Читать книгу The Psychology of Nations - G. E. Partridge - Страница 9

The simplest possible interpretation of the causes of war that might be offered is that war is a natural relation between original herds or groups of men, inspired by the predatory instinct or by some other instinct of the herd. To explain war, then, one need only refer to this instinct as final, or at most account for the origin and genesis of the instinct in question in the animal world. Some writers express this very view, calling war an expression of an instinct or of several instincts; others find different or more complex beginnings of war.

Nusbaum (86) says that both offense and defense are based upon an expansion impulse. Nicolai (79) sees the beginning of war in individual predatory acts, involving violence and the need of defense. Again we find the migratory instinct, the instinct that has led groups of men to move and thus to interfere with one another, regarded as the cause of war, or as an important factor in the causes. Sometimes a purely physiological or growth impulse is invoked, or vaguely the inability of primitive groups to adapt themselves to conditions, or to gain access to the necessities of life. Le Bon (42) speaks of the hunger and the desire that led Germanic forces as ancient hordes to turn themselves loose upon the world.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of the nature of the impulses or instincts which actuated the conduct of men originally and brought them into opposition, as groups, to one another, we do find at least some suggestion of a working hypothesis in these simple explanations of war. Granted the existence of groups formed by the accident of birth and based upon the most primitive protective and economic associations, and assuming the presence of the emotions of anger and fear or any instinct which is expressed as an impulse or habit of the group, we might say that the conditions and factors for the beginning of warfare are all present. When groups have desires that can best and most simply be satisfied by the exertion of force upon other groups, something equivalent to war has begun.

If we take the group (as herd or pack) and the instinct as the original factors or data of society, however, we probably simplify the situation too much. The question arises whether the motives are not more complex, even from the beginning, and whether both the tendencies or impulses by which the group was formed or held together and the motives behind aggressive conduct against other groups have not been produced or developed in the course of social relations, rather than have been brought up from animal life, or at any point introduced as instincts. We notice at least that animals living in groups do not in general become aggressive within the species. Possibly it was by some peculiarity of man's social existence, or his superior endowment of intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike creature. Man does seem to be a creature of feelings rather than of instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live in large groups at all. So he never acquired the mechanisms either for aggression or defense that some creatures have. Apparently he inherited neither the physical powers nor the warlike spirit nor the aggressive and predatory instincts that would have been necessary to make of him a natural fighting animal; but rather, perhaps, he has acquired his warlike habits, so to speak, since arriving at man's estate. Endowed with certain tendencies which express themselves with considerable variability in the processes by which the functions of sex and nutrition are carried out, man never acquired the definiteness of character and conduct that some animals have. He learned more from animals, it may be, than he inherited from them, and it is quite likely that far back in his animal ancestry he had greater flexibility or adaptability than other animals. The aggressive instinct, the herd instinct, the predatory instinct, the social instinct, the migratory instinct, may never have been carried very far in the stock from which man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken rise.

The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection—that war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races, the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in connection with the present war. This biological theory or apology of war appears in several forms, as applied to-day. They say that racial stocks contend with one another for existence, and with this goes the belief that nations fight for life, and that defeat in war tends towards the extermination of nations. The Germans, we often hear, were fighting for national existence, and the issue was to be a judgment upon the fitness of their race to survive. This view is very often expressed. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, for example, say that the same aggressive motives prevail as always in warfare: nations struggle for survival, and this struggle for survival must now and again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder, and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that absolute hostility is a law of nature in the world.

These views contain at least two very doubtful assumptions. One is that nations do actually fight for existence—that warfare is thus selective to the point of eliminating races. The other is that in warlike conflicts the victors are the superior peoples, the better fitted for survival. Confusion arises and the discussion is complicated by the fact that conflicts of men as groups of individuals within the same species are somewhat anomalous among biological forms of struggle. Commonly, struggle takes place among individuals, organisms having definite characteristics and but slightly variable each from its own kind contending with one another, by direct competition or through adaptation, in the first case individuals striving to obtain actually the same objects. Or, again, species having the same relations to one another that individuals have, contend in a similar manner.

