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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 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. . . .
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