The Group Mind Part 10

Just as the animal, on the instinctive plane of mental life, displays a very efficient activity in the special situation which brings some one instinct into play, so any one caste of a caste-nation may perform its function under normal circ.u.mstances with great efficiency, the priestly caste its priestly function, the warrior caste, or the caste of sweepers, its function; and, in both cases, the development of the deliberative organisation is apt to interfere to some extent with the perfect execution of these specialised functions.

Again, in the individual mind, adaptation of conduct to novel circ.u.mstances, or to secure improved action in familiar circ.u.mstances, requires the direction of the attention, that is the concentration of the whole energy of the mind, upon the task; whereas, when the new mode of behaviour is often repeated, it becomes more and more automatic; for, owing to the formation of new nervous organisation, the attention is set free for other tasks of adaptation. Just in the same way new modes of national behaviour are only effected when the attention of the nation's mind is turned upon the situation; whereas, with recurrence of the need for any such novel mode of action, there is formed some special executive organisation, say a Colonial Office, or an Unemployed Central Committee, or an Imperial Conference, which deals with it in a more or less routine fas.h.i.+on, and which, as it becomes perfected, needs less and less to be controlled and guided by national attention and therefore operates in the margin of the field of consciousness of the national mind, while public attention is set free to turn itself to other tasks of national adaptation.

We may also regard the customs of a nation as a.n.a.logous with the habits of the individual, if (for the sake of the a.n.a.logy) we accept the view that instincts are habits that have become hereditary; for custom is an informal mode in which routine behaviour is determined, and it tends to lead on to, and to become embodied in, formal inst.i.tutions; it is like habit, a transition stage between new adaptation and perfected organisation. Individual adaptation, habit and instinct are parallel to national adaptation, custom and legal inst.i.tution.

At the risk of wearying the reader, I will refer to one last point of the a.n.a.logy. Individual minds become more completely integrated in proportion as they achieve a full self-consciousness, in proportion as the idea of the self becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment generating impulses that control and override impulses of all other sources. In a similar way, the national mind becomes more completely integrated in proportion as it achieves full self-consciousness, that is, in proportion as the idea of the nation becomes widely diffused among the individual minds, becomes rich in content and the nucleus of a strong sentiment that supplies motives capable of overriding and controlling all other motives.

Consider now in the light of this a.n.a.logy the princ.i.p.al types of national organisation. The organisation of some peoples is wholly the product of the conflicts of blind impulses and purely individual volitions working through long ages. This is true of many peoples that have not arrived at a national self-consciousness or, as the French say, a social consciousness, and are not held in servitude by a despotic power. It is a natural stage of evolution which corresponds to the stage of the higher mammals in the scale of evolution of the individual mind.

A nation of this sort has no capacity for collective deliberation and volitional action. What collective mental life it has is on the plane of impulse and unregulated desire. Such ideas as are widely accepted may determine collective action; but such action is not the result of the weighing of ideas in the light of self-consciousness; hence they are little adapted to promote the welfare of the nation, and, because there is no organisation adapted for their expression, they can be but imperfectly realised.

We may perhaps take China (as she was until recently) as the highest type of a nation of this sort. Hers was a complex and vast organisation consisting of very ancient inst.i.tutions and customs, slowly evolved by the conflict of impulses and in part imposed by despotic power and individual wills; not formed by a national will under the guidance of national self-consciousness[80]. Hence China was incapable of vigorous national thought or volition, and its nearest approach to collective action was expressed in such blind impulsive actions as the Taeping Rebellion or the Boxer Rising. This last seems to have been prompted by a dawning national self-consciousness which had not, however, so moulded the national organisation as to make it an efficient instrument of its will.

Of other nations the organisation is, in part only, a natural growth, having been, in large part, impressed upon it by an external power.

Such is the case in all those many instances in which a foreign power of higher social organisation has conquered and successfully governed for a long period a people of lower civilisation. We may see a parallel to this type in the mind of an individual whose behaviour is in the main the expression of a number of habits engendered by a severe discipline which has continued from his earliest years, and which has never permitted the free development of his natural tendencies and character.

