|
| |
War Is the Health
of the State
To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World
War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think
about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought.
In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan political
controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is
the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The
State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of
patriotic holiday.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a
legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things
may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all
safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way.
What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical
machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans
are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august
majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of
men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable
from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they
could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have
no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed
grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good
old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system
where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the
passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not
in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the
sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican
State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions. What it has are
of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the
Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of
the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.
With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government,
with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the
negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it
into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country
into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of
the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the
benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper
of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries
where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of
the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive,
which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it
order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference
between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in
which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic
test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most
tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or
forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government,
and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as
a mass themselves.
The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual
alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They
then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be
regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed
scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The
citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with
its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the
dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the
relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a
part.
The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.
In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the basic idea of society. We think
vaguely of a loose population spreading over a certain geographical portion of the
earth’s surface, speaking a common language, and living in a homogeneous
civilization. Our idea of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a
people, its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its
characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans because we live in a certain
bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on a great enterprise of pioneering
and colonization, because we live in certain kinds of communities which have a certain
look and express their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is
different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican. The institutions of
our country form a certain network which affects us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in
a way that these other civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for better or for
worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological laws, and not in any
way through our own choice. By the time we have reached what are called years of
discretion, its influences have molded our habits, our values, our ways of thinking, so
that however aware we may become, we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or
could be mistaken for the child of any other country. Our feeling for our fellow
countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud of and
congenial to our particular network of civilization, or we may detest most of its
qualities and rage at its defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably
bound up in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and which
makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to be a fundamental fact of
our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of social feeling.
Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think of our own people
merely as living on the earth’s surface along with other groups, pleasant or
objectionable as they may be, but fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our
simple conception of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than
there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within rather than without, is
intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and our imaginations gradually stake out the
world we live in, they need no greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious
impulses than this sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned,
and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country would be an
uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and Government which are
associated with it. Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting
live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in
its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country
but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless
confusion.
The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group acting as a
repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice. International politics is a
“power politics” because it is a relation of States and that is what States
infallibly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may
be hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation to another
country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing
individuals or minorities, it is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is
quite different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the
pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was
used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the
struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the
world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to
pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money
to pay for all.
Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the
machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions.
Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the
public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the
hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace.
It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all
practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by
no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must
never be forgotten. Its glamour and its significance linger behind the framework of
Government and direct its activities.
Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes
and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a
republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The
ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be
universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is
thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing
to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for
union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The
State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another
herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will
become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd.
War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the
herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together
as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military
defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become —
the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men’s business and attitudes and opinions.
The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and
slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end, toward the
“peacefulness of being at war,” of which L.P. Jacks has so unforgettably spoken.
The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the
organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are
jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility,
new techniques must be learned. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have
remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of
rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world.
Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as universal
touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in
peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or
living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in
reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such
measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of
peace, was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with
actual crime, becomes, with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the
State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of
conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those
affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and
the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. “Loyalty,” or rather war
orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations.
Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There the smallest taint
is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified
to teach physics or to hold honorable place in a university — the republic of
learning — if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons
thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy
becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His
artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast
poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and
energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not
ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works
impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional
conformities, or even ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex
perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal
terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years
for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society
those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government
in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd
sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities
are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of
persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of
perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the
amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation
instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered
sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in
wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the
undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other
agency than war. Loyalty — or mystic devotion to the State — becomes the major
imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty,
the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the
significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are
engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other
persons into sacrificing them.
War — or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful
enemy — seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political
idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each
cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to
full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains
the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the
whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of
the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the
cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost
blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves
a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so
that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind
him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems
to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American
nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and
labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation
of nature, would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have
permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its
money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to
support a difficult cause to the slogan of “democracy,” it would reach the
highest level ever known of collective effort.
For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the education of man
and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and beauty in the nation’s communal
living, are alien to our traditional ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected
with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a
political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant,
throughout all history — war.
