Chapter II: The Grounds of Obedience in General

Political obedience is not a thing by itself, but a form of what may be called Compliance in general.

The grounds or motives of Compliance can be summed up under five heads. Putting them in the order of what seems to be their relative importance, they may be described as the following—Indolence, Deference, Sympathy, Fear, Reason. Let us consider each separately.

By Indolence I mean the disposition of a man to let some one else do for him what it would give him trouble to do for himself. There are of course certain persons to whom exertion, mental as well as physical, is pleasurable, and who delight in the effort of thinking out a problem and making a decision for themselves. There are also moments in the lives of most of us when under the influence of some temporary excitement we feel equal to a long succession of such efforts. But these are exceptional persons and rare moments. To the vast majority of mankind nothing is more agreeable than to escape the need for mental exertion, or, speaking more precisely, to choose only those forms of exertion which are directly accompanied by conscious pleasure and involve little fatigue. In a great many exertions of thought resulting in determinations of the will there is no pleasure, or at any rate no conscious pleasure, or at any rate no pleasure which is not outweighed by an accompanying annoyance. Such exertions may relate to things in which we have slight personal interest, and therefore no desires to gratify, or to things in which our personal interest is so doubtful that we shrink from the trouble of ascertaining which way it lies, and are glad to shift the responsibility from ourselves to whoever will undertake it for us. The ascendency of one of a married couple, for instance, or of one member of a group of persons living together, is usually acquired in some such way. It is not necessarily the will really strongest that in these cases prevails, but the will which is most active, most ready to take a little trouble, to exert itself on trivial occasions and undertake small responsibilities. Persons of a resolute and tenacious character are sometimes also hesitating and undecided, because they cannot be at the trouble of setting to work, for the little questions of daily life, their whole machinery of deliberation and volition. In five persons out of six the instinct to say Yes is stronger than the instinct to say No—were it not so, there would be fewer marriages—and this is specially so when the person who claims consent possesses exceptional force and self-confidence. In other words, most of us hate trouble and like to choose the line of least resistance. In tropical Africa the country is covered by a network of narrow footpaths, made by the natives. These paths seldom run straight, and their flexuosities witness to small obstacles, here a stone and there a shrub, which the feet of those who first marked them avoided. To-day one may perceive no obstacle. The prairie which the path crosses may be smooth and open, yet every traveller follows the windings, because it is less trouble to keep one’s feet in the path already marked than it is to take a more direct route for one’s self. The latter process requires thought and attention; the former does not.

Nor is the compliance of indolence less evident in thought than in action. To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking. They are pleased to be saved the effort. They willingly accept what is given them because they have nothing to do further than to receive it. They take opinions presented to them, and assume rules or institutions which they are told to admire to be right and necessary, because it is easier to do this than to form an independent judgement. The man who delivers opinions to others may be inferior to us in physical strength, or in age, or in knowledge, or in rank. We may think ourselves quite as wise as he is. But he is clear and positive, we are lazy or wavering; and therefore we follow him.

Under the name of Deference it is convenient to include the various cases in which some emotion, drawing one person to another, disposes the former to comply with the will of the latter. Whether the emotion be love, or reverence, or esteem, or admiration, a persuasion of superior goodness or of superior wisdom, there is a feeling on the part of the person attracted which makes him ready to sacrifice his own impulses, if they be not of unusual strength, to the will of the person loved or reverenced or admired. Wisdom and goodness give their possessor a legitimate authority, wisdom in making him appear as a fit person to follow where the question is of choosing means, goodness where it is a question of the choice of ends; and the belief that these qualities exist in the person revered or esteemed is just as effective as the reality, such belief being obviously the result of many causes besides a rational scrutiny. The force of the feeling of deference in securing compliance or adhesion varies in different nations and in different states of society. The advantages, for instance, which rank, wealth and learning give to a candidate for any public post in a modern country like France or England, only faintly represent the authority which belonged to birth, learning and sanctity, whether real or supposed, in simpler times. A so-called holy man in the Musulman or Hindu East, a Fakir or a Guru, exerts to-day enormous power in his own neighbourhood, in respect far less of any fear of the harm he can do than simply of the veneration he inspires. Even if he does not claim a direct supernatural mission, his words carry great weight. And there is abundant evidence in the careers of famous Europeans in the East to show how readily in primitive times a remarkable character and career would permanently attach a halo, not only of admiration but of submissive deference, to the descendants of such a person or to the occupant of the office he had filled.

