Stupendous Position In The West

( Originally Published 1918 )

IN the vast problems with which the Western mind is struggling in history there are thus, it will be seen, two distinct but absolutely opposing sides. For centuries past the attention of the Western intellect has been concentrated on the forces on one side only of this problem. From time immemorial the dominant theme of the West has been everywhere the same the activities of the individual successful in the struggle for his own interests. It is the science of these activities, the heredity of this individual, the laws of this struggle, which constitute the principal sum of Western knowledge and which have contributed the main elements of Western history. The era of evolution which this development represents is the era of the integration of the individual. And Darwin, and Darwin only, is the true exponent of the natural laws of the phase in human history in. which it culminates.

On the other side of the picture there is now the surprising opposing phenomenon in the West of the gathering of the forces which represent the supersession of the negation of every one of the ruling principles of this era of the past. For the goal towards which the face of civilization is set is not the individual integration but the social integration. It is in the social integration that the soul of the world is being brought to the birth. And the laws of the social integration are not the laws of the individual integration. It is not in the heredity inborn in civilized man, so accurately described by Bateson, but in the immeasurably more important cultural heredity imposed on civilized man by civilization itself through the action of the emotion of the ideal on the young of each generation that we have the cause of efficiency and the seat of power in the future of the world.

This is the basal fact which underlies all phases of the life of the West. The powerful and universal interests of civilization are already instinctively conscious of it. They may be observed on every side staging themselves, often with the strangest Caliban like movements, into the particular attitudes which represent this knowledge. Through-out the West all institutions in which power is centred, from the military empires to international organizations of finance, feel themselves to be envisaged with conditions wherein the past has ceased to be a guide to them. Absorbed in the seething struggle of the time they know by a sure instinct of their life that the emotion of the ideal in the general mind is a cause of the first magnitude to be reckoned with in the future. But the fact which has to be noticed, standing out above other phenomena, is that the interests which have hitherto ruled in the West do not understand the function of the emotion of the ideal, and are proving themselves unable to reckon with it. They are like organisms in an environment to which they have no developed organs of correspondence.

In the marshalling of forces in the present conditions of the West it may be observed that the stake for which nearly all the desperately in earnest combatants are playing in the last resort is to win to their side and to organize in their interests the emotion of the ideal in the general mind. Yet there is nothing within the range of human experience to compare with the actual fact of the failure throughout the West to employ in the cause of civilization the emotion of the ideal in any of its forms. The American writer already quoted regarded the attempt made to direct the mind of the German people for two generations to support the ideals which resulted in the world war of 1914 as one of the most pathetic instances in the history of mankind of colossal power misconceived and misdirected. But the full truth goes much further than this. The Western mind has, in reality, almost completely missed in every form the employment in the service of civilization of the emotion of the ideal. And where it has hitherto sought to employ this illimitable cause it has hitherto only directed it to some aim so essentially barbarous and monstrous in conception that the effort has been fore-doomed from the outset to failure.

What is the explanation of this strange and stupendous position in the West? The emotion of the ideal when directed by civilization is a cause so potent to transform the world that there is practically nothing which cannot be achieved through it, even, as we have seen, to the complete altering of the psychology of a people in a single generation. It is the cause in the function of which the whole social integration centres. Why then has the mind of the West so completely missed or misconceived this function? Why should a cultured mind of the East strike a note which rings true in describing Western science as no more than ignorant knowledge? Why after centuries of industrial progress should we only have still throughout the West the economic system untouched by the slightest breath of collective idealism against which Marx declared the social war or against which a President of the United States formulated the terrible indictment that it is only a struggle for interests, of which the law is, "Let everyone look out for himself : let every generation look out for itself; while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible for any but those who stood at the levers of control to have a chance to look out for themselves"?1 Above all, why in the single instance in which the West has hitherto grasped the conception of employing the emotion of the ideal on a large scale towards a collective aim, namely, in organizing nations for war, has it hitherto only directed it to results so atavistic and so devastating that for a thousand years Western civilization has rendered universal history synonymous with universal homicide?

