Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

by W. Trotter

POSTSCRIPT OF 1919

PREJUDICE IN TIME OF WAR.

With the exception of the two pre­lim­i­nary es­says, the fore­going chapters were written in the autumn of 1915. As the chief purpose of the book was to expound the conception that psychology is a science practically useful in actual affairs, it was inevitable that a great deal of the exemplary matter by which it was attempted to illustrate the theoretical discussion should be related to the war of 1914–1918. Rich, however, as this subject was in material with which to illustrate a psychological inquiry, it presented also the great difficulty of being surrounded and permeated by prejudices of the most deeply impassioned kind, prejudices, moreover, in one direction or another from which no inhabitant of one of the belligerent countries could have the least expectation of being free. To yield to the temptation offered by the psychological richness of war themes might thus be to sacrifice the detachment of mind and coolness of judgment without which scientific investigation is impossible. It had to be admitted, in fact, that there were strong grounds for such epistemological pessimism, and it will perhaps be useful in a broad way to define some of these here.

In normal times a modern nation is made up of a society in which no regard is paid to moral unity, and in which therefore common feeling is to {215} a great extent unorganized and inco-ordinate. In such a society the individual citizen cannot derive from the nation as a whole the full satisfaction of the needs special to him as a gregarious animal. The national feeling he experiences when at home among his fellows is too vague and remote to call forth the sense of moral vigour and security that his nature demands. As has already been pointed out[19] the necessary consequence is the segregation of society into innumerable minor groups, each constituting in itself a small herd, and dispensing to its members the moral energy that in a fully organized society would come from the nation as a whole. Of such minor herds some are much more distinct from the common body than others. Some engage a part only of the life of their members, so that the individual citizen may belong to a number of groups and derive such moral energy as he possesses from a variety of sources. Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his professional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly from the nation in which he is a unit. Indeed, so far from looking to the nation at large for the fulfilment of its natural function of providing “all hope, all sustainment, all reward,” he is apt to regard it as embodied by the tax-gatherer, the policeman, and the bureaucrat, at its best remote and indifferent, at its worst hostile and oppressive.

[19] Pp. [137], [138] supra.

The more distinct of these intra-national groups may not only be very fully isolated from the common body, but may be the seat of an actual corporate hostility to it, or rather to the aggregated minor groups which have come officially to represent it. When war breaks upon a society thus constituted {216} the intense stimulation of herd instinct that results tends to break down the moral restrictions set up by segregation, to throw back the individual citizen on to the nation at large for the satisfaction of his moral needs, and to replace class feeling by national feeling. The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted. If a minor group has already developed a certain hostility to the common body and resists the solvent effect of the outbreak of war, it becomes a potential source of anti-national feeling and of opposition to the national policy. Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness a herd can give. Thus we may say, that in a country at war every citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state. In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellows, and in him who belongs to a dissentient minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more—if no less—liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war all opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to {217} bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.

It is undoubtedly depressing to have to recognize this universality of prejudice and to have to abandon the opinion sometimes held that the char­ac­ter­is­tics of herd belief are limited to the judgments of the vulgar. The selectness of a minority in no way guarantees it against the fallacies of the mob. A minority sufficiently unpopular is, in a sense, a mob in which smallness is compensated for by density. The moral vigour and fortitude which unpopular minorities enjoy are evidences of herd instinct in vigorous action; the less admirable liability to prejudice being a part of the same instinctive process is a necessary accompaniment. We may lay it down, then, as fundamental that all opinion among the members of a nation at war is liable to prejudice, and when we remember with what vehemence such opinion is pronounced and with what fortitude it is defended we may regard as at least highly probable that such opinion always actually is prejudiced—rests, that is to say, on instinct rather than reason. Now, it is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war. All of it sharing the common characteristic of war opinion in being prejudiced, some will pronounce more or less clearly that the war is just and necessary, some will pronounce more or less clearly against that view; there will be a division into what we may call pro-national and anti-national currents of opinion, each accompanied respectively by its counterpart of what we may call anti-hostile and pro-hostile opinion. It is a significant fact that the relative development of pro-national and anti-national feeling varies according to the degree in which the given war is apprehended as dangerous. A {218} war apprehended as dangerous produces a more complete solution of the minor herds of society into the common body than does a war not so regarded; in consequence there is a nearer approach to homogeneity, and pro-national opinion is far in excess of anti-national opinion, which, if recognizable, is confined to insignificant minorities. A war regarded as not dangerous produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion, that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899–1902 was not apprehended as dangerous in this country, and in consequence, though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914–1918, regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made the conduct of the war cor­res­pon­ding­ly vigorous. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a further point is illustrated. The essential factor in the stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it. The Prussians were dangerous enough to France, but were not generally regarded as such by the French, and in consequence national {219} homogeneity did not develop as it did on a later occasion in face of the same menace.

If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor—the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question—it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people’s response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914–1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. The fact that such a sense of rectitude is a universal and inevitable accompaniment of war, and as strong in a predatory and {220} criminal belligerent as in a generally pacific one, gives us a convenient measure of the extent to which prejudice must prevail in warfare.[20]

[20] It is important that it should be quite clear that we have been speaking here of the reaction of the general body of a nation to the occurrence of war, and not of the reasons for which a given war was undertaken. In England and in Germany the feeling of the people that the late war was just and necessary was equally intense and equally a direct consequence of the danger to the herd it represented. It was therefore a non-rational instinctive response without reference to objective justice in either case. Had the threat to the herd on either side seemed less grave, opinion as to the justice of the war would in that country have been cor­res­pon­ding­ly more divided. By her calculated truculence in the years before the war Germany—intending doubtless to intimidate a decaying people—had made it certain that when the threat to this country did come it should be apprehended at once as dangerous to the last degree, and had thus herself organized the practical unanimity of her chief enemy. All such reactions upon the outbreak of war are instinctively determined. It is the burden of the statesman that his decision in a crisis in favour of war automatically renders impossible rational confirmation by the people.

We thus arrive at the discouraging conclusion that in a belligerent country all opinion in any way connected with the war is subject to prejudice, either pro-national or anti-national, and is very likely in consequence to be of impaired validity. Must we then conclude further that speculation upon war themes is so liable to distortion that reasoned judgments of any practical value are impossible? Now, it is guidance in just such a difficulty as this that a psychology having any pretensions to be called practical may fairly be expected to yield, and psychology does in fact provide certain broad precautionary principles, which, although by no means infallible guides, do profess to be able to keep within bounds the disturbing effects of prejudice on judgment and so render possible the not wholly unprofitable discussion even of matters the most deeply implicated by war-time passion.

First among such principles is the recognition of the fact that prejudice does not display itself as such to direct introspection. One who is being {221} influenced by prejudice will never be able to detect his biassed judgments by an apparent defect in their plausibility or by any characteristic logical weakness. Agreement or disagreement with common opinion will as such be no help, since prejudice infests minorities no less than majorities. To suppose that when one has admitted the liability to prejudice one can free oneself from it by a direct voluntary effort is a common belief and an entirely fallacious one. Such a task is far beyond the powers of the most fully instructed mind, and is not likely to be undertaken except by those who have least chance of success. Prejudice, in fact, is for the individual like the ether of the physicist, infinitely pervasive and potent, but insusceptible of direct detection; its presence is to be assumed as general, but it escapes before immediate search by introspection as the ether eludes the balance and the test-tube.

Secondly, it is possible for the investigator, having admitted the existence of prejudice as a condition of thought, to recognize the general direction of its action in his own mind, to recognize, that is to say, whether the tone of it is pro-national or anti-national, and thus to obtain a certain orientation for his efforts to neutralize it. Having frankly recognized this general tendency in his thinking, he will be able to do something towards correcting it by making allowance for it in his conclusion as a whole. If his tendency of feeling is pro-national, he will say to himself of any judgment favourable to his country, “This is a conclusion likely to have been influenced by prejudice, therefore for all the precautions I may have taken in forming it, and whatever scientific care and caution I may have used, in spite even of its agreeable appearance of self-evident truth, I must regard its validity as subject to some subtraction before it {222} can safely be made the basis for further speculation.” If his tendency of feeling is anti-national, he will have a similar task of attenuation to carry out upon the conclusions unfavourable to his country that he may reach, and will be prudent to make very drastic deductions in view of the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them.[21]

[21] It is perhaps of interest to note in passing that war-time opinion and prejudice are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly pro-national and anti-national, rather than anti-hostile and pro-hostile respectively. The impulse that might have led an isolated German to defend the English at the expense of his countrymen, or an isolated Englishman to defend the Germans at the expense of his countrymen, was in its psychological essence anti-national and animated by no love of the enemy; it was an instinctive revolt against his country, or rather the groups which in the process of social segregation had come to represent it. Such terms, therefore, as pro-German, and in another association pro-Boer, though doubtless convenient implements of abuse, were inexactly descriptive psychologically. “Anti-English” would have been more just, but immensely less effective, as vituperation, for the prejudice it was desired to decry was for the most part a hostility not to the nation, but to its official embodiment. Probably, however, it was the very element of injustice in the term pro-German that made it so satisfactory a vehicle for exasperated feeling.

