Human Nature In Politics by Graham Wallas
G >>
Graham Wallas >> Human Nature In Politics
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 | 17 |
18
[98] Aristotle, _Polit._, Bk. VII. ch. iv.
I have already pointed out[99] that the modern State must exist for the
thoughts and feelings of its citizens, not as a fact of direct
observation but as an entity of the mind, a symbol, a personification,
or an abstraction. The possible area of the State will depend,
therefore, mainly on the facts which limit our creation and use of such
entities. Fifty years ago the statesmen who were reconstructing Europe
on the basis of nationality thought that they had found the relevant
facts in the causes which limit the physical and mental homogeneity of
nations. A State, they thought, if it is to be effectively governed,
must be a homogeneous 'nation,' because no citizen can imagine his State
or make it the object of his political affection unless he believes in
the existence of a national type to which the individual inhabitants of
the State are assimilated; and he cannot continue to believe in the
existence of such a type unless in fact his fellow-citizens are like
each other and like himself in certain important respects. Bismarck
deliberately limited the area of his intended German Empire by a
quantitative calculation as to the possibility of assimilating other
Germans to the Prussian type. He always opposed the inclusion of
Austria, and for a long time the inclusion of Bavaria, on the ground
that while the Prussian type was strong enough to assimilate the Saxons
and Hanoverians to itself, it would fail to assimilate Austrians and
Bavarians. He said, for instance, in 1866: 'We cannot use these
Ultramontanes, and we must not swallow more than we can digest.'[100]
[99] Part I. ch. ii. pp. 72, 73, and 77-81.
[100] _Bismarck_ (J.W. Headlam), p. 269.
Mazzini believed, with Bismarck, that no State could be well governed
unless it consisted of a homogeneous nation. But Bismarck's policy of
the artificial assimilation of the weaker by the stronger type seemed to
him the vilest form of tyranny; and he based his own plans for the
reconstruction of Europe upon the purpose of God, as revealed by the
existing correspondence of national uniformities with geographical
facts. 'God,' he said, 'divided humanity into distinct groups or nuclei
upon the face of the earth.... Evil governments have disfigured the
Divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it, distinctly marked
out--at least as far as Europe is concerned--by the course of the great
rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and other geographical
conditions.'[101]
[101] _Life, and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iv. (written
1858), p. 275.
Both Mazzini and Bismarck, therefore, opposed with all their strength
the humanitarianism of the French Revolution, the philosophy which, as
Canning said, 'reduced the nation into individuals in order afterwards
to congregate them into mobs.'[102] Mazzini attacked the 'cosmopolitans,'
who preached that all men should love each other without distinction of
nationality, on the ground that they were asking for a psychological
impossibility. No man, he argued, can imagine, and therefore no one can
love, mankind, if mankind means to him all the millions of individual
human beings. Already in 1836 he denounced the original Carbonari for
this reason: 'The cosmopolitan,' he then said, 'alone in the midst of
the immense circle by which he is surrounded, whose boundaries extend
beyond the limits of his vision; possessed of no other weapons than the
consciousness of his rights (often misconceived) and his individual
faculties--which, however powerful, are incapable of extending their
activity over the whole sphere of application constituting the aim ...
has but two paths before him. He is compelled to choose between
despotism and inertia.'[103] He quotes the Breton fisherman who, as he
puts out to sea, prays to God, 'Help me my God! My boat is so small and
Thy ocean so wide.'[104]
[102] Canning, _Life_ by Stapleton, p. 341 (speech at Liverpool, 1818).
[103] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. iii. p. 8.
[104] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 274.
For Mazzini the divinely indicated nation stood therefore between the
individual man and the unimaginable multitude of the human race. A man
could comprehend and love his nation because it consisted of beings like
himself 'speaking the same language, gifted with the same tendencies and
educated by the same historical tradition,'[105] and could be thought of
as a single national entity. The nation was 'the intermediate term
between humanity and the individual,'[106] and man could only attain to
the conception of humanity by picturing it to himself as a mosaic of
homogeneous nations. 'Nations are the citizens of humanity as
individuals are the citizens of the nation,'[107] and again, 'The pact of
humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal
peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a
distinct existence.'[108]
[105] _Ibid._, vol. iv. p. 276 (written 1858).
[106] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 273.
[107] Mazzini, _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. v. p. 274
(written 1849).
[108] _Ibid_., vol. iii. p. 15 (written 1836).
Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck or by Mazzini, played a
great and invaluable part in the development of the political
consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth century. But it is
becoming less and less possible to accept it as a solution for the
problems of the twentieth century. We cannot now assert with Mazzini,
that the 'indisputable tendency of our epoch' is towards a
reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous national
States 'as nearly as possible equal in population and extent'[109]
Mazziui, indeed, unconsciously but enormously exaggerated the simplicity
of the question even in his own time. National types throughout the
greater part of south-eastern Europe were not even then divided into
homogeneous units by 'the course of the great rivers and the direction
of the high mountains,' but were intermingled from village to village;
and events have since forced us to admit that fact. We no longer, for
instance, can believe, as Mr. Swinburne and the other English disciples
of Mazzini and of Kossuth seem to have believed in the eighteen sixties,
that Hungary is inhabited only by a homogeneous population of patriotic
Magyars. We can see that Mazzini was already straining his principle to
the breaking point when he said in 1852: 'It is in the power of Greece
... to become, by extending itself to Constantinople, a powerful barrier
against the European encroachments of Russia.'[110] In Macedonia to-day
bands of Bulgarian and Greek patriots, both educated in the pure
tradition of Mazzinism, are attempting to exterminate the rival
populations in order to establish their own claim to represent the
purposes of God as indicated by the position of the Balkan mountains.
Mazzini himself would, perhaps, were he living now, admit that, if the
Bismarckian policy of artificial assimilation is to be rejected, there
must continue to be some States in Europe which contain inhabitants
belonging to widely different national types.
[109] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 275.
[110] _Life and Writings_ (Smith, Elder, 1891), vol. vi. p. 258.
Bismarck's conception of an artificial uniformity created by 'blood and
iron' corresponded more closely than did Mazzini's to the facts of the
nineteenth century. But its practicability depended upon the assumption
that the members of the dominant nationality would always vehemently
desire to impose their own type on the rest. Now that the
Social-Democrats, who are a not inconsiderable proportion of the
Prussian population, apparently admire their Polish or Bavarian or
Danish fellow-subjects all the more because they cling to their own
national characteristics, Prince Buelow's Bismarckian dictum the other
day, that the strength of Germany depends on the existence and dominance
of an intensely national Prussia, seemed a mere political survival. The
same change of feeling has also shown itself in the United Kingdom, and
both the English parties have now tacitly or explicitly abandoned that
Anglicisation of Ireland and Wales, which all parties once accepted as a
necessary part of English policy.
A still more important difficulty in applying the principle that the
area of the State should be based on homogeneity of national type,
whether natural or artificial, has been created by the rapid extension
during the last twenty-five years of all the larger European states into
non-European territory. Neither Mazzini, till his death in 1872, nor
Bismarck, till the colonial adventure of 1884, was compelled to take
into his calculations the inclusion of territories and peoples outside
Europe. Neither of them, therefore, made any effective intellectual
preparation for those problems which have been raised in our time by
'the scramble for the world.' Mazzini seems, indeed, to have vaguely
expected that nationality would spread from Europe into Asia and Africa,
and that the 'pact of humanity' would ultimately be 'signed' by
homogeneous and independent 'nations,' who would cover the whole land
surface of the globe. But he never indicated the political forces by
which that result was to be brought about. The Italian invasion of
Abyssinia in 1896 might have been represented either as a necessary
stage in the Mazzinian policy of spreading the idea of nationality to
Africa, or as a direct contradiction of that idea itself.
Bismarck, with his narrower and more practical intellect, never looked
forward, as Mazzini did, to a 'pact of humanity,' which should include
even the nations of Europe, and, indeed, always protested against the
attempt to conceive of any relation whatsoever, moral or political, as
existing between any State and the States or populations outside its
boundaries. 'The only sound principle of action,' he said, 'for a great
State is political egoism.'[111] When, therefore, after Bismarck's death
German sailors and soldiers found themselves in contact with the
defenceless inhabitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the
Social-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the
situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the
fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns.
[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J.W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 83.
The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of
national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the
publication of Seeley's _Expansion of England_ in 1883 till the Peace of
Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a
'Blood,' an 'Island Race,' consisting of homogeneous English-speaking
individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole
population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white
inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the
other inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'--the
necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The
idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a
homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that
it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of
imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian
realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South
Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps
the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of
Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on
any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the
ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of
a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's
Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those
'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too
cosmopolitan.'[112]
[112] _Times_, Dec. 19, 1907.
But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is
now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based
not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national
variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the
Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided
from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral
chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal
acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or
General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt
Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial
egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to
the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea.
