Justice in War Time/An Appeal to the Intellectuals of Europe
AN APPEAL TO THE INTELLECTUALS OF EUROPE.[1]
Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of "this war, in which philosophy takes no interest" (Philosophische Werke, Gerhardt’s edition, I., p. 420). We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors, and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other. Side by side, in the pages of Scientia, are to be read articles by learned men, all betraying shamelessly their national bias, all as incapable of justice as any cheap newspaper, all as full of special pleading and garbled history. And all accept, as a matter of course, the inevitability of each other's bias; disagreeing with each other’s conclusions, yet they agree perfectly with each other’s spirit. All agree that the whole of a writer’s duty is to make out a case for his own country.
To this attitude there have been notable exceptions among literary men—for example, Romain Rolland and Bernard Shaw—and even among politicians, although political extinction is now everywhere the penalty for a sense of justice. Among men of learning, there are no doubt many who have preserved justice in their thoughts and in their private utterances. But these men, whether from fear or from unwillingness to seem unpatriotic, have almost kept silence. Among those who have published their opinions, almost all have shown a complete lack of intellectual detachment. Such an article as that of V. Pareto in Scientia could hardly have been written by a professor in one of the belligerent countries.[2]
I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to color their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs: it is in its essence neutral. It stands outside the clash of passions and hatreds, revealing, to those who seek it, the tragic irony of strife with its attendant world of illusions. Men of learning, who should be accustomed to the pursuit of truth in their daily work, might have attempted, at this time, to make themselves the mouthpiece of truth, to see what was false on their own side, what was valid on the side of their enemies. They might have used their reputation and their freedom from political entanglements to mitigate the abhorrence with which the nations have come to regard each other, to help towards mutual understanding, to make the peace, when it comes, not a mere cessation due to weariness, but a fraternal reconciliation, springing from realisation that the strife has been a folly of blindness. They have chosen to do nothing of all this. Allegiance to country has swept away allegiance to truth. Thought has become the slave of instinct, not its master. The guardians of the temple of Truth have betrayed it to idolaters, and have been the first to promote the idolatrous worship.
One of the most surprising things in this war is the universal appeal to atavistic moral notions which, in times of peace, civilised men would have repudiated with contempt. Germans speak of England's brutal national egotism, and represent Germany as fighting to maintain a great ideal of civilisation against an envious world. Englishmen speak of Germany's ruthless militarism and lust of dominion, and represent themselves as fighting to uphold the sacredness of treaties and the rights of small nations. In a sober mood, many of the men who use such language would recognize that it is melodramatic and mythical. All nations, at all times, are egotistic. It may happen, accidentally, that in pursuing its own interest a nation is also spreading civilisation or upholding the sacredness of treaties; but no impartial person can believe that for such ends a nation will sacrifice a million lives and a thousand millions of pounds. Such sacrifices are only made for nationally selfish ends, and until it is recognised that all the nations engaged in the war are equally and wholly selfish, no true thought about the issues involved is possible.
Moral judgment, as applied to others than one's self, are a somewhat subtilised police force: they make use of men's desire for approbation to bring self-interest into harmony with the interest of one's neighbours. But when a man is already trying to kill you, you will not feel much additional discomfort in the thought that he has a low opinion of your moral character. For this reason, disapproval of our enemies in wartime is useless, so far as any possible effect upon them is concerned. It has, however, a certain unconscious purpose, which is, to prevent humane feelings towards the enemy, and to nip in the bud any nascent sympathy for his sufferings. Under the stress of danger, beliefs and emotions all become subservient to the one end of self-preservation. Since it is repugnant to civilised men to kill and maim others just like themselves, it becomes necessary to conquer repugnance by denying the likeness and imputing wickedness to those whom we wish to injure. And so it comes about that the harshest moral judgments of the enemy are formed by the nations which have the strongest impulses of kindliness to overcome.
In order to support this belief in the peculiar wickedness of the enemy, a whole mythology of falsehood grows up. partly through the deliberate action of newspapers and governments, but chiefly through the inherent myth-making tendency of strong collective emotions. Every powerful passion brings with it an impulse to an attendant system of false beliefs. A man in love will attribute innumerable non-existent perfections to the object of his devotion; a jealous man will attribute equally non-existent crimes to the object of his jealousy. But in ordinary life, this tendency is continually held in check by intercourse with people who do not share our private passions, and who therefore are critical of our irrational beliefs. In national questions, this corrective is absent. Most men meet few foreigners, especially in time of war, and beliefs inspired by passion can be communicated to others without fear of an unsympathetic response. The supposed facts intensify the passion which they embody, and are magnified still further by those to whom they are told. Individual passions, except in lunatics, produce only the germs of myths, perpetually neutralised by the indifference of others; but collective passions escape this corrective, and generate in time what appears like overwhelming evidence for wholly false beliefs.
