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 favour 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 [Lawrence Pearsall
Jacks, Oxford philosopher and Unitarian clergyman] 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. . . .
From the first draft of an essay, “The State”, which was left unfinished by Bourne at the time of his death. It is now in the Bourne MSS, Columbia University Libraries.
Reprinted from BigEye.
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