Such was England under the feudal system imposed upon her by her Norman conquerors. Such also France under Louis XIV. Such was Russia when the Varegs, the conquering Northmen, imposed on the almost unorganised ma.s.s of Slavs their rule and a national organisation; and such it remained up to the outbreak of the Great War, a ma.s.s of men in whom the national consciousness was only just beginning to glimmer here and there, crudely organised by the bureaucratic power of a few. Even in the minds of these few the national consciousness and purpose was but little developed.

Individual purposes and individual self-consciousness predominated.

Hence Russia had no capacity for national thought and action; and when, as recently, ideas stirred the ma.s.ses to action, their actions were those of unorganised crowds, impulsive and ineffective; the ends were but vaguely conceived, the means were not deliberately chosen, or, if so chosen, found no executive organisation for the effective expression of the collective purpose.

In such nations the organisation, which has been in the main created by a small governing cla.s.s, is adapted only for the execution of its purposes, and not at all for the formation of a national mind and the expression of the collective will. The organisation consists primarily in a system for the collecting of taxes and the compulsory service of a large army. The revenue is raised for two primary purposes-the support of the governing cla.s.s or caste in luxury and the support of the army; and the end for which the army is maintained is primarily the gathering of the taxes, and the further extension of the tax-collecting system over larger areas and populations-a vicious circle. On the other hand, the conditions which tend to the formation of national mind and character (which would have quite other ends than these) are naturally suppressed as completely as possible by the governing few.

Russian history in modern times exemplifies these principles in the clearest and most complete manner. The effects of this sort of organisation were very clearly ill.u.s.trated by Count Tolstoi's articles in the _Fortnightly Review_[81], in which he expressed as his social creed and ideal a complete anarchy to be achieved by pa.s.sive resistance; denied that nations have or can have any existence; and a.s.serted that the idea of a nation is as fict.i.tious as it is pernicious. He had in mind only this type of organisation of a people, which hardly ent.i.tles it to be called a nation. And the same considerations explain the wide prevalence of philosophic anarchy in Russia.

Another type of national organisation results when the natural evolution of the national mind and character has been artificially and unhealthily forced by the pressure of the external environment of a people, when the need of national self-preservation and self-a.s.sertion compels the ma.s.s of the people to submit to an organisation which is neither the product of a natural evolution through the conflict of individual wills, nor the expression of the general mind and will, nor is altogether imposed upon it for the individual purposes of the few, but is a system planned by the few for the good of the whole, and by them imposed upon the whole.

This is the kind of organisation of which a modern army stands as the extreme type and which is best represented among modern nations by Germany as she was before the War.

Under such a system there appears inevitably a tendency rigorously to subordinate the welfare of individuals to that of the nation as a whole.

And that was just the state of affairs in Germany. German political philosophy showed the opposite extreme from Tolstoi's; the individual existed for the nation only. Hence we find this condition of affairs justified by such writers as Bluntschli[82], Treitschke and Bernhardi, who represent the State as having an existence and a system of rights superior to that of all individuals; and we see attempts to justify the subordination of individual interests by means of the doctrine of the 'collective consciousness[83].'

In such States as that of the foregoing type the one kind of organisation is alone highly developed, namely the executive organisation; while the deliberative organisation is very imperfect and is repressed and discouraged by the governing power. Such a State is likely to appear very strong in all its relations with other States, and its material organisation may be developed in an effective and rapid way, as we have seen in pre-war Germany. But its actions are not the expression of the national will and are not the outcome of the general mind. They are designed by the minds of the few for the good not of all, but of the whole, the good, that is, not of individuals but of the State.