Men of learning, who are acquainted with the part played by collective error in the history of religion, ought to have been on their guard against assaults upon their credulity. They ought to have realised, from the obvious falsehood of the correlative opposite beliefs in enemy countries, that the myth-making impulse was unusually active, and could only be repelled by an unusual intellectual vigour. But I do not find that they were appreciably less credulous than the multitude. In the early days of last September, when the Germans were carrying all before them in France, the need for some source of hope produced in England an all but universal belief that a large Russian army had travelled from Archangel, through England, to Belgium. The evidence was very much better than the evidence for most facts of history: most men knew many eye-witnesses of their transit, and at last a newspaper, published a telegram from its correspondent saying that he had discovered them in Belgium. Only then was the story officially denied, but for a long time many continued to believe it. And the intellectuals were not by any means less ready to believe it than the rest of the country.
The really harmful beliefs are those which produce hatred of the enemy. The devastation and maltreatment of Belgium might naturally have aroused some qualms among humane Germans. But the instinct of self-protection produced a harvest of accusations against the Belgians: that they put out the eyes of wounded Germans, or cut off their hands; that they behaved brutally to German women in Belgium; and, generally, that they had shown such depravity as rendered them unworthy of consideration. At the very same time, innumerable German atrocities were reported in England. It cannot, unfortunately, be denied that many very shocking atrocities occurred, but not nearly so many as the English at first believed. Many men stated confidently that they knew people in England who had staying with them Belgian children whose hands had been cut off by German soldiers. Some such cases there were in Belgium, but I know of no evidence that any reached England. No effect whatever was produced by pointing out that if there were so many cases, at least one with a name and address would have been mentioned in the newspaper. Such arguments have no power against a belief which stimulates ferocity, and is on that account felt to be useful. No doubt atrocities have occurred on both sides. But it is certain that they have been far less numerous, and (for the most part) less unnatural, than they are almost universally believed to have been.
A correspondence in, the Labour Leader for March 18 will illustrate this point. Rev. J. F. Matthews,
Glossop Road Baptist Church,
Sheffield.
Dear Sir,
A correspondent informs us that on Sunday morning you stated in the course of a sermon delivered in Wash Lane Church, Latchford, Warrington, that there is a Belgian girl in Sheffield with her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open by the Germans, and that she is still living and getting better.
I am anxious to investigate stories of German atrocities, and should be grateful if you could send particulars to me by which your statements could be authenticated.
A. Fenner Brockway.
March 5, 1915.
Mr. A. Fenner Brockway.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your note. I have written to our Belgian Consul here for the name and address of the girl whose case I quoted at Latchford. If all I hear is true it is far worse than I stated. I am also asking for another similar instance, which I shall be glad to transmit to you if, and as soon as, I can secure the facts.
John Francis Matthews.
March 9, 1915.
Dear Mr. Brockway,
I enclose our Consul's letter, which I have just received. I am writing a letter to my old Church at Latchford, to be read on Sunday next, contradicting the story which I told, on what seemed to be unimpeachable authority. I am glad I did not give the whole of the alleged facts as they were given to me. With many thanks for your note and inquiry.
John Francis Matthews.
March 12, 1915.
Dear Mr. Matthews,
Replying to your letter of the 9th inst., enclosing a letter which you have received from the Labour Leader, although I have heard of a number of cases of Belgian girls being maltreated in one way and another. I have on investigation not found a particle of truth in one of them, and I know of no girl in Sheffield who has had her nose cut off and her stomach ripped open.
I have also investigated cases in other towns, but have not yet succeeded in getting hold of any tangible confirmation.
A. Balfay
March 11, 1915.
I have not the means of giving similar illustrations of false beliefs in Germany and Austria. But in case this book should be read by any German or Austrian, I would beg him not to infer any peculiar English credulity, but to realise that such false stories are an accident of war, and that a great deal of what the German or Austrian public believes on apparently unimpeachable evidence is sure to be untrue. No man with any spark of justice in his nature wall deliberately wish to think worse of his enemies than they deserve. So long as he is not on his guard, his instinct will play tricks with his judgment. We all perceive quite easily that this happens in enemy nations; what I wish to point out is that it happens in all the belligerent nations. Those who remark pityingly that the enemy are deluded with lies ought to remember our common human nature, and to realise that their own nation is equally deluded with exactly similar "lies"—though "lies" is hardly the word, since there is very little deliberate deception involved.