At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of
enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English
'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other
men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and
if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because
they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial
egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay
little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be
objected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling is
at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini
thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain
facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight
for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together
during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create
that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white
inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a
'dominant race,' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a
natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into
a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white
inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial
war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only
employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill
those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to
fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political
rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal
solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the
interests of our future opponents as well as those of our
fellow-subjects.
This sort of argument might of course be met by a _reductio ad
absurdum_. If the policy of imperial egoism is a successful one it will
be adopted by all empires alike, and whether we desire it or not, the
victor in each inter-imperial war will take over the territory of the
loser. After centuries of warfare and the steady retrogression, in the
waste of blood and treasure and loyalty, of modern civilisation, two
empires, England and Germany, or America and China, may remain. Both
will possess an armament which represents the whole 'surplus value,'
beyond mere subsistence, created by its inhabitants. Both will contain
white and yellow and brown and black men hating each other across a
wavering line on the map of the world. But the struggle will go on, and,
as the result of a naval Armageddon in the Pacific, only one Empire will
exist. 'Imperial egoism,' having worked itself out to its logical
conclusion, will have no further meaning, and the inhabitants of the
globe, diminished to half their number, will be compelled to consider
the problems of race and of the organised exploitation of the globe from
the point of view of mere humanitarianism.
Is the suggestion completely wanting in practicability that we might
begin that consideration before the struggle goes any further? Fifteen
hundred years ago, in south-eastern Europe, men who held the Homoousian
opinion of the Trinity were gathered in arms against the Homoiousians.
The generals and other 'Real-politiker' on both sides may have feared,
like Lord Milner, lest their followers should become 'too cosmopolitan,'
too ready to extend their sympathies across the frontiers of theology.
'This' a Homoousian may have said 'is a practical matter. Unless our
side learn by training themselves in theological egoism to hate the
other side, we shall be beaten in the next battle.' And yet we can now
see that the practical interests of Europe were very little concerned
with the question whether 'we' or 'they' won, but very seriously
concerned with the question whether the division itself into 'we' or
'they' could not be obliterated by the discovery either of a less clumsy
metaphysic or of a way of thinking about humanity which made the
continued existence of those who disagreed with one in theology no
longer intolerable. May the Germans and ourselves be now marching
towards the horrors of a world-war merely because 'nation' and 'empire'
like 'Homoousia' and 'Homoiousia' are the best that we can do in making
entities of the mind to stand between us and an unintelligible universe,
and because having made such entities our sympathies are shut up within
them?
I have already urged, when considering the conditions of political
reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our
tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations
into homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary and have been
avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as the
modern artist substitutes without mental confusion his ever-varying
curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so
the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of
nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of
identical individuals and represented to us by a single type.
Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human
race? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?
And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million
different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?
To the first question the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859
offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the
human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying
individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological
group, every individual in which differs from every other not
arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic
evolution.[113] And, since that which exists for the imagination can
exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second
question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the
warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been
dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can
watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards
a more harmonious relation to the universe.
[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book
_White Capital and Coloured Labour_ considers (in chap. ii.) the racial
distinctions between black and white from the point of view of
evolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite,
inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a
fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating
race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling
variety' (pp. 12, 13).
But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the
discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general
love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever
impossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless
struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to
cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore
would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.
This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and
unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation
after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun
hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by
famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before
Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the
non-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process of
education, would become in all respects except colour identical with
themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so
glossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected by
education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending
perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation.
The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence
presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first
half of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in daily
contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their
knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall,
yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming that
the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada
or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease,
and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest
races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are
showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we
are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our
responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time
when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done
deliberately.
But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can
there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the
killers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as I
know, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of
ethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Christianity,
which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously
failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official
Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal
value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a
given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million
converted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted
Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the
stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of
the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial
possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenth
century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their
ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious
hypocrisy.
But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' was
not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by
European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'struggle
for life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European
nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been
threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations
concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill,
for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day:
'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities,
and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle
of empires.'[114]
[114] _Times_, Jan. 22, 1908.
The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the
species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human
progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have
to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government
with a German statesman like Prince Buellow, who seems to combine the
teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching
of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a
declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national
conduct.
Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the
'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected
from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The
'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops
alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European
allies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as
Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is
'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected
Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act
of biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are brought
in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars,
or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological
loss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 'higher'
or 'lower' individuals will only be slightly diminished.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 | 17 |
18