War and Nationalism, Aldous Huxley
War and Nationalism
I propose to talk in this lecture about one of the more disturbing features of our present human situation: war and nationalism.
It is probably worthwhile to begin with a few words about war and nationalism in the abstract and more general context of biology and semantics. We often hear it said that war is inevitable because man is a fighting animal, but biologically speaking war—a conflict between organized groups of members of the same species—is a very rare phenomenon. There is, of course, continual preying of one species upon another, but in fact there are only two species of creatures which make war: one is the harvester ant and the other is the human being. These two creatures have in common the institution of property. The harvester ants from one nest collect large quantities of foodstuffs; the members of a neighbouring nest come in genuine armies and fight for the possession of these foodstuffs. In spite of the fact that harvester ants do not possess a language and therefore have no conceptual system of principles or ethical notions, these wars can last for a considerable time. Some have been observed to last for as much as five or six weeks, which is a very long time for an animal without a language system to keep a war going.
The human being, when he makes war, can go on far longer than the ant precisely because he possesses a language and a conceptual system. We are able, even when the passion of the moment has subsided, to keep on fighting and killing because we can goad ourselves with our concepts, our principles, our categorical imperatives, to do whatever we feel we have to do. One thinks of the phrase of Matthew Arnold, ‘tasks in hours of insight will’d, Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d’. This is true not only of positive tasks, tasks that we would regard as constructive, tasks willed in hours of insight, but it is also true, unfortunately, of tasks willed in hours of passion and prejudice and often of a profoundly destructive nature.
It is because we possess a symbol system and can formulate ideals and categorical imperatives that it is possible for human beings to achieve both sanctity and pure diabolism—to persist at the highest level of charity and understanding and also at the lowest level of wickedness and folly. The animal can never be an angel or a saint, a lunatic or a devil, for it lives so to speak in a condition of intermittence. You can see this when two dogs fight; they will begin with tremendous frenzy and then suddenly one will sit down and start scratching fleas and they will forget all about it. But this is impossible for human beings because they have motives for fighting; they have words that say that it is right for them to fight; they have categorical imperatives by which it is their duty to fight and not to run away.
Conflict—not war—is frequent among members of the same species. But natural selection has taken great care that conflict between animals of the same species shall rarely be pushed to the fatal conclusion. We always think of the wolf, for example, as a peculiarly ferocious and sinister animal. Actually, as naturalists have observed—you will find a full account of this in Konrad Lorenz’s book, King Solomon’s Ring—wolves never fight to the death. The wolf that feels it is going to be beaten exposes its throat to its adversary in such a way that if the adversary chose to do so, it could immediately sever the jugular vein and kill its enemy; but, owing to the benevolent action of natural selection, the vanquishing wolf finds it psychologically impossible to bite. Instead he starts growling and then turns away. One can see that there are very good evolutionary reasons for this; if male wolves habitually fought to the death over females, the species would very soon come to an end. And it is interesting to find that the injunction to turn the other cheek, which is very rarely practised by men, is constantly and instinctively practised by wolves.
War, which may be described as a culturally conditioned state of affairs based upon the natural condition of conflict, is precisely the opposite of this because it consists in pushing organized conflict to the limit of destruction and is not instinctive. It is very important to remember that both war and the motivating power which drives men to war are socially conditioned because it makes us realize that there is nothing biologically inevitable about the terrible thing that menaces us. Because it is a socially conditioned phenomenon, we can, if we want to, de-condition and get rid of it.
War is conditioned by human symbol systems, and in our modern life the symbol system is that of nationalism. One can say that nationalism is a kind of theology—a system of concepts and ideals and ethical commandments—based upon a natural and instinctive attachment to our place of origin and to familiar people, but extended, by means of our capacity for abstraction and generalization, far from the natural piety of the native place and the familiar folk. Nationalism uses all the devices of education to create an artificial loyalty to areas with which the individual is quite unacquainted and to people that he has never seen.
We have now to briefly consider the question, How is a nation to be defined? Many attempts have been made to do this, and it is very curious that none of the most obvious methods covers all the cases. We cannot say that a nation is a population occupying a single geographical area, because there are cases of nations which occupy areas widely separated, such as Pakistan at the present time. We cannot say that a nation is necessarily connected with the speaking of a single language, because there are many nations in which the people speak many languages—even in so small a nation as Switzerland there are three main languages, and in India there are hundreds, with twenty or thirty being quite important. (There is a very considerable linguistic patriotism within the national frame of India which does tend to produce strong centrifugal forces.)
There is the definition of a nation as something composed of a single racial stock, but this is quite obviously inadequate; even if one ignores the fact that nobody knows exactly what a race is, in this country alone 10 per cent of the inhabitants belong to non-Caucasian stocks and yet are quite clearly Americans in the fullest sense of the word. Finally, the only definition which the old League of Nations was ever able to find for a nation (and I presume the same definition is now adopted by the United Nations) was that a nation is a society possessing the means of making war. Thus the feeblest and smallest nation which has some kind of a war-making machine—Libya, for example—is a nation, but an immense geographical unit with a huge population, such as California, is not a nation because it does not have a war-making machine.
It is most curious to see how profoundly this oddly arbitrary definition of the nation as a society which is capable of making war has affected history. I remember being greatly struck twenty years ago, when I was travelling in Central America and reading the history of the region, by the extraordinary story of nationalism in that part of the world. It is worth looking at this history in some detail because in a certain sense it is like a small-scale laboratory experiment which can be studied more easily than large-scale events which take place in Europe and other parts of the world.
Nationalism came to Central America after 1821, when the Spanish colonies revolted against the crown of Spain because the idea of the divine right of kings had been smashed by Napoleon when he imposed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain. (Napoleon’s brutal extraction of this keystone of the great arch of Spanish loyalty led to the collapse of the whole arch.) In Central America the result was that each province of what had been the Spanish empire declared itself a nation, and even some of the departments within the provinces declared themselves nations and had to be reconquered by the provinces as a whole. It is only by chance that there is not a small state between Guatemala and Mexico called Quezaltenango; such a state did declare its independence, but then was re-conquered by the rest of Guatemala.
What happened when nationalism was suddenly born into this area? We have there a population fundamentally the same overall: a minority of Spaniards and, underneath them, the Mestizos, the Ladinos, and the Indians, who were politically quite untouched and had no relationship with the general march of affairs. Their religion—a mixture of Catholicism and the ancient Indian religions—and their economic interests were also much the same. The people had lived at perfect peace with one another for three hundred years because they took for granted that they were all subjects of the king. Then, overnight, the provinces became nations—which are by definition war-making machines—and they spent a considerable part of the following century in savage struggles one with another. These struggles were not economic in character; they were almost always ideological struggles between federalists and non-federalists, liberals and conservatives.
This, then, presents an extraordinarily interesting small-scale and simplified picture of the arbitrary nature of the whole national set-up. At one moment you are not a nation and the next moment you are. In Germany,
