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

by G. E. Partridge

Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in the production of war. There are significant extensions and also restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does, and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one biologically superior type. Man's work in the world is to make history. Even though war were a means of making a biologically superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.

Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and that there is very little fighting within species, for species have usually been too busy fighting their external enemies. Mitchell (10) says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence, among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question is involved in the present war as has been supposed. There is no conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.

Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way) we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.

The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak, under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse. His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the beginning have been very different as regards motive and development from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in character and to have the same ends.

There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry. These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social. One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider. Certain tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger. Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire, and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of aggression that may have been phyletically established.

Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives, therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear, and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.

Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence, the power of discriminating and of reacting to secondary likenesses and differences, and especially the recognition of the nature of death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment, of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together. It is practical, but at no stage can it be said to be wholly practical. Changes must have taken place in warfare as in other social reactions as men passed through a number of stages from primitive wandering or a relatively unstable life to a stable life, but the motives of conflict cannot have been added to in any essential way. Through all the course of history all the motives that originally made individuals of a group or the groups as wholes antagonistic have remained, although the mental processes have become generalized, fused and transformed. If Gumplowicz is right we can still detect in any great society to-day all the primitive individual and group animosities, tempered down and held in check by laws and customs, but still existent and by no means overcome and made innocuous.

These motives of warfare might best be traced out in four more or less definite principles of conduct, or four purposes of war that appear throughout primitive life. These are: 1) thievery, including wife capture; 2) the fear motive; 3) cannibalism; 4) the display motive, with the desire to intimidate and to display power (more or less closely associated with the play motive, the love of hunting, gaming and the dramatic motive).

Cannibalism, of course, is a special expression of the predatory motive in general, or it is mainly that. Cannibalism was certainly established early in primitive life, at least early enough to antedate all religion, and although its origin and history are shrouded in mystery, the motive was quite certainly practical. Evidently it was widespread if not universal. Whether it was introduced as a result of a failure of animal food, as some think, or has a still more simple explanation as a part of the original impulse which led men at a certain stage of their development to become hunters, cannot be determined. We know, however, that the alien human being was to some extent included under the same concepts as the animal enemy and prey, and presumably some of the strongest motives that led men to attack animals also included man as an object, since the alien group was regarded as in some degree different in kind from the in-group. It may have been in the great migrations when all the aggressive motives were increased that cannibalism became fixed as a habit.

Cannibalism may well have been the primitive motive of warfare as serious deadly combat, but all predatory habits must have contributed to establishing a more or less habitual state of warfare among all groups of men. The predatory raid, with the reaction of defense, when carried on as a group activity in any form, is in fact war, so far as attack and defense were serious and deadly, and intelligence and weapons were sufficiently developed to make man a dangerous opponent. This predatory motive, of course, extended to all desired objects, and these objects must have included all objects that could most simply be acquired by stealing. They included food, women, and all other possessions. The custom of driving out young males from the group, by the jealousy of the old males, and of preventing males from obtaining females within the group must have been one of the earliest and one of the strongest incentives to predatory warfare. At first all property of the group, for so long as groups were wandering, was to some extent common, and attack and defense must have been common. The objects of predatory raids which produced group combat must have changed with the social life. When habitation became fixed and property therefore more individual, probably the predatory impulse itself became relatively a less important factor in combat.