By Sympathy as a ground of obedience I mean not merely the emotion evoked by the sight of a corresponding emotion in another, but the various forms of what may be called the associative tendency in mankind, the disposition to join in doing what one sees others doing, or in feeling as others feel. The root of this instinct lies very near Indolence; for no way of saving effort is so obvious as to do what others have done or are doing; but it is not quite the same thing as Indolence, for it is a tendency strong among some of the less indolent races of mankind, and each of us must have noted from his own personal experience that its action depends as much upon the susceptibility of the imagination as upon the slowness or slackness of the will. There is hardly a more potent factor than this in the formation of communities, whether social or political, because it unites with, if it be not almost identical with, what we call party and civic spirit, substituting a sense of and a pleasure in the exercise of the collective will for the pleasure of exerting the individual will, and thus tending to subordinate the latter, and to make it rejoice in following, perhaps blindly, the will which directs the common action. The shock to individual pride is avoided, because each man acts spontaneously, at the bidding of his own emotion, and each feels that what he may lose as an individual he recovers as a member of the body, and that with a better chance of indulging his passions at the expense of his antagonists. The spirit of the body seems to live in and inspire him, increasing indefinitely the force of his own personality. Obedience to the directing authority is here a first necessity, and becomes the more implicit the greater the dangers of whatever enterprise the body may undertake. As fighting covers great part of the life of primitive communities, the disposition to obey becomes early strong among them, because in nothing is obedience so essential as in war.

Perhaps these three sources of the tendency to comply are really only forms of, as they are certainly all closely connected with, the disposition to imitate which is so strong, not only in man, but throughout the animal kingdom, so far as we can observe it. When ninety-nine sheep one after another jump over a fence at precisely the point where the first of the flock has jumped it, they reveal a propensity similar to that which makes a file of savages travelling over a wilderness each tread in the footsteps of his predecessor, or that which soon stamps the local accent upon the tongue of a child brought from some other part of the country, where the mode of speech was different. There is evidently a psychological, doubtless indeed a physiological, cause for this general and powerful tendency to reproduce the acts and ways of other creatures, even where, as in the case of a local accent, there is no motive whatever for doing so. Conscious imitation is of course frequently explainable by the desire to please, or by a perception of the advantage of doing as others do. But there are many facts to show that its roots lie deeper and that it is due largely to a sympathy between the organs of perception and those of volition, which goes on in unconscious or subconscious states of the mind, and which makes the following of others, the reproduction of their acts, or the adoption of their ideas, to be the path of least resistance, which is therefore usually followed by weaker natures, and frequently even by strong ones.

Of Fear and of Reason nothing need be said, because the school of Hobbes and Bentham for the one, and the apostles of democratic theory for the other, have said more than all that is needed to show the part they respectively play in political society. Fear is no doubt the promptest and most effective means of restraining the turbulent or criminal elements in society; and is of course the last and necessary expedient when authority either legally established or actually dominant is threatened by insurrection. Reason operates, and operates with increasing force as civilization advances, upon the superior minds, leading them to forgo the assertion of their own wills even where such assertion would be in itself innocent or beneficial, merely because the authority which rules in the community has otherwise directed. Reason teaches the value of order, reminding us that without order there can be little progress, and preaches patience, holding out a prospect that evils will be amended by the general tendency for truth to prevail. Reason suggests that it is often better that the law should be certain than that it should be just, that an existing authority should be supported rather than that strife should be caused by the attempt to set up a better one. So also Reason disposes minorities to acquiesce even where a majority is tyrannical, in the faith that tyranny will provoke a reaction and be overthrown by peaceable discussion.

Allowing for the efficacy of Fear as a motive acting powerfully upon the ruder and more brutish natures, and for that of Reason as guiding the more thoughtful and gentle ones, and admitting that neither can be dispensed with in any community, their respective parts would nevertheless seem to be less important than are the parts played by the three first-mentioned motives. If it were possible either in the affairs of the State, or in the private relations of life, to enumerate the number of instances in which one man obeys another, we should find the cases in which either the motive of Fear or the motive of Reason was directly and consciously present to be comparatively few, and their whole collective product in the aggregate of human compliance comparatively small. If one may so express it, in the sum total of obedience the percentage due to Fear and to Reason respectively is much less than that due to Indolence, and less also than that due to Deference or to Sympathy.