There is, however, another class of false beliefs, in which deliberate deception has played a greater part. These are false beliefs on political matters of fact. I will give two illustrations, one on each side.
In Germany, the belief seems to be almost universal that England violated the neutrality of Belgium before Germany did so. This belief is based partly on the assertion that the English sent troops to Belgium before the declaration of war, partly on the military conversations in Brussels in 1906 and 1912. As to the first of these allegations, not only has it been denied by our Government, which Germans could hardly be expected to regard as evidence; not only is its falsehood evident from the Belgian Grey Book, which Germans might regard as a piece of skillful manipulation; not only are those among us who have many acquaintances in the Army, and who must have heard privately if any troops were sent abroad, able to assert with absolute certainty that no such event took place; but the military events of last August are sufficient proof, one would have supposed, even to the credulity of an enemy. No English prisoners were taken by the Germans in their early battles with Belgians, and so far as I have heard they do not even allege that they encountered any English before they reached Mons.
The assertion that the military conversations constituted a breach of neutrality is supported by omitting the fact that all the arrangements were conditional upon the Germans first invading Belgium. It was well known that this was likely to happen in the event of war, and that England and France would, in that case, attempt the defence of Belgium if possible. If, when the time came, the Germans had respected Belgian neutrality, they might have pointed to the conversations as proof of groundless suspicion. But in view of what has occurred, it is absurd to pretend that England and Belgium had no right to consider in common how they should meet a threatening danger which proves to have been only too real. The German accusation, like the charges of atrocities brought against Belgians, is merely a symptom of a bad conscience, not an outcome of any calm consideration of the evidence.
My other illustration concerns the dates of mobilisation. It is usually asserted in England that Austria's general mobilisation preceded Russia's, whereas the opposite seems almost certainly the truth. At the time, the true view was generally accepted in England, just as Bethmann-Hollweg admitted that the invasion of Belgium was a wrong. But just as this admission was seen to constitute a fatal weakness in Germany's pose, so the Russian mobilisation was seen to constitute a weakness in the Allies' contention that Germany deliberately planned the war. And so each side set to work to explain away its earlier admissions, and to produce a completely comfortable state of mind by methods which seem hard to acquit wholly of deliberate falsification. But on neither side have the intellectuals made any appreciable attempt to resist the process of self-deception to which their Governments invited them. What little attempt at truth there has been has been almost wholly confined to Socialists, who had none of the educational advantages which proved so unavailing among professors.
The beliefs which the learned have allowed themselves to share with their compatriots are not only independent of fact in their broad outlines, but are inspired, even in their niceties, by the instincts connected with combat. The Germans have strong hope of a separate peace with France, some hope of a separate peace with Russia, and no hope of a separate peace with England. It follows from this that the French are not wicked at all, the Russians are only moderately wicked, while the English are a blot upon the human race. The English feel quite certain that the Allies can crush the Turks, fairly confident that they can prevent the Austrians from ever again becoming a danger, but not all sure that they can break the spirit of Germany. They deduce that the Turks are brave but misguided, the Austrians the mere tools of Prussia, while the Germans deserve to be condemned to the lowest pit of hell. It is useless to urge that the Turks have been for ages a by-word of cruelty, that the Austrians have primâ facie more responsibility for the war than the Germans, or that the Germans have contributed much of what is most valuable in the civilisation of the world. Such mere facts carry no weight: moral reprobation is nothing but an embodiment of hatred, and hatred is a mechanical product of biological instinct. It is unworthy of men who pretend to freedom of thought to be caught in the toils of this purely animal mechanism. There is no reason to expect an unusual degree of humane feeling from professors; but some pride of rationality, some unwillingness to let judgment be enslaved by brutal passions, we might have hoped to find. But we should have hoped in vain.
