Human nature in politics

Preface To The Third Edition (1920)

This edition is, like the second edition (1910), a reprint, with a few verbal corrections, of the first edition (1908).

I tried in 1908 to make two main points clear. My first point was the danger, for all human activities, but especially for the working of democracy, of the "intellectualist" assumption, "that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained" (p. 21). My second point was the need of substituting for that assumption a conscious and systematic effort of thought. "The whole progress," I argued, "of human civilization beyond its earliest stages, has been made possible by the invention of methods of thought which enable us to interpret and forecast the working of nature more successfully than we could, if we merely followed the line of least resistance in the use of our minds" (p. 114).

In 1920 insistence on my first point is not so necessary as it was in 1908. The assumption that men are automatically guided by "enlightened self-interest" has been discredited by the facts of the war and the peace, the success of an anti-parliamentary and anti-intellectualist revolution in Russia, the British election of 1918, the French election of 1919, the confusion of politics in America, the breakdown of political machinery in Central Europe, and the general unhappiness which has resulted from four years of the most intense and heroic effort that the human race has ever made. One only needs to compare the disillusioned realism of our present war and post-war pictures and poems with the nineteenth-century war pictures at Versailles and Berlin, and the war poems of Campbell, and Berenger, and Tennyson, to realize how far we now are from exaggerating human rationality.

It is my second point, which, in the world as the war has left it, is most important. There is no longer much danger that we shall assume that man always and automatically thinks of ends and calculates means. The danger is that we may be too tired or too hopeless to undertake the conscious effort by which alone we can think of ends and calculate means.

The great mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century have given us an opportunity of choosing for ourselves our way of living such as men have never

P R E F AG E had before. Up to our own time the vast majority of mankind have had enough to do to keep themselves property owners or a few organizers of other men's labours. Even when, as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, nature offered whole populations three hundred free days in the year if they would devote two months to ploughing and harvest, all but a fraction still spent alive, and to satisfy the blind instinct w^hich impels them to hand on life to another generation. An effective choice has only been given to a tiny class of hereditary themselves in unwilling toil, building tombs or palaces, or equipping armies, for a native monarch or a foreign conqueror. The monarch could choose his life, but his choice was poor enough. "There is," says Aristotle, "a way of living so brutish that it is only worth notice because many of those who can live any life they like make no better choice than did Sardanapalus."

The Greek thinkers started modern civilization, because they insisted that the trading populations of their walled cities should force themselves to think out an answer to the question, what kind of life is good. "The origin of the city-state," says Aristotle, "is that it enables us to live; its justification is that it enables us to live well."

Before the war, there were in London and New York, and Berlin, thousands of rich men and women as free to choose their way of life as was Sardanapalus, and as dissatisfied with their own choice. Many of the sons and daughters of the owners of railways and coal mines and rubber plantations were "fed up" with motoring or bridge, or even with the hunting and fishing which meant a frank resumption of palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger. But my own work brought me into contact with an unprivileged class, whose degree of freedom was the special product of modem industrial civilization, and on whose use of their freedom the future of civilization may depend. A clever young mechanic, at the age when the Wander jahre of the mediaeval craftsman used to begin, would come home after tending a "speeded up" machine from 8 A. M., with an hour's interval, till 5 P. M. At 6 P. M. he had finished his tea in the crowded living-room of his mother's house, and was "free" to do what he liked. That evening, perhaps, his whole being tingled with half-conscious desires for love and adventure and knowledge,^' and achievement. On another day he might have gone to a billiard match at his club or have hung round the corner for a girl who smiled at him as he left the factory, or might have sat on his bed and ground at a chapter of Marx or Hobson. But this evening he saw

P R E F AC E his life as a whole. The way of living that had been implied in the religious lessons at school seemed strangely irrelevant; but still he felt humble, and kind, and anxious for guidance. Should he aim at marriage, and if so should he have children at once or at all? If he did not marry, could he avoid self-contempt and disease? Should he face the life of a socialist organizer, with its strain and uncertainty, and the continual possibility of disillusionment? Should he fill up every evening with technical classes and postpone his ideals until he had become rich? And if he became rich what should he do with his money? Meanwhile, there was the urgent impulse to walk and think ; but where should he walk to, and with whom?

