and moral interest so as to make it include the foreign, to try to love our enemies in advance of all aesthetic and practical relations with the foreign seems futile. Distance must first be eliminated by imagination. Social and moral codes must be founded upon intimate relations. External and distant relations among peoples make for diplomatic forms and a hypocritical morality. These are subst.i.tutes for social feeling. These purely social relations of nations (like those of individuals) always hide enmity and jealousy. We cannot expect, therefore, to create a moral spirit in the relations of peoples to one another by teaching alone. We cannot hope to change individualism to altruism merely by exciting feeling. Our main effort must be directed toward establishing ethical relations, rather than to stimulating moral sentiments.

It seems useless to preach universal brotherhood either to the child who lacks entirely the content of experience to make such sentiments real, or to the working ma.s.ses who now lack enthusiasm in _all_ the social relations. At least to depend upon such teaching to create international spirit is futile. Love for mankind is too ideal and too remote, as yet, to arouse deep and sincere impulses and feelings. All teaching, therefore, whether in the school or elsewhere that is directed exclusively or especially to the moral aspects of peace, altruistic behavior and internationalism, seems to-day, to say the least, peculiarly inadequate. Our spirit in education must be broadly humanistic, and must indeed lay deep foundations for all moral and social relations, but in so far as it ends in being cultural and hortatory it can have no deep and lasting effect.

The teaching of international morality and universal interests, and the development of a _world-consciousness_ depend fundamentally, we may suppose, upon experiences which are perhaps not specifically moral in form at all. It is rather even by the aesthetic experience than the moral that the social consciousness will best be expanded and made to encircle the world. If we can make the world seem vividly real to the child we shall have the intellectual content for the making of moral feelings. The unmoral nature of international relations and of the feelings of peoples for one another are due in great part precisely to the lack of power of imagination and of that concrete knowledge and experience which would make the foreign seem real. That which is remote from us and different in appearance seems shadowy and ghost-like. The _internal meaning_ of that which is thus far away in s.p.a.ce cannot be perceived. Everything that is foreign tends to belong in our categories merely to the world of objects. Moral feeling towards objects is manifestly impossible. International law fails to have moral force because nations are in general aware of one another only in these external ways. The world of foreign objects must be changed to a world of persons having history and internal meaning.

When we can interpret and understand international law in terms of relations within human experience and as affecting individuals, it will begin perhaps to seem real and hence morally obligatory.

There is another aspect of the work of creating and directing the wider social consciousness and giving it ethical purpose and form, which is still more fundamental, and at the same time, to casual thought, perhaps still more remote from definite moral improvement in the world and from all the immediately practical problems of internationalism. It is the mood of our social life which we call the democratic spirit, and which, made universal, is the substratum of internationalism that most of all needs to be controlled and educated. At the same time this democratic spirit is least of all susceptible to definite and routine discipline, of all the factors of internationalism. This democratic spirit contains possibilities of the greatest good and of the greatest evil. Out of it may grow international order, or international anarchy and internal disruption. How to keep this democratic spirit progressive and constructive in its temper, broad in sympathy and full of enthusiasm, how to free it from infection by all the poisons that are p.r.o.ne to attack the popular consciousness is one of our great problems of education.

This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life, that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a ma.s.s interest in rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their origin in the city. The city represents, with all its evil, the higher life and the line of progress. Progress pa.s.ses through the city. The city is the symbol of creativeness and achievement. Industrialism, the essential spirit of the city, is the condition, normal and necessary we must conclude, out of which the necessity of international order arises. It is a phase of the process by which nations become dependent upon one another by being specialized and becoming densely populated.

It is also a factor in the cause of wars without and revolutions within.

The mood of the city is thus in a sense the essence of life, but it is also the source of disease and death in the national life. It is the price that is paid for civilization that the city tends to become the hardened artery of national life. The control of the city moods by educational forces we may believe is one of the most fundamental of all the problems of conscious evolution. It is the control at the fountain-head of the forces out of which internationalism is to be made that we undertake when we try to educate the life of the city, with reference to its good and its evil. The too rapid urbanizing of the life of nations, the production, in the cities, of powers too great and too rapidly growing to be controlled by the civilizing forces in a country is the great danger in modern life. So great indeed are the dangers in the accelerated growth of industrialism in all the great countries and the increased specialization in the industrial life, that something radical must be done, in our view, to counterbalance this movement, and especially to control and to raise to higher levels the psychic factors of city life.

