Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

by W. Trotter

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

Religious feeling is therefore a character inherent in the very structure of the human mind, and is the expression of a need which must be recognized by the biologist as neither superficial nor transitory. It must be admitted that some philosophers and {114} men of science have at times denied to the religious impulses of man their true dignity and importance. Impelled perhaps by a desire to close the circle of a materialistic conception of the universe, they have tended to belittle the significance of such phenomena as they were unable to reconcile with their principles and bring within the iron circle of their doctrine. To deal with religion in this way has not only been an outrage upon true scientific method, but has always led to a strong reaction in general opinion against any radical inquiry by science into the deeper problems of man’s nature and status. A large and energetic reaction of this kind prevails to-day. There can be little doubt that it was precipitated, if not provoked, by attempts to force a harsh and dogmatic materialism into the status of a general philosophy. As long as such a system is compelled to ignore, to depreciate, or to deny the reality of such manifestly important phenomena as the altruistic emotions, the religious needs and feelings, the experiences of awe and wonder and beauty, the illumination of the mystic, the rapture of the prophet, the unconquerable endurance of the martyr, so long must it fail in its claims to universality. It is therefore necessary to lay down with the strongest emphasis the proposition that the religious needs and feelings of man are a direct and necessary manifestation of the inheritance of instinct with which he is born, and therefore deserve consideration as respectful and observation as minute as any other biological phenomenon.

2. He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away. {115} It can make him acquiese in his own punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is in this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man. That a creature of strong appetites and luxurious desires should come to tolerate uncomplainingly his empty belly, his chattering teeth, his naked limbs, and his hard bed is miracle enough. What are we to say of a force which, when he is told by the full-fed and well-warmed that his state is the more blessed can make him answer, “How beautiful! How true!” In the face of so effectual a negation, not merely of experience and common sense but also of actual hunger and privation, it is not possible to set any limits to the power of the herd over the individual.

3. He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in his panics. These activities are by no means limited to the outbursts of actual crowds, but are to be seen equally clearly in the hue and cry of newspapers and public after some notorious criminal or scapegoat, and in the success of scaremongering by the same agencies.

4. He is remarkably susceptible to leadership. This quality in man may very naturally be thought to have a basis essentially rational rather than instinctive if its manifestations are not regarded with a special effort to attain an objective attitude. How thoroughly reasonable it appears that a body of men seeking a common object should put themselves under the guidance of some strong and expert {116} personality who can point out the path most profitably to be pursued, who can hearten his followers and bring all their various powers into a harmonious pursuit of the common object. The rational basis of the relation is, however, seen to be at any rate open to discussion when we consider the qualities in a leader upon which his authority so often rests, for there can be little doubt that their appeal is more generally to instinct than to reason. In ordinary politics it must be admitted that the gift of public speaking is of more decisive value than anything else. If a man is fluent, dextrous, and ready on the platform, he possesses the one indispensable requisite for statesmanship; if in addition he has the gift of moving deeply the emotions of his hearers, his capacity for guiding the infinite complexities of national life becomes undeniable. Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge either of affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality. Indeed, the mere absence of such seems to be an advantage; for originality is apt to appear to the people as flightiness, scepticism as feebleness, caution as doubt of the great political principles that may happen at the moment to be immutable. The successful shepherd thinks like his sheep, and can lead his flock only if he keeps no more than the shortest distance in advance. He must remain, in fact, recognizable as one of the flock, magnified no doubt, louder, coarser, above all with more urgent wants and ways of expression than the common sheep, but in essence to their feeling of the same flesh with them. In the human herd the necessity of the leader bearing unmistakable marks of identification is equally essential. Variations from the normal standard in intellectual matters are tolerated {117} if they are not very conspicuous, for man has never yet taken reason very seriously, and can still look upon intellectuality as not more than a peccadillo if it is not paraded conspicuously; variations from the moral standard are, however, of a much greater significance as marks of identification, and when they become obvious, can at once change a great and successful leader into a stranger and an outcast, however little they may seem to be relevant to the adequate execution of his public work. If a leader’s marks of identity with the herd are of the right kind, the more they are paraded the better. We like to see photographs of him nursing his little grand-daughter, we like to know that he plays golf badly, and rides the bicycle like our common selves, we enjoy hearing of “pretty incidents” in which he has given the blind crossing-sweeper a penny or begged a glass of water at a wayside cottage—and there are excellent biological reasons for our gratification.

In times of war leadership is not less obviously based on instinct, though naturally, since the herd is exposed to a special series of stresses, manifestations of it are also somewhat special. A people at war feels the need of direction much more intensely than a people at peace, and as always they want some one who appeals to their instinctive feeling of being directed, comparatively regardless of whether he is able in fact to direct. This instinctive feeling inclines them to the choice of a man who presents at any rate the appearance and manners of authority and power rather than to one who possesses the substance of capacity but is denied the shadow. They have their conventional pictures of the desired type—the strong, silent, relentless, the bold, outspoken, hard, and energetic—but at all costs he must be a “man,” a “leader who can lead,” a shepherd, in fact, who, by his gesticulations and {118} his shouts, leaves his flock in no doubt as to his presence and his activity. It is touching to remember how often a people in pursuit of this ideal has obtained and accepted in response to its prayers nothing but melodramatic bombast, impatience, rashness, and foolish, boasting truculence; and to remember how often a great statesman in his country’s need has had to contend not merely with her foreign enemies, but with those at home whose vociferous malignity has declared his magnanimous composure to be sluggishness, his cautious scepticism to be feebleness, and his unostentatious resolution to be stupidity.

5. His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition of him as a member of the herd. It is important to the success of a gregarious species that individuals should be able to move freely within the large unit while strangers are excluded. Mechanisms to secure such personal recognition are therefore a characteristic feature of the social habit. The primitive olfactory greeting common to so many of the lower animals was doubtless rendered impossible for man by his comparative loss of the sense of smell long before it ceased to accord with his pretensions, yet in a thriving active species the function of recognition was as necessary as ever. Recognition by vision could be of only limited value, and it seems probable that speech very early became the accepted medium. Possibly the necessity to distinguish friend from foe was one of the conditions which favoured the development of articulate speech. Be this as it may, speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition. As is usual with instinctive activities in man, the actual state of affairs is concealed by a deposit of rationalized explanation which is apt to discourage merely superficial inquiry. The function of conversation is, it is to be supposed, ordinarily regarded {119} as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers, and are known to be so by each. The process, however, is none the less satisfactory for this; indeed, it seems even to derive its satisfactoriness therefrom. The interchange of the conventional lead and return is obviously very far from being tedious or meaningless to the interlocutors. They can, however, have derived nothing from it but the confirmation to one another of their sympathy and of the class or classes to which they belong.

Conversations of greeting are naturally particularly rich in the exchange of purely ceremonial remarks, ostensibly based on some subject like the weather, in which there must necessarily be an absolute community of knowledge. It is possible, however, for a long conversation to be made up entirely of similar elements, and to contain no trace of any conveyance of new ideas; such intercourse is probably that which on the whole is most satisfactory to the “normal” man and leaves him more comfortably stimulated than would originality or brilliance, or any other manifestation of the strange and therefore of the disreputable.

Conversation between persons unknown to one another is also—when satisfactory—apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack {120} and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manœuvres of the dog, and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.