Читать книгу The Psychology of Nations - G. E. Partridge - Страница 11

There are several interesting theories of the causes of war, now in the field, most of them inspired by our recent great conflict, all of which (but no one perhaps completely or quite justly) may be described as based upon the view that war is an outbreak of, or reversion to, instincts and modes of activity which as primitive tendencies remain in the individual or in the social life and which, from time to time, with or without social cause, may break loose, so to speak, and hurl man back into savagery. These theories of war show us, in some cases, human character in the form of double personality, or liken civilization to a thin and insecure incrustation upon the surface of life, beneath which all that is animal-like and barbaric still remains smoldering. Some of these theories we need to review briefly here.

Bertrand Russell, in answer to the question, "Why do men fight?" which is the title of his book dealing with the causes of war, says, in substance, that men fight because they are controlled by instinct (and also by authority), rather than by reason. Men will cease fighting when reason controls instinct, and men think for themselves rather than allow their thinking to be done for them. This view does not explicitly state that war is a reversion, for man may be at no point better or more advanced than a creature of instinct, but it lays the blame for war upon the original nature of man. Man has instincts which presumably he has brought with him from his pre-human stage, and some of these instincts are, on their motor side, the reactions of fighting.

Le Bon (42) speaks of a conscious and an unconscious will in nations, and says that the motives behind great national movements may be beneath all conscious intentions, and may anticipate them. The Englishman in particular lives, in a sense, a divided life, since there is a manifest inconsistency between what he really is and what he thinks. What these instincts are, Le Bon does not specify; presumably they may be either better or worse than the conscious motives.

Trotter (82) and also Murray (90) consider war from a biological standpoint, regarding it as a herd phenomenon. Trotter's view, especially his interpretation of Germany, which we are not to consider here, is original and important. War is a result of the action of a herd instinct, a specific instinct which is peculiar in one respect, in that it acts upon other instincts but has no definite motor reactions of its own. War is the result of the action of the herd instinct in man upon the old instinct of aggression. At least aggressive war is. Men in all their social relations show the play of these instincts; in war it is the old aggressive instinct, the old passion of the pack, that dominates them; and it is the ancestral herd-fears that overcome them in their panics. It is the herd instinct that makes men in groups so highly sensitive to the leader, whose relations to the herd or pack are always dependent upon their recognizing him as one of the group; that is, as acting in accordance with the desires of the herd.

It is by the union of the herd, Murray says, or through the herd instinct, that suppressed unconscious impulses are given an opportunity to operate; when the human herd is excited by any external stimulus, the old types of reaction are brought into play. Curiously, in such times, leadership may be assumed by eccentric and even abnormal members of the group—by those who are governed by perverted instincts; by men who are touched with the mania of suspicion, or who even suffer from homicidal mania.

The essential point of these biological views is that, when the human herd is subjected to any influences that tend to arouse the herd instinct—that is, to unite the herd in any common emotion or action, the old instinctive forms of response are likely to be brought to the front. Whatever the stimulus, the tendency is for the herd to fixate its attention upon some external object, which at once is reacted to with deep emotion. Plainly, if this be true, if herd instinct does throw human society from time to time and from various causes into attitudes of defense and offense with the appropriate emotional reactions, and if in such times leaders are likely to appear, having exaggerated instinctive tendencies, there is always close at hand and ready a mechanism by which war can be produced, war being precisely of the type of mass action, under strong emotion, of a group closely united under spectacular leadership, with attention cramped upon some external object hated or feared.

Nicolai (79), who believes strongly that war is wholly useless, compares it to the play we turn to when the actions performed in the play are no longer in themselves practical. War is a great debauch, perhaps now the last the race will experience. War is like wine: in it nations renew their youth. It is not the war itself, but the mood it produces that we crave, and this mood is longed for because in it old and sacred feelings of patriotism are aroused, and these feelings are themselves survivals, something romantic, archaic, no longer needed in the present stage of social life.

Novicow (83) says something very similar to this. War is a survival, like the classical languages, for example. Men begin to find beauty and glory in these things only after the activities they represent are useless. The principle of their survival is nothing more or less than that of habit. It is habit that keeps war alive; wars are a concession to our forebears, a following in the footsteps of a dead past.

We are presenting these views in a somewhat loose and illogical order, but let us look at still a few more of them. Patrick thinks of war as precisely a plunge into the primeval. War is a reaction, a regression, but still it is something more than a mere slipping of the machinery of life. It is craved; and it is craved because it offers relief from the tension of modern life. It is not quite clear whether it is because we are tired and want rest for our over-worked functions, or are merely dull and need renewed life, but in any case, when the desire has accumulated enough, back we fall into the primeval. Then all the tensions and inhibitions of civilized society disappear. Society, relieved of its cross-tensions, is resolved and organized into an harmonious and freely acting whole, seeking a definite object. Life is simplified, and becomes again primitive. Old and vigorous movements take the place of the cramped thinking of our civilized life. All that keeps us modern and evolved is relaxed.