Finally, one who attempts to deal usefully with matters in which strong feeling is inevitable will do well, however thoroughly he may try to guard himself from the effects of prejudice, to bring his speculative conclusions into such form that they are automatically tested by the progress of events. Symmetry and internal consistency are unfortunately but too often accepted as evidences of objective validity. That the items of a series of conclusions fit into one another neatly and compose a system logically sound and attractive to the intellect gives us practically no information of their truth. For this a frequently repeated contact with external reality is necessary, and of such contacts the most thoroughly satisfactory one is the power to foretell the course of events. Foresight is the supreme {223} test of scientific validity, and the more a line of argument is liable to deflection by non-rational processes the more urgent is the need for it constantly to be put into forms which will allow its capacity for foresight to be tested. This was the one great advantage amongst heavy handicaps enjoyed by those who ventured into speculation upon the international situation during the late war. Events were moving so quickly from crisis to crisis that it was possible for the psychologist to see his judgments confirmed or corrected almost from day to day, to see in the authentic fabric of reality as it left the loom where he had had any kind of foreknowledge, where he had been altogether unprepared, and where he had failed in foresight of some development that should have been within his powers.

These three principles were those in accordance with which it was attempted to conduct the discussion in this book of topics connected with the war. The writer was aware that neither was he by nature or art immune to prejudice nor able by some miracle of will power to lay down passion when he took up the pen, and he admitted to himself with what frankness he could command the liability under which his conclusions would lie of having been arrived at under the influence of pro-national prejudice. He hoped, however, that a liberal allowance for the direction of his instinctive bias and a grateful use of the diurnal corrective of events might enable him to reach at any rate some conclusions not altogether without a useful tincture of validity.

It was possible, moreover, to put certain conclusions in a form which the development of the war must confirm or disprove, and it may be interesting as a test of what was put forward as an essay in an essentially practical psychology briefly {224} to review these theoretical anticipations in the light of what actually has happened.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTICIPATIONS

The hypothesis was put forward that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilizations. The next step was naturally to inquire whether the known characters of what we called aggressive gre­gar­i­ous­ness were able to account for the observed German peculiarities in reaction, and then to indicate what special features we might expect to appear in Germany under the developing stress of war if our hypothesis was sound.

Under the guidance of the hypothesis we found reason to believe that the morale of the German people was of a special kind, and essentially dependent for the remarkable vigour it then showed upon the possibility of continued successful aggression. This suggestion was borne out by the long series of offensive movements, increasing in weight and culminating in the spring of 1918, in the great attacks on which Germany broke herself. From the way in which these movements were announced and expected it became evident that during an enforced defensive the morale of Germany declined more rapidly than did that of her opponents. This was the essential confirmation of the psychological view we had put forward. Apart from all question of the strategic and merely military advantages of the offensive it was plain that Germany’s moral need for the posture of attack was peculiarly and char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly great. That she continually and convincedly—though perhaps injudiciously—declared the war to be one of defence only, that she had {225} everything to hope from disunion among her enemies and little to fear from disunion among her friends, that she was in assured possession of the most important industrial districts of France, that she had successfully brought into something like equilibrium the resistance to the effects of the blockade, and had proved like her animal prototypes only to be more fierce and eager when she was hungry—all of these strong objective reasons for fighting a defensive delaying war were over-whelmed by the crucially important requirement of keeping the aggressive spirit strung up to the highest pitch. The fighting spirit must be that of attack and conquest, or it would break altogether. Our hypothesis, therefore, enabled us to foresee that she would have to go on torturing her declining frame with one great effort after another until she had fought herself to a standstill, and then, if her enemies but just succeeded in holding her, her morale would begin to decline, and to decline with terrible abruptness. We were even able to regard it as probable that for all the talk of the war on the German side being defensive only, for all the passionate devotion to the Fatherland and the profound belief in the sanctity of its frontiers, as a matter of cold and dry reality, if it came to invasion, Germany would not be defended by its inhabitants.

Another subject upon which the psychological method of inquiry professed to yield some degree of foresight was that—at that time—fruitful cause of discussion, the objects for which the enemies of Germany were fighting. Opinion at that time was much ruled by the conception of a Germany gradually forced back upon and beyond her frontiers, grim, implacable, irreconcilable, her national spirit energized and made resilient by humiliation, and clinging unconquerably to the thought of a resurrection of her glory through the {226} faith of her sons. Under the influence of ideas of this romantic type, it was not always possible for opinion to be very precise upon what was to be made the object of the war in order to secure from Germany the safety of the civilizations opposed to hers. Psychologically, however, the moral condition of a beaten Germany seemed relatively easy to foretell. If the behaviour of other predaceous types was of any value as a guide, it was plain that a sound beating alone and in itself would produce all the effect that was needful. There could be no fear of the national morale being invigorated by defeat, but an enemy successfully invading Germany would necessarily find the one essential condition on which any subsequent security must be set up—the replacement of the aggressive and predaceous morale by complete moral collapse. These were the considerations that enabled one to say that considered psychologically the mere beating of Germany was the single object of the war. The completeness of the moral collapse which accompanied her beating seems to have been found remarkable and astonishing by very many, but can have been so only to those who had not interested themselves in the psychological aspects of the problem.

In stating, in 1915, these conclusions as to the social type and moral structure of Germany and in formulating the indications they seemed to give of the course of future events, it was necessary to make considerable deductions from the precision and detail with which one made one’s small efforts at foresight in order to allow for the effects one’s pro-national bias may have had in deflecting judgment. Enough, however, was stated definitely to enable the progress of events very clearly to confirm or disprove the conclusions arrived at. The not inconsiderable correspondences between the {227} theoretical considerations and the actual development of events is perhaps enough to suggest that the method of speculation used has a certain validity.

In considering the psychological case of England we came to the conclusion that her morale depended on mechanisms different from those which were in action in Germany, and indicating that social development had in her followed a different type. We saw reason to suppose that this social type would be very much more resistant to discouragement and disaster than the aggressive type embodied in Germany, and that if England won the war it would be by virtue of the toughness of her nerve. The form of social organization represented by England was seen to contain a germ of strength not possessed by her enemy, an intensely resistant nucleus of moral power that underlay the immeasurable waste and the inextricable confusion of her methods. If the moral structure of Germany was of its kind fully developed, it was also primitive; if the moral structure of England was embryonic, it was also integrative and still capable of growth. If it was very obvious at that time how immensely responsive to intelligent and conscious direction the moral powers of England would have been, if it was obvious how largely such direction would have diminished the total cost of the war in time and suffering, if it was obvious that such direction would not, and almost certainly could not, be forthcoming, it was equally clear that the muddle, the mediocrity, the vociferation with which the war was being conducted were phenomena within the normal of the type and evolutionary stage of our society, and were not much more than froth on the surface of an invisible and unsounded stream.

If one had been content to estimate the moral condition of England at that time by the utterance of {228} all ordinary organs of expression—public speeches, leading articles and so forth—one could scarcely have failed to reach the gloomiest conclusions. So common were ill-will, acrimony, suspicion and intrigue, so often was apparent self-possession mere languor, and apparent energy mere querulousness, so strong, in fact, were all the ordinary evidences of moral disintegration that an actual collapse might have seemed almost within sight. As a matter of fact, from the very necessities of her social type, in England the organs of public expression were char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly not representative of the national mood; probably far less than were those of Germany representative of the German mood. Thus it came about that the actual driving force—the will of the common man, as inflexible as it was inarticulate—remained intact behind all the ambiguous manifestations which went forth as the voice of England. This is the psychological secret of the socialized type of gregarious animal. As evolved in England to-day, this type cannot attain to the conscious direction of its destiny, and cannot submit to the fertilizing discipline of science; it cannot select its agents or justly estimate their capacity, but it possesses the power of evolving under pressure a common purpose of great stability. Such a common purpose is necessarily simple, direct, and barely conscious; high-flown imperialism and elaborate policies are altogether beyond its range, and it can scarcely accomplish an intellectual process more complex than the recognition of an enemy. The conviction that the hostility between England and Germany was absolute and irreconcilable, and the war a matter of national life and death, was just such a primitive judgment as could be arrived at, and it gave rise to a common purpose as stable as it was simple.[22] {229}

[22] There can be little doubt that national consciousness with regard to the war was very much less developed in this country than in Germany. The theory of his country’s purpose in the war was far less a matter of interest and speculation to the average Englishman than it was to the average German. The German was far more fully aware of the relation the situation bore to general politics and to history, and was much more preoccupied with the defence of his country’s case by rational methods and accepted principles, and he displayed from the first great faith in the value of a propaganda which should appeal to reason. Clumsy and futile as so much of this intellectual effort was ultimately seen to be, it did show that the interest in national affairs was more conscious and elaborate, and stood from the intellectual point of view at a higher level than it did in England.

