But man to-day is in danger not only through his lack of freedom, of the power of mental concentration, and of the opportunity for all-round development: he is in danger of losing his humanity.
The normal attitude of man to man is made very [pg 024] difficult for us. Owing to the hurry in which we live, to the increased facilities for intercourse, and to the necessity for living and working with many others in an overcrowded locality, we meet each other continually, and in the most varied relations, as strangers. Our circumstances do not allow us to deal with each other as man to man, for the limitations placed upon the activities of the natural man are so general and so unbroken that we get accustomed to them, and no longer feel our mechanical, impersonal intercourse to be something that is unnatural. We no longer feel uncomfortable that in such a number of situations we can no longer be men among men, and at last we give up trying to be so, even when it would be possible and proper.
In this respect, too, the soul of the townsman is influenced most unfavourably by his circumstances, and that influence, in its turn, works most unfavourably on the mentality of society.
Thus we tend to forget our relationship with our fellows, and are on the path towards inhumanity. Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.
As a matter of fact, the most utterly inhuman [pg 025] thoughts have been current among us for two generations past in all the ugly clearness of language and with the authority of logical principles. There has been created a social mentality which discourages humanity in individuals. The courtesy produced by natural feeling disappears, and in its place comes a behaviour which shows entire indifference, even though it is decked out more or less thoroughly in a code of manners. The standoffishness and want of sympathy which are shown so clearly in every way to strangers are no longer felt as being really rudeness, but pass for the behaviour of the man of the world. Our society has also ceased to allow to all men, as such, a human value and a human dignity; many sections of the human race have become merely raw material and property in human form. We have talked for decades with ever increasing light-mindedness about war and conquest, as if these were merely operations on a chess-board; how was this possible save as the result of a tone of mind which no longer pictured to itself the fate of individuals, but thought of them only as figures or objects belonging to the material world? When the war broke out the inhumanity within us had a free course. And what an amount of insulting stuff, some decently veiled, some openly coarse, about the coloured races, has made its appearance during the last decades, and passed for truth and [pg 026] reason, in our colonial literature and our parliaments, and so become an element in general public opinion! Twenty years ago there was a discussion in one of our Continental parliaments about some deported negroes who had been allowed to die of hunger and thirst; and there was no protest or comment when, in a statement from the tribune, it was said that they “had been lost” (“eingegangen” or “crêvé”), as though it were a question of cattle!
In the education and the school books of to-day the duty of humanity is relegated to an obscure corner, as though it were no longer true that it is the first thing necessary in the training of personality, and as if it were not a matter of great importance to maintain it as a strong influence in our human race against the influence of outer circumstances. It has not been so always. There was a time when it was a ruling influence not only in schools, but in literature, even down to the book of adventures. Defoe’s hero, Robinson Crusoe, is continually reflecting on the subject of humane conduct, and he feels himself so responsible for loyalty to this duty that when defending himself he is continually thinking how he can sacrifice the smallest number of human lives; he is so faithful, indeed, to this duty of humanity, that the story of his adventures acquires thereby quite a peculiar character. Is [pg 027] there among works of this kind to-day a single one in which we shall find anything like it?
Another hindrance to civilization to-day is the over-organization of our public life.
While it is certain that a properly ordered environment is the condition and, at the same time, the result of civilization, it is also undeniable that, after a certain point has been reached, external organization is developed at the expense of spiritual life. Personality and ideas are then subordinated to institutions, when it is really these which ought to influence the latter and keep them inwardly alive.
If a comprehensive organization is established in any department of social life, the results are at first magnificent, but after a time they fall off. It is the already existing resources which are realized at the start, but later on the destructive influence of such organization on what is living and original is clearly seen in its natural results, and the more consistently the organization is enlarged, the more strongly its effect is felt in the repression of creative and spiritual activity. There are modern States which cannot recover either economically or spiritually from the paralysing effects of a concentration which dates from a very early period of their history.
