The way the world is going

Let us assume that a great number of people in the world want peace, permanent world peace. We have to assume this because there is no way of proving it, and it is open to very considerable doubt. But it is a prevalent habit to assert as much. If it is true, then there is amazingly little effort to realize this aspiration. Those people who want permanent world peace carry inaggressiveness too far. Nowhere in the world do I find any evidence of a real, strenuous effort to establish the peace of the world on sure foundations. Nowhere do I find really clear-headed, resolute efforts on a scale commensurate to the task to restrain the processes that will inevitably develop into warfare in the not very remote future.

Many readers will no doubt rebel against this statement. They will point to the League of Nations, League of Nations Unions and Societies, innumerable declarations by prominent people, “No More War” organizations, and so forth and so on. I admit a prevalent sentimentality in the matter. I can even believe that if the peace of the world could be secured for ever by a show of hands, there would be a considerable majority in its favour. I am convinced, too, that wars in the future, even at the outset, will not be undertaken with the gusto with which we all set about the Great War. But if a man has an idiot incendiary in his house, it is no good for him to go about saying, “No more fire,” unless he has the matches locked up, the fires guarded, and the idiot watched. Since 1914, in spite of vast volumes of pious intention, hardly anything of practical value has been done to prevent future wars.

Peace talk bores many people. And it is interesting to note that it bores them. Among the hundreds of thousands who will glance over this article there are thousands, especially among the younger contingent, who will probably be killed or maimed in war. The present reader has a fairly good chance of having some of his face blown out at the back of his head, or his hips smashed to splinters, or his viscera dispersed rather painfully, or some such surprising experience—it always seems to surprise them—by one of the missiles that will be flying about in great abundance when the next fighting is under way. It is a touching manifestation of the careless bravery of our race that this probability does not seem to move them to any appreciable effort to avert such a culmination of their careers. Until it happens they seem rather to enjoy the prospect, and after it has happened their opinion loses any weight in the matter.

Still more of my readers will be maimed or impoverished, and wasted by the coming war, but they never seem to think they will draw bad numbers until they get them, and after they have got them, like the fox that lost its tail, the common reaction seems to be a more or less conscious desire to see the experience spread to those still intact. And for most women and girls war is as good as a richly sentimental film that moves them to tears and pity. While it converts great multitudes of men into a muddy mixture of rags of flesh and uniform, it greatly enhances the economic importance of women and their value as nurses, war wives, and the inspirers of heroic sacrifices. The feminine disapproval of war is an outward and visible gentleness that is entirely compatible with a very considerable readiness to face it bravely and to discourage effective efforts to prevent it. This widespread objection to war of which we hear so much does not go very deep into people’s hearts; it certainly does not stir them as religious hatred or unfamiliar customs can stir them, and it is a complete delusion to regard it as in itself an operative cause preventing war.

One real test of pacifist sincerity is to be found in the pose towards national independence. To any one who will sit down for five minutes and face the facts squarely it must be evident that the organization of world peace, so that wars will be impossible and disarmament secure, involves some sort of federal authority in the world’s affairs. At some point there must be the certainty of a decision upon all disputes of races and peoples and nations that would otherwise necessitate war. And this authority must clearly have the power to enforce its decisions. Whatever navies and armies survive, other than police forces for local and definite ends, must be under the control of this central authority. It may be a committee of national representatives or what you will, but central authority there must be. Pax Mundi, like the Pax Romana or the Pax Britannica, must be the only sovereign power within its realm. If you are not prepared to see your own country and your own flag so far subordinated to collective control, whatever protestations of peaceful intentions you make are either made unintelligently or else in bad faith. Your country cannot be both independent and restricted. Either you are for Cosmopolis or you are for war.

It is interesting to note how many excellent people boggle at this obvious alternative. They declare they are for peace, first, last, and all the time; they belong to this or that association for universal arbitration or for propaganda on behalf of the League of Nations, they advocate disarmament, and all the while they shirk the plain logical consequences of these pretensions, which are, in one word, disloyalty to their own government. The idea of loyalty is unquestioning obedience, complete devotion; “our country, right or wrong.” We abandon easy and natural poses and stiffen up to a mechanical salute at the first note of the national anthem. By that we indicate that, before all other things, and even to the sacrifice of our lives, we are prepared to serve, support, and sustain the free and separate existence, alleged collective prosperity, natural destiny, necessary expansion, honour, and glory of our own sovereign government, its Empire and its subjects, against right, reason, justice, the knavish tricks of foreigners (and practically that is all foreigners are supposed to do), the stars in their courses, or the welfare of mankind. We put our nationality first in our hearts and souls and lives. We regard our country as something primary and eternal. We must never think of it subordinated nor imagine that its separateness can end. It is to go on for all time just as it is, only more so. The rest of the world may go to the devil. If patriotism is not all that, then what is patriotism?

Now, I maintain that in this matter you cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. You cannot be an advocate of organized world peace and a full and complete patriot also. A great number of worthy people are trying to achieve this impossibility. If we subtract them from the total of those who are “working for world peace,” I doubt if any large number of people remain. The patriotic attitude seems to be a much more natural and satisfactory one than the cosmopolitan. It is much easier to adhere to a government that exists than to get at cross-purposes with all the honour and procedure of your own country in order to work for one that does not and never may exist. Patriotism is rich with associations; it is romantic and poetic. It is always nice and strengthening to hate and despise something, and patriotism gives you the whole outer world for that sustaining use. Its chief drawback is that it takes you along roads that end sooner or later in war, and that, in spite of the professional soldiers, war becomes more frightful, disgusting, destructive, and futile every year. And another drawback is that it restricts your movements to your own dear country, and that on the rest of this small planet you must travel about as a latent enemy and a potential spy.