Our educational work is serious. We are trying to save democracy from itself--from being destroyed by forces which acc.u.mulate in the cities.

We must keep life from becoming sophisticated before its time. We must prevent enthusiasm from degenerating into mob spirit, and from becoming attached to wholly material interests. _There must be found, in some way, means of causing counter-currents to set in against the tide that flows so strongly from country to city._ Germany's fate should teach us the dangers of this city life, and show us how the forces that gather in the great cities can be turned in the direction either of fanatical nationalism or toward the lowest of all forms of internationalism, in which all form of government is thrown down. It must teach us also how to catch the note of new "dominants" that are concealed in the roar of city life, and to make these prevail.

The control of the formation of the city moods, and the direction and utilization of the great energies contained in them, now require, if ever anything were demanded of conscious creative effort, _more power on the part of all our educational factors_. The school appears now to be at the parting of the ways, we say, when it must either settle down to its routine and limited occupation of preparing children for life, or become a far greater power in the world than it has as yet been. We must decide whether the school is to control, or to be controlled by, the political and industrial forces of the day. We must see whether the school is going to reflect the culture and the moods of the environment, or whether the school shall exert a creative influence upon its surroundings.

It is plain that nothing less than a radical change in the school can now greatly alter its position, and release it from its bondage to politics and from the overwhelming influences of its environment, and prevent the leveling downward and the stereotyping process that is taking place in the school, both as regards its intellectual and moral product and the training and selection of teachers. Nothing less than a movement which shall break up some of the deepest and most firmly rooted habits and conventions of the school and throw the school back, so to speak, upon more generic and primitive motives than those that now control it will be sufficient. _The school needs more than anything else a change of scene_--a change of _venue_, if a legal term be allowed. The school everywhere, but especially the school of the city, is surrounded by influences that prejudice it to fixed habits of thought and keep it true to a type which has long since ceased to be necessary. The school is causing an in-breeding of the city spirit in all the great industrial countries.

No single change in any inst.i.tution, in our view, could strike closer to the roots of our whole educational problem of the future than the bodily transfer of the city school far out into the open country. Such a move seems wholly practicable, economic from every point of view, even the financial, and it would place the school in a position in which profound changes in its whole plan and organization could hardly fail to follow almost automatically. With our present facilities for transportation, the daily exodus of children from the surroundings in which are being produced the elements of our civilization that are hardest to control would be entirely possible. The effects upon the whole of education, and upon all the future life of countries like our own could hardly fail to be profound. _The fundamental moods of childhood would be changed, and everything contained in child life would be more amenable to control._ Schools would become more variable and more experimental, and new selective influences would be exerted upon teachers presumably in the direction of raising the social and intellectual average of the profession. A much larger field would be opened up for all those methods of work in education that may be designated as aesthetic--that is, that contain qualities of freedom, activity and creativeness.

_VI. Idea of World Organization_

Some form of organization of nations having definite representation, const.i.tution, and laws, and with a certain degree of centralization and embodiment in visible inst.i.tutions and locations will exist, we may suppose, for all future time in the world. The existence, even in idea, of such organization presents to us inevitable educational problems. Instruction in a general way and universally in world politics, familiarizing all with the meaning of these laws and political bodies, is but a part, although a necessary part, of the work. Our democratic principle demands that more and more interest and partic.i.p.ation in all forms of government be acquired by the people, that peoples and not merely governments shall be the units which are brought together, that there be more organizations of the people performing group functions. If the loyalty of nations to one another is to be secured, as seems necessary, by establishing practical relations among them, the education of the coming generations in these relations and organizations and in all practical affairs seems unavoidable. The people must have a proper appreciation of common interests as implying common work, and not be encouraged to believe that rights of representation are their chief concern. All must know the power of organization. All must see that the international structures of our own day, however complete in form, are but a beginning and basis of function, and that there must be put behind these forms all the energies of the people, young and old, made effective through organization for practical efforts.