The conversion of a wood into a park and its maintenance as such may be a step towards carrying out several different objects, but it is all over then with the rich vegetation which would assure its future condition in nature’s own way.
Political, religious and economic associations aim to-day at forming themselves in such a way as will combine the greatest possible inner cohesion with the highest possible degree of external activity. Constitution, discipline, and everything that belongs to administration are brought to a perfection hitherto unknown. They attain their object, but just in proportion as they do so these centres of activity cease to work as living organizations, and come more and more to resemble perfected machines. Their inner life loses in richness and variety because the personalities of which they are composed must needs decay in character.
Our whole spiritual life nowadays has its course within organizations. From childhood up the man of to-day has his mind so full of the thought of discipline that he loses the sense of his own individuality and can only see himself as thinking in the spirit of some group or other of his fellows. A thorough discussion between one idea and another or between one man and another, such as constituted the greatness of the eighteenth century, is never met [pg 029] with now. But at that time fear of public opinion was a thing unknown. All ideas had then to justify themselves to the individual reason. To-day it is the rule—and no one questions it—always to take into account the views which prevail in organized society. The individual starts by taking it for granted that both for himself and his neighbours there are certain views already established which they cannot hope to alter, views which are determined by nationality, creed, political party, social position, and other elements in one’s surroundings. These views are protected by a kind of taboo, and are not only kept sacred from criticism, but are not a legitimate subject of conversation. This kind of intercourse, in which we mutually abjure our natural quality as thinking beings, is euphemistically described as respect for other people’s convictions, as if there could be any convictions at all where there is no thought.
The modern man is lost in the mass in a way which is without precedent in history, and this is perhaps the most characteristic trait in him. His diminished concern about his own nature makes him as it is susceptible, to an extent that is almost pathological, to the views which society and its organs of expression have put, ready made, into circulation. Since, over and above this, society, [pg 030] with its well-constructed organization, has become a power of as yet unknown strength in the spiritual life, man’s want of independence in the face of it has become so serious that he is almost ceasing to claim a spiritual existence of his own. He is like a rubber ball which has lost its elasticity, and preserves indefinitely every impression that is made upon it. He is under the thumb of the mass, and he draws from it the opinions on which he lives, whether the question at issue is national or political or one of his own belief or unbelief.
Yet this abnormal subjection to external influences does not strike him as being a weakness. He looks upon it as an achievement, and in his unlimited spiritual devotion to the interests of the community he thinks he is preserving the greatness of the modern man. He intentionally exaggerates our natural social instincts into something fantastically great.
It is just because we thus renounce the indefeasible rights of the individual that our race can neither produce new ideas nor make current ones serviceable for new objects; its only experience is that prevailing ideas obtain more and more authority, take on a more and more one-sided development, and live on till they have produced their last and most dangerous consequences.
Thus we have entered on a new mediæval period. [pg 031] The general determination of society has put freedom of thought out of fashion, because the majority renounce the privilege of thinking as free personalities, and let themselves be guided in everything by those who belong to the various groups and cliques.
Spiritual freedom, then, we shall recover only when the majority of individuals become once more spiritually independent and self-reliant, and discover their natural and proper relation to those organizations in which their souls have been entangled. But liberation from the Middle Ages of to-day will be a much more difficult process than that which freed the peoples of Europe from the first Middle Ages. The struggle then was against external authority established in the course of history. To-day the task is to get the mass of individuals to work themselves out of the condition of spiritual weakness and dependence to which they have brought themselves. Could there be a harder task?
Moreover, no one as yet clearly perceives what a condition of spiritual poverty is ours to-day. Every year the spread of opinions which have no thought behind them is carried further by the masses, and the methods of this process have been so perfected, and have met with such a ready welcome, that our [pg 032] confidence in being able to raise to the dignity of public opinion the silliest of statements, wherever it seems necessary to get them currently accepted, has no need to justify itself before acting.
During the war the control of thought was made complete. Propaganda definitely took the place of truth.