Nor do the logical consequences of a desire for world peace end with the sacrifice of complete national freedom in the matter of disarmament and in diplomatic action. These concern merely the material and forms of war. The underlying cause of most recent wars seems to be the treatment of each sovereign community as a separate economic system in hostile competition with all the rest, and the consequent struggle to secure priority in markets and exclusive or privileged access to supplies of raw material. Arrangements for disarmament and arbitration may delay conflicts and render warfare clumsier and more sluggish, exhausting, and painful, but they will do little or nothing to prevent the ultimate resort to war, so long as we are living under the assumption that there is a struggle for existence, an unavoidable competition for vital material, between sovereign states. Unless people are prepared to accept the idea that the economic life of the world can be regarded and controlled as one system to the general advantage of the race, their aspirations for a universal peace will remain the most unreal of all possible aspirations. Separate economic systems must compete, must jostle, must forestall, and must drive, for all their virtuous protestations, towards a tussle.

No doubt the reorganization of the world’s affairs and the world’s ideas to the form of an economic unity is a gigantic task. But it is not a bit of good preparing palm branches and hosannahs for the final pacification of mankind unless we believe and intend that that gigantic task will and shall be done.

When some central body determines the distribution of raw material and staple commodities throughout the world, when these movements are lubricated by transactions in a common currency, then, and only then, is a stable world peace a reasonable proposition.

And it is not only trade and business that have to be brought to the scale of world affairs, but the movements of population demand a similar unified control. We have to remember that the idea of world peace runs counter to the general processes of nature. Nature’s way with species seems always to have been multiplication up to the limits of subsistence and a consequent struggle to survive. This has not always produced happy or dignified results; the hyena, the wart-hog, thousands of species of parasites that seem very cruel, hideous, and vile to us, have been brought to their present state of survival efficiency by this struggle. War, both internecine and external, is nature’s way. But we are told by the moving spirits of what is called the birth-control movement that mankind need be driven no longer by population pressure. If they are right in saying that, then world peace is possible. If they are wrong it is not. If they are wrong, then the Italians and Japanese are justified in breeding like rabbits, clamouring to grab land from more restrained populations, and threatening war. If they are wrong, there is an excuse for the Italian threats against the French, and for the Japanese claims to a foothold in Australia and California. But if their increase is a preventable increase due to the sinful ignorance fostered by a repressive Government, then those “expansion”-seeking people cease to appear as heroic aggressors and become instead merely philoprogenitive nuisances in the commonweal of mankind. Apparently birth-rates fall as knowledge increases; the lower the standard of life, the greater the breeding. It is clear that unless there is a common protection of knowledge and information throughout the world, this biological suffocation of peace possibilities must continue. Civilization will remain restricted by the militant protective necessities imposed upon it by such slum-breeding regions as Fascist Italy, Japan, and Bengal. The space-consuming communities must arm against them. So here again we see a clear incompatibility between any hope of world peace and the sovereign freedom of individual states.

I suppose that this article is what amiable supporters of the dear League of Nations at Geneva will call a “pessimistic” article. It is not in the least pessimistic, but it does attempt to indicate something of the scale and quality of the task if peace is indeed to be established for ever in the world. The Anglo-Saxon community in particular suffers from a delusion that afternoon meetings (with tea), small regular subscriptions to societies with noble intentions, the circulation of nicely printed reports, and a polite and deferential attitude towards all that is respected and influential in life, may be considered not merely as progressive activities, but as all that is required in the way of progressive activities. This job calls for something much rougher and more fundamental. I do not see how we can avoid the conclusion that the search for world peace, since it is a project to subordinate our sovereign government to something larger, comes near to or passes the legal definition of treason. Moreover, the necessary conditions for world peace bring us into sharp conflict, not simply with the ordinary patriot but with much that is regarded by large sections of people as current morality. And, as a further obstacle, such views must necessarily antagonize big interests entrenched behind tariff walls and currency advantages. A real world peace movement must be a revolutionary movement in politics, finance, industrialism, and the daily life alike. It is not a proposed change in certain formal aspects of life; it is a proposal to change the whole of life. People are allowed to go about talking of world peace now, not because their views are regarded as acceptable, but because they are supposed to be incoherent and ineffective. As the conditions of world peace are made plainer and as the movement for world peace becomes more distinctly practicable, that present tolerance is unlikely to continue. The first phase when any creative movement passes from the realm of mere talk towards realization is resistance and persecution. The first sign that an attack is approaching its objective is that shots and shell take effect, amateurism vanishes, men fall, and the strain and effort mount steeply to the climax. My impression is that at present the movement for world peace is still at a considerable distance from its objective. One may doubt, indeed, whether any of these various League of Nations Unions and “No More War” societies that play about in the sun of popular approval can be regarded as even a preliminary assembly for the main attack. Great revolutions in human affairs need time to incubate, and the price of the peace of the world means an effort whose duration will have to be measured by lifetimes. I believe that such an effort will be made, but I believe it is a delusion to say that it has even begun.

12 June, 1927.