It is through partic.i.p.ation in activities that are international in scope that, in our opinion, the best education in the idea of internationalism will be obtained. This is the way to the good will without which political ideas will be likely to remain nationalistic in fact whatever political coordinations may exist among nations. It is as a practical idea that internationalism needs now to be impressed upon the minds of all. An international organization must be looked upon as something useful, which will remain only if it performs functions in which all are interested and in which all can in some way take part. _It is a sense of living in the world_ rather than of belonging exclusively to one locality that must be taught. It is the idea of a world of nations in organic unity rather than a world of nations attached to one another by political bonds that we need to convey.

It is active partic.i.p.ation in the business of a world that must be regarded as the necessary basis for education in the idea of internationalism. World government must be conceived in terms of world functions. But we must also provide for the most dramatic possible representation of everything contained in the idea of internationalism and represented in its laws and forms. The most vivid possible presentation must be made of everything that is done internationally, if we wish to keep alive the spirit which now prevails in the world.

We must lose no opportunity to make current history impressive; we must bring out all its dramatic features in order to fixate once for all the idea of the organic unity of the race, and its necessary coordination in tangible forms. International law must be made intelligible to very young minds, and now that we are to have an international seat of congresses and courts the utmost must be made of its existence to give reality to the idea of internationalism.

Those who plan for the future of the international idea will do well to take into account these pedagogical aspects of it. _It is quite as important to make the international idea pedagogically persuasive as to make it politically sound._ Such an idea must have a place and an embodiment if it is to seize hold upon the popular mind. An international city seems indispensable, and the further the thought of it can be removed from that of existing countries the more readily will it aid the young mind in making the abstractions necessary to conceive the true interests of all nations or all humanity as distinct from the interests of one nation. In this we are making beginnings to be realized perhaps in a far distant future. We want no unnatural and sentimental internationalism, but there is every reason now for wishing to plant the seed of a higher and more organic life than at the present time exists in the world.

The question of the possibility of an universal language arises again.

The invention of a new language, if we may judge at all by the past, is not practicable. But the extension universally of some living language seems possible. This seems to be demanded in the interest of the international idea. It is desirable and quite possible to make all civilized peoples bilingual, for of course we should not expect anywhere to see a foreign language supplant the native tongue. It is not alone to facilitate intercourse and give a sense of solidarity that the possession of an universal language is to be desired. We think quite as much of the impetus thus given to the production of an universal literature, in which there will be expressed not only ideas about the world, but moods which will not be found expressed in national literatures at all. This literature might be the beginning of a solidarity in the world which is not now definitely conceivable.

Such an extension of language, however, we should hardly expect to take place except in the course of development of practical relations which first stimulate the desire for such common language.

_VII. The Philosophical Att.i.tude_

There is an element in the idea and mood of internationalism which we can call nothing else but philosophic. The ideality and universality of internationalism itself are expressions of the philosophic spirit.

Internationalism, we might say, is a philosophic idea, although this might mean to some that we place it among the unrealizable and Utopian plans. But this is not the case. The philosophic spirit is, in our view, the most practical of moods, since it is the creative, liberal, and progressive att.i.tude and the source of the most profoundly right judgments even in practical affairs. The philosophic spirit is a background, we may say, for all the more specific moods, thoughts and activities that enter into the idea of internationalism.

And yet, real and important as the philosophic spirit is, we cannot readily discuss it as a definite aspect of education. The reason is that it involves the educational foundations themselves. The spirit, the method and the content of the school are all involved in it. We can, however, find some concrete manifestations of this philosophic att.i.tude. In the first place we might say that it is a religious mood in education. It is demanded of any school that hopes to play a large part in the affairs of the world that, in a broad sense, its whole spirit be _religious_. The school must be deeply touched by the sense of a spiritual world. The history of the world must be felt to be real--that is, as an unfoldment of purpose in the world. The values and the meaning of everything are to be appreciated and understood, according to this view, through a process of enrichment of the mind under the influence of the highest social ideals expressed in the most persuasive forms. Education thus centers in the work of developing the power to appreciate values in all experience. Anything, too, that sustains optimistic moods helps to create the philosophical spirit, and one function of this philosophic spirit is to forestall the cynical moods and the narrow and prejudiced ways of thinking which are among the most dangerous tendencies of the times. The tendency to form judgments upon insufficient evidence and to act according to narrow and one-sided principles is incompatible with the philosophic att.i.tude.