The relatively complex national consciousness that is necessary to evolve a positive movement of national expansion or a definite policy of colonization and aggrandisement seems to be hostile to the development of a common purpose of the most powerful kind. Thus we find moral vigour and stability attaining their greatest strength in a nation that has no definite theory of its destiny, and that is content to allow confusion of thought and vagueness of aim to be common and even characteristic in its public life. In such a people national consciousness is of the most elementary kind, and only the simplest conceptions can be effectively apprehended by it. Negative judgments are in general simpler than positive ones, and the simplest of all, perhaps, is the identification of an enemy. The history of England seems to show with remarkable constancy that the national consciousness has been in its most effective action limited to those elementary conceptions which have been simple and broad enough to manifest themselves in a common purpose of great strength and tenacity. England has, in fact, been made by her enemies. Rightly or wrongly, Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Germany, impressed themselves on the elementary consciousness of England as enemies, and excited in response a unity of purpose that was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly as immune from the effects of discouragement, disaster and fatigue as it was independent of reasoned political theory. {230}

Each of these enemies, in contrast with England, had the definite consciousness of a more or less elaborate political aim, and some of them embodied principles or methods in advance of those which obtained in England in corresponding fields. Whatever loftiness of aim they had availed them no more than their respect for principle and the intellect, and they all came to regret the mostly inadvertent effect of their pretensions in exciting the hostility of a people capable of an essential moral cohesion. The power of England would seem to have resided almost exclusively in this capacity for developing under pressure a common purpose. The immense moral energy she has been able to put forth in a crisis has enabled her to inspire such leaders as she has needed for the moment, but she has been char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly infertile in the production of true leaders who could impose themselves upon her efficiently. Thus among her great men, for one true leader, such as Oliver Cromwell, who failed, there have been a score of successful mouthpieces and instruments of her purpose, such as Pitt and Wellington. The vigour of her great moments has always been the product of moral unity induced by the pressure of a supposed enemy, and therefore it has always tended to die down when the danger has passed. As the greatness of her leaders has been less a product of their own genius than that of the moral stimulus which has reached them from the nation at large, when the stimulus has been withdrawn with the cessation of danger, these men have almost invariably come to appear in times of peace of a less dominating capacity than their performance during the stress of war might have indicated. The great wars of England have usually, then, been the affair of the common man; he has supplied the impulse that has made and the moral vigour that has conducted {231} them, he has created and inspired his leaders and has endowed his representatives in the field and on the sea with their stern and enduring pugnacity.

These conclusions have been confirmed by the way in which the war progressed and came to an end. The war became more and more fully a contest of moral forces until it ended in the unique event of a surrender practically unconditional that was not preceded by a total physical defeat. German morale proved throughout extremely sensitive to any suspension of the aggressive posture, and showed the unsuitability of its type in modern conditions by undergoing at the mere threat of disaster a disintegration so absolute that it must remain a classical and perfect example in the records of psychology. There can be no doubt that had there been among her enemies the least understanding of her moral type and state, her collapse could have been brought about with comparative ease at a much earlier date. English morale, on the other hand, seemed actually to be invigorated by defeat, and even remained untouched by the more serious trials of uninspired and mediocre direction, of ill-will, petty tyranny, and confusion.

The confrontation in war of two types of social structure differing so radically and by such clearly defined characters as did Germany and England was, as has been already suggested, a remarkable instance of statecraft being forced into a region of very much greater reality than that in which it usually operates. The historical scale of events, with its narrow range, its reckoning by dynasties and parliaments, its judgments in terms of tribal censure and approbation, was found momentarily to march with the biological scale where events are measured by the survival or extinction of species, where time acquires a new meaning, and the individual man, {232} however conspicuous historically, takes on the insect-like sameness of his fellows. Here was an experiment set out in Nature’s laboratory, and for the first time the issues were so narrowly focussed as to be within the apprehension of the very subjects of the research. The matter to be tested concerned the whole validity of gre­gar­i­ous­ness. Two types were confronted. In one the social habit had taken a form that limited the participation of the individual in the social unit; a rigid segregation of the society made it impossible to admit the moral equality of its members, and resulted in the activities of the social instinct being available solely through leadership; it was a led society where internal cohesion and integration were replaced by what we may call external cohesion—a migratory society developing its highest manifestations of the herd when it was being successfully led. In the other type the social habit had tended, however slowly and incompletely, towards the unlimited participation of the individual in the social unit. The tendency of the society was towards integration and internal cohesion; it was therefore unaggressive, refractory to leadership, and apt to develop its highest herd manifestations when threatened and attacked. The former enjoyed all the advantages of a led society. It was tractable, and its leaders could impose upon it a relative uniformity of outlook and a high standard of general training. The latter had no advantage save the potentiality—and it was little more—of unlimited internal cohesion. It was intractable to leadership, and in consequence knowledge and training were limited and extremely localized within it; it had no approach to unity of outlook, and its interests were necessarily concentrated on its internal rather than its external relations.

If the former type proved the stronger, any progressive evolution of society in a direction that {233} promised the largest extension of human powers would become very, improbable; the internal cohesion of social units would have appeared to be subject to limits, and the most hopeful prospective solution of human difficulties would have vanished. Conceivably accidental factors might have decided the issue of the experiment and left the principle still in doubt. As it happened, every element of chance that intruded went against the type that ultimately proved the stronger, and in the final decision the moral element was so conspicuously more significant than the physical that the experiment has yielded a result which seems to be singularly conclusive and unexceptionable.[23]

[23] Anxiety has frequently been expressed since the arm­is­tice of Novem­ber, 1918, as to whether Germany has properly assim­i­lat­ed the lesson of her defeat, and undergone the desired change of heart. In the face of such doubts it is well to remember that there is another conclusion about the assimilation of which there need be no anxiety. It is at any rate clearly proved that Germany’s enemies were able to beat her in spite of all the disadvantages of exterior lines, divided counsels, divergent points of view and inadequate preparation. The prestige of invulnerability need never be allowed again to accumulate about a social group of the aggressive migratory type, and to sit like an incubus upon a terrorized world.

The result of the experiment has been decisive, and it is still a possibility that the progressive integration of society will ultimately yield a medium in which the utmost needs of the individual and of the race will be reconciled and satisfied. Had the more primitive social type—the migratory, aggressive society of leadership and the pack—had this proved still the master of the less primitive socialized and integrative type, the ultimate outlook for the race would have indeed been black. This is by no means to deny that German civilization had a vigour, a respect for knowledge, and even a benignity within which comfortable life was possible. But it is to assert that it was a regression, a choice of the easy path, a surrender to the tamer platitudes of {234} the spirit that no aggressive vigour could altogether mask. To live dangerously was supposed to be its ideal, but dread was the very atmosphere it breathed. Its armies could be thrown into hysterical convulsions by the thought of the franc-tireur, and the flesh of its leaders made to creep by such naïve and transpontine machinations as its enemies ambitiously called propaganda. The minds that could make bugbears out of such material were little likely to attempt or permit the life of arduous and desperate spiritual adventure that was in the mind of the philosopher when he called on his disciples to live dangerously.

This great experiment was conducted under the very eyes of humanity, and the conditions were unique in this that they would have permitted the effective intervention of the conscious human will. As it happened the evolution of society had not reached a stage at which an informed and scientific statecraft was possible. The experiment, therefore, went through without any general view of the whole situation being attained. Had such been possible, there can be no doubt at all that the war could have been shortened enough to keep the world back from the neighbourhood of spiritual and even material bankruptcy in which it finds itself to-day. The armed confrontation of the two types, while it has yielded a result that may well fill us with hope, took place at a moment of human evolution when it was bound to be immensely expensive. Material development had far exceeded social development, mankind, so to say, had become clever without becoming wise, and the war had to be fought as a purely destructive effort. Had it come at a later stage of evolution, so great a mobilization of social power as the war caused might have been taken advantage of to unify the nation to a completely coherent structure which the cessation of {235} the external stimulating pressure would have left firmly and nobly established.