Naturally the Freudians have their own explanation of war in terms of subconscious wishes, repressed feelings and instincts. Freud (78) himself says that war is a recrudescence (and a mastery over us) of a more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at least been transformed are changed only in the sense that they have been influenced by the erotic motive, or have been repressed by an outer restraint, an educational factor, the demands of what we call civilized environment. But let us not deceive ourselves; the old impulses are still alive; the number of people who have been transformed by civilization is less than we supposed. All society is at heart barbaric. Judged by our unconscious wishes, we are a band of murderers, for the primitive wish is to kill all who oppose our self-interests, and war is precisely a reversion to the method of free expression of our desires in action. Society and the authority of government have suppressed these primitive reactions in the individual, but instead of eliminating them altogether from human nature (which, of course, no legislation can do in any case), government and society as a whole have appropriated all these primitive actions to their own use.

Jones (37), the Freudian, distinguishes two quite different groups of causes of war: the conscious causes, all expressed in the feeling of patriotism; and the unconscious causes, which grow out of the desire to release certain original passions—the passions of cruelty, destruction, loot and lust.

The central thought of all these views, it is plain, is that war belongs to the past. It is a return to something that, in a significant sense, is the natural man—is his instinctive and unguarded self. It is also plainly implied in these views, here and there, that modern man, by thus lapsing into war, is renewing his stock of primitive nature. The modern man is in unstable equilibrium, and whatever upsets that equilibrium sends him back through the ages. MacCurdy (37), having Jones and Freud in mind, protests against these views to this extent: he says that the present state of man, rather than the past, is the natural state, and that at least in reverting to the primitive state man becomes unnatural.

The question upon which our discussion of this aspect of war is going to hinge is whether, or in what sense, the activities and the feelings aroused in war are reversions. Wars, beyond a doubt, do involve to a greater extent than peaceful life certain instinctive reactions. Wars are so impulsive and so persistent that we must suppose very deep motives to be engaged in war; and the fact that in all wars, and on both sides of every war, the feelings and the reactions are fundamentally the same, indicates that war is something less differentiated than the peaceful life. But that war can be explained in terms of instinct as such, or that war can be disposed of as a mere recrudescence of old impulses and types of conduct buried beneath civilization, is very much to be doubted. War, in the first place, in its moods and passions, appears to be too complex, too synthetic a process to be quite what this view would imply. It is too intimately related to everything that occurs and exists in present day society. It means too much, concretely and with reference to objects specifically desired for the future. War is related to the past, but to a great extent, it may be, wars represent and contain the present and look toward the future. The distinctions and differences in the interpretation of war thus implied, and the conflicting understanding of facts about society and individual life cannot be very clear at this point, but that there are involved fundamental problems of psychology, and perhaps divergent ways of thinking of history and society, and of such principles of philosophy at least as are implicated in æsthetics, and finally of the practical questions that are of most interest in these fields to-day, may begin to be evident.

There is one aspect of war, or one question about war, that seems to suggest that its problems are more subtle and less simple than the instinct-theories imply. War has been, and still is, the great story of the world, the center of all that is dramatic and heroic in life. Its mood—and that is the essential thing in it, whatever else war may have been, and in spite of all its horrors—is ecstatic. War produces, or is produced by, states of mind that affiliate it with all the other ecstasies—of love, religion, intoxication, art. We may well doubt whether any explanation of war can ever be satisfactory that does not take this quality of it fully into account. One may say, of course, that war is ecstatic just because it does satisfy instincts, that the satisfaction of all instincts is pleasant, or that pleasure is the satisfaction of instincts. But there is more in the problem than that. Love, the source of the other great romance of the world, is not exhausted by calling it a gratification of the sexual instinct, or a primitive tendency of all organic life. It is at the other end of the process of development of it, so to speak, its place as a present motive in life, that it is most significant, and it is by no means explained by calling it a product of sexuality.

So with war. Made out of instincts, it may be, but it is not explained as the sum of instinctive reactions. That, at least, is our thesis. It is the fact that war is a great ecstasy of the social life, that it holds a high place in art, that history—our selective way of reacting upon human experience—is in a large measure the story of war, that its representations in dramatic forms are almost endless in variety; it is such facts that give us our clew to the nature of the problems of war, and also to the practical questions of its future.