The young schoolmistress, in her bed-sitting-room a few streets off, was in no better case. She and a friend sat late last night, agreeing that the life they were living was no real life at all; but what was the alternative? Had the "home duties" to which her High Church sister "^devoted herself with devastating self-sacrifice any more meaning. Ought she, with her eyes open, and without much hope of spontaneous love, to enter into the childless "modem" marriage which alone seemed possible for her? Ought she to spend herself in a reckless campaign for the suffrage? Meanwhile, she had had her tea, her eyes were too tired to read, and what on earth should she do till bedtime?

Such moments of clear self -questioning were of course rare, but the nerve-fretting problems always existed. Industrial civilization had given the growing and working generation a certain amount of leisure, and education enough to conceive of a choice in the use of that leisure; but had offered them no guidance in making their choice.

We are faced, as I write, with the hideous danger that fighting may blaze up again throughout the whole Eurasian continent, and that the young men and girls of Europe may have no more choice in the way they spend their time than they had from 1914 to 1918 or the serfs of Pharaoh had in ancient Egypt. But if that immediate danger is avoided, I dream that in Europe and in America a conscious and systematic discussion by the young thinkers of our time of the conditions of a good life for an unprivileged population may be one of the results of the new vision of human nature and human possibilities w<hich modern science and modem industry have forced upon us.

Within each nation, industrial organization may cease to be a confused and wasteful struggle of interests, if it is consciously related to a chosen way of life for which

PREFACE 11 it offers to every worker the material means. International relations may cease to consist of a constant plotting of evil by each nation for its neighbours, if ever the youth of all nations know that French, and British, and Germans, and Russians, and Chinese, and Americans, are taking a conscious part in the great adventure of discovering ways of living open to all, and which all can believe to be good.

GRAHAM WALLAS.

August 1920.

Contents

_ PAGE

Preface 5

Synopsis 15

Part I The Conditions Of The Problem

CHAPTER

I Impulse and Instinct in Politics 45

II Political Entities 81

III Non-Rational Inference in Politics 118 IV The Material of Political Reasoning 133

V The Method of Political Reasoning 156

Part II Possibilities Of Progress

I Political Morality 185

II Representative Government 215

III Official Thought 225

IV Nationality and Humanity 282

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS

(Introduction page 25)

The study of politics is now in an unsatisfactory position. Throughout Europe and America, representative democracy is generally accepted as the best form of government; but those who have had most experience of its actual working are often disappointed and apprehensive. Democracy has not been extended to non-European races, and during the last few years many democratic movements have failed.

This dissatisfaction has led to much study of political institutions; but little attention has been recently given in works on politics to the facts of human nature. Poltical science in the past was mainly based on conceptions of human nature, but the discredit of the dogmatic political writers of the early nineteeth century has made modern students of politics overanxious to avoid anything which recalls their methods. That advance therefore of psychology which has transformed pedagogy and criminology has left politics largely unchanged.

The neglect of the study of human nature is likely, however, to prove only a temporary phase of political thought, and there are already signs that it is coming to an end.

[PART I. — Chapter I. — Impulse and Instinct in Politics,

Any examination of human nature in politics must begin with an attempt to overcome that "intellectualism" which resuits both from the traditions of political science and from the mental habits of ordinary men. f Political impulses are not mere intellectual inferences from p calculations of means and ends; but tendencies prior to, though modified by, the thought and experience of individual human beings. This may be seen if we watch the action in politics of such impulses as personal affection, fear, ridicule, the desire of property, etc.

All our impulses and instincts are greatly increased in their immediate effectiveness if they are "pure," and in their more permanent results if they are "first hand" and are connected with the earlier stages of our evolution. In modern politics the emotional stimulus which reaches us through the newspapers is generally "pure," but "second hand," and therefore is both facile and transient.

The frequent repetition of an emotion or impulse is often distressing. Politicians, like advertisers, must allow for this fact, which again is connected with that combination of the need of privacy with intolerance of solitude to which we have to adjust our social arrangements.

Political emotions are sometimes pathologically intensified when experienced simultaneously by large numbers of human beings in physical association, but the conditions of political life in England do not often produce this phenomenon.

The future of international politics largely depends on the question whether we have a specific instinct of hatred for himaan beings of a different racial type from ourselves. The point is not yet settled, but many facts which are often explained as the result of such an instinct seem to be due to other and more general instincts modified by association.

