CHAPTER V (pp. 142-168)
PATRIOTISM AND POWER IN WAR AND PEACE: THE SOCIAL OUTCOME
THE greatest and most obvious present need of Europe, for the salvation of its civilisation, is unity and co-operation. Yet the predominant forces of its politics push to conflict and disunity. If it is the calculating selfishness of ‘realist’ statesmen that thus produces impoverishment and bankruptcy, the calculation would seem to be defective. The Balkanisation of Europe obviously springs, however, from sources belonging to our patriotisms, which are mainly uncalculating and instinctive, ‘mystic’ impulses and passions. Can we safely give these instinctive pugnacities full play?
One side of patriotism—gregariousness, ‘herd instinct’—has a socially protective origin, and is probably in some form indispensable. But coupled with uncontrolled pugnacity, tribal gregariousness grows into violent partisanship as against other groups, and greatly strengthens the instinct to coercion, the desire to impose our power.
In war-time, pugnacity, partisanship, coerciveness can find full satisfaction in the fight against the enemy. But when the war is over, these instincts, which have become so highly developed, still seek satisfaction. They may find it in two ways: in conflict between Allies, or in strife between groups within the nation.
We may here find an explanation of what seems otherwise a moral enigma: that just after a war, universally lauded as a means of national unity, ‘bringing all classes together,’ the country is distraught by bitter social chaos, amounting to revolutionary menace; and that after the war which was to wipe out at last all the old differences which divided the Allies, their relations are worse than before the War (as in the case of Britain and America and Britain and France).
Why should the fashionable lady, capable of sincere self-sacrifice (scrubbing hospital floors and tending canteens) for her countrymen when they are soldiers, become completely indifferent to the same countrymen when they have returned to civil life (often dangerous and hard, as in mining and fishing)? In the latter case there is no common enmity uniting duchess and miner.
Another enigma may be solved in the same way: why military terrorism, unprovoked war, secret diplomacy, autocratic tyranny, violation of nationality, which genuinely appal us when committed by the enemy, leave us unmoved when political necessity’ provokes very similar conduct on our part; why the ideals for which we went to war become matters of indifference to us when we have achieved victory. Gregariousness, which has become intense partisanship, makes right that which our side does or desires; wrong that which the other side does.
This is fatal, not merely to justice, but to sincerity, to intellectual rectitude, to the capacity to see the truth objectively. It explains why we can, at the end of a war, excuse or espouse the very policies which the war was waged to make impossible.
CHAPTER VI (pp. 169-198)
THE ALTERNATIVE RISKS OF STATUS AND CONTRACT
INSTINCT, being co-terminous with all animal life, is a motive of conduct immeasurably older and more deeply rooted than reasoning based on experience. So long as the instinctive, ‘natural’ action succeeds, or appears to succeed in its object, we do not trouble to examine the results of instinct or to reason. Only failure causes us to do that.