Organisation of this type is not of high stability, in spite of its appearance of strength and its efficiency for certain limited purposes, such as industrial organisation and the promotion and diffusion of material well-being. In a State so organised there inevitably grows up an antagonism between individual rights and interests and the rights and interests of the State. It is psychologically unsound. This fact was revealed in Germany by the tremendous growth of social democracy, which was the protest against the subordination of individual welfare to that of the State. The defect of such organisation was ill.u.s.trated by the fact that Germany, though its well-governed population increased rapidly, for many years continued to lose great numbers of its population to other countries. For the ma.s.s of the people felt itself to be not so much of the State as under it. And it is, I think, obvious that the advent of a bad and stupid monarch might easily have brought on a revolution at any time.

The inherent weakness of the system induced the governing power to all sorts of extreme measures directed to maintain its equilibrium and cohesion. Among such State actions the gravest were perhaps the deliberate falsification of history by the servile historians and the suppression and distortion of news by the press at the command and desire of the State. The expropriation of the Polish landowners and the treatment of Alsace-Lorraine were other striking manifestations of the imperfect development of the national mind and of the corresponding practice and philosophy of the State-craft which the world has learnt to describe as Prussian.

The organisation of pre-war Germany was, then, very similar to that of an army and was efficient in a similar way, that is to say for the attainment of particular immediate ends. In a wider view, such national organisation is of a lower nature than that of England or France or America; for the ends or purposes of a nation are remote, they transcend the vision of the present and cannot be defined in terms of material prosperity or military power; and only the development of the national mind, as a natural and spontaneous growth, can give a prospect of continued progress towards those indefinable ends. Germany was organised from above for the attainment of a particular end, namely material prosperity and power among the peoples of the world; and, as the bulk of her population had been led to accept this narrow national purpose, the organisation of the nation, like that of an army, was extremely effective for the purpose. It gave her a great advantage as against the other nations, among whom the lack of any such clear cut purpose in the minds of all was a princ.i.p.al difficulty in the way of effective national thought and action. For a like reason the existence of a nation organised in this way is a constant threat to the nations of higher type; and, as we have seen, it may compel them at any time to revert to or adopt, temporarily at least and so far as they are able, an organisation of the lower and more immediately effective kind. And this threat was the justification of the nations of the Entente, when they demanded a radical change in this political organisation of Germany. In a similar way, in the past, the Huns, the Turks, and the Arabs, peoples organised primarily for war and conquest, had to be destroyed as nations if the evolution of nations of higher type was to go forward.

CHAPTER XI

THE WILL OF THE NATION[84]

Rousseau, in his famous treatise, _Le Contrat Social_, wrote "There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a sum of individual wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the general will."

"Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will." That is to say, a certain number of men will the general good, while most men will only their private good; the latter neutralise one another, while the former co-operate to form an effective force.

Dr Bosanquet[85], criticising Rousseau's doctrine, says that the general will is expressed by the working of the inst.i.tutions of the community which embody its dominant ideas; that no one man really grasps the nature and relations of the whole society and its tendencies; that the general will is thus unconscious (by which he seems to mean that the nation is unconscious of itself and of its ends or purposes); and he goes on to say that the general will is the product of practical activities making for nearer smaller ends, and that its harmony depends on the fact that the activities of each individual are parts of a systematic whole.

Bosanquet's theory amounts to a justification of the old individualist _laissez faire_ doctrine-the doctrine that the good of the whole is best achieved by giving freest possible scope to the play and conflict of individual purposes and strivings-the philosophic radicalism of Bentham and Mill, which teaches that, if each man honestly and efficiently pursues his private ends, the welfare of the State somehow results. How this systematic whole which is the State arises he does not explain; and it seems to me that Bosanquet leaves unsolved that difficulty which, as we saw, led Schiller and others to postulate an external power guiding each people-the difficulty, if we a.s.sume that individual wills strive only after private egoistic ends, of explaining how the good of the whole is nevertheless achieved.