Hirschfeld (98), in a short study of war, has enumerated and briefly described some of the forms in which the ecstasy of war appears, or some of the ecstasies that appear in war. He speaks of the ecstasy of heroism, and the ecstatic sense that accompanies the taking part in great events, the consciousness of making history. On a little lower plane there is the excitement of adventure and of travel that gives allurement to the idea of war in the mind of the soldier, and which also glorifies the soldier; the sensation hunger; the cupidus rerum novarum; the ecstasies of nature and freedom, suggested by the very term "in the field." Add to these the ecstasies of battle and of victory, the Kampfsrausch and the Siegestrunkenheit, and the mood of war in which acts unlawful for the individual become not only lawful but highly honorable when done collectively. There is also in the mood of war the social intoxication, the feeling on the part of the individual of being a part of a body and the sense of being lost in a greater whole. The lusts of conquest, and of looting, and of combat, all contribute to this spirit of war. And finally, summing up all the other ecstasies, the strong inner movement of the soul expressing itself in strong external movements, and in the sense of living and dying in the midst of vivid and real life.

Hirschfeld's analysis of the ecstasy of war discloses deep and powerful motives in the individual mind and the social life. We can find this ecstasy everywhere in the history of war, sometimes as a national exaltation, sometimes as a more restricted phenomenon. Villard (54), speaking of the first days of the war, says that in Germany then one could see "the psychology of the crowd at its noblest height." The exaltation of a people, whatever its content, or its purpose, is an awe-inspiring spectacle. There can be no greater display of the sources of human power. In this particular time of exaltation we can see in action religious ecstasy, the cult of valor, and the stirring of more fundamental and more primitive feelings. This exaltation has its imaginative side. There is a dream of empire in it. There is an exhibition of the forms of royalty, its display, its color and its dramatic moments. There is the spirit of militarism and of great adventure, the excitement of chance, of throwing all into the hands of fate, the æsthetic and the play motives which are never separated from the practical passions in times of great exaltation.

This mood of war differs, of course, at different times under different circumstances. The French people certainly went into the great war with no such exaltation. We should have to look elsewhere in French history for the ecstatic war spirit, when the French are moved by the motives of glory and prestige, or by the vanity and eroticism which Reuthe thinks are the essential qualities of the spirit of France. But taking history as a whole there is no lack of ecstasy in the spirit of war. We find in this ecstasy exalted social feeling, joy of overcoming the pain of death, the exultation of sacrifice, love of display, feeling of tragedy, the ecstasy of exerting the utmost of power, love of danger, the gambling motive, the love of battle, love of all the dramatic elements of military life. These separate ecstasies, taken all together, make up the exalted mood of war. They represent war in its most significant moments.

In this mood of war instincts are exhibited, but they seem to be in some way transformed, so that the whole has a meaning different from the parts. The mood of war is not a mere effect, a reaction to events. It is a longing—plastic and indefinite it may be—but looking toward the future. It is a craving, not for the release of definite instincts, but is rather a force or a desire which, however misguided the expression of this mood or this energy may be, is the essence of what individuals and society to-day are. We may find in this mood, upon superficial examination, mere emotions, but in a final and deeper analysis, we may suppose, its content and its meaning will be found to be specific—purposes which constitute what is deepest and most continuous in the individual and in society, but which at the same time give to this mood its generality of direction and of form.

It is the war-mood, then, that must be explained, if we wish to understand the motives and causes of war. And this war mood, so it appears, is related to all the other great ecstasies—of art, religion, intoxication, love. It is, of course, then, a psychological problem, and one having many radiations and deep roots. The view that we are going to take is that in the mood of war we have to do essentially with what, relying upon previous studies of the principles of art and of the motives that are at work in society that produce the phenomena of intemperance we may call the intoxication motive. That this intoxication motive is a plastic force, a mood containing desires and impulses that may be satisfied in a variety of ways, since as a sum of desires it is no longer specific and instinctive, is the main implication of this view. It is this generic quality and compositeness of the purpose of the individual and of the spirit of society that obscures the meaning of history and often makes individual lives so enigmatical, and which also makes these purposes of individuals and nations so persistent, sometimes so terribly forceful and insatiable.

As contrasted with instincts, the motive of intoxication we say, is plastic, and its object—and this is one of its most significant characteristics—is to produce exalted states of consciousness mainly for their own sake. At least this experience of exaltation is the main or central thing sought. It is a tendency to seek exalted states, but at the same time, we should say, specific instincts gain some kind of satisfaction, although not at all necessarily by the performance of the external movements appropriate to them. They may obtain a certain vicarious satisfaction. The mood gives conduct a general direction, it provides a motive and the power, it is the source of interest and of desire, but its objects may be indefinite and variable.

