CHAPTER IVThe Spontaneous Habituation
The spontaneous habituation of patriotism has no conscious and set purpose, institution, or program. This is the habituation that makes itself felt from the mere fact that individuals in a society tend more and more to become assimilated to one another. Germany affords an extreme example of the deliberate habituation in patriotism. Every agency within the empire, including state, church, newspapers, schools, and so on, has been used towards securing a uniform result, that of nationalistic passion. But every country offers an example of the spontaneous habituation of patriotism. There is no less of nationalistic loyalty among the Allies than there is in Germany. It is interesting that the two kinds of habituation have come into combat. “Among the number of embattled principles and counter principles which this war has brought into the field, we must include as not the least interesting the duel between conscious national direction on the one side and unconscious national will and knowledge on the other.”[48]In the spontaneous habituation of patriotism we are dealing with a more subtle and powerful force than the deliberate habituation. The former goes deeper than the latter into human life. What we try to teach may not be learned, but what we are sets copy in the copybook of life. “The genuine beliefs, though not usually the professed precepts, of parents and teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by most children; and even if they depart from these beliefs in later life, something of them remains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in a time of stress or crisis.”[49]
It is natural that the citizens of a country should be thus habituated. In fact, in large measure, they habituate themselves. The basis of it is first of all that men are alike, and are faced with similar problems. The fact that men have like instincts, instincts, moreover, that have to adjust themselves to identical life conditions, makes it easy to assimilate them to one another and to the group. Suggestibility is one of these dispositions of human nature. McDougall defines it as “a process of communication resulting in the acceptance with conviction of the communicated proposition in the absence of logically adequate grounds for its acceptance.”[50]Suggestion, of course, is not omnipotent. There is, for one thing, what is known as a contra-suggestion, that is,behavior in which people do just the opposite to what one tries to persuade them to do. Early in the regime of Mr. Herbert Hoover as food administrator one butcher reported that his customers wanted meat more on meatless than on any other days. And there is always the possibility that suggestion may be disregarded altogether. But human beings are interdependent, and are open to guidance through suggestions from the ideas and practices of their fellows. An individual cannot think everything out for himself. Some hardly ever do any serious thinking and even the more serious take the bulk of their thoughts, at least in other fields than their own special one, upon suggestion. Choice is exhausting. It is hard business thinking, and we are likely to shirk the irksomeness of it if we can. “Either to be exceptional or to appreciate the exceptional requires a considerable expenditure of energy, and no one can afford this in many directions.”[51]The chances are, then, that except in such cases as where for some reason we are specially critical, an idea suggested will find lodgement in the mind and tend to issue in action; and this fact is tremendously important in the understanding of a social phenomenon such as patriotism.
It is rather ominous that today political thought does not seem to be as active as it once was. “My own impression,” says Graham Wallas, “formed after questioning a good many people in different parts of England is that, in our country, the quantity of such discussion [serious discussion on public questions] which takes place ... is diminishing.”[52]The great cause of this is the modern industrial system, and it is likely that what is true of England is true also of America. And if seriousdiscussionis diminishing it means probably that men are doing less seriousthinkingon political subjects, and that they are likely to become more suggestible with regard to them. The application to the subject of patriotism is obvious.
Imitation[53]is another disposition of human nature that is close to that of suggestibility. There is contra-imitation as well as contra-suggestion, and besides imitation there is also invention. But it is a powerful social force. For the interdependence of man makes for imitation as well as suggestibility. And society really owes a great deal to it. An invention in social living cannot hope to survive unless it is freely adopted by masses who have no thought of stopping to reason out its utility. And the effect of imitation is that it causes an immense impetus towards uniformity and solidarity within the group. “... Men and other animals imitate what they see others,especially they of their own species, do.”[54]And imitation of one’s own group tends to assimilatehim to it, to habituate him in its ways, and secure his loyalty to it and its ideals, which is to say, that imitation is a factor in the making of patriotism.
The fact that suggestion and imitation exercise their greatest force within the group makes it pertinent to recognize the part thatthe groupplays in the process of habituation in patriotism. The fact is that because of the individual’s membership in a group, the suggestions that come to him impinge upon his consciousness with a good deal of force. They strike him from all directions at almost the same time, and have a multiple dynamic behind them. Now the nation is a group. The space-annihilating devices of the present day in conjunction with the photographs and vivid descriptive reporting of the newspapers have extended and intensified the connections between the individual and his national group. The crowd for the individual may now well be, and in time of national crisis is, the people of his country.
