The Fruits of Victory / A Sequel to The Great Illusion

by Norman Angell

The refusal to face the plain facts of life, a refusal made on grounds which we persuade ourselves are extremely noble, but which in fact result too often in simple falsehood and distortion, is revealed by the common pre-war attitude to the economic situation dealt with in this book. The present writer took the ground before the War that much of the dense population of modern Europe could not support itself save by virtue of an economic internationalism which political ideas (ideas which war would intensify) were tending to make impossible. Now it is obvious that before there can be a spiritual life, there must be a fairly adequate physical one. If life is a savage and greedy scramble over the means of sheer physical sustenance, there cannot be much in it that is noble and inspiring. The point of the argument was, as already mentioned, not that the economic pre-occupation should occupy the whole of life, but that it will if it is simply disregarded; the way to reduce the economic pre-occupation is to solve the economic problem. Yet these plain and undeniable truths were somehow twisted into the proposition that men went to war because they believed it ‘paid,’ in the stockbroking sense, and that if they saw it did not ‘pay’ they would not go to war. The task of attempting to find the conditions in which it will be possible for men to live at all with decent regard for their fellows, without drifting into cannibalistic struggles for sustenance one against another, is made to appear something sordid, a ‘usurer’s gospel.’ And on that ground, very largely, the ‘economics’ of international policy were neglected. We are still facing the facts. Self deception has become habitual.

President Wilson failed to carry through the policy he had proclaimed, as greater men have failed in similar moral circumstances. The failure need not have been disastrous to the cause which he had espoused. It might have marked merely a step towards ultimate success, if he had admitted the failure. Had he said in effect: ‘Reaction has won this battle; we have been guilty of errors and shortcomings, but we shall maintain the fight, and avoid such errors in future,’ he would have created for the generation which followed a clear-cut issue. Whatever there was of courage and sincerity of purpose in the idealism he had created earlier in the War, would have rallied to his support. Just because such a declaration would have created an issue dividing men sharply and even bitterly, it would have united each side strongly; men would have had the two paths clearly and distinctly before their eyes, and though forced for the time along that of reaction, they would have known the direction in which they were travelling. Again and again victory has come out of defeat; again and again defeat has nerved men to greater effort.

But when defeat is represented as victory by the trusted leader, there follows the subtlest and most paralysing form of confusion and doubt. Men no longer know who are the friends and who the enemies of the things they care for. When callous cruelty is called righteous, and cynical deception justice, men begin to lose their capacity to distinguish the one from the other, and to change sides without consciousness of their treason.

In the field of social relationship, the better management by men of their society, a sincere facing of the simple truths of life, right conclusions from facts that are of universal knowledge, are of immeasurably greater importance than erudition. Indeed we see that again and again learning obscures in this field the simpler truths. The Germany that had grown up before the War is a case in point. Vast learning, meticulous care over infinite detail, had become the mark of German scholarship. But all the learning of the professors did not prevent a gross misreading of what, to the rest of the world, seemed all but self-evident—simple truths which perhaps would have been clearer if the learning had been less, used as it was to buttress the lusts of domination and power.

The main errors of the Treaty (which, remember, was the work of the greatest diplomatic experts in Europe) reveal something similar. If the punitive element—which is still applauded—defeats finally the aims alike of justice, our own security, appeasement, disarmament, and sets up moral forces that will render our New World even more ferociously cruel and hopeless than the Old, it will not be because we were ignorant of the fact that ‘Germany’—or ‘Austria’ or ‘Russia’—is not a person that can be held responsible and punished in this simple fashion. It did not require an expert knowledge of economics to realise that a ruined Germany could not pay vast indemnities. Yet sometimes very learned men were possessed by these fallacies. It is not learning that is needed to penetrate them. A wisdom founded simply on the sincere facing of self-evident facts would have saved European opinion from its most mischievous excesses. This ignorance of the learned may perhaps be related to another phenomenon; a great increase in our understanding of inert matter, unaccompanied by any corresponding increase in our understanding of human conduct. This latter understanding demands a temperamental self-control and detachment, which mere technical knowledge does not ask. Although in technical science we have made such advances as would cause the Athenians, say, to look on us as gods, we show no corresponding advance upon them, or upon the Hebrew prophets for that matter, in the understanding of conduct and its motives. And the spectacle of Germany—of the modern world, indeed—so efficient in the management of matter, so clumsy in the understanding of the essentials of human relationship, reminds us once more of the futility of mere technical knowledge, unless accompanied by a better moral understanding. For without the latter we are unable to use the improvement in technique (as Europe is unable to use it to-day) for indispensable human ends. Or worse still, technical knowledge, in the absence of wisdom and discipline, merely gives us more efficient weapons of collective suicide. Butler’s fantasy of the machines which men have made acquiring a mind of their own, and then rounding upon their masters and destroying them, has very nearly come true. If some new force, like the release of atomic energy, had been discovered during this war, and applied (as Mr Wells has imagined it being applied) to bombs that would go on exploding without cessation for a week or two, we know that passions ran so high that both sides would have used them, as both sides in the next war will use super-poison gas and disease germs. Not only the destruction, therefore, but the passion and the ruthlessness, the fears and hates, the universal pre-emption of wealth for ‘defence’ perpetually translating itself into preventive offence, would have grown. Man’s society would assuredly have been destroyed by the instruments that he himself had made, and Butler’s fantasy would have come true.