SYNOPSIS OP CONTENTS 17

(Chapter II. — Political Entities, page 81)

Political acts and impulses are the result of the contact between human nature and its environment. During the period studied by the politician, human nature has changed very little, but political environment has changed with ever-increasing rapidity.

Those facts of our environment which stimulate impulse and action reach us through our senses, and are selected from the mass of our sensations and memories by our instinctive or acquired knowledge of their significance. In politics the things recognized are, for the most part, made by man himself, and our knowledge of their significance is not instinctive but ccquired.

Recognition tends to attach itself to symbols, which take the place of more complex sensations and memories. Some of the most diflficult problems in politics result from the relation between the conscious use in reasoning of the symbols called words, and their more or less automatic and unconscious effect in stimulating emotion and action. A. political symbol whose significance has once been established by association, may go through a psychological development of its own, apart from the history of the facts which were originally symbolized by it. This may be seen in the case of the names and emblems of nations and parties; and still more clearly in the history of those commercial entities — "teas" or "soaps" — which may be already made current by advertisement before any objects to be symbolized by them have been made or chosen. Ethical difficulties are often created by the relation between the quickly changing opinions of any individual politician and such slowly changing entities as his reputation, his party name, or the traditional personality of a newspaper which he may control.

(Chapter III. — Non-Rational Inference in Politics, page 118)

Intellectual ist political thinkers often assume, not only that political action is necessarily the result of inferences as to means and ends, but that all inferences are of the same "rational" type.

It is difficult to distinguish sharply between rational and non-rational inferences in the stream of mental experience, but it is clear that many of the half-conscious processes by which men form their political opinions are non-rational. We can generally trust non-rational inferences in ordinary life, because they do not give rise to conscious opinions until they have been strengthened by a large number of undesigned coincidences. But conjurers and others who study our non-rational mental processes can so play upon them as to make us form absurd beliefs. The empirical art of politics consists largely in the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious non-rational inference. The process of inference may go on beyond the point desired by the politician who started it, and is as likely to take place in the mind of a passive newspaper-reader as among the members of the most excited crowd.

{Chapter IV. — The Material of Political Reasoning, page 133)

But men can and do reason, though reasoning is only one of their mental processes. The rules for valid reasoning laid down by the Greeks were intended primarily for use in politics, but in politics reasoning has in fact proved to be more difficult and less successful than in the physical sciences. The chief cause of this is to be found in the character of its material. We have to select or create entities to reason about, just as we select or create entities to stimulate our impulses

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 19 and non-rational inferences. In the physical sciences these selected entities are of two types, either concrete things made exactly alike, or abstract qualities in respect of which things otherwise unlike can be exactly compared. In politics, entities of the first type cannot be created, and political philosophers have constantly sought for some simple entity of the second type, some fact or quality, which may serve as' an exact "standard" for political calculation. This search has hitherto been unsuccessful, and the analogy of the biological sciences suggests that politicians are most likely to acquire the power of valid reasoning when they, like doctors, avoid the over-simplification of their material and aim at using in their reasoning as many facts as possible about the human type, its individual variations, and its environment. Biologists have shown that large numbers of facts as to individual variations within any type can be remembered if they are arranged as continuous curves rather than as uniform rules or arbitrary exceptions. On the other hand, any attempt to arrange the facts of environment with the same approach to continuity as is possible with the facts of human nature is likely to result in error; the study of history cannot be assimilated to that of biology.

{Chapter V. — The Method of Political Reasoning, page 156)

The method of political reasoning has shared the traditional over-simplification of its subject-matter.

In Economics, where both method and subject-matter were originally still more completely simplified, "quantitative" methods have since Jevons's time tended to take the place of "qualitative." How far is a similar change possible in politics?

Some political questions can obviously be argued quantitatively. Others are less obviously quantitative. But even on the most complex political issues experienced and responsible statesmen do in fact think quantitatively, although the methods by which they reach their results are often unconscious.

When, however, politicians start with intellectualist assumptions, though some half-consciously acquire quantitative habits of thought, many desert politics altogether from disillusionment and disgust. What is wanted in the training of a statesman is the fully conscious formulation and acceptance of methods which will not have to be unlearned.