This, however, is especially true of city populations, a fact which must have allowance made for it in the gauging of public opinion. It is the voice of the city-population that has too often been taken as the expression of public opinion. “The voice of ‘the people’ is very often nowadays only the voice of the city crowd, faintly re-echoed, if echoed at all, in the smaller towns. Sometimes also the noise is that of a few editors of newspapers.”[55]Another fact which ought to be noted is that there are prestige-groups within society. Examples of such are an old-fashioned aristocracy, the governing class, and in a democracy, the majority. Such groups often exercise compelling coercive power.
The coerciveness of the crowd makes for national unity, but it has unwelcome features. It is too likely to lead to a high disregard of the rights of the nonconformist and an unsympathetic and uncompromising attitude towards other nations. There are no incentives to broad-minded thought and sympathy within a homogeneous crowd. Opposition is the real matrix out of which reason and tolerance are extracted. The government of the United States of America had a tolerant spirit stamped upon it because the makers of our institutions were many men of many minds. The only way to do justice to their differences was by compromise. Close agreement confirms convictions, but does not stimulate the imagination. “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. But whatever he does think, he can think with all his soul.”[56]Without the differences it is more than likely that America would not have been quite so tolerant. It follows that thenation, because it has no critic to which it listens, is likely to be hard-minded, fanatical, and unyielding.
The atmosphere in which the individual lives and moves and has his being is that of his people’s customs or mores. These are intellectualized folkways. Folkways are the group’s ways of dealing with its environment. Mores are the folkways plus the convictions as to their relation to welfare. Sumner defines them as follows: “The mores are the folkways, including the philosophical and ethical generalizations as to societal welfare which are suggested by them, and inherent in them, as they grow.”[57]Tradition, which is crowd-memory, perpetuates the mores, and they become the lifemilieuof the individuals of each generation. A large part of one’s education, especially his moral education, is gained from the traditions and mores of his people. And their teachings are all the more authoritative because one is almost wholly unconscious of learning from them. “We learn the mores as unconsciously as we learn to walk and eat and breathe. The masses never learn how we walk, and eat, and breathe, and they never know any reason why the mores are what they are. The justification of them is that when we wake to consciousness of life we find them facts which already hold us in the bonds of tradition, custom, and habit.... The most important fact about the mores is their dominion over the individual. Arising he knows not whence or how, they meet his opening mind in earliest childhood, give him his outfit of ideas, faiths, and tastes, and lead him into prescribed mental processes. They bring to him codes of action, standards, and rules of ethics.”[58]
The mores have a bearing upon patriotism in various ways. In the first place, they areteachersof loyalty. They teach loyalty to the group and to country. Patriotism has become imbedded in the mores, and when one learns from them, he becomes indoctrinated with patriotism. The concept of patriotism has a long history, and has become a venerable ideal. It is not possible that the masses should escape having it taught them. The Japanese provide an example of a race thatpar excellenceshows the effects of centuries of training in nationalistic loyalty; it has given to them a marvellous solidarity. “In the war with Russia, in 1904, this people showed what a group is capable of when it has a strong ethos. They understand each other; they act as one man; they are capable of discipline to the death. Our western tacticians have had rules for the percentage of loss which troops would endure, standing under fire, before breaking and running. The rule failed for the Japanese. They stood to the last man.Their prowess at Port Arthur against the strongest fortifications, and on the battlefields of Manchuria, surpassed all record. They showed what can be done in the way of concealing military and naval movements when every soul in the population is in a voluntary conspiracy not to reveal anything. These traits belong to a people which has been trained by generations of invariable mores.”[59]One of the most thoroughly grounded ideals of the Japanese mores is that of patriotism.
In view of the function of the mores as teachers of loyalty, it becomes necessary to recognize that peace is not going to be easily provided for by facile external arrangements or even by the use of information, persuasion, and reason. If patriotic loyalty is in such large part a matter of habituation, then a change in it will have to be something of a matter of habituation too.
