And yet personality must be put into special enterprises in some way, or they will fail. They require for success a kind of interest and devotion that can come only from persons who do identify themselves with the group. I may buy stock in a company and draw dividends without putting myself into the work, but I could not do this unless others did put themselves into it.
The result of this requirement, working alongside of the depersonalizing tendency just mentioned, has been to make the characteristic form of modern organization what I may call the nucleated group, a group, that is, composed of a large number of members who put very little of themselves into it, along with a few, or perhaps only one, who enlist the main part of their personality. This gives a happy union of breadth and concentration, and if one will reflect upon the associations to which he belongs he will find, I imagine, that nearly all are conducted in this way. It is the only way to meet the demand for multifarious co-operation and specialization which modern life makes.
It is worth noting that the individual is nucleated as well as the group. That is, he spreads his life out over many groups, but yet concentrates his central personality upon two or three. A teacher, for example, may own stock in several companies and belong to a number of scientific, philanthropic and recreative associations, but after all he lives mainly in his teaching and his family.
This concentration is agreeable to human nature, which craves devotion to a cause. Life is energized by men throwing themselves into some one of its innumerable purposes, making themselves the blazing head of that particular comet while the rest of us gleam palely in the tail. In this way scientific theories, educational reforms, and business “propositions” are promoted with a personal ardor which reacts with antagonism to whatever opposes its object.
It might seem that patriotism must play a diminishing part in modern life, under the principle that personality is less and less embraced in any one group, even though that group be the nation. There is reason to think, however, that the need of devotion to a whole and of self-abandonment, at times, to some sort of mass enthusiasm, is a trait of human nature too strong to be overcome by the growing complexity of life. Like the love of the sexes, it is something elemental, without which life is felt to be baffled and incomplete. There is a deep need to merge the “I” in a “We,” some vast “We,” on which one may float as on a flood of larger life. The ordinary ambitions and specialties do not satisfy this need, which is certainly a large part of the real religion of mankind.
Collective emotion of this sort is always smouldering within us, and may at any time break forth and melt into some kind of a whole the differentiations of which our life appears to consist. It evidently does so in times of warlike excitement, and may well give rise to other forms of enthusiasm which we cannot now foresee. It produced the Crusades in the past, and may produce future movements equally remote from our recent experience.
The modern world makes distracting claims upon us. Shall we go with our family and class, or break away in pursuit of a larger humanitarian ideal? Is it better to “mind our own business” and go in for technical excellence, or to try for culture? Shall we follow the morals of our church or those of our profession? Shall we be national patriots or international socialists?
There is no way out but to strive for a synthesis of these ideas in an organic whole, in some supreme and inclusive allegiance, perhaps in some conception of a God to whom one may look for leadership above the divisions of nation, race, and sect. So long as we are conscious only of our country, our family, our class, or our business, we may make a kind of god of that, but conflicting ideals force us to seek a larger unity. In the heat of war we may be all one flame of patriotism; but after a while the rest of life asserts itself, and we ask what we are fighting for, demanding that it be something for the good of all mankind.
CHAPTER XXIII
SOCIAL CONTROL IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
RECENT GROWTH IN ORGANIZATION; COMMUNICATION, NATIONALISM—DEMOCRACY, DIFFUSION OF ORGANIZING CAPACITY—LESSONS OF THE WAR—WILL NATIONS BEHAVE LIKE PERSONS?—NATIONS AS MEMBERS OF A GROUP ARE SOCIAL AND MAY BECOME MORAL—NATIONAL HONOR IN THE PAST—AN ORGANIC INTERNATIONAL LIFE—ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF SUCH A LIFE; FORCE