.
War Is the Health of the State
by Randolph Bourne,
1886-1918
To most Americans of the classes
which consider themselves
significant, the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of
the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have
seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought.
In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favor of partisan
political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the
pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State
with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced
to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of
patriotic holiday.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it.
If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has
almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it
has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out
of the consciousness of men.
With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again.
The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is
fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been
hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal
and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes,
it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world.
The result is that, even in those countries where the business of
declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of
an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy
and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle.
Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State
in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State
in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to
the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the
freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all
foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or
forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part
of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from
popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.
The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part. The
patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and
government.
In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the
basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population
spreading over a certain geographical portion of the earth's surface,
speaking a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization.
Our idea of Country concerns itself with the nonpolitical 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 20
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 most convenient 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 subherd) 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.
Hypertext markup copyright © 2002 Dale Wharton.