Now if we regard the history of the West in the past, the first fact which stands out before the imagination is the overwhelming and dominating influence of the heredity of the fight in all Western peoples. The peoples of the West represent, it has been already said, the largest, the most intense, and most prolonged process of military selection in the world. For thousands of years before the dawn of history the West has been the seat of the highest expression of force representing the highest expression of the individual efficient in the fight for his own interests. The consequences of this fact are felt today throughout every fibre of Western civilization. It is the qualities of the fight (the qualities, that is to say, dominant in the age of evolution when the universal effort of the efficient individual of the race was for A to endeavour to kill B before B was able to kill A) which survive in overwhelming strength in all Western institutions.

If we turn now and regard the collective attempts made in the history of the West to employ the emotion of the ideal collectively as a creative and transforming cause in relation to the cultural inheritance of civilization, the spectacle which is presented in these conditions has most remarkable features.

By far the greatest attempt hitherto made by the West to apply the emotion of the ideal to the cultural inheritance of civilization has been made through Christianity. In this religion the social passion transfigures and transcends all other emotions. The sanction for sacrifice is the greatest that can be conceived. Christianity was accepted by the West, and has been for centuries taught by the West throughout the world, as the religion of universal peace. It is essentially, among all religions, the religion of brotherhood, of love, of goodwill among men. It proclaims these conditions uncompromisingly as universal, as operative beyond the boundaries of all creeds, and as extending even to enemies. It recognizes neither race nor colour nor nationality in the presence of the all-subordinating ideals which it uplifts. The essence of these ideals, as it was recently described with great insight and accuracy in a leading article in the Times, is the fact of what was apparently the most complete and terrible of world failures becoming, because of that apparent failure and only through it, the most incredible triumph over all the powers of the world.

Yet the result, if it could only be seen by a mind absolutely free from the prepossessions in which we are steeped, is one which would stagger the imagination. The terrible dominating heredity of the fight inborn in the West has made of this ideal throughout history a cause of blood and war and of world-embracing conflict. The unfolding of the Christian religion in the West has been a record of fighting and slaughter aiming at worldly triumph which is absolutely unparalleled in any other phase of the history of the race. In all the developments in which we see the West endeavouring to present to the human mind the tremendous ideals of the Christian religion, one aim seems almost invariably at some stage to become dominant in the fighting mind of those who have held power in the West. In the development of its churches, of its creeds, of its nationalities, of its theories of the State in relation to civilization, the West has continuously made interpretations of the interest or of the aims of the Christian religion, or of some system of national policy proceeding from them, the occasion for entrenching itself in absolutisms always resting on force, always organized by force, and always aiming directly or indirectly to impose themselves by force on other people.

The principal theme of the history of the West is the theme of these universal wars of slaughter carried on by nations and peoples in the name of the principles of the religion of universal peace.

In these conflicts, despite all appearances to the contrary, right, truth, and justice have been almost without exception, just as in the pagan world, made to rest in the last resort on successful force. The combatants on each side proclaim the principles of Christianity to be part of their cause. And after their victories they carry the battle-stained banners of their wars even into the churches and temples of the Christian religion exactly in the manner of the pagan systems of old, in which truth and right were no more than local expressions of successful force. Western civilization throughout history has professed to be the civilization founded on Christianity. Yet almost every development of the West has been based on war, and has taken place with the menace of war or the fact of war accompanying and pervading it.

The terrible individual heredity of the fighting male of the West is so blinding to the mind in all its effects that the violent contradictions of standards which it provokes mostly pass absolutely unnoticed. Men of culture, and even the actual leaders and teachers of Christianity, seem quite unconscious of the spirit of a contradiction which in actual fact exceeds anything that has been witnessed in the world under any other standards. The spectacle of the West, for more than a thousand years under the influence of the inborn heredity of the fight in its ruling classes, devastating the world with war in the name of the religion of universal peace, will beyond doubt strike the mind of the world in the future as probably the most monstrous phenomenon in the history of humanity.