It is of course by no means the actual teaching of philosophy to every one, or the spreading broadcast of any particular philosophical principle that one would advocate as a preventive culture or to cure existing evils. It is rather a mode of living and of thinking throughout society and in all the educational process that is wanted.

What we need is a better quality of mental product, more capacity to penetrate into the heart and substance of experience, greater responsiveness to good influences, greater ability to judge values, and a more plastic and more freely flowing mental life. These are of course large demands and imply faith and an interest in a remote future. _But a school which is religions through and through in its att.i.tude toward life and is deeply touched by the influence of art in all its ways of dealing with the child will go a long way toward fulfilling the requirements of an education in the spirit of philosophy._

Such conclusions as these might at least serve, we should suppose, as a working hypothesis, upon the basis of which we may consider in detail a variety of questions of the day. New problems have arisen before the eyes of the teacher, and indeed obtrude themselves upon all who must take part in the practical life of others. Some of these problems are due to changed external relations of countries to one another. Some are problems of internal adjustment and reconstruction.

At least they may so be cla.s.sified for purposes of discussion. In reality all changes are too closely bound up with one another to allow us to treat them practically as independent. No nation any longer stands alone. Internationalism is an idea that penetrates all other practical ideas. And no internal problems of any nation can be wholly local. The world is in a peculiar but also an inspiring way at the present time a single field of labor for the educational thinker and indeed the teacher in every field of human life.

CHAPTER IV

PEACE AND MILITARISM

Among the many pedagogical questions raised and given new significance by the war, is that of the teaching about war and about peace. This is a question of ideals, and of values and the teaching of history. There are practical and superficial questions to be considered. There are also more profound problems, since all our teaching of good and evil is implicated. Shall we continue, in one moment, to a.s.sume that war is the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly it begins to disturb us, as unimportant. No one pa.s.sing through the experiences of the past four years can have wholly escaped this dilemma, or can have kept himself entirely aloof from the doubts and perplexities that must always be attached to religious and philosophical problems of good and evil. These doubts and hesitations are necessarily increased when we try to become consistent teachers and wise counselors of the young.

It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong militarists. They do not try to strike a balance between good and evil, but war is either a great blessing upon mankind or the greatest curse of the ages. In general they do not seek to base their conclusions upon ultimate philosophical principles, but rather upon moral or biological principles, or, again, upon preferences for the activities of war or the arts of peace. How very different the good and evil of war and peace may seem from different points of view is well shown by the following excerpt from a daily newspaper:

A DEADLY PARALLEL

THIS IS THE WAY GERMANY TALKS | THIS IS WHAT THE SCOUT TO YOUNG BOYS OF SCOUT AGE | ORGANIZATION TEACHES AMERICAN | BOYS | | From the "Handbook for Boys,"

| 17th edition, page 454.

