The feelings associated with coercive domination evidently lie near the surface of our natures and are easily excited. To attain our end by mere coercion instead of bargain or agreement, is the method in conduct which, in the order of experiments, our race generally tries first, not only in economics (as by slavery) but in sex, in securing acquiescence to our religious beliefs, and in most other relationships. Coercion is not only the response to an instinct; it relieves us of the trouble and uncertainties of intellectual decision as to what is equitable in a bargain.
To restrain the combative instinct sufficiently to realise the need of co-operation, demands a social discipline which the prevailing political traditions and moralities of Nationalism and Patriotism not only do not furnish, but directly discourage.
But when some vital need becomes obvious and we find that force simply cannot fulfil it, we then try other methods, and manage to restrain our impulse sufficiently to do so. If we simply must have a man’s help, and we find we cannot force him to give it, we then offer him inducements, bargain, enter a contract, even though it limits our independence.
Stable international co-operation cannot come in any other way. Not until we realise the failure of national coercive power for indispensable ends (like the food of our people) shall we cease to idealise power and to put our most intense political emotions (like those of patriotism) behind it. Our traditions will buttress and ‘rationalise’ the instinct to power until we see that it is mischievous. We shall then begin to discredit it and create new traditions.
An American sociologist (Professor Giddings of Columbia University) has written thus:—
‘So long as we can confidently act, we do not argue; but when we face conditions abounding in uncertainty, or when we are confronted by alternative possibilities, we first hesitate, then feel our way, then guess, and at length venture to reason. Reasoning, accordingly, is that action of the mind to which we resort when the possibilities before us and about us are distributed substantially according to the law of chance occurrence, or, as the mathematician would say, in accordance with “the normal curve” of random frequency. The moment the curve is obviously skewed, we decide; if it is obviously skewed from the beginning, by authority, or coercion, our reasoning is futile or imperfect. So, in the State, if any interest or coalition of interests is dominant, and can act promptly, it rules by absolutist methods. Whether it is benevolent or cruel, it wastes neither time nor resources upon government by discussion; but if interests are innumerable, and so distributed as to offset one another, and if no great bias or overweighting anywhere appears, government by discussion inevitably arises. The interests can get together only if they talk. If power shall be able to dictate, it will also rule, and the appeal to reason will be vain.’
This means that a realisation of interdependence—even though it be subconscious—is the basis of the social sense, the feeling and tradition which make possible a democratic society, in which freedom is voluntarily limited for the purpose of preserving any freedom at all.
It indicates also the relation of certain economic truths to the impulses and instincts that underlie international conflict. We shall excuse or justify or fail to restrain those instincts, unless and until we see that their indulgence stands in the way of the things which we need and must have if society is to live. We shall then discredit them as anti-social, as we have discredited religious fanaticism, and build up a controlling Sittlichkeit.
The statement of Professor Giddings, quoted above, leaves out certain psychological facts which the present writer in an earlier work has attempted to indicate. He, therefore, makes no apology for reproducing a somewhat long passage bearing on the case before us:—
‘The element in man which makes him capable, however feebly, of choice in the matter of conduct, the one fact distinguishing him from that vast multitude of living things which act unreflectingly, instinctively (in the proper and scientific sense of the word), as the mere physical reaction to external prompting, is something not deeply rooted, since it is the latest addition of all to our nature. The really deeply rooted motives of conduct, those having by far the greatest biological momentum, are naturally the “motives” of the plant and the animal, the kind that marks in the main the acts of all living things save man, the unreflecting motives, those containing no element of ratiocination and free volition, that almost mechanical reaction to external forces which draw the leaves towards the sun-rays and makes the tiger tear its living food limb from limb.