AFTER THE WAR.

The psychological situation left by the conclusion of the war is likely to attract an increasing amount of attention as time passes, and it may be of interest to examine it in the light of the principles that we have been making use of in dealing with the war.

It is a fact fundamental in psychology that the state of war furnishes the most powerful of all stimuli to the social instinct. It sets in motion a tide of common feeling by the power of which union and energy of purpose and self-sacrifice for the good of the social unit become possible to a degree unknown under any other circumstances. The war furnished many instances of the almost miraculous efficacy of this stimulus. Perhaps the most effective example of all, even by the side of the steely fortitude of France and the adventurous desperation of England, was the fact that the dying Austrian Empire could be galvanized for four years into aggressive gestures lifelike beyond simulation.

The effect of this great liberation of feeling was to supersede the precarious equilibrium of society by a state very much more stable. Before the war moral power had come to the individual chiefly from the lesser herds in which he took part, and but little from the nation as a whole. Society had the appearance of stability because the forces at work were relatively small in proportion to the inertia of the whole fabric. But the actual firmness of the structure was small, and the individual led a life emotionally thin and tame because the social feelings were localized and faint. With the outbreak of war the national unit became the source of moral power, social feeling became wide in its {236} basis and strong in intensity. To the individual life became more intense and more significant, and in essence, in spite of horror and pain, better worth living; the social fabric, moreover, displayed a new stability and a capacity for resisting disturbances that would have effectually upset its equilibrium in time of peace. The art of government, in fact, became actually easier to practise, though it had a superficial appearance of being more difficult from the comparative rapidity with which the progress of events unmasked the quack. Successful practitioners were, it will be remembered, always ready to call attention to the unprecedented difficulty of their labours, while shrewdly enough profiting by the fact that in the actual tasks of government—the creation of interest, the development of unity and the nourishing of impulse—their difficulties had wholly disappeared.

With the cessation of war this great stream of moral power began rapidly to dry up at its source. Thinly continuing to trickle for a time as it were from habit, it is already almost dry. There is doubtless a tendency among responsible personages to persuade themselves that it still flows with all the power that made the war a veritable golden age of government. Such a persuasion is natural and fully to be expected. It would be difficult for those who have directed with whatever want of skill a power so great to avoid coming in time to be a little confused between the direction of power and the production of it, and to think that they still command the moral resources which war gave so abundantly. Such a mistake is likely to prove one of the elements of danger, though perhaps only a minor one, in the present situation.

Western society, with perhaps even Western civilization, is in a situation of great interest to the sociologist, and probably also of some considerable {237} danger. There are certain chief elements of danger which we may attempt to define.

First, with the end of the war the mental orientation of the individual has undergone a great change. National feeling is no longer able to supply him with moral vigour and interest. He must turn once more to his class for what the nation as a whole has been so much more efficiently supplying. Life has regained for him much of its old tameness, the nation in which he has lived vividly during the war is resuming its vagueness and becoming once more merely the state, remote and quasi-hostile. But the war has shown him what interest and moral vigour are in life, and he will not easily accept the absence of these; he has acquired the appetite for them, he has, so to speak, tasted blood. The tasteless social dietary of pre-war England is not likely to satisfy his invigorated palate.

Secondly, the transition from war to peace is in an imperfectly organized society a process necessarily dangerous because it involves the change from a condition of relative moral stability to one of relative moral instability. To get back to the precise state of delicately balanced but essentially insecure equilibrium of society before the war would seem, in fact, already shown to be impossible. The war ran its course without any attempt being made to replace the system of class segregation, through which the social instinct works in our society, by any more satisfactory mechanism. Before the war class segregation had reached a condition in which the individual had ceased to be conscious of the national unit as possessing any practical significance for himself while his class was the largest unit he was capable of recognizing as a source of moral power and an object of effort. There was no class which as such and {238} in relation to other classes was capable of submitting to any restraint or self-sacrifice in the interests of the nation as a whole. Of course, in each case it was possible for a class by a very easy process of rationalization to show that its interests were those of the nation at large, but this was merely the effect of the moral blindness to which class segregation inevitably leads. Since every one of us is classified somehow, it is not easy to grasp how completely class segregation obtains throughout our society, and how fully in times of peace it replaces national unity. Those occupying the lower social strata may be very fully aware of the intensity of class feeling and how complete a substitute for national feeling it affords at the upper end of the social scale, just as those in the upper strata may be very much alive to the class bitterness of their inferiors; but it is difficult for both to believe how complete are segregation and its consequences throughout the whole social gamut.

It is to this state of society that the return from the relative unity of war must be. The few conventional restraints upon the extremity of class feeling that were in any kind of activity before the war have been very greatly weakened. Change has become familiar, violence has been glorified in theory and shown to be effective in practice, the prestige of age has been undermined, and the sanctity of established things defied.

It would, indeed, seem that to re-establish a society based solely on class segregation, and relying upon the maintenance by it of a state of equilibrium, will be a matter of some difficulty, and it will probably be a mistake to depend altogether on fatigue, on the relaxation of feeling, and on the celebration of victory as stabilizing forces.

Thirdly, there is no reason to suppose that the {239} tendencies of society which made possible so huge a disaster as the war have been in any way corrected by it. Great efforts are being made at present to establish conditions which will prevent future wars. Such efforts are entirely admirable, but it must be remembered that after all war is no more than a symptom of social defects. If, therefore, war as a symptom is merely suppressed, valuable as that will be in controlling the waste and destruction of life and effort, indeed indispensable to any kind of vigorous mental life, it may leave untouched potentialities of disaster comparable even with war itself.

It was pointed out many years ago in the essays incorporated in this book that human society tends to restrict influence and leadership to minds of a certain type, and that these minds tend to have special and characteristic defects. Thus human affairs are in general under the direction of a class of thought that is not merely not the best of which the mind is capable, but tends to certain characteristic fallacies and to certain characteristic kinds of blindness and incapacity. The class of mind to which power in society gravitates I have ventured to describe as the stable type. Its characteristic virtues and deficiencies have been described more than once in this book, and we need do no more here than recall its vigour and resistiveness, its accessibility to the voice of the herd and its resistiveness to and even horror of the new in feeling and experience. The predominance of this type has been rigorously maintained throughout the war. This is why the war has been fought with a mere modicum of help from the human intellect, and why the result must be regarded as a triumph for the common man rather than for the ruling classes. The war was won by the inflexible resolution of the common citizen and the common soldier. No {240} country has shown itself to be directed by the higher powers of the intellect, and nowhere has the continued action of clear, temperate, vigorous, and comprehensive thought made itself manifest, because even the utmost urgency of warfare failed to dislodge the stable-minded type from its monopoly of prestige and power. What the necessities of war could not do there is certainly no magic in peace to bring about. Society, therefore, is setting out upon what is generally regarded as a new era of hope without the defect that made the war possible having in any degree been corrected. Certain supposedly immutable principles such as democracy and national self-determination are regarded by some as being mankind’s guarantees against disaster. To the psychologist such principles represent mere vague and fluctuating drifts of feeling, arising out of deep instinctive needs, but not fully and powerfully embodying such; as automatic safeguards of society their claims are altogether bogus, and cannot be ranked as perceptibly higher than those of the ordinary run of political nostrums and doctrinaire specifics. Society can never be safe until the direction of it is entrusted only to those who possess high capacity rigorously trained and acute sensitiveness to experience and to feeling.

Statecraft, after all, is a difficult art, and it seems unreasonable to leave the choice of those who practise it to accident, to heredity, or to the possession of the wholly irrelevant gifts that take the fancy of the crowd. The result of such methods of selection is not even a mere random choice from the whole population, but shows a steady drift towards the establishment in power of a type in certain ways almost char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly unfitted for the tasks of government. The fact that man has always shirked the heavy intellectual and moral {241} labour of founding a scientific and truly expert statecraft may contain a germ of hope for the future, in that it shows where effort may be usefully expended. But it cannot but justify uneasiness as to the immediate future of society. The essential factor in society is the subordination of the individual will to social needs. Our statecraft is still ignorant of how this can be made a fair and honest bargain to the individual and to the state, and recent events have convinced a very large proportion of mankind that accepted methods of establishing this social cohesion have proved to them at any rate the worst of bargains.