There is nothing invidious in the use of the term “herd” in connection with
the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first principles the nature of this
institution in the shadow of which we all live, move, and have our being. Ethnologists are
generally agreed that human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not as
a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in fact the original unit, and only
as it was differentiated did personal individuality develop. All the most primitive
surviving tribes of men are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social
organization where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes remain
strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and the modern State is one of
degree of sophistication and variety of organization, and not of kind.
Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls
which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals. Mankind is no
exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary history has prevented the impulse from ever dying
out. This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together,
and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack. Animals crowd
together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat
of war. Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength,
which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious
impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also to produce
identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up
into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so
successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of society that
gregariousness works its havoc.
For just as in modern societies the sex instinct is enormously oversupplied for the
requirements of human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is enormously oversupplied
for the work of protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough if
we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to cooperate
with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse
is not content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that
like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life. So that all human
progress, all novelty, and nonconformity, must be carried against the resistance of this
tyrannical herd instinct which drives the individual into obedience and conformity with
the majority. Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows little
sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand out of the sphere of
utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion,
so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.
The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because when the group is
in motion or is taking any positive action, this feeling of being with and supported by
the collective herd very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the
individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you feel
forlorn and helpless if you are out of the crowd. While even if you do not get any access
of power by thinking and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at
least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection.
Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual — the
pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience — this gregarious impulse becomes
irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the highest possible degree, sending the
influences of its mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to
the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little group that can
possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the State — the organization of
the entire herd, the entire collectivity — is founded on and makes use of.
There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial
mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire
back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of
protection. It is not for nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or
Motherland, that one’s relation toward it is conceived in terms of family affection.
The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike
attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we
have not the intense Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in
Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters
of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war service, the
ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most
literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in
the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but
necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this
recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx of power. On most
people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than
those members of the significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed
the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest of symbols under
which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but can
rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and
government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own
conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned from their selfish
and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of society, or something greater than
they — the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New
York to a post in the war management industrial service in Washington does not apparently
alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a
transfiguration has occurred! His is now not only the power but the glory! And his sense
of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice
that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial
prerogatives and sense of command.
From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if the change from
private enterprise to State service involves any real loss of power and personal
privilege. If there is to be pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of
honor, in the traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as
Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very real
craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile
attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its
government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and
you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you
fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the
flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and
determinant of your definite action and ideas.
The members of the working classes, that portion at least which does not identify
itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate it and rise to it, are notoriously
less affected by the symbolism of the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than
the significant classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in
wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired social
adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled and regimented, as by the
industrial regime of the last century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their
State, but they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without that
herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their “betters.” They
live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which, though nominally free, they are in
practice as a class bound to a system of machine-production the implements of which they
do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice,
except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation which draws slightly more
of the product in their direction. From such serfdom, military conscription is not so
great a change. But into the military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the
significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same apathy with
which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.
From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class sport. The novel
interests and excitements it provides, the inflations of power, the satisfaction it gives
to those very tenacious human impulses — gregariousness and parent-regression —
endow it with all the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely
just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the class division
of his society. A country at war — particularly our own country at war — does
not act as a purely homogeneous herd. The significant classes have all the herd-feeling in
all its primitive intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials of
intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment throughout the
entire nation. A modern country represents a long historical and social process of
disaggregation of the herd. The nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads
of groups representing the cooperation and similar feeling of men on all sorts of planes
and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. In every modern industrial country,
there are parallel planes of economic classes with divergent attitudes and institutions
and interests — bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions according to
power and function, and even their interweaving, such as those more highly skilled workers
who habitually identify themselves with the owning and the significant classes and strive
to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and
manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense
of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as cultural
colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition,
though their herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols. There
are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small sects, political parties,
classes, levels, interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and
interweave, and the same person may be a member of several different groups lying at
different planes. Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction or
another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the necessity that his
sect (or sub-herd) may prevail, in a political campaign, that his party shall triumph.
