The effect of this great liberation of feeling was to supersede the precarious equilibrium of society by a state very much more stable. Before the war moral power had come to the individual chiefly from the lesser herds in which he took part, and but little from the nation as a whole. Society had the appearance of stability because the forces at work were relatively small in proportion to the inertia of the whole fabric. But the actual firmness of the structure was small, and the individual led a life emotionally thin and tame because the social feelings were localized and faint. With the outbreak of war the national unit became the source of moral power, social feeling became wide in its {236} basis and strong in intensity. To the individual life became more intense and more significant, and in essence, in spite of horror and pain, better worth living; the social fabric, moreover, displayed a new stability and a capacity for resisting disturbances that would have effectually upset its equilibrium in time of peace. The art of government, in fact, became actually easier to practise, though it had a superficial appearance of being more difficult from the comparative rapidity with which the progress of events unmasked the quack. Successful practitioners were, it will be remembered, always ready to call attention to the unprecedented difficulty of their labours, while shrewdly enough profiting by the fact that in the actual tasks of government—the creation of interest, the development of unity and the nourishing of impulse—their difficulties had wholly disappeared.
With the cessation of war this great stream of moral power began rapidly to dry up at its source. Thinly continuing to trickle for a time as it were from habit, it is already almost dry. There is doubtless a tendency among responsible personages to persuade themselves that it still flows with all the power that made the war a veritable golden age of government. Such a persuasion is natural and fully to be expected. It would be difficult for those who have directed with whatever want of skill a power so great to avoid coming in time to be a little confused between the direction of power and the production of it, and to think that they still command the moral resources which war gave so abundantly. Such a mistake is likely to prove one of the elements of danger, though perhaps only a minor one, in the present situation.
Western society, with perhaps even Western civilization, is in a situation of great interest to the sociologist, and probably also of some considerable {237} danger. There are certain chief elements of danger which we may attempt to define.
First, with the end of the war the mental orientation of the individual has undergone a great change. National feeling is no longer able to supply him with moral vigour and interest. He must turn once more to his class for what the nation as a whole has been so much more efficiently supplying. Life has regained for him much of its old tameness, the nation in which he has lived vividly during the war is resuming its vagueness and becoming once more merely the state, remote and quasi-hostile. But the war has shown him what interest and moral vigour are in life, and he will not easily accept the absence of these; he has acquired the appetite for them, he has, so to speak, tasted blood. The tasteless social dietary of pre-war England is not likely to satisfy his invigorated palate.
Secondly, the transition from war to peace is in an imperfectly organized society a process necessarily dangerous because it involves the change from a condition of relative moral stability to one of relative moral instability. To get back to the precise state of delicately balanced but essentially insecure equilibrium of society before the war would seem, in fact, already shown to be impossible. The war ran its course without any attempt being made to replace the system of class segregation, through which the social instinct works in our society, by any more satisfactory mechanism. Before the war class segregation had reached a condition in which the individual had ceased to be conscious of the national unit as possessing any practical significance for himself while his class was the largest unit he was capable of recognizing as a source of moral power and an object of effort. There was no class which as such and {238} in relation to other classes was capable of submitting to any restraint or self-sacrifice in the interests of the nation as a whole. Of course, in each case it was possible for a class by a very easy process of rationalization to show that its interests were those of the nation at large, but this was merely the effect of the moral blindness to which class segregation inevitably leads. Since every one of us is classified somehow, it is not easy to grasp how completely class segregation obtains throughout our society, and how fully in times of peace it replaces national unity. Those occupying the lower social strata may be very fully aware of the intensity of class feeling and how complete a substitute for national feeling it affords at the upper end of the social scale, just as those in the upper strata may be very much alive to the class bitterness of their inferiors; but it is difficult for both to believe how complete are segregation and its consequences throughout the whole social gamut.
It is to this state of society that the return from the relative unity of war must be. The few conventional restraints upon the extremity of class feeling that were in any kind of activity before the war have been very greatly weakened. Change has become familiar, violence has been glorified in theory and shown to be effective in practice, the prestige of age has been undermined, and the sanctity of established things defied.
It would, indeed, seem that to re-establish a society based solely on class segregation, and relying upon the maintenance by it of a state of equilibrium, will be a matter of some difficulty, and it will probably be a mistake to depend altogether on fatigue, on the relaxation of feeling, and on the celebration of victory as stabilizing forces.
Thirdly, there is no reason to suppose that the {239} tendencies of society which made possible so huge a disaster as the war have been in any way corrected by it. Great efforts are being made at present to establish conditions which will prevent future wars. Such efforts are entirely admirable, but it must be remembered that after all war is no more than a symptom of social defects. If, therefore, war as a symptom is merely suppressed, valuable as that will be in controlling the waste and destruction of life and effort, indeed indispensable to any kind of vigorous mental life, it may leave untouched potentialities of disaster comparable even with war itself.
It was pointed out many years ago in the essays incorporated in this book that human society tends to restrict influence and leadership to minds of a certain type, and that these minds tend to have special and characteristic defects. Thus human affairs are in general under the direction of a class of thought that is not merely not the best of which the mind is capable, but tends to certain characteristic fallacies and to certain characteristic kinds of blindness and incapacity. The class of mind to which power in society gravitates I have ventured to describe as the stable type. Its characteristic virtues and deficiencies have been described more than once in this book, and we need do no more here than recall its vigour and resistiveness, its accessibility to the voice of the herd and its resistiveness to and even horror of the new in feeling and experience. The predominance of this type has been rigorously maintained throughout the war. This is why the war has been fought with a mere modicum of help from the human intellect, and why the result must be regarded as a triumph for the common man rather than for the ruling classes. The war was won by the inflexible resolution of the common citizen and the common soldier. No {240} country has shown itself to be directed by the higher powers of the intellect, and nowhere has the continued action of clear, temperate, vigorous, and comprehensive thought made itself manifest, because even the utmost urgency of warfare failed to dislodge the stable-minded type from its monopoly of prestige and power. What the necessities of war could not do there is certainly no magic in peace to bring about. Society, therefore, is setting out upon what is generally regarded as a new era of hope without the defect that made the war possible having in any degree been corrected. Certain supposedly immutable principles such as democracy and national self-determination are regarded by some as being mankind’s guarantees against disaster. To the psychologist such principles represent mere vague and fluctuating drifts of feeling, arising out of deep instinctive needs, but not fully and powerfully embodying such; as automatic safeguards of society their claims are altogether bogus, and cannot be ranked as perceptibly higher than those of the ordinary run of political nostrums and doctrinaire specifics. Society can never be safe until the direction of it is entrusted only to those who possess high capacity rigorously trained and acute sensitiveness to experience and to feeling.
Statecraft, after all, is a difficult art, and it seems unreasonable to leave the choice of those who practise it to accident, to heredity, or to the possession of the wholly irrelevant gifts that take the fancy of the crowd. The result of such methods of selection is not even a mere random choice from the whole population, but shows a steady drift towards the establishment in power of a type in certain ways almost characteristically unfitted for the tasks of government. The fact that man has always shirked the heavy intellectual and moral {241} labour of founding a scientific and truly expert statecraft may contain a germ of hope for the future, in that it shows where effort may be usefully expended. But it cannot but justify uneasiness as to the immediate future of society. The essential factor in society is the subordination of the individual will to social needs. Our statecraft is still ignorant of how this can be made a fair and honest bargain to the individual and to the state, and recent events have convinced a very large proportion of mankind that accepted methods of establishing this social cohesion have proved to them at any rate the worst of bargains.