Chapter III: The Great Illusion Argument

The preceding chapters have dealt rather with misconceptions concerning _The Great Illusion_ than with its positive propositions. What, outlined as briefly as possible, was its central argument?

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That argument was an elaboration of these propositions: Military preponderance, conquest, as a means to man's most elemental needs--bread, sustenance--is futile, because the processes (exchange, division of labour) to which the dense populations of modern Western society are compelled to resort, cannot be exacted by military coercion; they can only operate as the result of a large measure of voluntary acquiescence by the parties concerned. A realisation of this truth is indispensable for the restraint of the instinctive pugnacities that hamper human relationship, particularly where nationalism enters.[111] The competition for power so stimulates those pugnacities and fears, that isolated national power cannot ensure a nation's political security or independence. Political security and economic well-being can only be ensured by international co-operation. This must be economic as well as political, be directed, that is, not only at pooling military forces for the purpose of restraining aggression, but at the maintenance of some economic code which will ensure for all nations, whether militarily powerful or not, fair economic opportunity and means of subsistence.

It was, in other words, an attempt to clear the road to a more workable international policy by undermining the main conceptions and prepossessions inimical to an international order.[112] It did not elaborate machinery, but the facts it dealt with point clearly to certain conclusions on that head.

While arguing that prevailing beliefs (false beliefs for the most part) and feelings (largely directed by the false beliefs) were the determining factors in international politics, the author challenged the prevailing assumption of the unchangeability of those ideas and feelings, particularly the proposition that war between human groups arises out of instincts and emotions incapable of modification or control or re-direction by conscious effort. The author placed equal emphasis on both parts of the proposition--that dealing with the alleged immutability of human pugnacity and ideas, and that which challenged the representation of war as an inevitable struggle for physical sustenance--if only because no exposure of the biological fallacy would be other than futile if the former proposition were true.[113]

If conduct in these matters is the automatic reaction to uncontrollable instinct and is not affected by ideas, or if ideas themselves are the mere reflection of that instinct, obviously it is no use attempting demonstrations of futility, economic or other. The more we demonstrate the intensity of our inherent pugnacity and irrationalism, the more do we in fact demonstrate the need for the conscious control of those instincts. The alternative conclusion is fatalism: an admission not only that our ship is not under control, but that we have given up the task of getting it under control. We have surrendered our freedom.

Moreover, our record shows that the direction taken by our pugnacities--their objective--is in fact largely determined by traditions and ideas which are in part at least the sum of conscious intellectual effort. The history of religious persecution--its wars, inquisitions, repressions--shows a great change (which we must admit as a fact, whether we regard it as good or bad) not only of idea but of feeling.[114] The book rejected instinct as sufficient guide and urged the need of discipline by intelligent foresight of consequence.

To examine our subconscious or unconscious motives of conduct is the first step to making them conscious and modifying them.

This does not imply that instincts--whether of pugnacity or other--can readily be repressed by a mere effort of will. But their direction, the object upon which they expend themselves, will depend upon our interpretation of facts. If we interpret the hailstorm or the curdled milk in one way, our fear and hatred of the witch is intense; the same facts interpreted another way make the witch an object of another emotion, pity.

Reason may be a very small part of the apparatus of human conduct compared with the part played by the unconscious and subconscious, the instinctive and the emotional. The power of a ship's compass is very small indeed compared with the power developed by the engines. But the greater the power of the engines, the greater will be the disaster if the relatively tiny compass is deflected and causes the ship to be driven on to the rocks. The illustration indicates, not exactly but with sufficient truth, the relationship of 'reason' to 'instinct.'

The instincts that push to self-assertion, to the acquisition of preponderant power, are so strong that we shall only abandon that method as the result of perceiving its futility. Co-operation, which means a relationship of partnership and give and take, will not succeed till force has failed.

The futility of power as a means to our most fundamental and social ends is due mainly to two facts, one mechanical, and the other moral. The mechanical fact is that if we really need another, our power over him has very definite limits. Our dependence on him gives him a weapon against us. The moral fact is that in demanding a position of domination, we ask something to which we should not accede if it were asked of us: the claim does not stand the test of the categorical imperative. If we need another's labour, we cannot kill him; if his custom, we cannot forbid him to earn money. If his labour is to be effective, we must give him tools, knowledge; and these things can be used to resist our exactions. To the degree to which he is powerful for service he is powerful for resistance. A nation wealthy as a customer will also be ubiquitous as a competitor.

