By doing this they would allay the envy and resentment of the Have-not countries, appreciably lessen the probability of war, and solve the, at present, almost insoluble problem of imperial defence. This suggestion has not been acted upon by any colony-owning country. On the contrary, it has been indignantly rejected. All the governments concerned, from that of Great Britain to that of Portugal, have expressed the determination to shed the last drop of their subjects’ blood before yielding a foot of colonial territory. The British government has done more than refuse to transfer its colonies to the League of Nations: it has chosen the moment when it no longer possesses command of the seas and when, even if it did possess it, such command would be of little use, to reverse the free-trade policy by means of which its predecessors (though at the head of a country incomparably stronger and less vulnerable than contemporary Britain) thought fit to placate the envy of other powers. It has closed the doors of its colonies to the trade of other nations, thus forcibly reminding them of their own poverty and giving them new grievances against the British Empire.
It is one of the absurd paradoxes of the present situation that those Englishmen who are most anxious to establish friendly relations with the dictatorships, especially Germany and Italy, are precisely those who are loudest in their denunciations of the only scheme by means of which these Have-not States might be placated. Being militarists, they want to make friends with other militarists; being jingoes, they cannot accept the conditions upon which such a friendship might be formed—the conditions upon which, incidentally, it might be possible to get rid of militarism altogether. The machinery of the Mandate System is there, ready to be used; but nobody is willing to extend its present operations and, even in the existing mandated territories, the mandatory powers are tending to disregard their international obligations and to treat their mandates as plain unvarnished colonies.
Machinery has been devised by the League for the purpose of securing the elementary rights of individuals belonging to minorities, racially or linguistically distinct from the majority of the inhabitants of their country. From the first the governments in control of countries containing such minorities have shown themselves reluctant to make use of this machinery, and recently the reluctance has been transformed, in a number of cases, into downright refusal. It is known by all concerned that maltreatment of minorities begets bad feeling, both at home and abroad. Nevertheless, the governments concerned refuse to use the machinery of conciliation and obstinately persist in oppressing those of their unhappy subjects who have noses of the wrong shape or speak the wrong language.
The machinery for peaceful change is ready and waiting; but nobody uses it, because nobody wants to use it. Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.
By definition and in fact the League of Nations is, as we have seen, a league of societies prepared for war. That those who rule such essentially militaristic societies should take the initiative in eliminating the causes of war is, of course, enormously improbable. One cannot be the ruler of a militaristic society unless one is oneself a militarist, unless one accepts the beliefs and cherishes the sentiments which result in a militaristic policy. This being so, it is perfectly clear that most of the work of transforming the modern militaristic community into a community that desires peace and that proves the genuineness of its desire by pursuing only such policies as make for peace, will have to be done by private individuals, acting either alone or in association. Reforms are seldom initiated by the rulers of a nation. They have their source at the periphery and work gradually inwards towards the centre, till at last the strength of the reforming movement is so great that its leaders either become the government or the existing government adopts its principles and carries out its policies. With the work which will have to be done by private individuals and associations, I shall speak in the next chapter. In what remains of the present chapter I shall consider one by one the psychological causes of war, as outlined in earlier paragraphs, and point out how they might be eliminated.
(i) War, as we have seen, is tolerated, and by some even welcomed, because peace-time occupations seem boring, humiliating and pointless.
The application of the principle of self-government to industry and business should go far to deliver men and women in subordinate positions from the sense of helpless humiliation which is induced by the need of obeying the arbitrary orders of irresponsible superiors; and the fact of being one of a small co-operative group should do something to make the working life of its members seem more interesting. Heightened interest can also be obtained by suitably rearranging the individual’s tasks. Fourier insisted long ago on the desirableness of variety in labour, and in recent years his suggestion has been acted upon, experimentally, in a number of factories in Germany, America, Russia and elsewhere. The result has been a diminution of boredom and, in many cases, an increase in the volume of production. Tasks may be varied slightly, as when a worker in a cigarette factory is shifted from the job of feeding tobacco into a machine to the job of packing and weighing. Or they may be varied radically and fundamentally, as when workers alternate between industrial and agricultural labour. In both cases the psychological effects seem to be good.
(ii) It was suggested that the war-time decline in the suicide rate was due, among other things, to the heightened significance and purposefulness of life during a national emergency. At such a time the end for which all are striving is clearly seen; duties are simple and explicit; the vagueness and uncertainty of peace-time ideals gives place to the sharp definition of the war-time ideal, which is: victory at all costs; the bewildering complexities of the peace-time social patterns are replaced by the beautifully simple pattern of a community fighting for its existence. Danger heightens the sense of social solidarity and quickens patriotic enthusiasm. Life takes on sense and meaning and is lived at a high pitch of emotional intensity.
The apparent pointlessness of modern life in time of peace and its lack of significance and purpose are due to the fact that, in the Western world at least, the prevailing cosmology is what Mr. Gerald Heard has called the ‘mechanomorphic’ cosmology of modern science. The universe is regarded as a great machine pointlessly grinding its way towards ultimate stagnation and death; men are tiny offshoots of the universal machine, running down to their own private death; physical life is the only real life; mind is a mere product of body; personal success and material well-being are the ultimate measures of value, the things for which a reasonable person should live.
Introduced suddenly to this mechanomorphic cosmology, many of the Polynesian races have refused to go on multiplying their species and are in process of dying of a kind of psychological consumption. Europeans are of tougher fibre than the South Sea Islanders, and besides, they have had nearly three hundred years in which to become gradually acclimatized to the new cosmology. But even they have felt the effects of mechanomorphism. They move through life hollow with pointlessness, trying to fill the void within them by external stimuli—newspaper reading, day-dreaming at the films, radio music and chatter, the playing and above all the watching of games, ‘good times’ of every sort. Meanwhile any doctrine that offers to restore point and purpose to life is eagerly welcomed. Hence the enormous success of the nationalistic and communistic idolatries which deny any meaning to the universe as a whole, but insist on the importance and significance of certain arbitrarily selected parts of the whole—the deified nation, the divine class.
Nationalism first became a religion in Germany during the Napoleonic wars. Communism took its rise some fifty years later. Those who did not become devotees of the new idolatries either remained Christians, clinging to doctrines that became intellectually less and less acceptable with every advance of science, or else accepted mechanomorphism and became convinced of the pointlessness of life. The World War was a product of nationalism and was tolerated and even welcomed by the great masses of those who found life pointless. War brought only a passing relief to the victims of mechanomorphic philosophy. Disillusion, fatigue and cynicism succeeded the initial enthusiasm, and when it was over, the sense of pointlessness became a yawning abyss that demanded to be filled with ever more and intenser distractions, ever better ‘good times.’
But good times are not a meaning or a purpose; the void could never be filled by them. Consequently when the nationalists and communists appeared with their simple idolatries and their proclamation that, though life might mean nothing as a whole it did at least possess a temporary and partial significance, there was a powerful reaction away from the cynicism of the post-war years. Millions of young people embraced the new idolatrous religions, found a meaning in life, a purpose for their