THE INSTABILITY OF CIVILIZATION.

The foregoing considerations are enough, perhaps, to make one wonder whether, after all, Western civilization may not be about to follow its unnumbered predecessors into decay and dissolution. There can be no doubt that such a suspicion is oppressing many thoughtful minds at the present time. It is not likely to be dispelled by the contemplation of history or by the nature of recent events. Indeed, the view can be maintained very plausibly that all civilizations must tend ultimately to break down, that they reach sooner or later a period when their original vigour is worn out, and then collapse through internal disruption or outside pressure. It is even believed by some that Western civilization already shows the evidences of decline which in its predecessors have been the forerunners of destruction. When we remember that our very short period of recorded history includes the dissolution of civilizations so elaborate as those of the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, and of the Incas, that a social structure so complex as that but lately disclosed in Crete could leave no trace in human {242} memory but a faint and dubious whisper of tradition, and that the dawn of history finds civilization already old, we can scarcely resist the conclusion that social life has, more often than one can bear to contemplate, swung laboriously up to a meaningless apogee and then lapsed again into darkness. We know enough of man to be aware that each of these unnumbered upward movements must have been infinitely painful, must have been at least as fruitful of torture, oppression, and anguish as the ones of which we know the history, and yet each was no more than the swing of a pendulum and a mere fruitless oscillation landing man once more at his starting point, impoverished and broken, with perhaps more often than not no transmissible vestige of his greatness.

If we limit our view to the historical scale of time and the exclusively human outlook, we seem almost forced to accept the dreadful hypothesis that in the very structure and substance of all human constructive social efforts there is embodied a principle of death, that there is no progressive impulse but must become fatigued, that the intellect can provide no permanent defence against a vigorous barbarism, that social complexity is necessarily weaker than social simplicity, and that fineness of moral fibre must in the long run succumb to the primitive and coarse.

Let us consider, however, what comments may be made on this hypothesis in view of the biological conceptions of man which have been put forward in this book. At the same time an opportunity is afforded to put in a more continuous form the view of society that has necessarily been touched on so far in an interrupted and incidental way.

Whatever may be one’s view as to the larger pretensions that are put forward as to the significance and destiny of man, there can be no doubt {243} that it is indispensable to recognize the full implications of his status as an animal completely indigenous in the zoological series. The whole of his physical and mental structure is congruous with that of other living beings, and is constantly giving evidence of the complicated network of relationships by which he is bound to them.

The accumulation of knowledge is steadily amplifying the range over which this congruity with the natural order can be demonstrated, and is showing more and more fully that practical understanding and foresight of man’s behaviour are attained in proportion as this hypothesis of the complete “naturalness” of man is adhered to.

The endowment of instinct that man possesses is in every detail cognate with that of other animals, provides no element that is not fully represented elsewhere, and above all—however little the individual man may be inclined to admit it—is in no degree less vigorous and intense or less important in relation to feeling and activity than it is in related animals. This supremely important side of mental life, then, will be capable of continuous illustration and illumination by biological methods. It is on the intellectual side of mental life that man’s congruity with other animals is least obvious at first sight. The departure from type, however, is probably a matter of degree only, and not of quality. Put in the most general terms, the work of the intellect is to cause delay between stimulus and response, and under circumstances to modify the direction of the latter. We may suppose all stimulation to necessitate response, and that such response must ultimately occur with undiminished total energy. The intellect, however, is capable of delaying such response, and within limits of directing its path so that it may superficially show no relation to the stimulus of which it is the discharge. If we extend {244} the word stimulation to include the impulses arising from instinct, and grant that the delaying and deflecting influence of the intellect may be indefinitely enlarged, we have an animal in which instinct is as vigorous as in any of its primitive ancestors, but which is superficially scarcely an instinctive animal at all. Such is the case of man. His instinctive impulses are so greatly masked by the variety of response that his intellect opens to him that he has been commonly regarded until quite recent times as a practically non-instinctive creature, capable of determining by reason his conduct and even his desires. Such a conception made it almost impossible to gain any help in human psychology from the study of other animals, and scarcely less difficult to evolve a psychology which would be of the least use in foreseeing and controlling the behaviour of man.

No understanding of the causes of stability and instability in human society is possible until the undiminished vigour of instinct in man is fully recognized.

The significance of this rich instinctive endowment lies in the fact that mental health depends upon instinct finding a balanced but vigorous expression in functional activity. The response to instinct may be infinitely varied, and may even, under certain circumstances, be not more than symbolic without harm to the individual as a social unit, but there are limits beyond which the restriction of it to indirect and symbolic modes of expression cannot be carried without serious effects on personality. The individual in whom direct instinctive expression is unduly limited acquires a spiritual meagreness which makes him the worst possible social material.

All recorded history shows that society developing under the conditions that have obtained up {245} to the present time—developing, that is to say, spontaneously under the random influences of an uncontrolled environment of the individual—does not permit to the average man that balanced instinctive expression which is indispensable for the formation of a rich, vigorous, and functionally active personality. It has been one of my chief efforts in this book to show that the social instinct, while in itself the very foundation of society, takes, when its action is undirected and uncontrolled, a principal part in restricting the completeness and efficacy of the social impulse. This instinct is doubly responsible for the defects which have always inhered in society through the personal impoverishment of its individual constituents. In the first place, it is the great agent by which the egoistic instincts are driven into dwarfed, distorted, and symbolic modes of expression without any regard for the objective social necessity of such oppressive regulation. In the second place, it is an instinct which, while it embodies one of the deepest and potentially most invigorating passions of the soul, tends automatically to fall out of vigorous and constant activity with the expansion of societies. It is the common character of large societies to suffer heavily from the restrictive effect on personality of the social instinct, and at the same time to suffer in the highest degree from the debilitation of the common social impulse. Only in the smallest groups, such as perhaps was early republican Rome, can the common impulse inform and invigorate the whole society. As the group expands and ceases to feel the constant pressure of an environment it no longer has to fear, the common impulse droops, and the society becomes segregated into classes, each of which a lesser herd within the main body and under the reciprocated pressure of its fellows, now yields to its members the social feeling which the main body {246} can no longer provide. The passage of the small, vigorous, homogeneous and fiercely patriotic group into the large, lax, segregated and ultimately decadent group is a commonplace of history. In highly segregated peoples the restrictive effect of the social instinct upon personality has usually been to some extent relaxed, and a relatively rich personal development has been possible. Such an amplification has always, however, been limited to privileged classes, has always been accompanied by a weakening of the national bond, and a tendency of the privileged class to the sincere conviction that its interests are identical with those of the nation. No nation has ever succeeded in liberating the personality of its citizens from the restrictive action of the social instinct and at the same time in maintaining national homogeneity and common impulse. In a small community inter­com­mun­i­ca­tion among its individual members is free enough to keep common feeling intense and vigorous. As the community increases in size the general inter­com­mun­i­ca­tion becomes attenuated, and with this common feeling is cor­res­pon­ding­ly weakened. If there were no other mechanism capable of inducing common action than the faint social stimulus coming from the nation at large, a segregated society would be incapable of national enterprise. There is, however, another mechanism which we may call leadership, using the word in a certain special sense. All social groups are more or less capable of being led, and it is manifest that the leadership of individuals, or perhaps more usually of classes, has been a dominant influence in the expansion and enterprise of all civilizations of which we have any knowledge. It is only in the small communities that we can detect evidence of a true common impulse shared alike by all the members acting as the cause of expansion. In larger groups, {247} autocracies and dynasties, Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars have imposed the impulse of expansion upon the people, and by virtue of human susceptibility to leadership have secured a virtual, though only a secondary, common purpose.

Now leadership, potent as it undoubtedly is in calling forth the energy of the social instinct, is essentially a limited and therefore an exhaustible force. It depends for continued vigour upon successful enterprise. While it is succeeding there are only wide limits to the moral power it can set free and command, but in the face of misfortune and disaster its limitations become obvious, and its power inevitably declines. On the other hand, the moral power yielded by a true community of feeling, and not imposed by leadership, is enormously more resistant and even indestructible by failure and defeat. History gives many examples of the encounters of communities of these two types—the led society and the homogeneous society—and in spite of the invariably greater size and physical power of the former, frequently records the astoundingly successful resistance its greater moral vigour has given to the latter. This is perhaps why Carthage beat in vain against little Rome, and certainly why Austria failed to subdue Switzerland.