The factors which have operated to make physical compulsion (slavery) as a means of obtaining service less economical than service for reward, operate just as effectively between nations. The employment of military force for economic ends is an attempt to apply indirectly the principle of chattel-slavery to groups; and involves the same disadvantages.[115]

In so far as coercion represents a means of securing a wider and more effective social co-operation as against a narrower social co-operation, or more anarchic condition, it is likely to be successful and to justify itself socially. The imposition of Western government upon backward peoples approximates to the role of police; the struggles between the armed forces of rival Western Powers do not. The function of a police force is the exact contrary to that of armies competing with one another.[116]

The demonstration of the futility of conquest rested mainly on these facts. After conquest the conquered people cannot be killed. They cannot be allowed to starve. Pressure of population on means of subsistence has not been reduced, but probably increased, since the number of mouths to fill eliminated by the casualty lists is not equivalent to the reduced production occasioned by war. To impose by force (e.g. exclusion from raw materials) a lower standard of living, creates (_a_) resistance which involves costs of coercion (generally in military establishments, but also in the political difficulties in which the coercion of hostile peoples--as in Alsace-Lorraine and Ireland--generally involves their conqueror), costs which must be deducted from the economic advantage of the conquest; and (_b_) loss of markets which may be indispensable to countries (like Britain) whose prosperity depends upon an international division of labour. A population that lives by exchanging its coal and iron for (say) food, does not profit by reducing the productivity of subject peoples engaged in food production.

In _The Great Illusion_ the case was put as follows:--

'When we conquer a nation in these days, we do not exterminate it:
we leave it where it was. When we "overcome" the servile races, far
from eliminating them, we give them added chances of life by
introducing order, etc., so that the lower human quality tends to
be perpetuated by conquest by the higher. If ever it happens that
the Asiatic races challenge the white in the industrial or military
field, it will be in large part thanks to the work of race
conservation, which has been the result of England's conquest in
India, Egypt, and Asia generally.'--(pp. 191-192.)

'When the division of labour was so little developed that every
homestead produced all that it needed, it mattered nothing if part
of the community was cut off from the world for weeks and months at
a time. All the neighbours of a village or homestead might be slain
or harassed, and no inconvenience resulted. But if to-day an
English county is by a general railroad strike cut off for so much
as forty-eight hours from the rest of the economic organism, we
know that whole sections of its population are threatened with
famine. If in the time of the Danes England could by some magic
have killed all foreigners, she would presumably have been the
better off. If she could do the same thing to-day half her
population would starve to death. If on one side of the frontier a
community is, say, wheat-producing, and on the other
coal-producing, each is dependent for its very existence on the
fact of the other being able to carry on its labour. The miner
cannot in a week set to and grow a crop of wheat; the farmer must
wait for his wheat to grow, and must meantime feed his family and
dependents. The exchange involved here must go on, and each party
have fair expectation that he will in due course be able to reap
the fruits of his labour, or both starve; and that exchange, that
expectation, is merely the expression in its simplest form of
commerce and credit; and the interdependence here indicated has, by
the countless developments of rapid communication, reached such a
condition of complexity that the interference with any given
operation affects not merely the parties directly involved, but
numberless others having at first sight no connection therewith.

'The vital interdependence here indicated, cutting athwart
frontiers, is largely the work of the last forty years; and it has,
during that time, so developed as to have set up a financial
interdependence of the capitals of the world, so complex that
disturbance in New York involves financial and commercial
disturbance in London, and, if sufficiently grave, compels
financiers of London to co-operate with those of New York to put an
end to the crisis, not as a matter of altruism, but as a matter of
commercial self-protection. The complexity of modern finance makes
New York dependent on London, London upon Paris, Paris upon Berlin,
to a greater degree than has ever yet been the case in history.
This interdependence is the result of the daily use of those
contrivances of civilisation which date from yesterday--the rapid
post, the instantaneous dissemination of financial and commercial
information by means of telegraphy, and generally the incredible
progress of rapidity in communication which has put the half-dozen
chief capitals of Christendom in closer contact financially, and
has rendered them more dependent the one upon the other than were
the chief cities of Great Britain less than a hundred years
ago.--(pp. 49-50.)