In a large proportion of the cases arising in private life the motive of Fear cannot be invoked at all, because there is no power of inflicting harm; and Reason just as little, because the persons who habitually apply ratiocinative processes to their actions are after all few. It may be said that conscious thought is not ordinarily applied to action because Habit supplies its place, and Habit, enabling and disposing us to do without consideration the acts which otherwise would need to be considered, is in fact fossil reason. That is largely so, but Habit is still more often the permanent and unchanging expression of Indolence. Nothing becomes a habit so quickly as does the acquiescence due to Indolence, nor does any tendency strike its roots so deep. And though it is true as regards public or civic matters that physical force is always at hand in the background, we must also recognize that the background is not in fact usually visible to the majority of those who act according to the laws which they obey. They do not necessarily, nor even generally, think of the penalties of the law. They defer to it from respect and because other people defer; they are glad that it is there to save them and other people from trouble. This attitude is not confined to civilized States, but has existed always, even in unsettled societies, where the law might not be able to prevail but for the aid of private citizens.

Of the three springs of Obedience which have been represented as on the whole the stronger, Indolence disguises itself under Deference and Deference is intensified by Sympathy; that is to say, the tendency of men to let others take decisions for them which they might take for themselves becomes much stronger and more constant when they have any ground for believing others to possess some sort of superiority, while the disposition to admit superiority is incomparably more active where a number of other persons are perceived to be also admitting it. A society like that in which modern men live in England or America is apt to suppose that the admission of superiority mortifies a man’s pride, but this is so far from being generally true that the attitude of submission is to most men rather pleasurable than the reverse. So Protestants have been apt to assume that the natural and normal attitude of man in religious matters is independence—a wish to seek out truth for himself, a sense of the duty of consulting his own conscience; whereas the opposite is the fact, and those religious systems take the greatest hold upon man which leave least to individual choice and inculcate, not merely humility towards the Unseen Powers, but the duty of implicitly accepting definite traditions or of revering and following visible ecclesiastical guides.

Some philosophers have talked of Will as the distinctive note of Man—and in so far as the exercise of Will implies the conscious exertion of rational choice it may be admitted to be characteristic of him alone. But in mere tenacity of purpose and persistence in a particular course other animals run him hard. A rogue elephant or a bucking mustang can show as much persistence, sometimes mingled with a craft which seeks to throw the opponent off his guard, and bides its time till the most favourable moment for resistance arrives. In most men the want of individual Will—that is to say, the proneness to comply with or follow the will of another—is the specially conspicuous phenomenon. It is for this reason that a single strenuous and unwearying will sometimes becomes so tremendous a power. There are in the world comparatively few such wills, and when one appears, united to high intellectual gifts, it prevails whichever way it turns, because the weaker bow to it and gather round it for shelter, and, in rallying to it, increase its propulsive or destructive power. It becomes almost a hypnotizing force. One perceives this most strikingly among the weaker races of the world. They are not necessarily the less intelligent races. In India, for instance, an average European finds many Hindus fully his equals in intelligence, in subtlety, and in power of speech; but he feels his own volitions and his whole personality to be so much stronger than that of the great bulk of the native population (excluding a very few races) that men seem to him no more than stalks of corn whom he can break through and tread down in his onward march. This is how India was conquered and is now held by the English. Superior arms, superior discipline, stronger physique, are all secondary causes. There are other races far less cultivated, far less subtle and ingenious, than the Hindus, with whom Europeans have found it harder to deal, because the tenacity of purpose and the pride of the individual were greater. This is the case with the North-American Indians, who fought so fiercely for their lands that it has been estimated that in the long conflict they maintained they have probably killed more white men than they have lost at the hands of the whites. Yet they were far inferior in weapons and in military skill; and they had no religious motives to stimulate their valour.