All large societies that have had their day and have fallen from their zenith by internal dissolution or outward attack have been given their impulse to expansion by leadership and have depended on it for their moral power. If society is to continue to depend for its enterprise and expansion upon leadership, and can find no more satisfactory source of moral power, it is, to say the least, highly probable that civilizations will continue to rise and fall in a dreadful sameness of alternating aspiration and despair until perhaps some lucky accident of {248} confusion finds for humanity in extinction the rest it could never win for itself in life.

There is, however, reason to suppose that susceptibility to leadership is a characteristic of relatively primitive social types, and tends to diminish with increasing social complexity. I have already called attention to and attempted to define the apparently specific psychological differences between Germany and England before and during the war. These differences I attributed to variations in the type of reaction to herd instinct shown by the two peoples. The aggressive social type represented by Germany and analogous with that characteristic of the predaceous social animals I regarded as being relatively primitive and simple. The socialized type represented by England and presenting analogies with that characteristic of many social insects I regarded as being, though imperfect as are all the human examples available for study up to the present time, more complex and less primitive, and representing at any rate a tendency towards a satisfactory solution of the problems with which man as a gregarious animal is surrounded. Now, it is a very obvious fact that the susceptibility to leadership shown by Germany and by England before the war was remarkably different. The common citizen of Germany was strikingly open to and dependent upon discipline and leadership, and seemed to have a positive satisfaction in leaving to his masters the management of his social problems and accepting with alacrity the solutions that were imposed upon him. The nation consequently presented a close knit uniformity of purpose, a singleness of national consciousness and effort that gave it an aspect of moral power of the most formidable kind. In England a very different state of affairs prevailed. The common citizen was apt to meet with indifference or resentment all efforts to change the social {249} structure, and it had long been a political axiom that “reform” should always await an irresistible demand for it. Instances will be within every one’s memory of politicians who met with crushing rebuffs through regarding the supposed desirability of a reform as a justification for imposing it. This almost sullen indifference to great projects and ideals, this unwillingness to take thought in the interests of the nation and the empire in spite of the apostolic zeal of the most eloquent political prophets, was generally regarded as evidence of a weakness and slackness in the body politic that could not but threaten disaster. And yet in the trials of the war the moral stability of England showed itself to be superior to that of Germany, which, in those rough waters, it jostled as mercilessly and as effectually as did the brass pot the earthen crock in the fable.

During the war itself the submission to leadership that England showed was characteristic of the socialized type. It was to a great extent spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined, and gave repeated evidence that the passage of inspiration was essentially from the common people to its leaders rather than from the leaders to the common people. When the current of inspiration sets persistently in this direction, as it unquestionably did in England, it is very plain that the primitive type of leadership that has led so many civilizations to disaster is no longer in unmodified action.

Germany has provided the most complete example of a culture of leadership that has ever been recorded, and has gone through the phases of her evolution with a precision which should make her case an illustration classical for all history. With a people showing strongly the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the aggressive social type, and a social structure deeply and rigidly segregated, the nation was ideally {250} susceptible to discipline and leadership, and a leading class was available which possessed an almost superhuman prestige. The opportunity given to leadership was exploited with great energy and thoroughness and with an intelligence that by its intensity almost made up for being nowhere really profound. With all these advantages and the full uses of the huge resources science has made available to intelligently concerted effort, an extremely formidable power was created. The peoples of the socialized type towards whom from the first its hostility was scarcely veiled were under obvious disadvantages in rivalry with it. Their social type made it impossible for them to combine and organize themselves against what was to them no more than a vaguely hypothetical danger. Against peaceful conquest by Germany in the industrial sphere England was therefore practically helpless, and to it would probably in time have succumbed. Paradox as it may seem, there can be no doubt that it was in war only that England could contend with Germany on equal terms. Paradoxically again, it was war for which England was reluctant and Germany was eager.

War brought Germany into contact with the, to her, inexplicable ferocity of peoples of the socialized type under attack, and it was by this disappointment that the first blow to her morale was struck. The wastage of modern warfare must very soon have begun to impair the isolation and prestige of the officer class through increasingly free importation from without the pale. With this necessarily began to be sapped the absolute and rigid segregation on which leadership of the type we are considering so largely depends. At the same time, the general tendency of the increasing pressure of war is to wear down class segregation over the whole social field. This tendency which intensified {251} and invigorated the morale of her enemies would work steadily against the leadership morale of Germany. These factors must no doubt be added to the moral need for aggression, the exhaustion consequent upon forced offensives, and the specific intolerance of failure and retreat that combined to bring down the strongest example of the predaceous led society that history records.

SOME CHARACTERS OF A RATIONAL STATECRAFT.

If the foregoing discussion has been sound, we may attribute the impermanence of all civilizations of which we have knowledge to the failure of society to preserve with increasing magnitude of its communities a true homogeneity and a progressive integration of its elements. We have seen that there is a type of society—distinguished here as the socialized type—in which a trace of this integrative tendency can be detected at work. Under the threat of war this tendency is accelerated in its action, and can attain a moderate, though very far indeed from a complete, degree of development. In the absence of such a powerful stimulus to homogeneity, however, segregation reasserts itself, and the society, necessarily deprived by its type of the advantages of leadership, becomes confused, disunited, and threatened with disruption. It seems probable, indeed, that the integrative tendency unaided and uncontrolled is too weak to surmount the obstacles with which it has to contend, and to anticipate disruption by welding the elements of society into a common life and common purpose. It has already been repeatedly suggested that these difficulties, due as they are to the human power of various reaction, can be met only by the interposition of the intellect as an active factor in the problem of the direction of society. In other words, the progressive evolution of society has reached a point where the {252} construction and use of a scientific statecraft will become an indispensable factor in further development and the only means of arresting the dreary oscillations between progress and relapse which have been so ominous a feature in human history. We are perhaps in a position to-day to suggest tentatively some of the principles on which such a statecraft might be built.

It would have to be based on a full recognition of the biological status of man, and to work out the tendencies which as an animal he is pursuing and must pursue. If we have evidence of the only course evolution can follow satisfactorily, then it is clear that any social and legislative effort not in line with that course must be entirely wasted. Moreover, since we are proceeding on the hypothesis that direct conscious effort is now a necessary factor in the process, we must clear our minds of the optimistic determinism which regards man as a special pet of nature and the pessimistic determinism which would reduce him to a mere spectator of his destiny. The trained and conscious mind must come to be regarded as a definite factor in man’s environment, capable of occupying there a larger and larger area.

Such a statecraft would recognize how fully man is an instinctive being and how his mental vigour and stability depend entirely upon instinctive expression being adequate. The tyrannous power of the social instinct in repressing and distorting instinctive expression would have to be controlled and directed with the purpose of enlarging the personal and social effectiveness of the individual to the maximum extent; the social instinct would no longer be left to operate on the individual under the random direction of custom and habit, of fashion and social whim, or for the satisfaction of the jealousy of age. {253}

Perhaps most important of all, a scientific statecraft would understand that the social instinct itself is as deep and powerful as any, and hungrily demands intense and positive gratification and expression. The social instinct drives the individual to seek union with some community of his fellows. The whole national body is in the present state of society the smallest unit in which the individual can find complete and permanent satisfaction. As long as the average man’s sense of possession in the state is kept so low as it is at present, as long as the sense of moral inequality between himself and his fellows is so vigorously maintained, so long will he continue to make his class rather than his nation the object of social passion, and so long will society continue to breed within itself a principle of death.

The exploration of the psychology of man’s social relations has been left almost exclusively to the operation of what we may call the method of prophetic intuition, and there is no branch of knowledge where the fumbling methods of unclarified intuition have introduced more confusion. Intuitions in the sphere of feeling—moral intuitions—have more than the usual tendency of intuitions to appear as half-truths surrounded and corrupted by fantasies of the seer and isolated from correlation with the rest of knowledge. Let us consider, for example, the intuitional doctrine of philosophic anarchism. The nucleus of truth in this is the series of perfectly sound psychological conceptions that all social discipline should be, as experienced by the individual, spontaneous and voluntary, that man possesses the instinctive endowment which renders possible a voluntary organization of society, and that in such a society order would be more effectively maintained than under our present partially compulsory system. This nucleus, which of course is not understood or expressed in these {254} definite psychological terms by the anarchist, is apt to be associated with dogmas which altogether obscure its strictly unassailable truth. Communism, again, is another doctrine which contains its core of psychological truth, namely, that individual property is an economic convention rather than a psychological necessity, and that social inequality is an infirmity of the state rather than its foundation stone. As it is exemplified in practice, however, communism is so deeply tainted by the belief in an inverted class segregation of its own, and by a horror of knowledge, that its elements of reality are wholly obscured and rendered useless.