In all societies many general changes result, and in some nations no doubt the good of the whole is achieved in a measure by fortunate accident, in the way Bosanquet describes-namely, by the interplay of individual wills working for near individual ends. But, I think, it is improper to say that in such a case any general will exists. Such a nation, if it displays any collective activity, only does so in an impulsive blind way which is not true volition, but is comparable rather with instinctive action; for, as we have seen, self-consciousness is essential to volition; a truly volitional action is one which issues from the contemplation of some end represented in relation to the idea of the self and found to be desirable. And the changes of a society which result in the way Bosanquet claims as the expression of the general will are unforeseen and unwilled; they are no more the expression and effects of a general will than are the movements of a billiard ball struck simultaneously by two or more men each of whom aims at a different position.

Bosanquet maintains that the national will is unconscious of its ends; but that the life of a nation does express a general will, in virtue of the fact that the individuals, who will private and less general ends than the ends of the nation, live in a system of relations that const.i.tutes them an organism; and that it is in virtue of this organic system of relations that the individual volitions work out to an unforeseen unpurposed resultant, which he calls the end willed by the general will. He makes of this organic unity the essential difference between a mere crowd and a society or nation-defining an organism or organic unity as a system of parts the capacities and functions of each of which are determined by the general nature and principle of the whole group.

That is an excellent definition of an organism; and we have recognised fully the importance of organisation in national life, consisting in specialisation of the parts such that each part is adapted to perform some one function that subserves the life of the whole, while itself dependent upon the proper functioning of all other parts.

We may admit too that, in proportion as this specialisation of functions is carried further, organic unity is promoted because the life of the whole becomes more intimately dependent on the life of each part, and each part more intimately and completely dependent on the life of the whole.

But unity of this sort is characteristic of all animal bodies; and, though the mind has this kind of organic unity, it acquires, in proportion as self-consciousness develops, over and above this kind of unity, a unity of an altogether new and unique kind; a unity which consists in the whole (or the self) being present to consciousness, whether clearly or obscurely, during almost every moment of thought, and pervading and playing some part in the determination of the course of thought and action.

Now, the national mind also has both the lower and the higher kinds of unity. In both cases-that is, in the development both of the individual and of the national mind-a certain degree of organic unity must be achieved, before self-consciousness can develop and begin to play its part; but in both cases, when once it has begun to operate, self-consciousness goes on greatly to increase the organic unity, to increase the specialisation of functions and the systematic interdependence of the parts.

Consider a single ill.u.s.tration of this parallelism of the individual with the national mind. Take the aesthetic faculty. In the individual mind there develops a certain capacity for finding pleasure in certain objects and impressions, such as young children and even the animals have; and then, with the growth of self-consciousness, the individual sets himself deliberately to cultivate this faculty, to specialise it along particular lines and to exercise it as something apart from his other mental functions; while, nevertheless, it becomes for him, in proportion as it is developed and specialised, more and more an essential part of his total experience. Just so there spontaneously develop in a people some rudimentary aesthetic practices and traditions and some cla.s.s of persons, say the bards, who are more skilled than other men in ministering to the aesthetic demands of their fellows.

Then, as national self-consciousness develops, the place and value of these functions in the system of national life becomes explicitly recognised, and they are deliberately fostered by the establishment of national inst.i.tutions, schools of art, academies of letters and music, the award of public t.i.tles and honours and so forth; whereby the specialisation of these national functions is increased, their dependence on the life of the whole rendered more intimate, and, at the same time, the life of the whole rendered more dependent upon the life of these parts, because the richer aesthetic development of the parts reacts upon the whole, diffusing itself through and elevating the life of the whole.

Bosanquet recognises in national life only the lower kind of unity and not the unity of self-consciousness. He seems to reject the notion of national self-consciousness, on the ground that the life of a nation is so complex that it cannot be fully and adequately reflected in the consciousness of any individual; yet in this respect the difference between the national mind and the individual mind is one of degree only and not of kind. In the individual mind also, even the most highly developed and self-conscious, the capacities and dispositions and tendencies that make up the whole mind are never fully and adequately present to consciousness; the individual never knows himself exhaustively, though he may continually progress towards a more nearly complete self-knowledge. Just so the national mind may progress towards a more complete self-knowledge, and, though at the present time no nation has attained more than a very imperfect self-knowledge, yet the process is accelerating rapidly among the more advanced nations; and such increasing self-knowledge promises to become the dominating factor in the life of nations, as it is in the lives of all men, save the most primitive.