The fundamental irrational belief, on which all the others rest, is the belief that the victory of one's own side is of enormous and indubitable importance, and even of such importance as to outweigh all the evils involved in prolonging the war. It is possible, in view of the uncertainty of all human affairs, that the victory of one side or the other might bring great good to humanity. But even if this be the case, the beliefs of the combatants are none the less irrational, since there is no evidence such as would convince an impartial outsider. The Allies are convinced that their victory is for the good of mankind, and the Germans and Austrians are no less convinced in the opposite sense. When a large mass of men hold one opinion, and another large mass hold another, and when in each case the opinion is in accordance with self-interest, it is hardly to be supposed that it is based on rational grounds either on the one side or on the other. Meanwhile the evils produced by the war increase from day to day, and they, at least, must be admitted by both sides equally.
The difference of opinion as to the desirable issue of the war is not wholly due to self-interest, though that is no doubt the chief cause. The difference is due in part to divergent ideals embodying divergent desires. Putting the matter crudely, and considering only the Western war, we may say that the Germans love order, learning, and music, all of which are good things, while the French and English love democracy and liberty, which are also good things. In order to force their respective ideals upon nations which do not value them, the Germans are willing to replace order in Europe by the universal chaos of war, and to send the young men who pursue learning or music to be killed on the battlefield, while the French and English have found it necessary to suppress democracy and liberty for the present, without any guarantee that they will be restored when the war is over. If the war lasts long, all that was good in the ideals of Germany, France, and England will have perished, as the ideals of Spartans and Athenians perished in the Peloponnesian War. All three races, with all that they have added to our civilisation, will have become exhausted, and victory, when it comes, will be as barren and as hopeless as defeat.
Under the distorting influence of war, the doubtful and microscopic differences between different European nations have been exaggerated when it has become treason to question their overwhelming importance. Every educated man knew and acknowledged before the war began, and every educated man now knows without acknowledging, that the likenesses among European nations are immeasureably greater than their differences. Congresses, conferences, and international bodies of many kinds testified to the diffused consciousness of a common purpose, a common task in the life of a civilisation. Suddenly, between one day and the next, all this is forgotten: German scholars repudiate English honours, English scholars say that Germany has done nothing of importance in learning. In a moment, all the great co-operative work for which academic bodies exist is set aside for the pleasure of indulging a bitter and trivial hatred.
This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side. The supposed ideal ends for which it is being fought are merely part of the myth. Every nation is fighting in self-defence, every nation is fighting to destroy the tyranny of armaments, every nation is fighting to show that unprovoked aggression cannot be practised with impunity. Every nation pays homage to peace by maintaining that its enemies began the war. The fact that these assertions carry equal conviction on both sides shows that they are not based on reason, but are merely inspired by prejudice. But besides these common objects, there are some in which the two sides differ. Probably the two Kaisers would say, and perhaps believe, that they are fighting to prove it a crime to assassinate heirs to thrones. It can hardly be supposed that the Tsar would deny that this is a crime, but he would say, as the English do, that it is a crime for a great nation to oppress a small one. This proposition, however, is only true in certain latitudes; it does not apply to Finland or Persia. The English and French say they are fighting in defence of democracy, but they do not wish their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta. And, oddly enough, those who most bitterly hate democracy at home are the most ferocious in defending it against Germany.
This war is not being fought for any rational end: it is being fought because, at first, the nations wished to fight, and now they are angry and determined to win victory. Everything else is idle talk, artificial rationalising of instinctive actions and passions. When two dogs fight in the street, no one supposes that anything but instinct prompts them, or that they are inspired by high and noble ends. But if they were capable of what is called thought, if they had been taught that Dog is a rational animal, we may be sure that a superstructure of belief would grow up in them during the combat. They fight really because something angers them in each other's smell. But if their fighting were accompanied by intellectual activity, the one would say he was fighting to promote the right kind of smell (Kultur), and the other to uphold the inherent canine right of running on the pavement (democracy). Yet this would not prevent the bystanders from seeing that their action was foolish, and that they ought to be parted as soon as possible. And what is true of dogs in the street is equally true of nations in the present war.
The original impulse towards war, though by now it has spent its force, was very strong in the first days. Fighting and killing are among the natural activities of males, both of human beings and of the higher animals. The spectacle of males killing each other in sexual combat is pleasant, presumably, to animal females, and certainly to many of those of the species homo sapiens. Owing to the activities of the police, opportunities for these pleasures are much curtailed in civilised countries. For this reason, when war is coming there is a liberation of a whole set of instinctive activities normally repressed. This brings with it an exhilaration comparable to that of falling in love. Instead of being oppressed by the prospect of the horrors of war—friends and relations killed or maimed, countries ravaged, civilisation bleeding in the mire—most men, in the first days, were excited and happy, feeling an unusual freedom, and inventing, with unconscious hypocrisy, all sorts of humane reasons to excuse their joy. In this mood there is no great hatred of the enemy: he has his uses, since without him there could be no fighting. The injury to him is a merely incidental and almost regrettable result of the battle. Primitive poetry is full of this mood, and the early days of August showed that it is still possible to civilised men.
