From this point of view we may see in war the preliminary process of rejuvenescence. International adjustments and compromises are made until they can be made no longer; a condition is brought about which in Europe has been termed the balance of power, until the situation becomes so complicated that each new adjustment has such wide ramifications that it threatens the whole structure. Finally, as the result of the accumulated structure of diplomatic relations and precedents, a situation arises to which adjustment, with the machinery that has been developed, is impossible and the whole house of cards collapses. The collapse is a process of dedifferentiation during which the old structures are destroyed, precedents are disavowed, new situations occur with bewildering rapidity, for dealing with which there is no recognized machinery available. Society reverts from a state in which a high grade of individual initiative and development was possible to a relatively communistic and paternalistic state, the slate is wiped clear, and a start can be made anew along lines of progress mapped out by the new conditions—rejuvenescence is possible.
War, from this point of view, is a precondition for development along new lines of necessity, and the dedifferentiation is the first stage of a constructive process. Old institutions have to be torn down before the bricks with which they were built can be made available for new structures. This accounts for the periodicity of war, which thus is the outward and evident aspect of the progress of the life-force which in human societies, as elsewhere, advances in cycles. It is only by such means that an impasse can be overcome.
War is an example of ambivalency on the grandest scale. That is, it is at once potent for the greatest good and the greatest evil: in the very midst of death it calls for the most intense living; in the face of the greatest renunciation it offers the greatest premium; for the maximum of freedom it demands the utmost giving of one's self; in order to live at one's best it demands the giving of life itself. "No man has reached his ethical majority who would not die if the real interests of the community could thus be furthered. What would the world be without the values that have been bought at the price of death?" In this sense the great creative force, love, and the supreme negation, death, become one. That the larger life of the race should go forward to greater things, the smaller life of the individual must perish. In order that man shall be born again, he must first die.
Does all this necessarily mean that war, from time to time, in the process of readjustment, is essential? I think no one can doubt that it has been necessary in the past. Whether it will be in the future depends upon whether some sublimated form of procedure can adequately be substituted. We have succeeded to a large extent in dealing with our combative instincts by developing sports and the competition of business, and we have largely sublimated our hate instinct in dealing with various forms of anti-social conduct as exhibited in the so-called "criminal." It remains to be seen whether nations can unite to a similar end and perhaps, by the establishment of an international court, and by other means, deal in a similar way with infractions of international law.
2. War as a Form of Relaxation[210]
The fact is that it does not take a very careful reader of the human mind to see that all the utopias and all the socialistic schemes are based on a mistaken notion of the nature of this mind.
It is by no means sure that what man wants is peace and quiet and tranquillity. That is too close to ennui, which is his greatest dread. What man wants is not peace but a battle. He must pit his force against someone or something. Every language is most rich in synonyms for battle, war, contest, conflict, quarrel, combat, fight. German children play all day long with their toy soldiers. Our sports take the form of contests in football, baseball, and hundreds of others. Prize fights, dog fights, cock fights, have pleased in all ages. When Rome for a season was not engaged in real war, Claudius staged a sea fight for the delectation of an immense concourse, in which 19,000 gladiators were compelled to take a tragic part, so that the ships were broken to pieces and the waters of the lake were red with blood.
You may perhaps recall Professor James's astonishing picture of his visit to a Chautauqua. Here he found modern culture at its best, no poverty, no drunkenness, no zymotic diseases, no crime, no police, only polite and refined and harmless people. Here was a middle-class paradise, kindergarten and model schools, lectures and classes and music, bicycling and swimming, and culture and kindness and elysian peace. But at the end of a week he came out into the real world, and he said:
Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama, without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things—I cannot abide with them.
What men want, he says, is something more precipitous, something with more zest in it, with more adventure. Nearly all the Utopias paint the life of the future as a kind of giant Chautauqua, in which every man and woman is at work, all are well fed, satisfied, and cultivated. But as man is now constituted he would probably find such a life flat, stale, and unprofitable.