No one can read the history of the East without being struck by the extraordinary triumphs which a single energetic will has frequently achieved there. A military adventurer, or the chief of a petty tribe, suddenly rises to greatness, becomes the head of an army which attacks all its neighbours, and pursues a career of unbroken conquest till he has founded a mighty empire. Perhaps he raises vast revenues, constructs magnificent works, establishes justice, creates a system of administration which secures order and peace during his lifetime. Men like Thothmes III, Cyrus, and Darius son of Hystaspes, Khosroes Anushirwan, Saladin, Tamerlane, Baber, Akbar the Great, Hyder Ali are in their several ways only the most striking instances of the tremendous effect which a man of exceptional force and activity produces among Oriental peoples[2]. One asks why this happens chiefly in the East. Is there a greater difference in Asiatic than in European peoples between the few most highly-gifted men and the great mass of humanity, so that where the ordinary characters are weak one strong character prevails swiftly and easily? Or is the cause rather to be sought in the fact that in the East there are no permanent institutions of government to be overthrown? That which is strong and permanent there—viz. the customs, religious and legal, of the people—a ruler does not (except in a fit of insanity) venture to touch, while the thrones of neighbouring potentates go down at a stroke before him. In mediaeval and modern Europe, the weakness of the ordinary man was and is entrenched behind a fabric of government and law, which the strongest individual will cannot overthrow; and it is only when this fabric has been shattered by a revolution, as happened in France at the end of the eighteenth century, that the adventurer of genius and volition has a chance of rivalling the heroes of the East.

-----

Footnote 2:

Some of these succeeded to thrones already established, but their
careers illustrate none the less the results effected by brilliant
gifts appearing in the midst of a comparatively inert people.

-----

Thus the comparative stability of governments in mediaeval and modern Europe does not disprove the view which finds in the force of individual will, and the tendency of average men to yield to it, a potent factor in compelling obedience. For in the European countries the resistance offered to the ambition of such a will is effective, not so much because ordinary men are themselves more independent and more capable of opposition as because their superior intelligence has built up well-compacted systems of polity to which obedience has by long habit become attached. Traditions of deference and loyalty have grown up around these systems, so that they enable individuals to stand firmly together, and constitute a solid bulwark against any personality less forceful than that of a Julius Caesar or a Buonaparte.

To this explanation one may perhaps add another. In the East the monarch is as a rule raised so far above his subjects that they are all practically on a level, as compared with him; and those who are for the moment powerful are powerful in virtue of his favour, which has elevated and may at any moment abase them. This has long been the case in Musulman States, and was to a large extent true even in the Byzantine Empire. It is in some degree true in Russia now. Where there is no land-holding or clan-leading aristocracy, nor any richly endowed hierarchy, there may be nothing to diminish the impression of overwhelming power which the sovereign’s position produces. Hence there may be no order of men to set the example of an independence of feeling and attitude which springs from their position as the leaders of their dependents and as entitled to be consulted by the Crown. Such an order of men existed in the feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages, who have done much to create a type of character in the States of modern Europe. To them has now succeeded, in some modern countries, a so-called aristocracy of wealth, which, vain as it may be of its opportunities for influencing others, is much less stable than was the land-holding class of old days, and much less high-spirited. Meanwhile the general levelling down and up which has created what we call modern democracy has, in reducing the number of those whom rank and tradition had made ‘natural leaders,’ increased the opportunities of strong-willed and unscrupulous men, restless and reckless, versed in popular arts, and adroitly using that most powerful of all agents for propagating uniformity of opinion which we call the newspaper press, powerful because it drives the individual to believe that if he differs from the mass he must be wrong. Such a man may have a career in a huge democracy which he could not have had a century ago, because the forces that resist are fewer and feebler to-day than they were then, and the multitude is more easily fascinated by audacity or force of will, apart from moral excellence, apart from intellectual distinction, than is an aristocratic society.

