Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

by W. Trotter

That the working classes have to a certain extent failed to develop a complete sense of national unity is obvious enough. It is contended here that what would have been easy in the early days of the war and actually inexpensive to prescriptive right, has steadily become more and more costly to effect {148} and less and less efficiently done. We are already faced with the possibility of having to make profound changes in the social system to convince the working-man effectually that his interests and ours in this war are one.

That a very large class of common citizens, incapable of direct military work, has been left morally derelict during all these agonizing months of war has probably not been any less serious a fact, although the recognition of it has not been forced unavoidably on public notice. It must surely be clear that in a nation engaged in an urgent struggle for existence, the presence of a large class who are as sensitive as any to the call of the herd, and yet cannot respond in any active way, contains very grave possibilities. The only response to that relentless calling that can give peace is in service; if that be denied, restlessness, uneasiness, and anxiety must necessarily follow. To such a mental state are very easily added impatience, discontent, exaggerated fears, pessimism, and irritability. It must be remembered that large numbers of such individuals were persons of importance in peace time and retain a great deal of their prestige under the social system we have decided to maintain, although in war time they are obviously without function. This group of idle and flustered parasites has formed a nucleus from which have proceeded some of the many outbursts of disunion which have done so much to prevent this country from developing her resources with smoothness and continuity. It is not suggested that these eruptions of discontent are due to any kind of disloyalty; they are the result of defective morale, and bear all the evidences of coming from persons whose instinctive response to the call of the herd has been frustrated and who, therefore, lack the strength and composure of those whose souls are uplifted by a satisfactory {149} instinctive activity. Moral instability has been characteristic of all the phenomena of disunion we are now considering, such as recrudescences of political animus, attacks on individual members of the Government, outbursts of spy mania, campaigns of incitement against aliens and of blustering about reprisals. Similar though less conspicuous manifestations are the delighted circulation of rumours, the wild scandalmongering, the eager dissemination of pessimistic inventions which are the pleasure of the smaller amongst these moral waifs. Of all the evidences of defective morale, however, undoubtedly the most general has yet to be mentioned, and that is the proffering of technical advice and exhortation. If we are to judge by what we read, there are few more urgent temptations than this, and yet it is easy to see that there are few enterprises which demand a more complete abrogation of reason. It is almost always the case that the subject of advice is one upon which all detailed knowledge is withheld by the authorities. This restriction of materials, however, seems generally to be regarded by the volunteer critic as giving him greater scope and freedom rather than as a reason for silence or even modesty.

It is interesting to notice in this connection what those who have the ear of the public have conceived to be their duty towards the nation and to try to estimate its value from the point of view of morale. It is clear that they have in general very rightly understood that one of their prime functions should be to keep the Government working in the interests of the nation to the fullest stretch of its energy and resources. Criticism is another function, and advice and instruction a third which have also been regarded as important.

The third of these activities is, no doubt, that which has been most abused and is least important. {150} It tends on the one hand to get involved in technical military matters and consequent absurdity, and on the other hand, in civil matters, to fall back into the bad old ways of politics. Criticism is obviously a perfectly legitimate function, and one of value as long as it keeps to the field of civil questions, and can free itself of the moral failure of being acrimonious in tone. In a government machine engaged upon the largest of tasks there will always be enough injustice and inhumanity, fraud and foolishness to keep temperate critics beneficially employed.

It is in the matter of stimulating the energy and resolution of the Government that the psychologist might perhaps differ to some extent from the popular guides of opinion. In getting work out of a living organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient stimulus. One can make a man’s muscles contract by stimulating them with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural stimulus sent out from the man’s brain. Rising to a more complex level, we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man’s soul. It is plain, therefore, that the best way to extract the maximum amount of work from members of a Government—and it is to yield this, at whatever cost to themselves, that they are there—is not by the use of threats and objurgations, by talk of impeachment or dismissal, or by hints of a day of reckoning after the war, but by keeping their souls full of a burning passion of service. Such a supply of mental energy can issue only from a {151} truly homogeneous herd, and it is therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian.

We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of disturbance to the social structure.

The simplest basis of unity is equality, and this has been an important factor in the unity which in the past has produced the classically successful manifestations of moral and military power, as for example in the cases of Puritan England and Revolutionary France. Such equality as obtained in these cases was doubtless chiefly moral rather than material, and it can scarcely be questioned that equality of consideration and of fundamental moral estimation is a far more efficient factor than would be equality of material possessions. The fact that it is difficult to persuade a man with thirty shillings a week that he has as much to lose by the loss of national independence as a man with thirty thousand a year, is merely evidence that the imagination of the former is somewhat restricted by his type of education, and that we habitually attach an absurd moral significance to material advantages. It seems certain that it would still be possible to attain a very fair approximation to a real moral equality without any necessary disturbance of the extreme degree of material inequality which our elaborate class segregation has imposed upon us.

A serious and practical attempt to secure a true moral unity of the nation would render necessary a general understanding that the state to be striven for was something different, not only in degree but also in quality, from anything which has yet {152} been regarded as satisfactory. A mere intellectual unanimity in the need for prosecuting the war with all vigour, we may be said actually to possess, but its moral value is not very great. A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little inclination to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value, and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of inferior station, equally arbitrary. To a gregarious species at war the only tolerable claim to any kind of superiority must be based on leadership. Any other affectation of superiority, whether it be based on prescriptive right, on tradition, on custom, on wealth, on birth, or on mere age, arrogance, or fussiness, and not on real functional value to the State, is, however much a matter of course it may seem, however blandly it may be asserted or picturesquely displayed, an obstacle to true national unity.

Psychological considerations thus appear to indicate a very plain duty for a large class of civilians who have complained of and suffered patriotically {153} from the fact that the Government has found nothing for them to do. Let all those of superior and assured station make it a point of honour and duty to abrogate the privileges of consideration and prestige with which they are arbitrarily endowed. Let them persuade the common man that they also are, in the face of national necessity, common men. The searching test of war has shown that a proportion of the population, serious enough in mere numbers, but doubly serious in view of its power and influence, has led an existence which may fairly be described as in some degree parasitic. That is to say, what they have drawn from the common stock in wealth and prestige has been immensely larger than what they have contributed of useful activity in return. Now, in time of war, they have still less to give proportionally to what they have received. Their deplorably good bargain was in no way of their making; no one has the slightest right to attack their honour or good faith; they are as patriotically minded as any class, and have contributed their fighting men to the Army as generously as the day labourer and the tradesman. It is therefore not altogether impossible that they might come to understand the immense opportunity that is given them by fate to promote a true, deep, and irresistibly potent national unity.

A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability, impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. All these would be tasks for the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals. Towards the Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the attempt to make himself so.