'Credit is merely an extension of the use of money, and we can no
more shake off the domination of the one than we can of the other.
We have seen that the bloodiest despot is himself the slave of
money, in the sense that he is compelled to employ it. In the same
way no physical force can in the modern world set at naught the
force of credit. It is no more possible for a great people of the
modern world to live without credit than without money, of which it
is a part.... The wealth of the world is not represented by a fixed
amount of gold or money now in the possession of one Power, and now
in the possession of another, but depends on all the unchecked
multiple activities of a community for the time being. Check that
activity, whether by imposing tribute, or disadvantageous
commercial conditions, or an unwelcome administration which sets up
sterile political agitation, and you get less wealth--less wealth
for the conqueror, as well as less for the conquered. The broadest
statement of the case is that all experience--especially the
experience indicated in the last chapter--shows that in trade by
free consent carrying mutual benefit we get larger results for
effort expended than in the exercise of physical force which
attempts to exact advantage for one party at the expense of the
other.'--(pp. 270-272.)

In elaboration of this general thesis it is pointed out that the processes of exchange have become too complex for direct barter, and can only take place by virtue of credit; and it is by the credit system, the 'sensory nerve' of the economic organism, that the self-injurious results of economic war are first shown. If, after a victorious war, we allow enemy industry and international trade to go on much as before, then obviously our victory will have had very little effect on the fundamental economic situation. If, on the other hand, we attempt for political or other reasons to destroy our enemy's industry and trade, to keep him from the necessary materials of it, we should undermine our own credit by diminishing the exchange value of much of our own real wealth. For this reason it is 'a great illusion' to suppose that by the political annexation of colonies, territories with iron-mines, coal-mines, we enrich ourselves by the amount of wealth their exploitation represents.[117]

The large place which such devices as an international credit system must take in our international economy, adds enormously to the difficulty of securing any 'spoils of victory' in the shape of indemnity. A large indemnity is not impossible, but the only condition on which it can be made possible--a large foreign trade by the defeated people--is not one that will be readily accepted by the victorious nation. Yet the dilemma is absolute: the enemy must do a big foreign trade (or deliver in lieu of money large quantities of goods) which will compete with home production, or he can pay no big indemnity--nothing commensurate with the cost of modern war.

Since we are physically dependent on co-operation with foreigners, it is obvious that the frontiers of the national State are not co-terminous with the frontiers of our society. Human association cuts athwart frontiers. The recognition of the fact would help to break down that conception of nations as personalities which plays so large a part in international hatred. The desire to punish this or that 'nation' could not long survive if we had in mind, not the abstraction, but the babies, the little girls, old men, in no way responsible for the offences that excited our passions, whom we treated in our minds as a single individual.[118]

As a means of vindicating a moral, social, religious, or cultural ideal--as of freedom or democracy--war between States, and still more between Alliances, must be largely ineffective for two main reasons. First, because the State and the moral unit do not coincide. France or the British Empire could not stand as a unit for Protestanism as opposed to Catholicism, Christianity as opposed to Mohammedanism, or Individualism as opposed to Socialism, or Parliamentary Government as opposed to Bureaucratic Autocracy, or even for European ascendancy as against Coloured Races. For both Empires include large coloured elements; the British Empire is more Mohammedan than Christian, has larger areas under autocratic than under Parliamentary government; has powerful parties increasingly Socialistic. The State power in both cases is being used, not to suppress, but to give actual vitality to the non-Christian or non-European or coloured elements that it has conquered. The second great reason why it is futile to attempt to use the military power of States for ends such as freedom and democracy, is that the instincts to which it is compelled to appeal, the spirit it must cultivate and the methods it is compelled increasingly to employ, are themselves inimical to the sentiment upon which freedom must rest. Nations that have won their freedom as the result of military victory, usually employ that victory to suppress the freedom of others. To rest our freedom upon a permanent basis of nationalist military power, is equivalent to seeking security from the moral dangers of Prussianism by organising our States on the Prussian model.

Our real struggle is with nature: internecine struggles between men lessen the effectiveness of the human army. A Continent which supported precariously, with recurrent famine, a few hundred thousand savages fighting endlessly between themselves, can support, abundantly a hundred million whites who can manage to maintain peace among themselves and fight nature.

Nature here includes human nature. Just as we turn the destructive forces of external nature from our hurt to our service, not by their unintelligent defiance, but by utilising them through a knowledge of their qualities, so can the irrepressible but not 'undirectable' forces of instinct, emotion, sentiment, be turned by intelligence to the service of our greatest and most permanent needs.