Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

But, according to the advocates of Realpolitik, facts and realities mean nothing but the sole rule of interest, selfishness, ruthlessness, force, cunning and contempt for all foreign rights; whereas fairness, justice, the curbing and suppression of one's own desires, consideration for one's neighbour, love of mankind—all these are phrases, or let us rather say ideals, which are to be found, not in the world, but in the brains of a small minority of enthusiasts without influence. He who confesses to such views, to whom the worst impulses alone are real, while he relegates Morality to the sphere of the unreal, of visions far from reality, is a pessimist as long as his convictions remain theory; but if he puts them into practice, or urges the leaders of the state to do so, then he is an evildoer who breaks the moral law as soon as it appears unaccompanied by the police, the prison and the gallows. In private life a man with such views is a criminal who obeys his evil instincts whenever he may hope to evade the law of the state. The bandit, who is clever enough to manage so that police and court of justice cannot touch him, is a practical politician, for the riches he acquires by theft, robbery and murder are realities; the criminal code is but a scrap of paper, something visionary, as long as its minions do not seize him by the collar.

The immorality of politics, the way in which the foundations of Morality are ignored by the state, is the natural consequence of the power of rulers; for in them all the original instincts of the human beast still untamed by moral law are exaggerated by the intense realization of their loftiness, the glory and the illustriousness of their position, and they are not forced by wholesome fear of the means of coercion wielded by the moral administration to control themselves, to exercise and develop their organic powers of inhibition. The elevation of this fact of the Immorality of the state to a theory that the state is not bound by moral law, is derived from the conception which philosophers of all ages, from ancient times to the present day, have formed of the character and the purpose of the state. Plato, in the Republic, maintains the omnipotence of the state, which nothing and no one can limit; and Aristotle, not rising to such heights of error as his master, says more soberly: "It is a grave mistake to believe that every citizen is his own master." The Italian philosopher Filangieri considers the guiding principle and motive power of the state to be "love of power," which a fool three centuries later called the "will to power," whereupon other fools declared this to be a brand-new discovery.

Hegel goes farthest of all in his idolatry of the state; according to him the state is not alone moral, but Morality itself, just as God is according to the theologians. As it would be arrogant blasphemy to characterize anything that God ordains as immoral, as it would be nonsensical to wish to impose upon God a moral law from outside, not emanating from Him, to which He would have to submit even against His will, so it is reprehensible to judge the actions of the state by the standard of individual Morality; and it is equally absurd to admit any moral coercion imposed on the state from outside, any guiding principle other than the law of its necessities and the logic which indicates the means needed to attain the necessary end.

According to Treitschke the state is the highest form of human existence; nothing higher than the state exists. He has never asked himself the question whether, after all, humanity itself is not superior to the state which is the form, a form, of its existence and therefore not its essence.

From his conviction that the state is the highest thing existing, Treitschke concludes that certain moral duties, e.g. that of self-sacrifice, cannot possibly exist for the state. "The individual is to sacrifice himself for the sake of a higher community of which he is a member; but the state is itself the highest thing in the outer community of mankind, therefore it can never be confronted with the duty of self-destruction."

How obvious that seems! How grossly mistaken it is all the same! First of all the state is not the highest thing; there is something higher, and that is humanity; if then we recognize a moral duty of self-sacrifice for humanity, theoretically this duty may arise just as much for the state as for the individual.

Secondly, the idea that owing to Morality the state might one day actually be in such a position as to be forced to sacrifice itself is the most shocking nonsense. How could that possibly be? If the state always acts with strict Morality towards its citizens and foreign states, it is simply impossible that it should have to sacrifice its existence in the fulfilment of some task; for tasks only arise when, and as long as, the state exists. Once it is disintegrated there can be no task, either theoretically or practically, for it to accomplish, therefore it cannot have to sacrifice itself for such a task. But if the Immorality of another state, or of a minority of its citizens, should endanger it, threaten it with an unjust attack from within or without, then there is no rule of Morality that can forbid it to defend itself to the last, and its self-sacrifice could then only be a result of its complete annihilation in a justifiable war of necessity. On the other hand, even the most unscrupulous practical politicians do not possess any absolute guarantee against defeat, though they declare a war of aggression to be permissible, whether waged on account of an itching for power, for purposes of conquest, for the winning of prestige, predominance or economic advantages.

Thirdly and lastly, the duty of self-sacrifice for the state can only be envisaged and seriously discussed, if the state be conceived as a person to whom the duty of Morality applies in every way; but this conception is mystic anthropomorphism, not sober, sensible recognition of realities such as the practical politicians love to boast of.

For, as a matter of fact, the state is not a person but a concept, an institution created by man in the interests of one individual, of a few, of many or of all; an organization of habits and interests, a relation in which individuals live together. The mysticism of the weak-minded has transformed it into a person with human features, with the qualities, desires, duties, and aims of an individual; these men are intellectually incapable of penetrating to the fundamental facts underlying the concept, and cling entirely to word-pictures which are mere verbalism. Scholasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was chiefly occupied in a quarrel about Nominalism and Realism. It was allowed to drop and was not fought out to a decision. Perhaps because it is impossible to convince these superficial babblers who take a name or a word for an object actually existent in time and space, that they are in error. The fight between Abelard and Roscelet and that between the two of them and Duns Scotus ought to be taken up again. Above all, one ought to knock it into the heads of those who make a fetish of the state that it is a mere word, the famous "flatus vocis" of the Nominalists, which they worship, to which they build altars and make human sacrifices.

This humiliating form of idolatry is practised by the school of sociologists known as organicistic, as well as by the practical politicians. This school maintains that the individual has no independent existence at all, that he continues to exist only in the community, by the community, as a totally subordinate, dependent and incomplete fraction of the community; that the only real thing in the species is society, the state; that this must be regarded as a living organism, in which the individual human being is merely a cell which in solitude, outside the community and detached from it, is as little capable of life and has as little significance as a cell separated from a highly differentiated creature, such as a man or some other mammal. In my book "Der Sinn der Geschichte" (The Meaning of History), I threw as much light as I possibly could on this superstition, and I pointed out in detail its lack of sense as well as its dangers. I can, therefore, content myself here with a résumé and a few indications.