Suppose that all those conditions making for national unity which we have considered in the foregoing chapters were realised, but that nevertheless all men continued to be moved only by self-regarding motives, or by those which have reference to the welfare of themselves and their family circle or to any ends less comprehensive than the welfare of the whole nation. We could not then properly speak of the tendencies resulting from the interplay and the conflict of all these individual wills as expressions of the general will, as Bosanquet and others have done, even though the organic unity of the whole secured a harmonious resultant national activity, if such a thing were possible.

But there is no reason to suppose that such a thing is possible.

I think we may say that it is only in so far as the idea of the people or nation as a whole is present to the consciousness of individuals and determines their actions that a nation in the proper sense of the word can exist or ever has existed. Without this factor any population inhabiting a given territory remains either a mere horde or a population of slaves under a despotism. Neither can be called a nation; wherever a nation has appeared in the history of the world, the consciousness of itself as a nation has been an essential condition of its existence and still more of its progress.

We may see this, even more clearly, in the case of the smaller aggregations of men, the smaller social units, the family, the clan, the tribe. The family is a family only so long as it is conscious of itself as a family, and only in virtue of that self-consciousness and of the part which this idea and the sentiments gathered about it play in determining the actions of each member. How carefully such family consciousness is sometimes fostered and how great a part it plays in social life is common knowledge. In the early stages of Greek and Roman history, the family consciousness was the dominant social force which long succeeded in overriding and preventing the development of any larger social consciousness. Just as the _gens_ played this part in early Rome, so the clan has played a similar part elsewhere, for example in the highlands of Scotland. Such peoples form the strongest nations.

Just so with the tribe. It exists as a tribe only because, and in so far as, it is conscious of itself, and in so far as the idea of the tribe and devotion to its service determines the actions of individuals. The mere fact of the possession of a tribal name suffices to prove the existence of this self-consciousness. And, as a matter of fact, tribal self-consciousness is in many cases extremely strongly developed; the idea of the tribe, of its rights and powers, of its past and its future plays a great part among warlike savages; and an injury done to the tribe, or an insult offered to it, will often be kept in mind for many years, even for generations, and will be avenged when an opportunity occurs, even in spite of the certainty of death to many individuals and the risk of extermination of the whole tribe.

The federation of Iroquois tribes to form a rudimentary nation seems to have been due to a self-conscious collective purpose. And, when other tribes become fused to form nations, the same holds true. Consider the Hebrew nation, one of the earliest historical examples of a number of allied tribes becoming fused to a nation. Surely the idea of the nation as the chosen people of Jehovah played a vital part in its consolidation, implanted and fostered as it was by a succession of great teachers, the prophets. Their work was to implant this idea and this sentiment strongly in the minds of the people, to create and foster this traditional sentiment by the aid of supernatural sanctions. The national self-consciousness thus formed has continued to be not only one factor, but almost the only factor or condition, of the continued existence of the Jewish people as a people, or at any rate the one fundamental condition on which all the others are founded-their exclusive religion, their objection to intermarriage with outsiders, their hope of a future restoration of the fortunes of the nation, and so forth.

And the same is true of every real nation; its existence and its power are grounded in its consciousness of itself, the idea of the nation as a dominant factor in the minds of the individuals. The dominant sentiment which centres about that idea is very different in the various nations.

It may be chiefly pride in the nation's past history, as in Spain; or hope for its future, as in j.a.pan; or the need of self-a.s.sertion in the present, as in pre-war Germany.

The political history of Europe in the nineteenth century is chiefly the history of the national actions that have sprung from increase of national self-consciousness resulting from the spread of education, from the improvement of means of communication within each people and from increase of intercourse between nations. The opening pages were the wars in which the French people, suddenly aroused to an intense national consciousness, successfully resisted and drove back all the other European powers. Of other leading events the formation of modern Italy and of modern Germany, of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, were results of the awakening of national self-consciousness[86].

