The Great Illusion Part 18

CHAPTER III

IS THE POLITICAL REFORMATION POSSIBLE?

Men are little disposed to listen to reason, "therefore we should not talk reason"--Are men's ideas immutable?

We have seen, therefore--

1. That the need for defence arises from the existence of a motive for attack.

2. That that motive is, consequently, part of the problem of defence.

3. That, since as between the advanced peoples we are dealing with in this matter, one party is as able in the long run to pile up armaments as the other, we cannot get nearer to solution by armaments alone; we must get at the original provoking cause--the motive making for aggression.

4. That if that motive results from a true judgment of the facts; if the determining factor in a nation's well-being and progress is really its power to obtain by force advantage over others, the present situation of armament rivalry tempered by war is a natural and inevitable one.

5. That if, however, the view is a false one, our progress towards solution will be marked by the extent to which the error becomes generally recognized in international public opinion.

That brings me to the last entrenchment of those who actively or pa.s.sively oppose propaganda looking towards reform in this matter.

As already pointed out, the last year or two has revealed a suggestive s.h.i.+fting of position on the part of such opposition. The original position of the defenders of the old political creeds was that the economic thesis here outlined was just simply wrong; then, that the principles themselves were sound enough, but that they were irrelevant, because not interests, but ideals, const.i.tuted the cause of conflict between nations. In reply to which, of course, came the query, What ideals, apart from questions of interest, lie at the bottom of the conflict which is the most typical of our time--what ideal motive is Germany, for instance, pursuing in its presumed aggression upon England?

Consequently that position has generally been abandoned. Then we were told that men don't act by logic, but pa.s.sion. Then the critics were asked how they explained the general character of _la haute politique_, its cold intrigues and expediency, the extraordinary rapid changes in alliances and _ententes_, all following exactly a line of pa.s.sionless interest reasoned, though from false premises, with very great logic indeed; and were asked whether all experience does not show that, while pa.s.sion may determine the energy with which a given line of conduct is pursued, the direction of that line of conduct is determined by processes of another kind: John, seeing James, his life-long and long-sought enemy, in the distance, has his hatred pa.s.sionately stirred, and harbors thoughts of murder. As he comes near he sees that it is not James at all, but a quiet and inoffensive neighbor, Peter. John's thoughts of murder are appeased, not because he has changed his nature, but because the recognition of a simple fact has changed the direction of his pa.s.sion. What we in this matter hope to do is to show that the nations are mistaking Peter for James.

Well, the last entrenchment of those who oppose the work is the dogmatic a.s.sertion that though we are right as to the material fact, its demonstration can never be made; that this political reformation of Europe the political rationalists talk about is a hopeless matter; it implies a change of opinion so vast that it can only be looked for as the result of whole generations of educative processes.

Suppose this were true. What then? Will you leave everything severely alone, and leave wrong and dangerous ideas in undisturbed possession of the political field?

This conclusion is not a policy; it is Oriental fatalism--"Kismet," "the will of Allah."

Such an att.i.tude is not possible among men dominated by the traditions and the impulses of the Western world. We do not let things slide in this way; we do not a.s.sume that as men are not guided by reason in politics, therefore we shall not reason about politics. The time of statesmen is absorbed in the discussion of these things. Our press and literature are deeply concerned in them. The talk and thought of men are about them. However little they may deem reason to affect the conduct of men, they go on reasoning. And progress in conduct is determined by the degree of understanding which results.

It is true that physical conflict marks the point at which the reason has failed; men fight when they have not been able to "come to an understanding" in the common phrase, which is for once correct. But is this a cause for deprecating the importance of clear understanding? Is it not, on the contrary, precisely why our energies should be devoted to improving our capacity for dealing with these things by reason, rather than by physical force?

Do we not inevitably arrive at the destination to which every road in this discussion leads? However we may start, with whatever plan, however elaborated or varied, the end is always the same--the progress of man in this matter depends upon the degree to which his ideas are just; man advances by the victories of his mind and character. Again we have arrived at the region of plat.i.tude. But also again it is one of those plat.i.tudes which most people deny. Thus the London _Spectator_:

For ourselves, as far as the main economic proposition goes, he preaches to the converted.... If nations were perfectly wise and held perfectly sound economic theories, they would recognize that exchange is the union of forces, and that it is very foolish to hate or be jealous of your co-operators.... Men are savage, bloodthirsty creatures ... and when their blood is up will fight for a word or a sign, or, as Mr. Angell would put it, for an illusion.