To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all these smaller herds offer resistance. To
the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the threat of war, and which would
normally involve the entire nation, the only groups which make serious resistance are
those, of course, which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which
they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all practical purposes
citizens of their new country. They keep alive their ethnic traditions more as a luxury
than anything. Indeed these traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect
with some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for freedom, or
some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too invidious policy of
Americanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in time of war, these ethnic elements which
have any traditional connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may
have little real sympathy with the enemy’s cause, are naturally lukewarm to the
herd-feeling of the nation which goes back to State traditions in which they have no
share. But to the natives imbued with State-feeling, any such resistance or apathy is
intolerable. This herd-feeling, this newly awakened consciousness of the State, demands
universality. The leaders of the significant classes, who feel most intensely this State
compulsion, demand a 100 percent Americanism, among 100 percent of the population. The
State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one,
and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism
which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.
Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport between the hunters
and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness the
assault on the enemy without. The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear
against the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white terrorism is
carried on by the Government against pacifists, socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder
unofficial persecution against all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected
with the enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the bourgeois
elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The revolutionary proletariat shows
more resistance to this unification, is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current.
Its vanguard, as the I.W.W., is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that it is a
symptom, not a cause, and its persecution increases the disaffection of labor and
intensifies the friction instead of lessening it.
But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not take into
consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led by its significant classes, is
engaged in liberating certain of its impulses which have had all too little exercise in
the past. It is getting certain satisfactions, and the actual conduct of the war or the
condition of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new forms of virtue and
power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown conclusively that the persecution of
slightly disaffected elements actually increased enormously the difficulties of production
and the organization of the war technique, it would be found that public policy would
scarcely change. The significant classes must have their pleasure in hunting down and
chastising everything that they feel instinctively to be not imbued with the current State
enthusiasm, though the State itself be actually impeded in its efforts to carry out those
objects for which they are passionately contending. The best proof of this is that with a
pursuit of plotters that has continued with ceaseless vigilance ever since the beginning
of the war in Europe, the concrete crimes unearthed and punished have been fewer than
those prosecutions for the mere crime of opinion or the expression of sentiments critical
of the State or the national policy. The punishment for opinion has been far more
ferocious and unintermittent than the punishment of pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable
Anglo-Saxon Americans who were freer of pacifist or socialist utterance than the
State-obsessed ruling public opinion, received heavier penalties and even greater
opprobrium, in many instances, than the definitely hostile German plotter. A public
opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as just, adequate, beautiful, deserved, and
in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, a sentence of twenty
years in prison for mere utterances, no matter what they may be, shows itself to be
suffering from a kind of social derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis, that
deserves analysis and comprehension.
On our entrance into the war, there were many persons who predicted exactly this
derangement of values, who feared lest democracy suffer more at home from an America at
war than could be gained for democracy abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The
question whether the American nation would act like an enlightened democracy going to war
for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd, has been decisively answered.
The record is written and cannot be erased. History will decide whether the terrorization
of opinion and the regimentation of life were justified under the most idealistic of
democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation had ostensibly a
chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous regard to the safety of democratic values
at home, it chose rather to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the
enemy and of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and ferocity of
punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For its former unconsciousness and
disrespect of the State ideal, the nation apparently paid the penalty in a violent swing
to the other extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of
minorities that there is no artificiality in interpreting the progress of the war in terms
of the herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out into the strongest relief the true
characteristics of the State and its intimate alliance with war. It provided for the
enemies of war and the critics of the State the most telling arguments possible. The new
passion for the State ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged forces that threaten
very materially to reform the State. It has shown those who are really determined to end
war that the problem is not the mere simple one of finishing a war that will end war.
