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

by G. E. Partridge

It must be a serious function of some kind of geography to give reality to the idea of country, although of course we cannot separate entirely geographical from historical idea of country. The teaching of the geography of the native land must be different from other geography. Native land must have a warmth and home feeling about it that other countries do not have, but as yet the psychological conditions for this have apparently not been worked out. With our present facilities in pictorial art, the geographical element in the idea of country seems controllable. The minds of children are exceedingly impressionable in this direction. Intensity of feeling and vividness of imagination are at the disposal of the educator. The love of color, especially, must be used to make lasting impressions upon the mind. We need to notice also that the idea of physical country that enters most into patriotic feeling is not an idea of city streets but of the open country. It is the country that inspires the strongest home feeling, and it is the country that is the basis of the sense of changelessness and eternity of native land, that is a strong element in patriotic sentiment. This element of patriotism, it is plain, is something aesthetic. It is not so much a moral loyalty to country that is inspired by the everlasting hills, as an aesthetic love of it as the home land. This aesthetic love of the home land is a response to such stimuli as the beautiful arouses everywhere. It is susceptible, therefore, to all the influences of art—of music, picture, symbol; these must all be employed in teaching patriotism. The theme of home is especially sensitive to the effects of music. It is this idea of home, enlarged and enriched by pictorial representation of country, deeply impressed and influenced by music, and unified and imbued with the feeling of personal possession by the story of country that is the core of patriotic feeling. It is the function of art, especially of music, to help to make the home feeling of the child normal and enthusiastic—to raise it above the stage of being an "anxiety of animal life," as Nicolai terms the primitive love of home. Art must help to remove the fears and depressions that may lurk in the idea of home, which are great obstacles to the development of the higher devotions. It is the lack of normal love of home in the city, we should say, that makes socialism and all forms of internationalism that breed so rapidly there such dangerous moods in a democracy. Without true home love, we may conclude, the wider loyalties can never be quite wholesome, although they may be intense and fanatical.

The second element in patriotism we identify as the love of, or loyalty to, the sum of the customs, beliefs, and standards that make up the mores of a people. A peculiarly perplexing educational problem arises, since there are two opposite evils to be avoided We may too readily cultivate a spirit which either takes the form of a narcissistic love of one's own ways, or which, extraverted, so to speak, becomes a fanatical ambition to impose one's own culture upon the world; or, on the other hand we might become too self-critical, too cosmopolitan, and too receptive toward all foreign culture. National conceit, complacency and destinism face us in one direction, the danger of losing our identity and our individuality and our mission in the other. These problems of course confront all nations; they are especially urgent in America, because of the composite nature of our national life and the rapid changes that take place in it, and also because of the ideal nature of the bond that holds us together. We are still a somewhat inchoate and flowing mass of social elements, imperfectly coördinated, manifestly, yet deeply united by ideals which appeal to very deep emotions. Our work is to maintain social solidarity, preserve and educate certain fundamental qualities of our national life which are our real claims to individuality as a people. These essential traits, perhaps because of our newness as a form of civilization, appear to be less clearly defined, less definitely represented in institutions, and to be more abstract than the qualities that make up the essential character of other peoples.

Our educational problem is, naturally, different from all others. We are committed to an idea of liberty. We make this principle of freedom the dominant in all our national life. We have not tried, and cannot consistently attempt to centralize our educational institutions very much, or even allow our culture to become crystallized into a definite type, for this would be almost as bad as denying our principle of religious freedom. But we cannot, in the other direction, become too diversified intellectually, and still less in regard to more fundamental aspects of life, for this would break up our unity altogether, or determine it more and more in the direction of political coercion. Thus far, it appears, it has been our great virtue as a people that we have remained united by emotional forces, or by the suggestive power of an idea. Sooner or later we shall need to see whither our present tendencies lead, and education must in all probability be put to work to control and regulate the elements that make for unity and for disruption in our life. Our work as educators will be to maintain a working harmony in the affective and instinctive life of the people. We need now, and we shall need more and more, religious, moral and aesthetic unity in our life as a nation—not a forced and superficial agreement, but a deep harmony of ideals and moods. This purpose must never be lost sight of by the educator. It must be made to pervade all our educational philosophy and all our plans for the school. This educational problem exists of course everywhere in some degree, and in regard to all manner of social groups. But American life as a whole is peculiarly a growth in which diverse and even divergent elements must continue to be brought together and held together through the power of ideas which are subject to many influences. Diversity and differentiation are added as fast as the process of assimilation can be carried on. There can be no closing up of differences in a final perfection and security.