It may help to explain the theory I am trying to present if we pause for a moment to examine the influences under which the habit of obedience is first formed in the individual man and in the nascent community. For the individual, it begins in the Family; and it grows up there only to a small extent by the action of Force and Fear. The average child, even in the days of a discipline harsher than that which now obtains, did not as a rule act under coercion, but began from the dawn of consciousness to comply with the wish of the parent or the nurse, partly from the sense of dependence, partly from affection, partly because it saw that other children did the like. Force might sometimes be resorted to; but force was in most cases a secondary and subsidiary agency. Nor did force succeed so well as softer methods. Everybody knows that the children who have been most often punished are not the most obedient, nor is this merely because, being naturally self-willed, they have needed more correction. After those little squalls of aimless passion which belong to a certain period in the child’s life have passed away, the boy usually moves as a matter of course at his parents’ bidding until the age is reached when circumstances oblige him to act for himself, or when the sense of independence is stimulated by perceiving that others of his own age will despise him if he remains too submissive. The child whose constant impulse is to disobey is as likely to turn out ineffective as the child who obeys too readily; for perversity is as frequently due to want of affection, sympathy, and common sense as to exceptional force of will.

Thus most people enter adult life having already formed the habit of obeying in many things where Force and Fear do not come in at all, but in which the most obvious motive is the readiness to be relieved of trouble and responsibility by following the directions of some one else, presumably superior. They have also formed during boyhood the habit of adopting the opinions of those around them. An acute observer has said that the chief fault of the English public school is that it makes this habit far too strong. Custom—that is to say, whatever is established and obeyed—has great power over them. No conservatism surpasses that of the schoolboy.

It would not be safe to try to find a general explanation of the growth of political communities in the phenomena of domestic life, though it was a favourite doctrine of a past generation that the germ or the type of the State was to be found in the Family. There are some races among whom the Family and its organization seem to have played no great part. But it is clear that in primitive societies three forces, other than Fear, have been extremely powerful—the reverence for ancient lineage, the instinctive deference to any person of marked gifts (with the disposition to deem those gifts supernatural), and the associative tendency which unites the members of a group or tribe so closely together that the practice of joint action supersedes individual choice. These forces have imprinted the habit of obedience so deeply upon early communities that it became a tradition, moulding the minds of succeeding generations. Physical force had plenty of scope in the strife of clans or cities, or (somewhat later) of factions, with one another; but in building up the clan or the city it was hardly needed, for motives more uniform and steady in their efficiency were at work. To pursue this topic would lead us into a field too wide for this occasion; yet it is well to note two facts which stand out in the early history of those communities in which Force and Fear might seem to have had most to do with the formation of governments, and of the habit of obedience to authority. One is the passionate and persistent attachment to a particular reigning family, apart from their personal gifts, apart from their power to serve the community or to terrify it. The Franks in Gaul during the seventh and eighth centuries were as fierce and turbulent a race as the world has ever seen. Their history is a long record of incessant and ferocious strife. From the beginning of the seventh century the Merwing kings, descendants of Clovis, became, with scarcely an exception, feeble and helpless. Their power passed to their vizirs, the Mayors of the Palace, who from about A.D. 638 onwards were kings _de facto_. But the Franks continued to revere the blood of Clovis, and when, in 656, a rash Mayor of the Palace had deposed a Merwing and placed his own son on the throne, they rose at once against the insult offered to the ancient line; and its scions were revered as titular heads of the nation for a century longer, till Pippin the Short, having induced the Pope to pronounce the deposition of the last Merwing and to sanction the transfer of the crown to himself, sent that prince into a monastery. This instance is the more remarkable because the Franks, being Christians in doctrine if not in practice, can hardly have continued to hold the divine origin of their dynasty.