For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so out of a spiritual
compulsion which pushes it on, perhaps against all its interests, all its real desires,
and all its real sense of values. It is States that make wars and not nations, and the
very thought and almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of the State. Not for
centuries have nations made war; in fact the only historical example of nations making war
is the great barbarian invasions into southern Europe, the invasions of Russia from the
East, and perhaps the sweep of Islam through northern Africa into Europe after
Mohammed’s death. And the motivations for such wars were either the restless
expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious fanaticism. Perhaps these great
movements could scarcely be called wars at all, for war implies an organized people
drilled and led: in fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such
organization, such huge conflicts between nations — nations, that is, as cultural
groups — have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume that for centuries in
Europe there would have been any possibility of a people en masse (with their own
leaders, and not with the leaders of their duly constituted State) rising up and
overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the
Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and,
moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but against the autocratic
governments that were combining to crush the Revolution. There is no instance in history
of a genuinely national war. There are instances of national defenses, among primitive
civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against intolerable invasion by neighboring
despots or oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur except in a system of competing
States, which have relations with each other through the channels of diplomacy.
War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except in such a
system. Nations organized for internal administration, nations organized as a federation
of free communities, nations organized in any way except that of a political
centralization of a dynasty, or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly
make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for conflict, but they would
be unable to muster the concentrated force to make war effective. There might be all sorts
of amateur marauding, there might be guerrilla expeditions of group against group, but
there could not be that terrible war en masse of the national State, that
exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse of the national life
and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide, which is modern war.
It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations,
indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not
the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal
religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment
cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity
only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and
functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against
the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end
war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form.
The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its
present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the
dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.
If the State’s chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a
large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It
devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation.
No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces.
If the State’s chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating
and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not
only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well.
For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always
under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits
means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.
All this organization of death-dealing energy and technique is not a natural but a very
sophisticated process. Particularly in modern nations, but also all through the course of
modern European history, it could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands
of no other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial, political
group. If the demand for military organization and a military establishment seems to come
not from the officers of the State but from the public, it is only that it comes from the
State-obsessed portion of the public, those groups which feel most keenly the State ideal.
And in this country we have had evidence all too indubitable how powerless the pacifically
minded officers of State may be in the face of a State obsession of the significant
classes. If a powerful section of the significant classes feels more intensely the
attitudes of the State, then they will most infallibly mold the Government in time to
their wishes, bring it back to act as the embodiment of the State which it pretends to be.
In every country we have seen groups that were more loyal than the king — more
patriotic than the Government — the Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in
Prussia, l’Action Française in France, our patrioteers in America. These groups
exist to keep the steering wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from
ever veering very far from the State ideal.
Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse only of this class.
The other classes, left to themselves, have too many necessities and interests and
ambitions, to concern themselves with so expensive and destructive a game. But the
State-obsessed group is either able to get control of the machinery of the State or to
intimidate those in control, so that it is able through use of the collective force to
regiment the other grudging and reluctant classes into a military program. State idealism
percolates down through the strata of society; capturing groups and individuals just in
proportion to the prestige of this dominant class. So that we have the herd actually
strung along between two extremes, the militaristic patriots at one end, who are scarcely
distinguishable in attitude and animus from the most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire,
and unskilled labor groups, which entirely lack the State sense. But the State acts as a
whole, and the class that controls governmental machinery can swing the effective action
of the herd as a whole. The herd is not actually a whole, emotionally. But by an ingenious
mixture of cajolery, agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an
effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are told simultaneously
that they will enter the military establishment of their own volition, as their splendid
sacrifice for their country’s welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be
hunted down and punished with the most horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable
confusion of democratic pride and personal fear they submit to the destruction of their
livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would formerly have seemed to them so
obnoxious as to be incredible.
In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is
primarily a sort of blind animal push toward military unity. Any difference with that
unity turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and
the Government, backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality, however
small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the outlaws, regardless of their
value to the other institutions of the nation, or to the effect their persecution may have
on public opinion. The herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and war
enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.
It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each other, nor in the
strictest sense is it nations that fight each other. Much has been said to the effect that
modern wars are wars of whole peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is
regimented and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this does not
mean that it is the country qua country which is fighting. It is the country
organized as a State that is fighting, and only as a State would it possibly fight. So
literally it is States which make war on each other and not peoples. Governments are the
agents of States, and it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting truest to
form in the interests of the great State ideal they represent. There is no case known in
modern times of the people being consulted in the initiation of a war. The present demand
for “democratic control” of foreign policy indicates how completely, even in the
most democratic of modern nations, foreign policy has been the secret private possession
of the executive branch of the Government.
