The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

‘To make plain what that really means in human conduct, we must recall the character of that process by which man turns the forces of nature to his service instead of allowing them to overwhelm him. Its essence is a union of individual forces against the common enemy, the forces of nature. Where men in isolated action would have been powerless, and would have been destroyed, union, association, co-operation, enabled them to survive. Survival was contingent upon the cessation of struggle between them, and the substitution therefor of common action. Now, the process both in the beginning and in the subsequent development of this device of co-operation is important. It was born of a failure of force. If the isolated force had sufficed, the union of force would not have been resorted to. But such union is not a mere mechanical multiplication of blind energies; it is a combination involving will, intelligence. If mere multiplication of physical energy had determined the result of man’s struggles, he would have been destroyed or be the helpless slave of the animals of which he makes his food. He has overcome them as he has overcome the flood and the storm—by quite another order of action. Intelligence only emerges where physical force is ineffective.

‘There is an almost mechanical process by which, as the complexity of co-operation grows, the element of physical compulsion declines in effectiveness, and is replaced by agreement based on mutual recognition of advantage. There is through every step of this development the same phenomenon: intelligence and agreement only emerge as force becomes ineffective. The early (and purely illustrative) slave-owner who spent his days seeing that his slave did not run away, and compelling him to work, realised the economic defect of the arrangement: most of the effort, physical and intellectual, of the slave was devoted to trying to escape; that of the owner, trying to prevent him. The force of the one, intellectual or physical, cancelled the force of the other, and the energies of both were lost so far as productive value was concerned, and the needed task, the building of the shelter or the catching of the fish, was not done, or badly done, and both went short of food and shelter. But from the moment that they struck a bargain as to the division of labour and of spoils, and adhered to it, the full energies of both were liberated for direct production, and the economic effectiveness of the arrangement was not merely doubled, but probably multiplied many times. But this substitution of free agreement for coercion, with all that it implied of contract, of “what is fair,” and all that followed of mutual reliance in the fulfilment of the agreement, was based upon mutual recognition of advantage. Now, that recognition, without which the arrangement could not exist at all, required, relatively, a considerable mental effort, due in the first instance to the failure of force. If the slave-owner had had more effective means of physical coercion, and had been able to subdue his slave, he would not have bothered about agreement, and this embryo of human society and justice would not have been brought into being. And in history its development has never been constant, but marked by the same rise and fall of the two orders of motive; as soon as one party or the other obtained such preponderance of strength as promised to be effective, he showed a tendency to drop free agreement and use force; this, of course, immediately provoked the resistance of the other, with a lesser or greater reversion to the earlier profitless condition.

‘This perpetual tendency to abandon the social arrangement and resort to physical coercion is, of course, easily explainable by the biological fact just touched on. To realise at each turn and permutation of the division of labour that the social arrangement was, after all, the best demanded on the part of the two characters in our sketch, not merely control of instinctive actions, but a relatively large ratiocinative effort for which the biological history of early man had not fitted him. The physical act of compulsion only required a stone axe and a quickness of purely physical movement for which his biological history had afforded infinitely long training. The more mentally-motived action, that of social conduct, demanding reflection as to its effect on others, and the effect of that reaction upon our own position and a conscious control of physical acts, is of modern growth; it is but skin-deep; its biological momentum is feeble. Yet on that feeble structure has been built all civilisation.

‘When we remember this—how frail are the ultimate foundations of our fortress, how much those spiritual elements which alone can give us human society are outnumbered by the pre-human elements—is it surprising that those pre-social promptings of which civilisation represents the conquest, occasionally overwhelm man, break up the solidarity of his army, and push him back a stage or two nearer to the brute condition from which he came? That even at this moment he is groping blindly as to the method of distributing in the order of his most vital needs the wealth he is able to wring from the earth; that some of his most fundamental social and political conceptions—those, among others, with which we are now dealing—have little relation to real facts; that his animosities and hatreds are as purposeless and meaningless as his enthusiasms and his sacrifices; that emotion and effort which quantitatively would suffice amply for the greater tasks before him, for the firmer establishment of justice and well-being, for the cleaning up of all the festering areas of moral savagery that remain, are as a simple matter of fact turned to those purposes hardly at all, but to objects which, to the degree to which they succeed, merely stultify each other?

‘Now, this fact, the fact that civilisation is but skin-deep and that man is so largely the unreflecting brute, is not denied by pro-military critics. On the contrary they appeal to it as the first and last justification of their policy. “All your talk will never get over human nature; men are not guided by logic; passion is bound to get the upper hand,” and such phrases, are a sort of Greek chorus supplied by the military party to the whole of this discussion.

‘Nor do the militarist advocates deny that these unreflecting elements are anti-social; again, it is part of their case that, unless they are held in check by the “iron hand,” they will submerge society in a welter of savagery. Nor do they deny—it is hardly possible to do so—that the most important securities which we enjoy, the possibility of living in mutual respect of right because we have achieved some understanding of right; all that distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of (among other things) religious wars and St. Bartholomew massacres, and distinguishes British political methods from those Turkey or Venezuela, are due to the development of moral forces (since physical force is most resorted to in the less desirable age and area), and particularly to the general recognition that you cannot solve religious and political problems by submitting them to the irrelevant hazard of physical force.

‘We have got thus far, then: both parties to the discussion are agreed as to the fundamental fact that civilisation is based upon moral and intellectual elements in constant danger of being overwhelmed by more deeply-rooted anti-social elements. The plain facts of history past and present are there to show that where those moral elements are absent the mere fact of the possession of arms only adds to the destructiveness of the resulting welter.

‘Yet all attempts to secure our safety by other than military means are not merely regarded with indifference; they are more generally treated either with a truly ferocious contempt or with definite condemnation.

‘This apparently on two grounds: first, that nothing that we can do will affect the conduct of other nations; secondly, that, in the development of those moral forces which do undoubtedly give us security, government action—which political effort has in view—can play no part.

‘Both assumptions are, of course, groundless. The first implies not only that our own conduct and our own ideas need no examination, but that ideas current in one country have no reaction on those of another, and that the political action of one State does not affect that of others. “The way to be sure of peace is to be so much stronger than your enemy that he will not dare to attack you,” is the type of accepted and much-applauded “axioms” the unfortunate corollary of which is (since both parties can adopt the rule) that peace will only be finally achieved when each is stronger than the other.