It is coming true to-day. What starves Europe is not lack of technical knowledge; there is more technical knowledge than when Europe could feed itself. If we could combine our forces to effective co-operation, the Malthusian dragon could be kept at bay. It is the group of ideas which underlie the process of Balkanisation that stand in the way of turning our combined forces against Nature instead of against one another.

We have gone wrong mainly in certain of the simpler and broader issues of human relationship, and this book has attempted to disentangle from the complex mass of facts in the international situation, those ‘sovereign ideas’ which constitute in crises the basic factors of public action and opinion. In so doing there may have been some over-simplification. That will not greatly matter, if the result is some re-examination and clarification of the predominant beliefs that have been analysed. ‘Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion,’ as Bacon warned us. It is easier to correct a working hypothesis of society, which is wrong in some detail, than to achieve wise conduct in society without any social principle. If social or political phenomena are for us first an unexplained tangle of forces, and we live morally from hand to mouth, by opinions which have no guiding principle, our emotions will be at the mercy first of one isolated fact or incident, and then of another.

A certain parallel has more than once been suggested in these pages. European society is to-day threatened with disintegration as the result of ideas and emotions that have collected round Patriotism. A century or two since it was threatened by ideas and passions which gathered round religious dogma. By what process did we arrive at religious toleration as a social principle? That question has been suggested because to answer it may throw some light on our present problem of rendering Patriotism a social instead of an anti-social force.

If to-day, for the most part, in Europe and America one sect can live beside another in peace, where a century or two ago there would have been fierce hatreds, wars, massacres, and burnings, it is not because the modern population is more learned in theology (it is probably less so), but rather conversely, because theological theory gave place to lay judgment in the ordinary facts of life.

If we have a vast change in the general ideas of Europe in the religious sphere, in the attitude of men to dogma, in the importance which they attach to it, in their feeling about it; a change which for good or evil is a vast one in its consequences, a moral and intellectual revulsion which has swept away one great difficulty of human relationship and transformed society; it is because the laity have brought the discussion back to principles so broad and fundamental that the data became the facts of human life and experience—data with which the common man is as familiar as the scholar. Of the present-day millions for whom certain beliefs of the older theologians would be morally monstrous, how many have been influenced by elaborate study concerning the validity of this or that text? The texts simply do not weigh with them, though for centuries they were the only things that counted. What do weigh with them are profounder and simpler things—a sense of justice, compassion—things which would equally have led the man of the sixteenth century to question the texts and the premises of the Church, if discussion had been free. It is because it was not free that the social instinct of the mass, the general capacity to order their relations so as to make it possible for them to live together, became distorted and vitiated. And the wars of religion resulted. To correct this vitiation, to abolish these disastrous hates and misconceptions, elaborate learning was not needed. Indeed, it was largely elaborate learning which had occasioned them. The judges who burned women alive for witchcraft, or inquisitors who sanctioned that punishment for heresy, had vast and terrible stores of learning. What was needed was that these learned folk should question their premises in the light of facts of common knowledge. It is by so doing that their errors are patent to the quite unlearned of our time. No layman was equipped to pass judgment on the historical reasons which might support the credibility of this or that miracle, or the intricate arguments which might justify this or that point of dogma. But the layman was as well equipped, indeed, he was better equipped than the schoolman, to question whether God would ever torture men everlastingly for the expression of honest belief; the observer of daily occurrences, to say nothing of the physicist, was as able as the theologian to question whether a readiness to believe without evidence is a virtue at all. Questions of the damnation of infants, eternal torment, were settled not by the men equipped with historical and ecclesiastical scholarship, but by the average man, going back to the broad truths, to first principles, asking very simple questions, the answer to which depended not upon the validity of texts, but upon correct reasoning concerning facts which are accessible to all; upon our general sense of life as a whole, and our more elementary institutions of justice and mercy; reasoning and intuitions which the learning of the expert often distorts.