However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may be in all that
concerns the internal administration of a country’s political affairs, in
international relations it has never been possible to maintain that the popular body acted
except as a wholly mechanical ratifier of the Executive’s will. The formality by
which Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality. Before such a
declaration can take place, the country will have been brought to the very brink of war by
the foreign policy of the Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one
more fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course of action, will have
been taken without either the people or its representatives being consulted or expressing
its feeling. When the declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the
Parliament or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the course of history,
without repudiating what has been representing itself in the eyes of the other States as
the symbol and interpreter of the nation’s will and animus. To repudiate an Executive
at that time would be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the country had
been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the country with an almost criminal
carelessness had allowed its Government to commit it to gigantic national enterprises in
which it had no heart. In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic
States represents the common man and not the significant classes who most strongly cherish
the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign policy which it understands even less
than it would care for if it understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an
incalculable war, in which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin. That is why the
referendum which was advocated by some people as a test of American sentiment in entering
the war was considered even by thoughtful democrats to be something subtly improper. The
die had been cast. Popular whim could only derange and bungle monstrously the majestic
march of State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the world. The irresistible
State ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas up to this time, it had been
irreproachable to be neutral in word and deed, for the foreign policy of the State had so
decided it, henceforth it became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The Middle West,
which had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of neutrality, became in a few months just
as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within
gave precedence to no section of the country. The herd-mind followed faithfully the
State-mind and, the agitation for a referendum being soon forgotten, the country fell into
the universal conclusion that, since its Congress had formally declared the war, the
nation itself had in the most solemn and universal way devised and brought on the entire
affair. Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter were
perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly declared will of a majority
of the nation. The herd coalescence of opinion which became inevitable the moment the
State had set flowing the war attitudes became interpreted as a prewar popular decision,
and disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously antisocial act. So that
the State, which had vigorously resisted the idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously
and, of course, with entire success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign
policy, had the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to the
retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken place. When once a country
has lapped up these State attitudes, its memory fades; it conceives itself not as merely
accepting, but of having itself willed, the whole policy and technique of war. The
significant classes, with their trailing satellites, identify themselves with the State,
so that what the State, through the agency of the Government, has willed, this majority
conceives itself to have willed.
All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary,
coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of
everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State
is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical
patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State
lover. With the ravages of democratic ideas, however, the modern republic cannot go to war
under the old conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. If a successful
animus for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they can only come back under
democratic forms, under this retrospective conviction of democratic control of foreign
policy, democratic desire for war, and particularly of this identification of the
democracy with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may be, however, is indicated
by the laws against sedition, and by the Government’s unreformed attitude on foreign
policy. One of the first demands of the more farseeing democrats in the democracies of the
Alliance was that secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have been made possible by
a web of secret agreements between States, alliances that were made by Governments without
the shadow of popular support or even popular knowledge, and vague, half-understood
commitments that scarcely reached the stage of a treaty or agreement, but which proved
binding in the event. Certainly, said these democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be
avoided unless this poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy is destroyed, this
system by which a nation’s power, wealth, and manhood may be signed away like a blank
check to an allied nation to be cashed in at some future crisis. Agreements which are to
affect the lives of whole peoples must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or
at least by their representatives in the full glare of publicity and criticism.
Such a demand for “democratic control of foreign policy” seemed axiomatic.