The spirit of the fight which accompanies and produces this contradiction pervades all phases of Western life, political and economic alike. It has sterilized for centuries every attempt to apply the emotion of the ideal in the service of civilization. Any detached mind which takes its way through the notable charters, speeches, bulls, greater State documents, and social pronouncements in which the vital decisions of the West have been put on record, will receive this conviction with overwhelming strength. The influence, moreover, of the blighting cause which has prevented the West from utilizing the function of the emotion of the ideal in the service of civilization has never been more powerful and more all-pervading than in the time in which we are living.

For two generations past the dominant feature of the history of the West has been nothing else than the struggle of the comparatively small class who have held military power in modern Germany against the soul of the world. History has produced no more striking set of documents than those in which the phases of this gigantic conflict are recorded. And there are no more characteristic documents in this collection than the public utterances made during his reign of the Emperor William II. It would be impossible to have in evidence in more impressive form than in these addresses the clash of the standards of two epochs of time as it existed in the mind of the sovereign who more than any single individual held military power concentrated in his hand, and who at the same time grasped even in the midst of the struggle the overwhelming collective significance of the emotion of the ideal in the future of the world.

For instance, we witness this Western ruler on his accession to the throne in 1888 addressing his people as a Christian sovereign,' extolling the acts "born of Christian humility," and vowing to God "to be a righteous and gentle Prince." We turn back a few pages, and then behold him almost simultaneously addressing the army. The reader seems to live in another world. Instantly the army is placed before the nation. The heredity of another epoch of time seems to dominate every thought and utterance. In the address to the army we behold force as the ultimate fact of the world. It is the dependence of the Emperor's ancestors on the army which is emphasized as the vital and significant fact in the history of the State.

So we are bound together [the address continues], I and the army so are we born for one another . . . you are now about to swear to me the oath of fidelity and obedience, and I vow that I shall ever be mindful of the fact that the eyes of my forefathers look down upon me from that other world, and that I one day shall have to render up to them an account of the fame and the honour of the army.

This conflict of standards in which the Western heredity of the fight in the individual struggles with and at times completely dominates the spirit of the Christian religion is visible continuously in almost every page of this notable record. Again and again in the Emperor's addresses throughout his reign the spirit of the Christian religion appears to be uppermost. The standards of Christianity are held high before the German nation as ideals. His soldiers, he tells them, as in the address on administering the oath to recruits in Berlin in 1897,1 must be good Christians. But ever and again it is as if we were ushered suddenly into another world. In the address at Potsdam in 1891, when the feeling against socialists ran high, these same Christian soldiers were told that "more and more unbelief and discontent raise their heads in the Fatherland, and it may come to pass that you will have to shoot down or stab your own relatives and brothers. Then seal your loyalty with your heart's blood ! " 2 This was the pronouncement which roused Tolstoy to describe as an "abyss of degradation" the condition which the recruits reached when they promised obedience. And he called the world to witness the paralysing self-contradiction and self-stultification of the West, when "men Christians, liberals, cultured men of our time, all of them are not only not provoked by this insult, but do not even notice it."

The heredity of the fight allied to uncontrolled power in the mind of the West is capable of producing results so extreme that without the facts in evidence they could scarcely have been conceived. In his address at Bremen in March, 1905, on the mission of Germany, the Emperor put aside on behalf of the German nation all dreams of empty world empire.

I have made a vow [he continued], never to strive for an empty world dominion. For what has become of the so called world empires? Alexander the Great, Napoleon I all the great warriors have swum in blood. . . . The world empire of which I have dreamed shall consist in this, that a newly-created German empire shall first of all enjoy on all sides the most absolute confidence as a quiet, honour-able, and peaceful neighbour; and that . . . it shall not be founded upon acquisitions won with the sword, but upon the mutual trust of the nations who are striving for the same goal.

The pronouncement in which we seem to see the spirit of Christianity uppermost must be kept in view to gauge to the full the extent of the position of self-stultification in which the West is locked.