The other fact to be dwelt upon is this, that where religion comes into the matter we discover an associative tendency of immense strength, which binds men into a community, and wins obedience for those who, whether as priests or as kings, embody the unity of the community, who represent its collective relation to the Unseen Powers, who approach them with its collective service of prayers or sacrifice. Altars have probably done even more than hearths to stimulate patriotism, especially among those who, like the Romans, had a sort of domestic altar for every hearth, and kept up a worship of family and clan spirits beside the worship of the national gods. It may be said that the power of religion in welding men together and inducing them to obey kings or magistrates or laws is due to the element of Fear in religion. Such an element has no doubt been at work, but its influence is more seen in the requirement of sacrifices to the deities themselves than in enforcing obedience to the authorities and institutions of the State. What commends these latter to reverence is rather the belief that their divine appointment gives them a claim on the affection of the citizens, and makes it a part of piety as well as of patriotism to support them. In the Old Testament, for instance, the love of Jehovah, and the sense of gratitude to Him for his favours to His people, are motives invoked as no less potent than the dread of His wrath. There has always been a tendency, since Christianity lost its first freshness and power, to insist upon the more material motives, upon those which appear palpable and ponderable, such as the fear of future punishment, rather than on those of a more refined and ethereal quality. But it was not by appealing to these lower motives that Christianity originally made its way in the Roman Empire. The element of Fear, though not wholly absent from the New Testament, plays a very subordinate part there, and became larger in mediaeval and modern times. Yet it may be doubted whether, in growing stronger, it increased the efficiency of Christianity as an engine of moral reform. ‘Perfect love casteth out fear.’ It was the gospel of love, and not the fear of hell, that conquered the world, and made men and women willing to suffer death for their faith. The martyrs in the persecutions under Decius and Diocletian, and the Armenian martyrs of 1895, who were counted by thousands, overcame the terror of impending torture and death, not from any thought of penalties in a world to come, but from the sense of honour and devotion which forbade them to deny the God whom they and their parents or forefathers had worshipped.

Returning to the general question of the disposition of the average man to follow rather than to make a path for himself, it may be remarked that the abstract love of liberty, the desire to secure self-government for its own sake, apart from the benefits to be reaped from it, has been a comparatively feeble passion, even in nations far advanced in political development. It is not easy to establish this proposition by instances, because wherever arbitrary power is exercised, there are pretty certain to be tangible grievances as well as a denial of liberty, and where a monarch, or an oligarchy, attempts to deprive a people of the freedom they have enjoyed, they conclude, and with good reason, that oppression is sure to follow. But when the sources of insurrections are examined, it will be almost always found that the great bulk of the insurgents were moved either by the hatred of foreign domination, or by religious passion, or by actual wrongs suffered. Those who in drawing the sword appeal to the love of liberty and liberty only are usually a group of persons who, like the last republicans of Rome, are either exceptional in their sense of dignity and their attachment to tradition, or deem the predominance of a despot injurious to their own position in the State. So we may safely say that rebellions and revolutions are primarily made, not for the sake of freedom, but in order to get rid of some evil which touches men in a more tender place than their pride. They rise against oppression when it reaches a certain point, such as the spoiling of their goods by the tax-gatherer, the invasion of their homes by the minions of tyranny, the enforcement of an odious form of worship, or perhaps some shocking deed of cruelty or lust. Once they have risen, the more ardent spirits involve the sacred name of liberty and fight under its banner. But so long as the government is fairly easy and tolerant, the mere denial of a share in the control of public affairs is not acutely resented, and a great deal of paternally regulative despotism is acquiesced in.

In A.D. 1863, when Bismarck was flouting the Prussian Parliament, Englishmen were surprised at the coolness with which the Prussian people bore the violations of their not too liberal constitution. The explanation was that the country was well governed, and the struggle for political power did not move peasants and tradesmen otherwise contented with their lot. The English were a people singularly attached to their ancient political and civil rights, yet Charles the First might probably have destroyed the liberties of England, and would almost certainly have destroyed those of Scotland, if he had left religion alone. One of the few cases that can be cited where a great movement sprang from the pure love of independence is the migration of the chieftains of Western Norway to Iceland in the ninth century, rather than admit the overlordship of King Harold the Fairhaired. But even here it is to be remembered that Harold sought to levy tribute: and the Norsemen were of all the races we know those in whom the pride of personality and the spirit of independence glowed with the hottest flame.

There are even times when peoples that have enjoyed a disordered freedom tire of it, and are ready to welcome, for the sake of order, any saviour of society who appears, an Octavianus Augustus or even a Louis Napoleon. The greatest peril to self-government is at all times to be found in the want of zeal and energy among the citizens. This is a peril which exists in democracies as well as in despotisms. Submission is less frequently due to overwhelming force than to the apathy of those who find acquiescence easier than resistance.

Two questions arising out of the view that has been here presented regarding the main sources of Obedience remain to be considered.

One of these, that which bears upon the theory of jurisprudence as a science, being somewhat technical, had better not be suffered to interrupt the course of the general argument. I have therefore relegated it to a note at the end of this essay.