The mores are theobjectsof loyalty. One gets into the way of saying, “These ways are my ways and I am going to stick by them. They are mine; I am going to preserve and foster them, and no one shall take them from me.” Loyalty to the mores forms national character. It is tradition which forms a nation of British, Saxon, and Norman strains. Tradition unites Walloon and Fleming in Belgium, Breton and Gens du Midi in France.[60]The likenesses of a people owe no more to the fact of race than to that of the mores. And so the mores become what the patriot is conscious of being loyal to. His patriotism is not so much love of country as love of the mores. The mores for such a spirit of loyalty are the country. When it sings, its song should be, “Mymores, ’tis of thee, of thee I sing.” What it claims for itself is the right to be true to the traditions of its own people. When asked to justify its allegiance, it in turn asks the question:
“And who are they who best may claim our trust?Surely our own people, of whose blood we are;Who from our infancy have proved their love,And never have deceived us, save, perchance,When kindly guile was wholesomer for usThan truth itself.”[61]
The loyalty to national customs stiffens patriotism, and because of that is, from the standpoint of the patriot, highly desirable, but the problem that it sets is that of preventing it from being satisfied to remain a mere unreasoning superstition.
The mores get embodied in character, and come to be a veritablespiritof loyalty. They grow out of the life of the people, and return to that life. They become actually constituent in personality. The mores become a part of ourselves; we not only think of them, we think with them. They are so natural that we do not notice them. “The more thoroughly American a man is, the less he can perceive Americanism. He will embody it; all he does, says, or writes will be full of it; but he can never truly see it, simply because he has no exterior point of view from which to look at it.”[62]Under such conditions, how could one help being patriotic? It is not something that he strives after; it is to be what he cannot help being. He is patriotic simply because he is himself.
Some conclusions from the study of the habits of patriotism may now be drawn. The complexity of patriotism has further manifested itself. And it is evident that the habits of patriotism, like the impulses, may be either good or bad, or so far as the motive of the individual is concerned, ethically colorless. The patriotism of habituation is natural, like breathing. The habituated patriot will go with the group, and groups like individuals sometimes fall into bad habits. But groups also acquire good habits, and will in those matters be worth serving. Habituation and conformity in such a case will be valuable. Their weakening would often be really disastrous. “There are cases in which the discrediting of tradition is like picking out the mortar that holds together the fabric of society.”[63]There are times when the discrediting of patriotism would mean the destruction of the nation.
The great objection to the patriotism of habituation is that it cannot criticize itself. The lack of criticism will, of course, make for overwhelming strength. In commenting upon the patriotism of the present time, Russell has written as follows: “This instinct [patriotism], just because, in its intense form, it was new and unfamiliar, had remained uninfected by thought, not paralyzed or devitalized by doubt and cold detachment.”[64]But it is just an accident if such patriotism is good. It may easily be the patriotism of the man who takes the stand, “My country, right or wrong,” a position which, while there is something to be said for it on the ground that countries are fundamental institutions which must not be lightly abandoned to destruction, is hardly one to be striven for as an ethical ideal. The road to goodness is not by chance, but by intelligent self-direction. And the goodness of patriotism rests upon the use of intelligence. Patriotism could not as matters now stand be done away with by criticism, but its naturecould be molded. We could habituate ourselves to admire and serve in our life what really was to be admired and served.
But the process of habituation, while it produces a powerful spirit of group loyalty, can hardly give a full account of the rise of a conscious ideal like patriotism. The question would remain, “Why the habituation, and why so much insistence upon it?” The process implies a reason for its existence. And reasons become effective through the action of an intelligent agent. The objection to a theory like that of Sumner is that by it social activity is looked at too exclusively on the outside when it ought also to be looked at on the inside. The theory does not do justice to the initiative of the mind. The mores for the most part seem almost to be active entities, which, starting from environmental conditions, develop themselves. Minds are held in their grip. But mores are products of human activity and reflection, and if one would understand them, he must understand the mind, with not only its impulses, but also its ways of thought. Sumner’s own work shows that he believes in something beyond the mores, and that he has an ideal of acting above them. His confidence is placed in thought. He believes that he at least can reflect upon the group ways, and that a science, or perhaps even a philosophy, of the mores can be established. The following are his own words: “Since it appears that the old mores are mischievous if they last beyond the duration of the conditions and needs to which they are adapted, and that constant, gradual, smooth, and easy readjustment is the course of things which is conducive to healthful life, it follows thatfree and rational criticismof traditional mores is essential to societal welfare.”[65]
Human beings are moved not only by instincts and habits, but also by reasons. And it is with the reasoned beliefs of patriotism that the following part will deal.