For it proceeded, it must be remembered, from the absolute ruler of the nation which was compelled by its ruling classes to play Germany's part immediately after in the world war of 1914, with all its consequences to neighbouring States and to the whole world; the State whose diplomacy and policy was being almost at the same time defined by its military writers like Von Bernhardi as resting not on "the most absolute confidence on all sides," but, as it was frankly expressed in Bernhardi's words, "simply and solely on power and expediency." It was the utterance, moreover, of the supreme military head of the nation, whose General Military Staff issued soon after for the instruction of German officers the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, in which every ethic of the German State at war is made to turn similarly to power and expediency applied in the most terrible conditions of war.

For to quote again Professor J. H. Morgan's summary of some of the Kriegsbrauch im Land-kriege rules of war:

Should they (the peaceful inhabitants of an invaded country) be exposed to the fire of their own troops? Yes: it may be indefensible, but its main justification is that it is successful. Should prisoners of war be put to death? It is always ugly, but it is sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin, or corrupt a citizen, or incite an incendiary? Certainly: it may not be reputable and honour may fight shy of it, but the law of war is less touchy. Should the women and children, the old and the feeble, be allowed to depart before a bombardment begins? On the contrary, their presence is greatly to be desired; it makes the bombardment all the more effective.

In all this picture of the illimitable genius of humanity directed thus to monstrous ends, a feature upon which special attention has to be fixed is the effect of the concentration of power in a few hands. The fact has great significance in the future of democracy. For it is in such conditions of power, even where they prevail in institutions outwardly representative in character, that the primitive inborn heredity of the fight in the individual struggles with and, in the end, completely dominates the cultural heredity which is imposed on the individual by civilization.

After Christianity, nationality has been the principal institution through which the West has sought to apply the emotion of the ideal on a collective scale in the service of civilization. But the inborn heredity of the fight in vast strength has everywhere throughout the West carried the expressions of nationality into similar forms of combativeness.

In the result we see nearly every function of nationality amongst Western peoples diverted, just as in the pagan world, to some expression of exclusiveness, with the ultimate fact of war in the background. The appeal to the emotion of the ideal through nationality in the West has, in short, ever been an appeal to the instinct of combativeness, and nearly always with the conception of war in the background. Every living nation idealizes itself. But throughout the West the idealization of a people through nationality has almost invariably taken the form of idealization in contrast to, or in opposition to, some other people or nation. Western history displays an ascending curve of slaughter as it rises to the Armageddon of 1914 which furnishes an example of the instinct of combativeness expressing itself through nationality that would be absolutely incredible if we were not familiarized with it and if we had received it as the record of some savage order of the world.

Even within national frontiers the influence of this heredity of the fight pervades all forms of the national consciousness of the Western races. When we see a leader like Mazzini dreaming of the high ideals of the Italian nation in its relations to the wider fellowship of humanity, we behold him driven by necessity inherent in his environment still thinking and reasoning in terms of combativeness and force.

"What we have to do to establish the new order," he tells his fellow-countrymen, "is to overthrow by force the brute force which opposes itself today to every attempt at improvement."1 And what we see Mazzini thinking in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century is precisely what the Westminster Gazette sees the leaders of democracy thinking nearly a century later in England when it deplores the fact that the internal politics of the British nation are becoming "battles rather than deliberations, and that it has become in our time" the practice of all minorities "to threaten to carry on every controversy by violent and extra constitutional means even when Parliament has decided against them."

Nor is there any essential change in the note of all-pervading combativeness when the horizon of that class-consciousness which expresses itself externally and internally in nationalism extends into organizations world-wide in their aims. The principal opponents in Germany against whom the extreme sentiments of the speech of the Emperor William II at Potsdam, already quoted, were supposed to be directed, were the socialists who followed Karl Marx. But we have only to read with insight to see that in the pages of Marx's Kapital, as in the Emperor's addresses, the distinctive fact is that we are in the presence of the same furious heredity of the fight. It is only the conditions which have changed. In Marx the national war has become the social war, and the frontiers of Marx's Fatherland have become ex-tended to those of international socialism. But we are still only in the presence of the primitive Darwinian man whose heredity Bateson so accurately described to us as furnishing only one universal motive of action, namely, that which drives him in the struggle with somebody else for the possession of property.