Criticism at the other end of the journalistic scale--that, for instance, from Mr. Blatchford--is of an exactly similar character. Mr.

Blatchford says:

Mr. Angell may be right in his contention that modern war is unprofitable to both belligerents. I do not believe it, but he may be right. But he is wrong if he imagines that his theory will prevent European war. To prevent European wars it needs more than the truth of his theory: it needs that the war lords and diplomatists and financiers and workers of Europe shall believe the theory.... So long as the rulers of nations believe that war may be expedient (see Clausewitz), and so long as they believe they have the power, war will continue.... It will continue until these men are fully convinced that it will bring no advantage.

Therefore, argues Mr. Blatchford, the demonstration that war will not bring advantage is futile.

I am not here, for the purpose of controversy, putting an imaginary conclusion into Mr. Blatchford's mouth. It is the conclusion that he actually does draw. The article from which I have quoted was intended to demonstrate the futility of books like this. It was by way of reply to an early edition of this one. In common with the other critics, he must have known that this is not a plea for the impossibility of war (I have always urged with emphasis that our ignorance on this matter makes war not only possible, but extremely likely), but for its futility. And the demonstration of its futility is, I am now told, in itself futile!

I have expanded the arguments of this and others of my critics thus:

The war lords and diplomats are still wedded to the old false theories; _therefore_ we shall leave those theories undisturbed, and generally deprecate discussion of them.

Nations do not realize the facts; _therefore_ we should attach no importance to the work of making them known.

These facts profoundly affect the well-being of European peoples; _therefore_ we shall not systematically encourage the efficient study of them.

If they were generally known, the practical outcome would be that most of our difficulties herein would disappear; _therefore_ anyone who attempts to make them known is an amiable sentimentalist, a theorist, and so on, and so on.

"Things do not matter so much as people's opinions about things"[119]; _therefore_ no effort shall be directed to a modification of opinion.

The only way for these truths to affect policy, to become operative in the conduct of nations, is to make them operative in the minds of men; _therefore_ discussion of them is futile.

Our troubles arise from the wrong ideas of nations; _therefore_ ideas do not count--they are "theories."

General conception and insight in this matter is vague and ill-defined, so that action is always in danger of being decided by sheer pa.s.sion and irrationalism; _therefore_ we shall do nothing to render insight clear and well-defined.

The empire of sheer impulse, of the non-rational, is strongest when a.s.sociated with ignorance (_e.g._, Mohammedan fanaticism, Chinese Boxerism), and only yields to the general progress of ideas (_e.g._, sounder religious notions sweeping away the hate and horrors of religious persecution); _therefore_ the best way to maintain peace is to pay no attention to the progress of political ideas.

The progress of ideas has completely transformed religious feeling in so far as it settles the policy of one religious group in relation to another; _therefore_ the progress of ideas will never transform patriotic feeling, which settles the policy of one political group in relation to another.

What, in short, does the argument of my critics amount to? This: that so slow, so stupid is the world that, though the facts may be una.s.sailable, they will never be learned within any period that need concern us.

Without in the least desiring to score off my critics, and still less to be discourteous, I sometimes wonder it has never struck them that in the eyes of the profane this att.i.tude of theirs must appear really as a most colossal vanity. "We" who write in newspapers and reviews understand these things; "we" can be guided by reason and wisdom, but the common clay will not see these truths for "thousands of years." I talk to the converted (so I am told) when my book is read by the editors and reviewers. _They_, of course, can understand; but the notion that mere diplomats and statesmen, the men who make up Governments and nations, should ever do so is, of course, quite too preposterous.

Personally, however flattering this notion might be, I have never been able to feel its soundness. I have always strongly felt the precise opposite--namely, that what is plain to me will very soon be equally plain to my neighbor. Possessing, presumably, as much vanity as most, I am, nevertheless, absolutely convinced that simple facts which stare an ordinary busy man of affairs in the face are not going to be for ever hid from the mult.i.tude. Depend upon it, if "we" can see these things, so can the mere statesmen and diplomats and those who do the work of the world.

Moreover, if what "we" write in reviews and books does not touch men's reasons, does not affect their conduct, why do we write at all?

We do _not_ believe it impossible to change or form men's ideas; such a plea would doom us all to silence, and would kill religious and political literature. "Public Opinion" is not external to men; it is made by men; by what they hear and read and have suggested to them by their daily tasks, and talk and contact.

