8. To go on ignoring the economic unity and interdependence of Europe, to refuse to subject nationalist pugnacities to that needed unity because ‘economics’ are sordid, is to refuse to face the needs of human life, and the forces that shape it. Such an attitude, while professing moral elevation, involves a denial of the right of others to live. Its worst defect, perhaps, is that its heroics are fatal to intellectual rectitude, to truth. No society built upon such foundations can stand.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT ILLUSION ARGUMENT
THE preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions concerning The Great Illusion than with its positive propositions. What, outlined as briefly as possible, was its central argument?
That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: Military preponderance, conquest, as a means to man’s most elemental needs—bread, sustenance—is futile, because the processes (exchange, division of labour) to which the dense populations of modern Western society are compelled to resort, cannot be exacted by military coercion; they can only operate as the result of a large measure of voluntary acquiescence by the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is indispensable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that hamper human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters.[111] The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and fears, that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation’s political security or independence. Political security and economic well-being can only be ensured by international co-operation. This must be economic as well as political, be directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for the purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of some economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether militarily powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and means of subsistence.
It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more workable international policy by undermining the main conceptions and prepossessions inimical to an international order.[112] It did not elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point clearly to certain conclusions on that head.
While arguing that prevailing beliefs (false beliefs for the most part) and feelings (largely directed by the false beliefs) were the determining factors in international politics, the author challenged the prevailing assumption of the unchangeability of those ideas and feelings, particularly the proposition that war between human groups arises out of instincts and emotions incapable of modification or control or re-direction by conscious effort. The author placed equal emphasis on both parts of the proposition—that dealing with the alleged immutability of human pugnacity and ideas, and that which challenged the representation of war as an inevitable struggle for physical sustenance—if only because no exposure of the biological fallacy would be other than futile if the former proposition were true.[113]
If conduct in these matters is the automatic reaction to uncontrollable instinct and is not affected by ideas, or if ideas themselves are the mere reflection of that instinct, obviously it is no use attempting demonstrations of futility, economic or other. The more we demonstrate the intensity of our inherent pugnacity and irrationalism, the more do we in fact demonstrate the need for the conscious control of those instincts. The alternative conclusion is fatalism: an admission not only that our ship is not under control, but that we have given up the task of getting it under control. We have surrendered our freedom.
Moreover, our record shows that the direction taken by our pugnacities—their objective—is in fact largely determined by traditions and ideas which are in part at least the sum of conscious intellectual effort. The history of religious persecution—its wars, inquisitions, repressions—shows a great change (which we must admit as a fact, whether we regard it as good or bad) not only of idea but of feeling.[114] The book rejected instinct as sufficient guide and urged the need of discipline by intelligent foresight of consequence.
To examine our subconscious or unconscious motives of conduct is the first step to making them conscious and modifying them.
This does not imply that instincts—whether of pugnacity or other—can readily be repressed by a mere effort of will. But their direction, the object upon which they expend themselves, will depend upon our interpretation of facts. If we interpret the hailstorm or the curdled milk in one way, our fear and hatred of the witch is intense; the same facts interpreted another way make the witch an object of another emotion, pity.