But when, as in this war, neither side wins decisive successes, and the utmost effort is required to avert disaster, the honeymoon intoxication of the first moments is soon succeeded by a sterner mood. Checks cause fury, and injuries suffered produce hatred. More and more men's thoughts become concentrated on humbling the pride of their enemies. If the war remains undecided for a long time, if the new levies on both sides are exterminated without either victory or defeat, there will be a growing ferocity, leading to horrors such as even this war has not yet brought into the imaginations of men. One by one soldiers will pass suddenly from ferocity to apathy: the spring of will will break, leaving millions of derelicts fit only for the hospital or the asylum. This is what the German military authorities mean when they say that the war will be decided by nervous endurance. They hope that a smaller percentage of the Germans than of the Allies will be broken by the strain. Militarists on both sides look forward cheerfully to the extinction, for all purposes of national life, of most of the men now between twenty and forty. And yet they continue to pretend that the victory of their side is more important than an early peace. And in this infamy their professorial parasites support them and egg them on.
The worst disasters would have been averted if either side had won a rapid victory, and are even now not inevitable if the war comes to an end during this year. But if peace is not made soon, if no military decision is reached, there will have to be an increasing passionate concentration of will in all countries upon the one common purpose of mutual destruction. As the effort of will required grows greater and more difficult through weariness, the vital force of the nations will be more and more weakened. When at last peace comes, it is to be feared that no stimulus will be adequate to rouse men to action. After the fierce tension of combat, nothing will seem important; a weak and relaxed dissipation will succeed the terrible unnatural concentration. There is no parallel in history to the conflict in which the world is now engaged. Never before have so large a proportion of the population been engaged in fighting, and never before has the fighting been so murderous. All that science and organisation have done to increase the efficiency of labour has been utilised to set free more men for the destructive work of the battlefield. Man's greater command over Nature has only magnified the disaster, because it has not been accomplished by greater command over his own passions. And if he does not acquire command over his own passions, whatever destruction is not achieved now is only postponed to a later day.
The degradation of science from its high function in ameliorating the lot of man is one of the most painful aspects of the war. Savage man, like the brutes, lives in bondage to matter: the task of securing a bare subsistence absorbs his energies, leaving no leisure for art and thought and the goods of the mind. From this bondage science has been progressively liberating the populations of civilized countries. One man's labour now will produce a great deal more than one man's food. Out of the time set free in this way have grown literature and music, poetry and philosophy, amid the intoxicating triumphs of science itself. On the basis of the greater productivity of labour, education, democracy, and all the political advances of the modern State have been built. Suddenly, now, because a madness of destruction has swept over Europe, the men of science have abandoned their beneficent activities : physicists invent swifter aircraft, chemists devise more deadly explosives, and almost all who can, devote themselves to the labour of death. The place of science in human development, one is compelled to think, has never become present to their minds, since they are willing to prostitute it to the undoing of its own work.
Knowledge with elevation of mind is the chief instrument of human progress; knowledge without elevation of mind easily becomes devilish, and increases the wounds which man inflicts on man. Men of learning should be the guardians of one of the sacred fires that illumine the darkness into which the human spirit is born: upon them depends the ideal of just thought, of disinterested pursuit of truth, which, if it had existed more widely, would have sufficed alone to prevent the present horror. To serve this ideal, to keep alive a purpose remote from strife, is more worthy of the intellectual leaders of Europe than to help Governments in stimulating hatred or slaughtering more of the young men upon whom the future of the world depends. It is time to forget our supposed separate duty toward Germany, Austria, Russia, France, or England, and remember that higher duty to mankind in which we can still be at one.
- ↑ This article was written in April, before the Russian defeats, the participation of Italy, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the Bryce Report. I have not altered anything, though if it were written now some alterations would be required. It was to have appeared in the Italian review, Scientia, in June, and was already in proof, but was withdrawn in Consequence of Italy's joining in the war. It appeared. with some omissions, in Nos. 4 and 5 of the Swiss International Review.
- ↑ Though the article of N. Kostyleff in the April number of Scientia falls not far short of a completely just outlook.