And when we turn from Marx's programme of socialism in the pages of Kapital to Professor Karl Pearson's programme of socialism in the Ethic of Free Thought, it continues still to be the same spirit. Professor Pearson draws in academic seclusion in England the picture of his new order of society under socialism. And then the frantic heredity of the fighting male of the West takes possession of his soul. To those who offend against the laws of public property in Professor Pearson's new order of society it is to be, to use his actual words before quoted, "short shrift and the nearest lamp-post." The rules of the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege could hardly furnish a more characteristic example of the spirit of the Darwinian man. The self-stultification of the West is, in short, as complete and as absolute at the hands of the socialistic Professor in England as Tolstoy considered it to be at the hands of the Christian Emperor in Germany. And the tragic irony of it is that, in this case also, Tolstoy would have had equal cause for saying that persons of culture, liberals, even the fellow-men of free thought whom Professor Pearson is addressing, are "not only not provoked by the insult, but do not even notice it."

The history of the emotion of the ideal in the West, in short, has been the same in all its principal manifestations. When controlled by those who have held power, especially when power has been concentrated in few hands, it has ever tended to be directed by and dominated by the qualities of the primitive heredity of the fight. In the propagandas of parties and the marshalling and organizing of the great forces of the day, the orientation of all the arguments, of all the interests, is instinctively, as just observed, towards the emotion of the ideal in the general mind. But the failure of this effort in every form is one of the most marked features of the time. It is a fact that the mind of the West, on the whole, has completely failed to understand the emotion of the ideal. It has not grasped either the nature, or the magnitude, or the management of its function in the future of civilization. The only medium through which it has hitherto attempted to utilize collectively this transforming cause of the future in imposing the cultural inheritance of civilization on the general mind, on a universal scale, has been through the primitive and characteristic instinct of combativeness.

The level at which the argument proceeds in any great question of the day in the West is, there-fore, above everything remarkable. It is almost as if we saw continuously the leaders of civilized men making an appeal before an audience of savages. It is the same kind of emotions which are being stirred, the same feelings of combativeness which are being aroused, the same kind of arguments which are being used. Every device, every ruse, every absurdity, even to grotesque distortions of the truth, are pressed into service to move or excite the feelings of combativeness.

It is a wonderful sight. As party government has developed in the West under democratic institutions, a new world of literature and art has come into existence in the press to supply all the machinery of this appeal to the instinct of combativeness. Every capable editor understands that in all the leading questions of the day the most effective appeal to the multitude is the emotional appeal through the spirit of combativeness. An appeal to the pure instinct of the fight or to that class consciousness upon which combativeness is based, and which man shares with the animal world, is known to be the most direct and effective means of moving the general mind on public questions.

In such circumstances, the standards of effectiveness which have come to prevail in the press of Western countries in the midst of the struggle of commercial and financial interests on the one side and the war of political parties on the other, are altogether remarkable. Until recently in the West the press had been, after the organized institutions of Christianity, the greatest agent in moving the world through the emotion of the ideal. Its activities have been one of the main ultimate facts upon which Western liberties have rested. Its spokesmen have exercised in the past an influence exceeding a thousandfold that of the orators of the Pnyx in ancient Athens in creating and sustaining in the imagination of the multitude the ideas through which the cultural inheritance of civilization was imposed on the people. But the conditions of the past have been profoundly altered as the press has passed, like all other institutions, under the sway of the dominant forces of the time.

Mr. R. Donald, the editor of the London Daily Chronicle, speaking recently in Great Britain as President of the Institute of Journalists, described in a remarkable address' the great revolution which the British press has undergone in this respect in less than a generation. The leading feature of the change, as stated by Mr. Donald, is that the press had been commercialized on a gigantic scale. The central fact of this transition is that corporate ownership of the joint-stock type is superseding individual ownership of the idealist type. The effect of this, coupled with other changes, was, he said, to "place enormous power to sway public opinion in the hands of a few people." It was an inherent feature of these agglomerations, he continued, that they were controlled by exactly the same forces which operated in other fields of financial and commercial activity. Under the old system the proprietor "preferred less profit to compromise with principle," but under the new the culminating aim is necessarily the payment of dividends. "Dividends," said Mr. Donald, "must be earned even if principle is to suffer in the process."