Such a conscious change is already taking place in the work of Royal Commissions, International Congresses, and other bodies and persons who have to arrange and draw conclusions from large masses of specially collected evidence. Thedr methods and vocabulary, even when not numerical, are nowadays in large part quantitative.

In parliamentary oratory, however, the old tradition of over-simplification is apt to persist.

[PART II. — Chapter I. — Political Morality, page 185)

But in what ways can such changes in political science affect the actual trend of political forces?

In the first place, the abandonment by political thinkers and writers of the intellectualist conception of politics will sooner or later influence the moral judgments of the working politician. A young candidate will begin with a new conception of his moral relation to those whose will and opinions he is attempting to influence. He will start, in that respect, from a position hitherto confined to statesmen who have been made cynical by experience.

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 21

If that were the only result of our new knowledge, political morality might be changed for the worse. But the change will go deeper. When men become conscious of psychological processes of which they have been unconscious or half-conscious, not only are they put on their guard against the exploitation of those processes in themselves by others, but they become better able to control them from within.

If, however, a conscious moral purpose is to be strong enough to overcome, as a political force, the advancing art of political exploitation, the conception of control from within must '-be formed into an ideal entity which, like "Science," can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organized system of education. The difi&culties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity of moral passion,

{Chapter II. — Representative Government, page 215)

The changes now going on in our conception of the psychological basis of politics will also re-open the discussion of representative democracy.

Some of the old arguments in that discussion will no longer be accepted as valid, and it is probable that many political thinkers (especially among those who have been educated in the natural sciences) will return to Plato's proposal of a despotic government carried on by a selected and trained class, who live apart from the "ostensible world"; though English experience in India indicates that even the most carefully selected ofl&cial must still live in the "ostensible world," and that the argument that good government requires the consent of the governed does not depend for its validity upon its original intellectualist associations.

Our new way of thinking about politics will, however, certainly change the form, not only of the argument for consent, but also of the institutions by which consent is expressed. An election (like a jury -trial) will be, and is already beginning to be, looked upon rather as a process by which right decisions are formed under right conditions, than as a mechanical expedient by which decisions already formed are ascertained.

Proposals for electoral reform which seem to continue the old intellectualist tradition are still brought forward, and new difficulties in the working of representative government will arise from the wider extension of political power. But that conception of representation may spread which desires both to increase the knowledge and public spirit of the voter and to provide that no strain is put upon him greater than he can bear.

(Chapter III. — Official Thought, page 255j

A quantitative examination of the political force created by popular election shows the importance of the work of non-elected officials in any effective scheme of democracy.

What should be the relation between these officials and the elected representatives? On this point English opinion already shows a marked reaction from the intellectualist conception of representative government. We accept the fact that most state officials are appointed by a system uncontrolled either by individual members of parliament or by parliament as a whole, that they hold office during good behaviour, and that they are our main source of information as to some of the most difficult points on which we form political judgments. It is

SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 23 largely an accident that the same system has not been introduced into our local government.

But such a half-conscious acceptance of a partially independent Civil Service as an existing fact is not enough. We must set ourselves to realize clearly what we intend our ofi&cials to do, and to consider how far our present modes of appointment, and especially our present methods of organizing official work, provide the most effective means for carrying out that intention.

(Chapter IV. — Nationality and Humanity, page 282^

What influence will the new tendencies in political thought have on the emotional and intellectual conditions of political solidarity?

In the old city-states, where the area of government corresponded to the actual range of human vision and memory, a kind of local emotion could be developed which is now impossible in a "delocalized" population. The solidarity of a modern state must therefore depend on facts not of observation but of imagination.

The makers of the existing European national states, Mazzini and Bismarck, held that the possible extent of a state depended on national homogeneity, i.e. on the possibility that every individual member of a state should believe that all the others were like himself. Bismarck thought that the degree of actual homogeneity which was a necessary basis for this belief could be made by "blood and iron"; Mazzini thought that mankind was already divided into homogeneous groups, whose limits should be followed in the reconstruction of Europe. Both were convinced that the emotion of political solidarity was impossible between individuals of consciously different national types.