Every doctrine that makes disciples freely must contain in it some embodiment of psychological reality, however exiguous; but where it has been arrived at by the methods of the prophet, there is no reason to expect that stress will be laid on the true more than on the false elements of the doctrinal scheme, and experience shows that the inessential falsity has for the expositor as many, if not more, attractions than the essential truth. An expert statecraft would be able to identify the real elements of discovery that were present in any fresh prophetic appeal to public belief, and would be able at any rate to save the state from the condition of petrified embarrassment into which it now falls when faced by social dogmas and experiments which win attention and adhesion while at the same time they outrage convention and common sense.

The examination of the functional satisfactoriness of society, which has been a chief object of this book, has yielded a certain general body of conclusions. An attempt will now be made to summarize these in a compact and even dogmatic form, and to add what further element of definition seems indispensable for clearness. {255}

1. All societies of which we have any knowledge have shown two general defects—they have proved unable to develop and direct more than a small fraction of the resources they theoretically possess, and they have been impermanent, so that time after time laborious accumulations of constructive effort have been wasted. According to our analysis these defects are due to the drift of power into the hands of the stable-minded class, and to the derivation of moral power and enterprise from the mechanisms of leadership and class segregation.

2. A society, in order to have stability and full functional effectiveness, must be capable of a continually progressive absorption of its individual members into the general body—an uninterrupted movement towards a complete moral homogeneity.

3. A tendency towards a progressive integration of this kind can be detected in society to-day by direct observation. It is weak and its effects are fluctuating, so that there is doubt whether it can, unless directly encouraged by human effort, counteract the forces which up till now have always limited social evolution to movements of oscillation rather than of true progress.

4. The only way in which society can be made safe from disruption or decay is by the intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect as a factor among the forces ruling its development.

This last doctrine has been repeatedly stated, but we have perhaps scarcely defined it precisely enough to avoid misunderstanding. Some such definition is our concluding task. Of all the elements we find in a general examination of the whole biological series the human intellect is the one that most clearly gives the impression of a new and intrusive factor. The instinctive side of man, with its derivatives, such as his morals, his altruism, and his aspirations, {256} falls very easily into line with the rest of the natural order, and is seen to be at work in modes which nowhere show any essential new departure. The intellect, however, brings with it a capacity for purpose as distinct from and additional to desire, and this does apparently introduce a factor virtually new to the biological series. The part that the purposive foresight of the intellect has been allowed to take in human affairs has always been limited by instinctive inhibitions. This limitation has effectually prevented man from defining his situation in the world, and he remains a captive in the house of circumstance, restrained as effectually by the mere painted canvas of habit, convention, and fear as by the solid masonry of essential instinctive needs. Being denied the freedom, which is its indispensable source of vigour, the intellect has necessarily failed to get a clear, comprehensive, and temperate view of man’s status and prospects, and has, of course, shrunk from the yet more exacting task of making itself responsible for his destiny. Nowhere has been and is the domination of the herd more absolute than in the field of speculation concerning man’s general position and fate, and in consequence prodigies of genius have been expended in obscuring the simple truth that there is no responsibility for man’s destiny anywhere at all outside his own responsibility, and that there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts. Western civilization has recently lost ten millions of its best lives as a result of the exclusion of the intellect from the general direction of society. So terrific an object lesson has made it plain enough how easy it is for man, all undirected and unwarned as he is, to sink to the irresponsible destructiveness of the monkey.

Such ostensible direction as societies obtain derives its sanction from one or more of three {257} sources—the hereditary, the representative, and the official. No direction can be effective in the way needed for the preservation of society unless it comes from minds broad in outlook, deep in sympathy, sensitive to the new and strange in experience, capable of resisting habit, convention, and the other sterilizing influences of the herd, deeply learned in the human mind and vividly aware of the world. Plainly enough, neither of the classes enumerated above is any more likely to possess these char­ac­ter­is­tics than any one else. To the representative and official classes there even attaches, at any rate theoretically, the suspicion that the methods by which they are chosen and promoted, while they obviously in no way favour fitness, may actually tend to favour unfitness. Of the hereditary class it may at any rate be said that while it does not in any special degree include the fit, its composition is random and in no way tainted by popular standards of suitability or by the prejudices and conventions of the examination room. It would seem, then, that none of the methods by which society appoints its directors shows any promise of working towards the effective intervention of the intellect in social affairs. In reaching this conclusion we have perhaps passed too lightly over the claims of the trained official as a possible nucleus of an ultimate scientific statecraft. The present-day controversies as to the nationalization of various industries give an especial interest to this very problem, and illustrate how unpromising a source of knowledge is political discussion. One group of advocates points to the obvious economies of conducting industry on the great scale and without the destructive effects of competition; the other group points to the infirmities which always have infected officially conducted enterprises. Both sides would seem to be perfectly right so far and both to be wrong when {258} the first goes on to affirm that governments as they now are can and do conduct industrial affairs quite satisfactorily, and the second goes on to affirm that the only mechanism by which society can get its work effectively done is commercial competition, and that the only adequate motive is greed. It seems to have escaped the notice of both parties to the controversy that no civilized country has evolved, or begun to evolve, or thought of evolving a method of selecting and training its public servants that bears any rational relation to their fitness for the art of government. It is not here denied that selection and training are both of them severe in many countries. Mere severity, however, as long as it is quite without relevance, is manifestly worthless. We are forced to the conclusion, therefore, that to expect an effective statecraft to be evolved from the official, whether of the Chinese, the Prussian, or any other type, is a mere dream. To encourage such a hope would be to strengthen the grip of the unsatisfactory stable-minded class upon the gullet of society. The evidence then shows that among the mechanisms whereby the directors of society are chosen there is none that favours that intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect that we have suggested is necessary to the effective evolution of civilization. Nowhere in the structure of society is there a class tending to develop towards this goal. Since from the point of view of social effectiveness segregation into classes has been entirely random, the appearance of such a class would have been indeed an extraordinary accident. Good as are the grounds for hoping that human society may ultimately mature into a coherent structure possessed of comprehensive and intelligent direction, it would be no more than idle optimism to suppose that there is any institution or class now existing which promises to inspire a fundamental {259} reconstruction. If the effective intrusion of the intellect into social affairs does happily occur, it will come from no organ of society now recognizable, but through a slow elevation of the general standard of consciousness up to the level at which will be possible a kind of freemasonry and syndicalism of the intellect. Under such circumstances free communication through class barriers would be possible, and an orientation of feeling quite independent of the current social segregation would become manifest.

Throughout the enormously long period during which modern man has been established on the earth human society has been left to the uncontrolled contention of constructive and destructive forces, and in the long run the destructive have always proved the stronger. Whether the general level of consciousness will reach the height necessary to give a decisive predominance to constructive tendencies, and whether such a development will occur in time to save Western civilization from the fate of its predecessors, are open questions. The small segment of the social process of which we have direct knowledge in the events of the day has no very encouraging appearance. Segregation has reasserted itself effectively; the dominion of the stable and resistive mind is as firmly established as ever, and no less dull and dangerous; while it is plain how far, in the atmosphere of relaxation and fatigue, the social inspiration of the common man has sunk from the high constancy of spirit by which throughout the long pilgrimage of war so many weary feet have been upborne, so many dry lips refreshed.