The conditions under which the work of publicity is done in the midst of this raging war of interests, both external and internal, in which the press itself has become centrally engaged, have been described recently in striking and earnest language by more than one experienced observer. A writer in the British Review put in moderate language the party feature of it as seen from the outside in saying that the public is be-coming uneasily aware that "a fair presentment of the truth is not the main object."1 Mr. Chesterton, writing as an experienced journalist, has described the struggle as he saw it from the inside in the press itself. He sketched in a few bold and vivid strokes the work as it proceeded in the office of an effective newspaper. In the conditions which prevail, Mr. Chesterton saw the directing mind continually abolishing truth as Turner abolished a tower because it did not suit him.

He described him, as it were, the arch creator of fact, with the great instrument of publicity in his hands, daily plunging a whole people into darkness, as Rembrandt would plunge a whole picture into darkness-to bring out a purpose. He saw him as the master artist of his time, at work upon events effacing and disguising the lineaments of affairs as Whistler would efface the face of a woman so that more important matters should not be interfered with.'

This description of the inside conditions of the press as they prevailed in one of the freest countries of the West in the first quarter of the twentieth century is of the profoundest interest. The calculated lightness of touch only adds to the significance as we read between the lines. It was written at a time when Great Britain was at peace with all the world, at a period when all the commercial and industrial interests of the West were in the full flush of the highest prosperity. It was given on first-hand knowledge by one of the foremost of British journalists. But as we scrutinize the description, the extraordinary import of it grips and even shocks the mind.

Two years later, most of the principal countries of the world had closed in the greatest war of all time. The public press in the greater part of the Western world was held, as it had never before been held in history, in the dominant grasp of an all-embracing military censorship. The surprising significance of the fact just referred to is this. Reading Mr. Chesterton's description now it seems to be, line for line and word for word, al-most an exact description of the conditions of the press which prevailed in the principal countries of the West under the most ruthless form of military censorship to which public news and public opinion on a large scale has ever been subjected.

For during the Armageddon truth in the press throughout the greater part of Western civilization was indeed abolished because it was not suitable. Peoples were, indeed, daily plunged into darkness on a universal scale to bring out a purpose. The faces and lineaments of men and affairs were indeed effaced so that they should not interfere with more important matters. Yet Mr. Chesterton's description was a description of the conditions prevailing in the press in one of the foremost countries in the world with regard to its social, political, and industrial affairs in a time of peace and under normal conditions. No more searching indictment of our civilization was ever written. It brings out the meaning of our Western life in these normal conditions as with a flash of universal illumination. It is a state of permanent war relentless, remorseless, truth extinguishing, primitive war throughout all our institutions, national and political, social and economic.

And the tragic irony of it in this case also is that Tolstoy would again have equal cause for saying that "men, Christians, liberals, cultured men of our time, all of them "can listen to these and similar descriptions of our current institutions and remain unconscious of their significance and of the self-stultification of our civilization which they imply. " They are not only not provoked by the insult; they do not even notice it!"

This is the condition to which the long intensive heredity of the fight inborn in the man of the West has carried civilization. It is the culminating phase of the epoch of the individual integration; the epoch, that is to say, of the ascendancy in the world of the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interests. The future lies in the social integration. The social integration rests on organization. And in this organization the seat of efficiency and the centre of all power in the future is in that cultural heredity which civilization imposes on the individual through the emotion of the ideal. There is practically nothing which cannot be accomplished through the emotion of the ideal in civilization. There is absolutely no aim, which civilization chooses to set before itself, which it is not possible for civilization to achieve, even to the sweeping away of this existing world and the creation of a new world in a brief space of time. The great question of the age, the question to which all others are subordinate, is : Where are we to look in the new order for the psychic centre of this cultural heredity of civilization?