| "War is the n.o.blest and | "The movement is one for holiest expression of human | efficiency and patriotism. It activity. For us, too, the | does not try to make soldiers glad great hour of battle | of boy scouts, but to make will strike. Still and deep | boys who will turn out as men in the German heart must live | to be fine citizens, and who the joy of battle and the | will if their country needs longing for it. Let us | them make better soldiers for ridicule to the utmost the | having been scouts. No one old women in breeches who | can be a good American unless fear war and deplore it as | he is a good citizen, and cruel and revolting. No; war | every boy ought to train is beautiful. Its august | himself so that as a man he sublimity elevates the human | will be able to do his full heart beyond the earthly and | duty to the community. I want the common. In the cloud | to see the boy scouts not palace above sit the heroes, | merely utter fine sentiments, Frederick the Great and | but act on them, not merely Blucher and all the men of | sing 'My Country, 'Tis of action--the Great Emperor, | Thee,' but act in a way that Moltke, Roon, Bismarck are | will give them a country to there as well, but not the | be proud of. No man is a good old women who would take away | citizen unless he so acts as our joy in war. When here on | to show that he actually uses earth a battle is won by | the Ten Commandments, and German arms and the faithful | translates the Golden Rule dead ascend to Heaven, a | into his life conduct--and I Potsdam lance corporal will | don't mean by this call the guard to the door | exceptional cases under and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick | spectacular circ.u.mstances, the Great), springing from | but I mean applying the Ten his golden throne, will give | Commandments and the Golden the command to present arms. | Rule in the ordinary affairs That is the Heaven of Young | of everyday life. I hope the Germany. | boy scouts will practice | truth and square dealing and "Because only in war all the | courage and honesty, so that virtues which militarism | when as young men they begin regards highly are given a | taking a part not only in chance to unfold, because | earning their own livelihood, only in war the truly heroic | but in governing the comes into play, for the | community, they may be able realization of which on earth | to show in practical fashion militarism is above all | their insistence upon the concerned; therefore, it | great truth that the eighth seems to us who are filled | and ninth commandments are with the spirit of militarism | directly related to everyday that war is a holy thing, the | life, not only between men as holiest on earth, and this | such in their private high estimate of war in its | relations, but between men turn makes an essential | and the government of which ingredient of the military | they are a part. Indeed, the spirit. There is nothing that | boys, even while only boys, trades-people complain of so | can have a very real effect much as that we regard it as | upon the conduct of the holy." | grown-up members of the | community, for decency and | square dealing are just as | contagious as vice and | corruption."

The praise of war takes many forms, and invokes many fundamental principles--ethical, aesthetic, biological, sociological. From Leibnitz' saying that perpetual peace is a motto fit only for a graveyard to Moltke's that peace is only a dream and not even a beautiful dream, there is a long list of defenses of war. This philosophy of war is by no means peculiarly German, although German writers seem to have been the most ardent apologists of war in recent times. Treitschke, Schmitz (29), Scheler (77), Nusbaum (86), Arndt, Steinmetz, La.s.son, Engelbrecht, Schoonmaker, all sing the praises of war as the most glorious work of man, or as performing for civilization some n.o.ble good. Even Hegel said that wars invigorate humanity just as the storm preserves the sea from putrescence.

But this praise of war, we say, is by no means exclusively German.

Thucydides thought war a n.o.ble school of heroism, the exercise ground of the nations. To Mohammed and his Arabs war seemed not only in itself a heroism, we are told, but a divine act. This belief in war as divine is an idea that is very wide-spread among primitive peoples.

Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. Redier says that the war has brought us all the n.o.ble joys so necessary to stimulate mankind, and one no longer finds happiness, therefore, in sleeping comfortably, but only in living bravely.

There is no lack, indeed, of recognition of the heroic motive in war.

Sometimes the argument appeals to religion, sometimes to art, sometimes to morality. Sometimes the advocates of war are thinking of war as the great adventure. War and the thought of war induce an ecstasy, a glow of the feelings. War is thought of as an expression of normal, healthy life, as making life more abundant and more beautiful.

War brings out fundamental virtues in the individual; it also destroys the weaker and the meaner race and leaves the strong and the virtuous.

Struggle, they say, is the method of civilization. Again, it is urged that war is always just in its issues. Like the old ordeal which always registered the decrees of heaven, war is the just arbiter of fate. The saving of the world through bloodshed, the uniting of the world through war, war as the great teacher of mankind, war as the creator of great personalities--all these are persistent themes in the literature of war. There is no place for the pacifist in the minds of these apologists of the heroic order. The crises of war are historic necessities; they come when it is time to release people from the bondage of the past and to bring individualistic generations back to the sense of duty and of loyalty to great causes. This is the belief of many, even now.

On the other side we find the great variety of pacifistic minds. War to the pacifists is wrong, unholy, morally sinful, biologically and economically and in every other way evil. The conscientious objector's point of view is very simple. War antagonizes some principle which is religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask them to go.

The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and produces a condemning doc.u.ment. That war indeed selects but selects unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many, among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in which he calls war _dysgenic_. The psychologist tends to see in war a reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say.

War lingers because of man's love of old inst.i.tutions. We cling to old habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the aesthetic, because of their antiquity and old a.s.sociations. This is the explanation by Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery.

MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.