Must we not, then, make the education of instincts and feelings, and the control of the basic moods, rather than the development and stimulation of specialization and differentiation our first and chief concern? Must we not do this even at a loss of efficiency in some directions, if necessary? Certainly we must not go too fast nor too far towards industrialism. To control any tendency to over differentiation and industrialism that is now likely to occur we must have a broad humanitarianism and a humanistic ideal of culture (by which we do not mean classicism). The sharing of all experiences that represent our spirit and purpose and American ideas, and equal opportunity to realize them, must be our thought in planning our educational work. The future of America may well depend upon our power, or upon the power of our original idea, to hold people together by the essential moods in which our American ideas are represented. The production, out of these elemental moods, of common interests on a high level will be, we take it, the only preventive in the end of the growth of common interests on a low level, which is always threatened in democracies, and is the way democracies tend to destroy themselves by their democracy. Education in the fundamentals of industrial life, in social relations, in play and in art, in religion, is what we most need—the latter, we may conclude, most of all. We must have in some way a greater religious unity and more religion, not by attempting an impossible amalgamation of creeds as was promulgated by some of the founders of the New Japan, but by an education that includes and brings forth all that is common in religion. That at least is the only kind of unity that offers hope finally of making a world safe with democracy in it. This is not a plea for a back-to-nature movement, for the simple life, for a life which tends away from industrialism. Industrialism will go on, if for no other reason, because pastoral or agricultural peoples would soon be at a disadvantage in an industrial world as it is organized now, for want of rapid increase in population. But it is implied that industry itself must be made suitable for the democratic life. It means that we must go back of the identities of language and obedience to common laws, and take as our educational foundations that which American life is in truth based upon: physical power and motor freedom, the sense of liberty, the colonial spirit of comradeship and devotion to common cause, the ideal of an abundant and enthusiastic life. Merely becoming conscious of these and observing their meaning and their place in our national life is in itself a large contribution to the sources out of which patriotism may be drawn. When our patriotism is sincere enough so that we shall be milling to sacrifice for country our religious intolerance and bigotry, our social antipathies, and our industrial advantages, we shall have a morale which for peace or for war will be wholly sufficient.

Must our ambition be to teach American children that American ways are the best, and that these ways ought to be established in the world? There is both an evil and a good, both an absurdity and a sublime loyalty in the view which all nations have, that their own culture and life are the best. This conceit is in part a product of isolation, and is pure provincialism. But it is also of the very essence of the reality feeling and the sense of solidarity of peoples and of their loyalty to country. It must not be dealt with too ruthlessly. There is a primitive stratum of it that must remain in all peoples. Nations, however benighted, will not be dispossessed of this idea, but experience and education will make nations more discriminating so that they can at least see what is essential and what is superficial in their own characteristics. Certainly whatever is ethical in our foundations we, and all other peoples, will be expected to hold to. We feel it a duty to spread our moral truth abroad and our mores are necessarily right for us, and this idea of rightness of mores must imply a desire to make them prevail in the world. We may recognize, abstractly, other standards of conduct, but there is something in moral belief which, of course, cannot voluntarily be changed, and which must stand for the ultimately real in consciousness so long as it is held to be so by the mass of the people. This must extend also to æsthetic standards, and to all final judgments of values to some extent.

For these reasons we must suppose that the spirit of competition among nations, certainly so far as it concerns the ambition for empires of the spirit, must remain. Belief on the part of a people in the superiority of their own culture cannot and should not be eliminated. By this spirit the good, we may be sure, will prevail, but prevail only through opposition and competition. There can be no real compromise in the field of these moral possessions and appreciations. We must be Americans, and react with American ideas. True nationalists everywhere appear to recognize and to be guided by this truth. We cannot voluntarily lay aside our own beliefs nor help believing they are right, although we may see that were we differently situated we might change them.

