War Is the Health

War Is the Health of the State

B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S

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 non-political aspects of

a people, its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and

art, its characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans

because we live in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors

have carried on a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization,

because we live in certain kinds of communities which have a certain

look and express their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that

our civilization is different from contiguous civilizations like the

Indian and Mexican. The institutions of our country form a certain

network which affects us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way

that these other civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for

better or for worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of

physiological laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the

time we have reached what are called years of discretion, its

influences have molded our habits, our values, our ways of thinking,

so that however aware we may become, we never really lose the stamp of

our civilization, or could be mistaken for the child of any other

country. Our feeling for our fellow countrymen is one of similarity or

of mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud of and congenial to

our particular network of civilization, or we may detest most of its

qualities and rage at its defects. This does not alter the fact that

we are inextricably bound up in it. The Country, as an inescapable

group into which we are born, and which makes us its particular kind

of a citizen of the world, seems to be a fundamental fact of our

consciousness, an irreducible minimum of social feeling.

Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think

of our own people merely as living on the earth's surface along with

other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but

fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception

of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than

there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within

rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and

our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need

no greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than

this sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less

attuned, and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for

country would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of

State and Government which are associated with it. Country is a

concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State

is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a

group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being

born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we

learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group

acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of

justice. International politics is a "power politics" because it is a

relation of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously

are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be

hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in

relation to another country, or in imposing laws on its own

inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it

is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is quite

different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama

of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and

the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the

carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes.

But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world,

making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from

being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees

are offensive, and collecting money to pay for all.

Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor

Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State,

carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the

administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force.

Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in

the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign

of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has

necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government

is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no

means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is

something that must never be forgotten. Its glamour and its

significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its

activities.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and

reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace

the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized.

For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State

is that within its territory its power and influence should be

universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of

man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political

salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of

the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for

union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most

unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act

offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized.

The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become

the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member

of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing

down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches.

All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible

to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military

defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly

struggled to become -- the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's

business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-

currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but

with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end,

toward the "peacefulness of being at war," of which L.P. Jacks has so

unforgettably spoken.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive

role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of

activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine,

many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques

must be learned. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have

remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service

overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant

classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals

are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as universal

touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every

individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by

which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the

State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting

spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating

such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority

opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be

dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes,

with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State,

objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the

beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far

exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public

opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the

schools, becomes one solid block. "Loyalty," or rather war orthodoxy,

becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations.

Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life.

There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so

that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach

physics or to hold honorable place in a university -- the republic of

learning -- if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association

with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher.

Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are

suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic

products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints

of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy

music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken

against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such

an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works

impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies

and traditional conformities, or even ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy

of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers

lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon

on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty

years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion

throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for

passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience

the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties;

the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly

around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really

to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty,

perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the

amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often

their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their

resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual

opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime

attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at

the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be

produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty -- or mystic

devotion to the State -- becomes the major imagined human value. Other

values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the

enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed,

and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the

amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these

values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into

sacrificing them.

War -- or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a

powerful enemy -- seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the

most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer

indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is

brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full

realization of that collective community in which each individual

somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every

citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely

strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the

collective community live in each person who throws himself

wholeheartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between

society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the

individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a

superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas

and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he

is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the

collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to

have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse

could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en

masse, such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good,

such as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it

have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have

permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as

conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of

offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the

slogan of "democracy," it would reach the highest level ever known of

collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the

education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and

beauty in the nation's communal living, are alien to our traditional

ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it

is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a

political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival

group has meant, throughout all history -- war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term "herd" in connection

with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first

principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of which we

all live, move, and have our being. Ethnologists are generally agreed

that human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not

as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in fact the

original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal

individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes of men

are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization

where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes

remain strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and

the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of

organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest

primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different

species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious

evolutionary history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out.

This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to

coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself

threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men

become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war.

Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of

massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on.

In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce

concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion.

Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up

into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which

wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the

conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex instinct is enormously

oversupplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the

gregarious impulse is enormously oversupplied for the work of

protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite

enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of

others, to be able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight

malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not

content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that

like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life.

So that all human progress, all novelty, and nonconformity, must be

carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd instinct which

drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority.

Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows

little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand

out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more

fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes

to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because

when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this

feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very

greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the

individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by

conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the

crowd. While even if you do not get any access of power by thinking

and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at

least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of

protection.

Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual

-- the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience -- this

gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it

to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its

mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to

the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little

group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which

the State -- the organization of the entire herd, the entire

collectivity -- is founded on and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element

of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for

protection, sends one's desire back to the father and mother, with

whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for

nothing that one's State is still thought of as Father or Motherland,

that one's relation toward it is conceived in terms of family

affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger

have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves

again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense

Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in

Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the

many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more

tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived

in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense

obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that na