.
Part II, "War is the health of the state," by
Randolph Bourne (1918)
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 that shows
more resistance to this unification,
is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as
the IWW, 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 20 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 abuseof 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
wornout 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 deprecated, 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 20 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 byproduct 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. . . . #
Randolph Bourne, 1886-1918, was a social critic, essayist, and
journalist. He contributed to The Atlantic Monthly and The
Masses. In 1914 he joined The New Republic but his pacifist
convictions forced him out of the leading media. By 1916 he wrote for
radical publications such as Seven Arts and The Dial.
He was a defender of African American equality and a supporter of
radical feminists. Bourne died at 32, victim of the influenza
epidemic. This essay was the start of a longer one, "The State" --
left unfinished at his death.
(Downloaded from Gilles d'Aymery's site, Swans Commentary, then edited.)
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© 2002 Dale Wharton.