Exactly the service which extricated us from the intellectual and moral confusion that resulted in such catastrophes in the field of religion, is needed in the field of politics. From certain learned folk—writers, poets, professors (German and other), journalists, historians, and rulers—the public have taken a group of ideas concerning Patriotism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the nature of our obligation to the State, and so on, ideas which may be right or wrong, but which we are all agreed, will have to be very much changed if men are ever to live together in peace and freedom; just as certain notions concerning the institution of private property will have to be changed if the mass of men are to live in plenty.
It is a commonplace of militarist argument that so long as men feel as they do about their Fatherland, about patriotism and nationalism, internationalism will be an impossibility. If that is true—and I think it is—peace and freedom and welfare will wait until those large issues have been raised in men’s minds with sufficient vividness to bring about a change of idea and so a change of feeling with reference to them.
It is unlikely, to say the least, that the mass of Englishmen or Frenchmen will ever be in possession of detailed knowledge sufficient to equip them to pass judgment on the various rival solutions of the complex problems that face us, say, in the Balkans. And yet it was immediately out of a problem of Balkan politics that the War arose, and future wars may well arise out of those same problems if they are settled as badly in the future as in the past.
The situation would indeed be hopeless if the nature of human relationship depended upon the possession by the people as a whole of expert knowledge in complex questions of that kind. But happily the Sarajevo murders would never have developed into a war involving twenty nations but for the fact that there had been cultivated in Europe suspicions, hatreds, insane passions, and cupidities, due largely to false conceptions (though in part also themselves prompting the false conceptions) of a few simple facts in political relationship; conceptions concerning the necessary rivalry of nations, the idea that what one nation gains another loses, that States are doomed by a fate over which they have no control to struggle together for the space and opportunities of a limited world. But for the atmosphere that these ideas create (as false theological notions once created a similar atmosphere between rival religious groups) most of these at present difficult and insoluble problems of nationality and frontiers and government, would have solved themselves.
The ideas which feed and inflame these passions of rivalry, hostility, fear, hate, will be modified, if at all, by raising in the mind of the European some such simple elementary questions as were raised when he began to modify his feeling about the man of rival religious belief. The Political Reformation in Europe will come by questioning, for instance, the whole philosophy of patriotism, the morality or the validity, in terms of human well-being, of a principle like that of ‘my country, right or wrong’;[95] by questioning whether a people really benefit by enlarging the frontiers of their State; whether ‘greatness’ in a nation particularly matters; whether the man of the small State is not in all the great human values the equal of the man of the great Empire; whether the real problems of life are greatly affected by the colour of the flag; whether we have not loyalties to other things as well as to our State; whether we do not in our demand for national sovereignty ignore international obligation without which the nations can have neither security nor freedom; whether we should not refuse to kill or horribly mutilate a man merely because we differ from him in politics. And with those, if the emergence from chattel-slavery is to be complemented by the emergence from wage slavery, must be put similarly fundamental questions touching problems like that of private property and the relation of social freedom thereto; we must ask why, if it is rightly demanded of the citizen that his life shall be forfeit to the safety of the State, his surplus money, property, shall not be forfeit to its welfare.
To very many, these questions will seem a kind of blasphemy, and they will regard those who utter them as the subjects of a loathsome perversion. In just that way the orthodox of old regarded the heretic and his blasphemies. And yet the solution of the difficulties of our time, this problem of learning to live together without mutual homicide and military slavery, depends upon those blasphemies being uttered. Because it is only in some such way that the premises of the differences which divide us, the realities which underlie them, will receive attention. It is not that the implied answer is necessarily the truth—I am not concerned now for a moment to urge that it is—but that until the problem is pushed back in our minds to these great yet simple issues, the will, temper, general ideas of Europe on this subject will remain unchanged. And if they remain unchanged so will its conduct and condition.
The tradition of nationalism and patriotism, around which have gathered our chief political loyalties and instincts, has become in the actual conditions of the world an anti-social and disruptive force. Although we realize perhaps that a society of nations of some kind there must be, each unit proclaims proudly its anti-social slogan of sacred egoisms and defiant immoralism; its espousal of country as against right.[96]
The danger—and the difficulty—resides largely in the fact that the instincts of gregariousness and group solidarity, which prompt the attitude of ‘my country right or wrong,’ are not in themselves evil: both gregariousness and pugnacity are indispensable to society. Nationality is a very precious manifestation of the instincts by which alone men can become socially conscious and act in some corporate capacity. The identification of ‘self’ with society, which patriotism accomplishes within certain limits, the sacrifice of self for the community which it inspires—even though only when fighting other patriotisms—are moral achievements of infinite hope.
The Catharian heresy that Jehovah of the Old Testament is in reality Satan masquerading as God has this pregnant suggestion; if the Father of Evil ever does destroy us, we may be sure that he will come, not proclaiming himself evil, but proclaiming himself good, the very Voice of God. And that is the danger with patriotism and the instincts that gather round it. If the instincts of nationalism were simply evil, they would constitute no real danger. It is the good in them that has made them the instrument of the immeasurable devastation which they accomplish.
That Patriotism does indeed transcend all morality, all religious sanctions as we have heretofore known them, can be put to a very simple test. Let an Englishman, recalling, if he can, his temper during the War, ask himself this question: Is there anything, anything whatsoever, that he would have refused to do, if the refusal had meant the triumph of Germany and the defeat of England? In his heart he knows that he would have justified any act if the safety of his country had hung upon it.