During the last quarter of a century this conception of the world as composed of a mosaic of homogeneous nations has heen made more difi&cult (a) by the continued existence and even growth of separate national feelings within modern states, and (b) hj the fact that the European and non-European races have entered into closer political relationships. The attempt, therefore, to transfer the traditions of national homogeneity and solidarity either to the inhabitants, of a modem worldempire as a whole, or to the members of the dominant race in it,'*disguises the real facts and adds to the danger of war.

Can we, however, acquire a political emotion based, not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but upon the recognition of their unlikeness? Darwin's proof of the relation between individual and racial variation might have produced such an emotion, if it had not been accompanied by the conception of the "struggle for life" as a moral duty. As it is, interracial and even interimperial wars can be represented as necessary stages in the progress of the species. But presentday biologists tell us that the improvement of any one race will come most effectively from the conscious co-operation, and not from the blind conflict of individuals; and it may be found that the improvement of the whole species will also come rather from a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition of the value of racial as well as individual variety, than from mere fighting.

Introduction

The study of politics is just now (1908) in a curiously unsatisfactory position.

At first sight the main controversy as to the best form of government appears to have been finally settled in favour of representative democracy. Forty years ago it could still be argued that to base the sovereignty of a great modern nation upon a widely extended popular vote was, in Europe at least, an experiment which had never been successfully tried. England, indeed, by the "leap in the dark" of 1867, became for the moment the only large European State whose government was democratic and representative. But to-day a parliamentary republic based upon universal suffrage exists in France without serious opposition or protest. Italy enjoys an apparently stable constitutional monarchy. Universal suffrage has just been enacted in Austria. Even the German Emperor for an instant after the election of 1907 spoke of himself rather as the successful leader of a popular electoral campaign than as the inheritor of a divine right. The vast majority of the Russian nation passionately desires a sovereign parliament, and a reactionary Duma finds itself steadily pushed by circumstances towards that position. The most ultramontane Roman Catholics demand temporal power for the Pope,

■I I

no longer as an ideal system of world government, but as an expedient for securing in a few square miles of Italian territory liberty of action for the directors of a church almost all of whose members will remain voting citizens of constitutional States. None of the proposals for a non-representative democracy which were associated with the communist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century have been at all widely accepted, or have presented themselves as a definite constructive scheme; and almost all those who now hope for a social change by which the results of modern scientific industry shall be more evenly distributed put their trust in the electoral activity of the working classes.

And yet, in the very nations which have most whole-heartedly accepted representative democracy, politicians and political students seem puzzled and disappointed by their experience of it. The United States of America have made in this respect by far the longest and most continuous experiment. Their constitution has lasted for a century and a quarter, and, in spite of controversy and even war arising from opposing interpretations of its details, its principles have been, and still are, practically unchallenged. But as far as an English visitor can judge, no American thinks with satisfaction of the electoral "machine," whose power alike in Federal, State, and Municipal politics is still increasing.

In England not only has our experience of representative democracy been much shorter than that of America, but our political traditions have tended to delay the full acceptance of the democratic idea even in the working of democratic institutions. Yet, allowing for differences of degree and circumstance, one finds in England among the most loyal democrats, if they have been brought into close contact with the details of electoral organization, something of the same disappointment which has become more articulate in America. I have helped to fight a good many parliamentary contests, and have myself been a candidate in a series of five London municipal elections. In my last election I noticed that two of my canvassers, when talking over the day's work, used independently the phrase, "It is a queer business." I have heard much the same words used in England by those professional political agents whose efficiency depends on their seeing electoral facts without illusion. I have no first-hand knowledge of German or Italian electioneering, but when a year ago I talked with my hosts of the Paris Municipal Council, I seemed to detect in some of them indications of good-humoured disillusionment with regard to the working of a democratic electoral system.

In England and America one has, further, the feeling that it is the growing, and not the decaying, forces of society which create the most disquieting problems. In America the "machine" takes its worst form in those great new cities whose population and wealth and energy represent the goal towards which the rest of American civilization is apparently tending. In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils. The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules intended, but those by which the players find that they can win; and men feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.

More significant still is the fear, often expressed as new questions force themselves into politics, that the existing electoral system will not bear the strain of an intensified social conflict. Many of the arguments used in the discussion of the tariff question in England, or of the concentration of capital in America, or of socialdemocracy in Germany, imply this. Popular election, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalise a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented w^ould prevent them from spending it. If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund, or discovered some new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.