Even if the country had been swung into war by steps taken secretly and announced to the
public only after they had been consummated, it was felt that the attitude of the American
State toward foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must be superseded in
the new order. The American President himself, the liberal hope of the world, had
demanded, in the eyes of the world, open diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived
at. Did this mean a genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State functions
from Government to people? Not at all. When the question recently came to a challenge in
Congress, and the implications of open discussion were somewhat specifically discussed,
and the desirabilities frankly commended, the President let his disapproval be known in no
uncertain way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a State idealist, and whenever
democratic aspirations swung ideals too far out of the State orbit, he could be counted on
to react vigorously. Here was a clear case of conflict between democratic idealism and the
very crux of the concept of the State. However unthinkingly he might have been led on to
encourage open diplomacy in his liberalizing program, when its implication was made vivid
to him, he betrayed how mere a tool the idea had been in his mind to accentuate
America’s redeeming role. Not in any sense as a serious pragmatic technique had he
thought of a genuinely open diplomacy. And how could he? For the last stronghold of State
power is foreign policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts most concentratedly
as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of aggressive-power, acts with freest
arbitrariness. In foreign policy, the State is most itself. States, with reference to each
other, may be said to be in a continual state of latent war. The “armed truce,”
a phrase so familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the normal relation of
States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the normal
relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by
barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to
gain more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are recuperating
from conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves. It is the wheedling and the
bargaining of the worn-out bullies as they rise from the ground and slowly restore their
strength to begin fighting again. If diplomacy had been a moral equivalent for war, a
higher stage in human progress, an inestimable means of making words prevail instead of
blows, militarism would have broken down and given place to it. But since it is a mere
temporary substitute, a mere appearance of war’s energy under another form, a
surrogate effect is almost exactly proportioned to the armed force behind it. When it
fails, the recourse is immediate to the military technique whose thinly veiled arm it has
been. A diplomacy that was the agency of popular democratic forces in their non-State
manifestations would be no diplomacy at all. It would be no better than the Railway or
Education commissions that are sent from one country to another with rational constructive
purpose. The State, acting as a diplomatic-military ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it
must act arbitrarily and autocratically in time of war, it must act in time of peace in
this particular role where it acts as a unit. Unified control is necessarily autocratic
control. Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore a contradiction in terms. Open
discussion destroys swiftness and certainty of action. The giant State is paralyzed. Mr.
Wilson retains his full ideal of the State at the same time that he desires to eliminate
war. He wishes to make the world safe for democracy as well as safe for diplomacy. When
the two are in conflict, his clear political insight, his idealism of the State, tells him
that it is the naïver democratic values that must be sacrificed. The world must primarily
be made safe for diplomacy. The State must not be diminished.
What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and
personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with
attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our
hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and
law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries,
temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all,
eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have
the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war — or at least, its
significant classes — considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from
the idea of the State. Nation and State are scarcely differentiated, and the concrete,
practical, apparent facts are sunk in the symbol. We reverence not our country but the
flag. We may criticize ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag
at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men’s heart beat high and fill
them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious hopes for America as a free and
enlightened nation.
It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the flag is the
symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American flag we are reverencing the
nation. For the flag is not a symbol of the country as a cultural group, following certain
ideals of life, but solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige
and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military achievement, military
memory. It represents the country not in its intensive life, but in its far-flung
challenge to the world. The flag is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with
patriotic anthem and holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation’s patriotic
history is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health and
glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag, we are responding to the
appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd organized as an offensive and defensive
body, conscious of its prowess and its mystical herd strength.
Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has been granted
autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are scarcely able to philosophize over,
this distinction. It has been authoritatively declared that the horrid penalties against
seditious opinion must not be construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is, partisan
criticism of the Administration. A distinction is made between the Administration and the
Government. It is quite accurately suggested by this attitude that the Administration is a
temporary band of partisan politicians in charge of the machinery of Government, carrying
out the mystical policies of State. The manner in which they operate this machinery may be
freely discussed and objected to by their political opponents. The Governmental machinery
may also be legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What may not be discussed or
criticized is the mystical policy itself or the motives of the State in inaugurating such
a policy. The President, it is true, has made certain partisan distinctions between
candidates for office on the ground of support or nonsupport of the Administration, but
what he means was really support or nonsupport of the State policy as faithfully carried
out by the Administration. Certain of the Administration measures were devised directly to
increase the health of the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others
were concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to oppose the State and
was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second was to oppose fallible human judgment,
and was therefore, though to be depreciated, not to be wholly interpreted as political
suicide.