There are three things at least, as regards our mores that cannot be accomplished. For this we may take our evidence and our warning from Germany. Culture cannot be spread by force, since force does not conquer spirit. Devotion to the basic principles of one's civilization cannot rationally nor safely be extended to include all customs and manners, so that we may assume that there is a right way in everything which is ours and a wrong way which is foreign. The mores of a people cannot be changed or manipulated by education and propaganda without uprooting the moral structures of society. When we begin to practice a Social-politik we enter upon dangerous ground.

Are we not, then, to take the attitude in education that our culture is an experimental culture and represents an experimental civilization? Although for us our ways and beliefs are final criteria of values in conduct, and we cannot hope or wish to free ourselves from them or to be guided by objective data, still we put them forward in the spirit of the enquirer, rather than as eternal principles. If this be right, we are not to guard our civilization jealously, hedge it about with national jealousy and bigotry but rather send our culture abroad on a mission. We are to understand and to teach the culture of every other nation sympathetically, trusting to our own foundations to hold firm. We must be so fortified in our own virtue that we shall not be afraid to send our spirit abroad to compete with whatever it shall meet in the old world or the new. This impulse to extend one's culture and philosophy is a deep one, and we believe it to be well-grounded. It has been said that the deepest impulse of British imperialism has been to extend English ways of thought throughout the world. There is truth in this. We may conclude also that unless a nation can feel sincerely that it is founded upon something that ought to endure and at least to have an opportunity to become universal, it lacks a growth principle and its civilization is not very secure. Certainly it lacks a great pedagogical advantage in all the internal work of education.

The work of the intellectual leaders of a people is to uncover this kernel of sincere belief and worth, and strip nationalism at the same time of its encrustations of vanity and deception. There are, we may suppose, at the bottom of every nation's consciousness such sincere principles which are entitled to a fair field in the competition of the civilizations and the cultures of the world. We may be sure that there is Americanism that needs to be taught both for the sake of the world and for our own sake; something which constitutes our best contribution to an experimental world in which the over-emphasis of all sincere principles can ultimately do no harm. Americanism, with all the errors it may contain, and all the limitations it may have as a universal principle is better for us and for all, we may believe, than any dispassionate and well considered intellectualism, or a cosmopolitanism that is based upon a fear of provincialism. Let us be prepared, therefore, to go forth not to conquer but to participate in the life of the world.

As regards materials by means of which we are to teach a patriotism that shall be a strong devotion to the mores of the nation, there appear to be three important elements. We have, first, a literature which contains in part at least the spirit of our national life, although it does so only in part. Secondly, we have a beginning at least of an interpretation of American life through an American history that is to be something more than a history of political events, and shall be a true history of the American people. This history must include the history of our ideas and our ideals, our literature, institutions, art, and be indeed a true social history. This history must be the main source book for teaching what our country has meant to those who have lived in it, and what these people have really been and done. This is national character study. Character study, a truly psychological and interpretative history, should teach us what we are likely to do and what we ought to do in all typical situations with which we are likely to be confronted. How far we are as yet from such a general knowledge in regard to ourselves needs hardly to be suggested. The third element in this aspect of the teaching of patriotism is something more tangible and more immediately practical. Our ideals have to some extent at least been crystallized in our institutions, where they will still further be elaborated. The participation on the part of all in some way in these institutions is a part of our required training for good American life. A book knowledge of institutions is, of course, better than none at all, but there is no reason why knowledge should end there. All people, especially those now being educated, ought to have more direct and more intimate part in all the representative institutions of our country, even in the political institutions, and perhaps in them most of all. Americanism, whatever else it may be, must be a practical Americanism. It must have ideals and clear visions, it goes without saying, but it is the making and shaping of institutions by living in and through them that must be the main feature of our social life and of our education. When the individual and the social form are molded and developed together, patriotism will be a natural phase of mental growth.