• INDEX
  • AFFIRMATIONS of the herd, belief in normal, [39]
  • AGE and the herd instinct, [86]
    • ——, the predominance of, [87]
  • AGE AND YOUTH, jealousy between, [86]
    • ——, reactions of, in relation to sex, [84], [85]
  • ALCOHOLISM, psychological meaning of, [58]
  • ALTRUISM, instinctive meaning of, [122]–[124]
    • ——, a natural instinctive product, [46]
    • ——, not a judgment, [46]
    • ——, energy of, [47]
  • ANARCHISM, psychological basis of, [253]
  • ANTHROPOMORPHISM in psychology, [14]
  • BEER, and comparative psychology, [14]
  • BELIEF, non-rational and rational, distinction of, [43], [44]
    • ——, characters of, [44]
  • BETHE, and comparative psychology, [14]
  • BINET, [34]
  • BREEDING against degeneracy, objections to, [64]
    • —— for rationality, objections to, [45]
  • CAT AND DOG, instinctive differences in feeling, [98]
  • CERTITUDE and knowledge, [35]
  • CHURCH, the, in wartime, [154]
  • CIVILIZATION, its influence on instinct in man, [93]
  • CIVILIZATIONS, the decline of, [241], [242]
  • COMMUNISM, psychological basis of, [254]
  • CONFLICT in the adult, superficial aspects of, [52], [53]
    • —— in childhood and adolescence, [49]
    • —— in civilized man, [49]
  • CONSCIENCE, peculiar to gre­gar­i­ous animals, [40]
  • CONVERSATION as a mode of recognition, [119]
  • DARWINISM as a herd affirmation, [39]
  • DEDUCTIVE METHOD in psychology, [14]
  • DUTY, [48]
  • ENGLAND, social type, [201], [202]
    • ——, morale of, [207]–[209]
    • ——, and the spirit of the hive, [203]–[206]
  • ENVIRONMENT OF THE MIND, importance of, [63]
    • ——, need for rational adjustment of, [64]
  • FREUD’S PSYCHOLOGY, general discussion of, [76]
    • ——, as an embryology of the mind, [88]
    • ——, biological criticism of, [77], [78]
    • ——, evolution of the “normal” mind, [73]
    • ——, hypothesis of mental development, [72]
    • ——, importance of conflict, [72]
    • ——, nature of mental conflict, [73]
    • ——, suggested deficiencies of, [88], [89]
    • ——, the unconscious, [74]
  • GERMANY, features of government, [163]–[165]
    • ——, aggressive social type, [167], [168]
    • ——, social structure, [169], [170]
    • ——, observed mental characters, [173] et seq.
    • ——, conscious direction of the State, [163], [169], [191]
    • ——, in relation to other nations, [179]–[182]
    • ——, morale of, [182]–[188]
    • ——, discipline, [189]–[191]
    • ——, conditions of morale in, [193], [194]
    • ——, objects of war with, [194]–[201]
  • GOVERNMENT, Sources of, [257]
  • GREGARIOUSNESS, not a superficial character, [19]
    • ——, widespread occurrence in nature, [20]
    • —— in man, probably primitive, [22]
    • ——, mental equivalents of, [31]–[33]
    • ——, biological meaning of, [101], [102]
    • ——, analogy to multicellular structure, [103]
    • ——, meaning of wide distribution of, [103], [104]
    • ——, specialization and co-ordination, [105], [106]
    • ——, varieties of, [107], [108]
    • ——, in insects, [105]–[107]
    • ——, in mammals, [107], [108]
    • ——, protective and aggressive, [110], [111]
    • —— in man, disadvantages of:
      • disease, [133];
      • resistiveness, [133]
    • —— in man, defects
      • of specialization, [135];
      • of homogeneity, [137]
    • ——, aggressive, protective, socialized, [166], [167]
  • GREGARIOUS ANIMAL, special char­ac­ter­is­tics of, [28]
    • ——, general char­ac­ter­is­tics of, [29]
    • ——, characters of, [108], [109]
    • ——, fear in, [111]
  • GREGARIOUS CHARACTERS IN MAN:
    • intolerance of solitude, [113];
    • religion, [113];
    • sensitiveness to the herd, [114];
    • mob violence and panic, [115];
    • susceptibility to leadership, [115];
    • recognition by the herd, [118]
  • HAECKEL, [24]
  • HERD INSTINCT, contrasted with other instincts, [47]
    • ——, mode of action of, [48]
    • —— in the individual, special character of, [98]
  • HISTORY, biological interpretation of, [99], [100]
  • HUMAN CONDUCT, apparent complexity of, [13], [14]
  • HUXLEY, antithesis of cosmical and ethical processes, [24]
  • INSTINCT, definition of, [94]
    • ——, mental manifestations of, [95]
    • ——, disguised but not diminished in man, [99]
  • INSTINCTIVE ACTIVITIES, obscured in proportion to brain-power, [97]
  • INSTINCTIVE EXPRESSION, essential to mental health, [244], [245]
  • INTELLECT, the, essential function of, [243]
    • ——, biological aspect of, [255]
  • JAMES, WILLIAM, introspective aspect of instinct, [15]
  • LEADERSHIP, [116], [117]
    • —— in society, [246]
    • —— a substitute for common impulse, [247]
    • ——, defects of, [247]
    • —— in Germany and in England, [248]–[250]
  • LE BON, GUSTAVE, [26]
  • MAN as an animal, a fundamental conception, [66], [67], [243]
    • —— as a gre­gar­i­ous animal, vagueness of earlier conceptions, [21]
    • —— as an instinctive animal, current view of, [93]
  • MENTAL CAPACITY and instinctive expression, [121]
  • MENTAL CONFLICT, discussed in relation to Freud’s doctrines, [79]–[81]
    • ——, the antagonism to instinctive impulses, [82]
  • MENTAL CONFLICT, source of the repressive impulse in, [82], [83]
  • MENTAL INSTABILITY, and conflict, [57]
    • ——, in modern society, [56], [57]
  • MINORITIES and prejudice, [216], [217]
  • MORALE, in England, [207]–[209]
    • ——, in Germany, [182]–[188]
    • ——, maintenance of, [147]–[155]
    • ——, relation of homogeneity to, [144]–[147]
    • —— and officialism, [155]
  • MULTICELLULARITY and natural selection, [18]
  • MULTICELLULAR ORGANISMS, the, [18]
  • NATIONAL consciousness, [228]
    • ——, simplicity of, in England, [228]
  • NATIONAL feeling in war, [216]–[218]
    • ——, growth and common impulse, [245], [246]
  • NATIONAL industry and private enterprise, [257]
  • NATIONAL types contrasted, [232]
  • NON-RATIONAL OPINION, frequency of, [35], [36], [93], [94]
  • “NORMAL” type of mind, [53], [54]
  • NUEL and comparative psychology, [14]
  • PACIFISM, [125]
  • PEARSON, KARL, biological significance of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, [23], [24]
    • ——, possibility of sociology as a science, [12]
  • PERSONALITY, elements in the evolution of, [87]
  • PREJUDICE, precautions against, [220]–[222]
  • PRIMITIVE MAN, rigidity of mental life, [34]
  • PSYCHO-ANALYSIS, char­ac­ter­is­tics of, [70], [71]
  • PSYCHOLOGICAL ENQUIRY, biological method, [91], [92]
    • ——, primitive introspective method, [68], [69]
    • ——, objective introspective method of Freud, [70]
  • PSYCHOLOGY of instinctive man, failure of earlier speculations, [16]
  • RATIONALIZATION, [38]
  • RATIONAL statecraft, need of, [241], [251]
    • ——, basis of, [252], [253]
  • RECOGNITION, [118], [119]
  • RELIGION and the social animal, [50], [51]
  • SEGREGATION of society, effects of, [215]
  • SENSITIVENESS to feeling, importance and danger of, [64]
  • SIDIS, BORIS, and the social instinct in man, [26], [27]
  • SOCIAL EVOLUTION, in insects, relation to brain-power, [62]
    • ——, in man, delayed by capacity for reaction, [62]
  • SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, continuous with individual psychology, [12]
  • SOCIAL stability, an effect of war, [235], [236]
  • SOCIAL instability, a sequel of war, [236], [237]
  • SOCIOLOGY, definition of, [11]
    • ——, psychological principles of, [255]
  • SOLITARY AND GREGARIOUS ANIMALS, elementary differences, [17]
  • SOMBART, WERNER, Germans the representatives of God, [177]
  • SPEECH in man, and gre­gar­i­ous­ness, [34], [40]
  • SPENCER, [24]
  • STABLE-MINDED type, [54], [55]
  • SUGGESTION and reason not necessarily opposed, [45]
  • UEXKÜLL and comparative psychology, [14]
  • UNSTABLE-MINDED type, [58], [59]
  • VARIED REACTION and capacity for communication, importance to the herd of, [61]
  • WAR, instinctive reactions to, [140]–[143]
    • —— and rumour, [144]
    • —— as a biological necessity, [126]–[132]
  • WARD, LESTER, views on gre­gar­i­ous­ness in man, [24], [25]
  • WELLS, H. G., impossibility of sociology as a science, [12]
  • WOLF PACK, the, as an organism, [29]

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

• Original spelling and grammar have been generally retained, with some exceptions noted below. Original printed page numbers are shown like this: {52}. Footnotes have been relabeled 1–23, and moved from within paragraphs to nearby locations between paragraphs. A few full stops and commas were added where they were required but were not clearly visible in the original print. The transcriber produced the cover image and hereby assigns it to the public domain. Original page images are available from archive.org—search for "instinctsofherdi00trot".
• Page [239]. The phrase “but it is must be remembered” was changed to “but it must be remembered”.
• Page [264]. Index entry “UEXKULL” was changed to “UEXKÜLL” to agree with the text on page [14].