The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so carefully
observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as the seat of authority should be
confused with the State or the mystic source of authority. You cannot very well injure a
mystical idea which is the State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of
Government. So that the two become identified in the public mind, and any contempt for or
opposition to the workings of the machinery of Government is considered equivalent to
contempt for the sacred State. The State, it is felt, is being injured in its faithful
surrogate, and public emotion rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any
criticism of the form of Government a crime.
The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully shown by those laws
which emphasize interference with the Army and Navy as the most culpable of seditious
crimes. Pragmatically, a case of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would
seem to be far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than the isolated
and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent recruiting. But in the tradition of
the State ideal, such industrial interference with national policy is not identified as a
crime against the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally as an
impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those obscure seats of
the herd mind which dictate the identity of crime and fix their proportional punishments.
Army and Navy, however, are the very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious
lifeblood. To paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty of the
State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a crime equal to a successful
strike. The will is deemed sufficient. Even though the individual in his effort to impede
recruiting should utterly and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the
wrath of the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does not try any overt
action, but merely utters sentiments that may incidentally in the most indirect way cause
someone to refrain from enlisting, he is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask
whether any pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is enough that the
will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed too much for such
sacrilege.
Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human reason, are no
accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by the war. They are considered just,
proper, beautiful by all the classes which have the State ideal, and they express only an
extreme of health and vigor in the reaction of the State to its nonfriends.
Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the State. For the State
is a personal as well as a mystical symbol, and it can only be understood by tracing its
historical origin. The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern
men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion.
It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social
end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit
of our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of security and benefit
of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions,
and not because at any time men or classes in the full possession of their insight and
intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very important that we should occasionally
lift the incorrigible veil of that ex post facto idealism by which we throw a
glamour of rationalization over what is, and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit
that we have personally invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary
institutions which we see around us. Things are what they are, and come down to us with
all their thick encrustations of error and malevolence. Political philosophy can delight
us with fantasy and convince us who need illusion to live that the actual is a fair and
approximate copy — full of failings, of course, but approximately sound and sincere
— of that ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as creating. From this it is a
step to the tacit assumption that we have somehow had a hand in its creation and are
responsible for its maintenance and sanctity.
Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into
something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage,
like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take
up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of
customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped
on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of
discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social
institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we
are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals
and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what
our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own
passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of
beauty.
Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the
fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the
individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There
is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We
may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is
only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not
because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the
State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of
power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any
uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the
whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the
reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance
toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with
the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under
the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the
nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . .
RANDOLPH BOURNE
1918
First part of an essay entitled “The State,” which was left
unfinished at Bourne’s untimely death in 1918.
Bourne’s distinctions between State and Government and between State
and Nation are sometimes a little too neat, and his stress on the State’s intimate
connection with war tends to obscure its more “normal” ongoing role as enforcer
of the economic system during peacetime. While he recognizes that war cannot be abolished
without abolishing the State, he is less clear (or at least less explicit) about the fact
that the State cannot be abolished without abolishing capitalism. With this qualification,
I think his essay is one of the most lucid analyses of the patriotic hysteria that springs
up with astonishing rapidity in times of war, and that has usually proved far more
powerful than the rational arguments of its radical opponents. I drew on it in some
passages of The War and the Spectacle.
Though Bourne sympathized with the IWW and the more radical socialist
currents of his day, his social perspective seems to have been along the more eclectic
liberal-humanistic lines of later figures such as Lewis Mumford. Two good collections of
his writings are War and the Intellectuals (Harper, 1964) and The Radical
Will (Urizen, 1977). Another online Bourne article, The War and the Intellectuals (1917), examines
the virtually unanimous capitulation of even the most “progressive” American
intellectuals to support of American’s entry into World War I. Bourne was one of the
few honorable exceptions. Twenty-five years later, when Kenneth Rexroth and his comrades
formed an antiwar group during World War II, they named it the Randolph Bourne Council.
No copyright. “War Is the Health of the State” is now in the public domain
and may be reproduced freely.
[CROSSFIRE]
| |
|