Primitive groups of men, however, are not so definite; they are not biological entities in any such sense as individuals and species are. They are not definitely brought into conflict with one another, in general, as contending for the same objects, and it is difficult to see how, in the beginning, at least, economic pressure has been a factor at all in their relations. Whatever may have been the motive that for the most part was at work in primitive warfare, it is not at all evident that superior groups had any survival value. The groups that contended with one another presumably differed most conspicuously in the size of the group, and this was determined largely by chance conditions. Other differences must have been quite subordinate to this, and have had little selective value. The conclusion is that the struggle of these groups with one another is not essentially a biological phenomenon.

The fact is that peace rather than war, taking the history of the human race as a whole, is the condition in which selection of the fittest is most active, for it is the power of adaptation to the conditions of stable life, which are fairly uniform for different groups over wide areas, that tests vitality and survival values, so far as these values are biological. It may be claimed that war is very often, if not generally, a means of interrupting favorable selective processes, the unfit tending to prevail temporarily by force of numbers, or even because of qualities that antagonize biological progress. Viewing war in its later aspects, we can see that it is often when nations are failing in natural competition that they resort to the expedient of war to compensate for this loss, although they do not usually succeed thereby in improving their economic condition as they hope, or increase their chance of survival, or even demonstrate their survival value. It is notorious that nations that conquer tend to spend their vitality in conquest and introduce various factors of deterioration into their lives. The inference is that a much more complex relation exists among groups than the biological hypothesis allows. Survival value indeed, as applied to men in groups, is not a very clear concept. There may be several different criteria of survival value, not comparable in any quantitative way among themselves.

Scheler (77) says that we cannot account for war as a purely biological phenomenon. Its roots lie deep in organic life, but there is no direct development or exclusive development from animal behavior to human. War is peculiarly human. That, in a way, may be accepted as the truth. Warfare as we know it among human groups, as conflict within the species is due in some way to, or is made possible by, the secondary differentiations within species which give to groups, so to speak, a pseudo-specific character. And these differences depend largely upon the conditions that enter into the formation of groups—upon desires, impulses and needs arising in the social life rather than in instinct as such. These characteristic differences are not variations having selective value, but are traits that merely differentiate the groups as historical entities. These secondary variations have not resulted in the elimination of those having inferior qualities, but have shared the fortunes of the groups that possessed them—the fortunes both of war and of peace. War, from this point of view, belongs to history rather than to biology. It belongs to the realm of the particular rather than to the general in human life. War has favored the survival of this or that group in a particular place, but has probably not been instrumental in producing any particular type of character in the world, either physical or mental.

Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in the production of war. There are significant extensions and also restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does, and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one biologically superior type. Man's work in the world is to make history. Even though war were a means of making a biologically superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.

Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and that there is very little fighting within species, for species have usually been too busy fighting their external enemies. Mitchell (10) says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence, among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question is involved in the present war as has been supposed. There is no conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.

Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way) we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.

The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak, under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse. His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the beginning have been very different as regards motive and development from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in character and to have the same ends.

There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry. These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social. One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider. Certain tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger. Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire, and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of aggression that may have been phyletically established.

Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives, therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear, and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.

Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence, the power of discriminating and of reacting to secondary likenesses and differences, and especially the recognition of the nature of death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment, of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together. It is practical, but at no stage can it be said to be wholly practical. Changes must have taken place in warfare as in other social reactions as men passed through a number of stages from primitive wandering or a relatively unstable life to a stable life, but the motives of conflict cannot have been added to in any essential way. Through all the course of history all the motives that originally made individuals of a group or the groups as wholes antagonistic have remained, although the mental processes have become generalized, fused and transformed. If Gumplowicz is right we can still detect in any great society to-day all the primitive individual and group animosities, tempered down and held in check by laws and customs, but still existent and by no means overcome and made innocuous.

These motives of warfare might best be traced out in four more or less definite principles of conduct, or four purposes of war that appear throughout primitive life. These are: 1) thievery, including wife capture; 2) the fear motive; 3) cannibalism; 4) the display motive, with the desire to intimidate and to display power (more or less closely associated with the play motive, the love of hunting, gaming and the dramatic motive).