Some general aspects of the moods that we have to consider have already come to light, and these may prove to be valuable clews to a psychological analysis of their content. There is the ecstatic state, and the craving to experience it, the love of excitement, the desire to have a sense of reality, the impulse to seek an abundant life, the love of power and of the feeling of power. These are all related, and at least they have something in common, but it is the last mentioned, the motive of power, that seems to be the most definite and to have the clearest biological meaning and implications. Indeed this motive of power (and we must here again depend upon previous studies of the æsthetic motives and other aspects of ecstasy), appears to be fundamental in art, in religion, and in history. It is a concept that gives us a vantage ground for the interpretation of some of the most significant parts of life. The idea of power and the craving for power as a general motive, but also containing and exploiting specific purposes and desires, runs through all the history of art and religion and also through history itself. Religion is based upon the desire to exert and to feel power, and it is the manifest and indeed the expressly acknowledged purpose of all primitive art, and is concealed and implied in all later art. Art is practical, an effort to realize a sense of power, to become a god (just as in his motive of play the child desires more than anything else to realize himself as a man), to influence people, or objects, or gods, to exert magic somewhere in the world. In the feeling of power which the ecstatic state produces, the belief in the power of art is established, and at the same time deep and hidden impulses are exploited. On the feeling side, and indeed in every way, this ought to explain how art, religion, and all states of intoxication have a common element, if they are not primitively the same.

A psychology of the war moods must undertake to trace the history of the motive of power, considering its beginnings as the desire and sense of satisfaction connected with the performance of definite instinctive acts, and with their physiological results, with the exertion of power and the production of effects upon objects. It is in the performance of instinctive acts, in which superiority is inborn, that animal and man obtain their original sense of power or superiority. As capacities are differentiated and multiplied, the experiences of achievement generate a mood and a more general impulse, a desire to exert power for its own sake. The sensory or organic elements tend to predominate in this generalized motive, simply because the specific actions in which the sense of power is obtained cannot so readily, or cannot at all, be generalized. Such an organization of actions and states in consciousness demands nothing new in principle, implies nothing different from that found on the intellectual side when concepts are formed from concrete experiences. The associative processes and the selective principles everywhere present in mental action are all that are necessary to be assumed here. We may take advantage, however, of the special investigations of affective logic, and the like, as giving evidence in support of such a conception of the formation of moods as is here being worked out. We are likely to make the mistake of thinking the specific instincts and the impulses and pleasure states that we find in human experiences, such as ecstasy, as the whole of these experiences, and to overlook the constant process of generalization that goes on in all the mental activity of the individual. For example, we may think of various plays which involve instinctive actions as being wholly explained by, or to be made up of, these instinctive acts alone, whereas in most plays that take the form of excitement, abandon or ecstasy, there are being employed processes which are general in the sense of reënforcing all the specific acts alike, and are yet specific in the sense that they are themselves, or have been, practical: that is, they are in reality processes that belong to the fundamental strata of consciousness—to the nutritional and reproductive tendencies. Out of these tendencies the more complex processes of which we speak are made, but they are no mere repetition of old forms. That, at least, is the way these ecstatic moods appear from our point of view.

It is precisely because ecstatic moods are presumably thus general and composite, and involve fundamental instincts (but in such a way that they are transformed, and no longer present in body, so to speak, but are represented by their organic processes rather than appearing as specific concatenated chains of motor events), with their purposes changed and their whole meaning determined by the present states to which they belong, that we should be inclined to say that to explain any great and powerful movement in the lives of individuals or nations as merely reversions is very inadequate and indeed wrong. They are emotional forces that are at work, composite feelings and moods rather than instincts. They are aspects of the continuity of the life of the present, rather than of the fragmentary past that lives in the individual. These forces are plastic, complex and organized, rather than haphazard and suppressed. They are directive, creative, but incidentally they make amends for and satisfy and exploit the past.

If these principles be valid, their application to the psychology of war seems plain. The central purpose or motive of war to-day is a craving for the realization of the sense of power. This is the subjective side of it, the unconscious, instinctive, mystical motive so often observed. The question of the actual power exerted or displayed is not the most essential point of this war mood. It is the manipulation and the satisfaction of inner factors that make the most significant aspect of these moods. History, we should hold, is in great part an unfoldment of this motive. Nations crave, as collective or group consciousness, the feeling of power. Just as we say the child in his plays wants to be a man, and the individual in his art feels himself a god, so nations in their wars and in their thoughts of wars, feel themselves more real, realize themselves as world powers, and as supreme and divine. To be first and all is indeed the purpose that runs in these moods, and this we believe is true, in its way, of the most insignificant and hopelessly decrepit of peoples. This must be taken account of in the interpretation of history, and in that larger pedagogy, the pedagogy of nations to which we just now look forward.