If it _were_ true, therefore, that the difficulties in the way of modifying political opinion were as vast as my critics would have us believe, that would not affect our conduct; the more they emphasize those difficulties, the more they emphasize the need for effort on our part.

But it is not true that a change such as that involved here necessarily "takes thousands of years." I have already dealt with the plea, but would recall only one incident that I have cited: a scene painted by a Spanish artist of the Court and n.o.bles and populace in a great European city, gathered on a public holiday as for a festival to see a beautiful child burned to death for a faith that, as it plaintively said, it had sucked in with its mother's milk.

How long separates us from that scene? Why, not the lives of three ordinarily elderly people. And how long after that scene--which was not an isolated incident of uncommon kind, but a very everyday matter, typical of the ideas and feelings of the time at which it was enacted--was it before the renewal of such became a practical impossibility? It was not a hundred years. It was enacted in 1680, and within the s.p.a.ce of a short lifetime the world knew that never again would a child be burned alive as the result of a legal condemnation by a duly const.i.tuted Court, and as a public festival, witnessed by the King and the n.o.bles and the populace, in one of the great cities of Europe.

Or, do those who talk of "unchanging human nature" and "thousands of years" really plead that we are in danger of a repet.i.tion of such a scene? In that case our religious toleration is a mistake. Protestants stand in danger of such tortures, and should arm themselves with the old armory of religious combat--the rack, the thumbscrew, the iron maiden, and the rest--as a matter of sheer protection.

"Men are savage, bloodthirsty creatures, and will fight for a word or a sign," the _Spectator_ tells us, when their patriotism is involved.

Well, until yesterday, it was as true to say that of them when their religion was involved. Patriotism is the religion of politics. And as one of the greatest historians of religious ideas has pointed out, religion and patriotism are the chief moral influences moving great bodies of men, and "the separate modifications and mutual interaction of these two agents may almost be said to const.i.tute the moral history of mankind."[120]

But is it likely that a general progress which has transformed religion is going to leave patriotism unaffected; that the rationalization and humanization which have taken place in the more complex domain of religious doctrine and belief will not also take place in the domain of politics? The problem of religious toleration was beset with difficulties incalculably greater than any which confront us in this problem. Then, as now, the old order was defended with real disinterestedness; then it was called religious fervor; now it is called patriotism. The best of the old inquisitors were as disinterested, as sincere, as single-minded, as are doubtless the best of the Prussian Junkers, the French Nationalists, the English militarists. Then, as now, the progress towards peace and security seemed to them a dangerous degeneration, the break-up of faiths, the undermining of most that holds society together. Then, as now, the old order pinned its faith to the tangible and visible instruments of protection--I mean the instruments of physical force. And the Catholic, in protecting himself by the Inquisition against what he regarded as the dangerous intrigues of the Protestant, was protecting what he regarded not merely as his own social and political security, but the eternal salvation, he believed, of unborn millions of men. Yet he surrendered such instruments of defence, and finally Catholic and Protestant alike came to see that the peace and security of both were far better a.s.sured by this intangible thing--the right thinking of men--than by all the mechanical ingenuity of prisons and tortures and burnings which it was possible to devise. In like manner will the patriot come finally to see that better than _Dreadnoughts_ will be the recognition on his part and on the part of his prospective enemy, that there is no interest, material or moral, in conquest and military domination.

And that hundred years which I have mentioned as representing an apparently impa.s.sable gulf in the progress of European ideas, a period which marked an evolution so great that the very mind and nature of men seemed to change, was a hundred years without newspapers--a time in which books were such a rarity that it took a generation for one to travel from Madrid to London; in which the steam printing-press did not exist, nor the railroad, nor the telegraph, nor any of those thousand contrivances which now make it possible for the words of an American statesman spoken to-day to be read by the millions of Europe to-morrow morning--to do, in short, more in the way of the dissemination of ideas in ten months than was possible then in a century.

When things moved so slowly, a generation or two sufficed to transform the mind of Europe on the religious side. Why should it be impossible to change that mind on the political side in a generation, or half a generation, when things move so much more quickly? Are men less disposed to change their political than their religious opinions? We all know that _not_ to be the case. In every country in Europe we find political parties advocating, or at least acquiescing in, policies which they strenuously opposed ten years ago. Does the evidence available go to show that the particular side of politics with which we are dealing is notably more impervious to change and development than the rest--less within the reach and influence of new ideas?