Cannibalism, of course, is a special expression of the predatory motive in general, or it is mainly that. Cannibalism was certainly established early in primitive life, at least early enough to antedate all religion, and although its origin and history are shrouded in mystery, the motive was quite certainly practical. Evidently it was widespread if not universal. Whether it was introduced as a result of a failure of animal food, as some think, or has a still more simple explanation as a part of the original impulse which led men at a certain stage of their development to become hunters, cannot be determined. We know, however, that the alien human being was to some extent included under the same concepts as the animal enemy and prey, and presumably some of the strongest motives that led men to attack animals also included man as an object, since the alien group was regarded as in some degree different in kind from the in-group. It may have been in the great migrations when all the aggressive motives were increased that cannibalism became fixed as a habit.

Cannibalism may well have been the primitive motive of warfare as serious deadly combat, but all predatory habits must have contributed to establishing a more or less habitual state of warfare among all groups of men. The predatory raid, with the reaction of defense, when carried on as a group activity in any form, is in fact war, so far as attack and defense were serious and deadly, and intelligence and weapons were sufficiently developed to make man a dangerous opponent. This predatory motive, of course, extended to all desired objects, and these objects must have included all objects that could most simply be acquired by stealing. They included food, women, and all other possessions. The custom of driving out young males from the group, by the jealousy of the old males, and of preventing males from obtaining females within the group must have been one of the earliest and one of the strongest incentives to predatory warfare. At first all property of the group, for so long as groups were wandering, was to some extent common, and attack and defense must have been common. The objects of predatory raids which produced group combat must have changed with the social life. When habitation became fixed and property therefore more individual, probably the predatory impulse itself became relatively a less important factor in combat.

Two motives grow out of the practical motives of combat, which we may assume to have been the original motives. These are both emotional rather than instinctive. Fear and anger, that is to say, become more or less detached motives for attack. Fear is increased with the increase of intelligence up to a certain point at least—with the increase of the capacity for understanding danger, and of the powers of man to become dangerous. All the experience of combat engenders anger and hatred, and these moods of hatred toward enemies are cumulative, absorb all the detached motives and feelings of antagonism between groups, preserve and give continuity to the memories of conflict, and so produce among groups the fear and hate motive. The feeling of fear arouses the motive of aggression, and the feeling of anger; and these in turn generate more fear, until both the moods of anger and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation of deep moods.

In another direction, also, the practical motives tend to be superseded by more abstract and more subjective motives. Both in the fear and anger reactions and in the motive that originates in the sexual impulse—display of males, and combat with reference to females—consciousness of prowess for its own sake, and the display of it in order to intimidate the enemy, arise. Into this motive of war there enter all the antagonisms that come from self-consciousness, the whole force of the diathesis of developing sexuality, with its jealousy and cruelty, and tendencies to perversion. The force of this motive of prowess must at some period of development have become very great. It extends out into a love of combat for its own sake, reënforces other motives, and issues in the more abstract motives of honor and power that we see playing such a great part in modern warfare.

These primitive motives of war are not merely numerous. They fuse, reënforce one another, and almost from the beginning, we must suppose, create complex states of consciousness, and form moods. War very early, we say, must contain all the motives that ever enter into it. The predatory impulse, the love of deception, of conquest, the love of combat for its own sake, the hunting impulse, the motive of power, of fear and anger, the impulse of display and the more primitive sexual motives, the motives of courage and jealousy, even a beginning of the aesthetic motive, are all there. They become the warlike mood or produce war, in the sense in which we now understand it, only when the intelligence gives to the relations between groups definite intentions and directions, and out of the many impulses that lead to combat, a distinctive motive and mood are derived. So we may say with all certainty that the making of war is not a mere perpetuation of some alleged instinct of murder, surreptitiously retained by man in his rise from an animal state, but it is quite as much a product of his whole social nature. It becomes established as life grows more complex, as specific desires increase in number. Man is not, as thus seen in these genetic views of him, a self-tamed animal. He has not arrived at a precarious and unstable social condition out of a primitive individualism which is the essence of his warlike nature. On the other hand, he has not degenerated from some ideal pacific state. Ages ago he was already divinely human, and possessed those capacities both for coöperation and antagonism out of which war is created.