The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

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

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

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

Patriotism, or love of country or feeling of loyalty toward country, is a highly complex emotion or mood, and its object, an ideal construction, is formed by a process of abstraction in which certain qualities of home, environment, social objects selected by those feelings are made over into a composite whole. Patriotism is immediately connected with the fact that men, by some biological or other necessity are formed into groups, in which the consciousness of the individual in regard to the group and its members and its habitat is different from the consciousness in regard to everything outside. Patriotism is devotion to all that pertains to the group as a separate unit, and its form and intensity are dependent upon what the group as a unit does. The size and organization of the group to which the patriotic feeling may go out may, it is obvious, differ widely.

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

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

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

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

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

This transformation of the individual is something desired and sought by the individual. It comes as a fulfillment of impulses that are latent in the social life, and these impulses are tendencies to seek exalted states of social feeling, rather than to perform specific social functions. War is seized upon by the social consciousness, so to speak, as an opportunity to extend itself and become more intense, and indeed in war we see the social consciousness performing a work of genius, overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and aversions. Under such circumstances, social feeling becomes strongly fortified against many suggestions that tend to break it down. An intense ferocity is directed toward any disloyal member of the group, a fictitious character may be attributed to the enemy, and there is an imaginative interpretation of all his acts in a manner favorable to uniting the sentiment of the group. This does not appear to be merely a defensive reaction or a result of fear, but an awareness of the precarious condition of the social feeling itself, when it is widely extended. In its moments of most extreme and fanatical intensity it is likely to be most unstable. It has been said that the surest way to break down social feeling is to make it include too much. The conditions of war always create that danger. Patriotism is greatly intensified, but it is in danger of collapse. The mild patriotism and yet secure cohesion of peace is replaced by a social consciousness increased in breadth and depth, but which is liable also to sudden contraction. All nations when at war appear to be quite as much afraid of themselves as they are of the enemy. It is in part this susceptibility of social feeling to rapid and extreme variation that makes patriotism so mysterious a force. It may be extended in a moment to unite supposed incompatibles, or again apparently strongly cemented groups may fall into disunion. This seems to be due to the fact that social feeling is plastic and is subject to control and is a force and not merely an instinctive reaction.