The resistance of the j.a.panese to the Russians and their victory over them were in the fullest sense the immediate outcome of the idea of the j.a.panese nation in the minds of all its people, leading to a strong collective volition for the greater power, glory, and advancement of the nation. The recent unrest in China is recognised on all hands to be the expression of a dawning national self-consciousness. In Europe, Poland, Finland, Hungary, and Ireland exemplify its workings very clearly in recent years. The Magyars were not oppressed by the Austrians. They, economically and individually, had nothing material to gain by a separation from Austria; and in separating themselves they would have risked much, their lives, and their material welfare; yet the idea of the Magyar nation impelled them to it. The Poles of Germany were not rebellious because they were ill-treated and their affairs maladministered. If they could and would have cast out from their minds the idea of the Polish nation, they might have comfortably shared in the marvellously advancing material prosperity of Germany. But they were severely treated by the Germans, because they were moved by this idea and this sentiment; and the bad treatment it brought upon them did but render the idea more vividly, more universally, present to the consciousness of all, even of the little children at school, and, by inflaming the pa.s.sions which have their root in the national sentiment, strengthened that sentiment.

But for the idea of the Boer nation and the dawning national sentiment, the late Boer war would never have occurred; and that sentiment was, as in the case of the j.a.panese in their late war, the princ.i.p.al source of the great energy displayed by the Boers and of such success as they achieved.

Even in India, the proposal to divide Bengal has suddenly discovered among the Bengalese, the most submissive part of the population, the part which has seemed most devoid of national spirit, the existence and the importance as a political factor of the idea of the Bengalese as a people and of sentiments centred upon that idea.

The rapid increase of national self-consciousness among the peoples of the world and the increasing part everywhere played by the sentiment for national existence are in short the dominant facts in the present period of world history; their influence overshadows all others.

Since, then, any nation exists only in virtue of the existence of the idea of the nation in the minds of the individuals of whom it is composed, and in virtue of the influence of this idea upon their actions, and since this idea plays so great a part in shaping the history of the world, it is absurd to maintain that the general will is but the blind resultant of the conflict of individual wills striving after private ends and unconscious of the ends or purposes of the nation. In opposition to such a view, we must maintain that a population seeking only individual ends cannot form or continue to be a nation, though all the other conditions we have noticed be present; that a nation is real and vigorous in proportion as its consciousness of its self is full and clear. In fact national progress and power and success depend in chief part upon the fulness and the extension, the depth and width of this self-consciousness-the accuracy and fulness with which each individual mind reflects the whole; and upon the strength of the sentiments which are centred upon it and which lead men to act for the good of the whole, to postpone private to public ends. And the same holds good of all the many forms of corporate life within the nation.

Each individual's sense of duty, in so far as it is a true sense of duty, and not a fict.i.tious sense due merely to superst.i.tious fear or to habit formed by suggestion and compulsion, is chiefly founded upon the consciousness of the society of which he forms a part, upon the group spirit that binds him to his fellows and makes him one with them. And the nations in which this national self-consciousness is strongest and most widely diffused will be the successful nations.

Reflect a little on these facts vouched for by General Sir Ian Hamilton.

No soldier of the j.a.panese army, none even of the coolies, would accept anything in the shape of a tip even for honest services rendered, lest the purity of his motives should be sullied; and each man always went into action not merely prepared to die if necessary, but actually prepared and expecting to conquer and to die for the good and glory of his nation. He writes "j.a.panese officers have constantly to explain to their men that they must not consider the main object of the battle is to get killed[87]." And he goes on to show that they are not fanatics, are not inspired by any idea of the supernatural or by any hope of rewards after death, as is usually the case of the Moslem soldier who displays an equal recklessness of life. Surely, if in any nation the national consciousness could inspire and maintain all cla.s.ses of its people in all relations of life to this high level of strenuous self-sacrifice for the welfare of the nation, that nation would soon predominate over all others, and be impregnably strong, no matter what defects of individual and national character it might display.