With independence of thought thrown overboard, we have, as was inevitable, lost our faith in truth. Our spiritual life is disorganized, for the over-organization of our external environment leads to the organization of our absence of thought.
Not only in the intellectual sphere, but in the moral also, the relation between the individual and the community has been upset. With the surrender of his own personal opinion the modern man surrenders also his personal moral judgment.
In order that he may find good what the mass declares to be such, whether in word or deed, and may condemn what it declares to be bad, he suppresses the scruples which stir in him. He does not allow them to find utterance either with others or with himself. There are no stumbling-blocks which his feeling of unity with the herd does not enable him to surmount, and thus he loses his judgment in that of the mass, and his own morality in theirs.
Above all, he is thus made capable of excusing [pg 033] everything that is meaningless, cruel, unjust, or bad in the behaviour of his nation. Unconsciously to themselves, the majority of the members of our barbarian civilised States give less and less time to reflection as moral personalities, so that they may not be continually coming into inner conflict with their fellows as a body, and continually having to get over things which they feel to be wrong.
Public opinion helps them by popularizing the idea that the actions of the community are not to be judged so much by the standards of morality as by those of expediency, but they suffer injury to their souls. If we find among men of to-day only too few whose human and moral sensibility is still undamaged, the chief reason is that the majority have offered up their personal morality on the altar of their country, instead of remaining at variance with the mass and acting as a force which impels the latter along the road to perfection.
Not only between the economic and the spiritual, then, but also between the mass of men and individuals, there has developed a condition of unfavourable action and reaction. In the days of rationalism and serious philosophy the individual got help and support from society through the general confidence in the victory of the rational and moral, which society never failed to acknowledge [pg 034] as something which explained and justified itself. Individuals were then carried along by the mass; we are stifled by it. The bankruptcy of the civilized State, which becomes more manifest every decade, is ruining the man of to-day. The demoralization of the individual by the mass is in full swing.
The man of to-day pursues his dark journey in a time of darkness, as one who has no freedom, no mental collectedness, no all-round development, as one who loses himself in an atmosphere of inhumanity, who surrenders his spiritual independence and his moral judgment to the organized society in which he lives, and who finds himself in every direction up against hindrances to the temper of true civilization. Of the dangerous position in which he is placed philosophy has no understanding, and therefore makes no attempt to help him. She does not even urge him to reflection on what is happening to himself.
The terrible truth that with the progress of history and the economic development of the world it is becoming not easier, but harder, to develop true civilization, has never found utterance.
What is civilization? Origin of the unethical conception of civilization. Our sense of reality. Our historical sense. Nationalism. National civilization. Our misleading trust in facts and organization. The true sense for reality.
This question ought to have been pressing itself on the attention of all men who consider themselves civilized, but it is remarkable that in the world’s literature generally one hardly finds that it has been put at all until to-day, and still more rarely is any answer given. It was supposed that there was no need for a definition of civilization, since we already possessed the thing itself. If the question was ever touched upon, it was considered to be sufficiently settled with references to history and the present day. But now, when events are bringing us inexorably to the consciousness that we live in a dangerous medley of civilization and barbarism, we must, whether we wish to or not, try to determine the nature of true civilization.
For a quite general definition we may say that civilization is progress, material and spiritual progress, on the part of individuals as of the mass.
In what does it consist? First of all in a lessening of the strain imposed on individuals and on the mass by the struggle for existence. The establishment of as favourable conditions of living as possible for all is a demand which must be made partly for its own sake, partly with a view to the spiritual and moral perfecting of individuals, which is the ultimate object of civilization.
The struggle for existence is a double one: man has to assert himself in nature and against nature, and similarly also among his fellow-men and against them.
A diminution of the struggle is secured by strengthening the supremacy of reason over both external nature and human nature, and making it subserve as accurately as possible the ends proposed.
Civilization is then twofold in its nature: it realizes itself in the supremacy of reason, first, over the forces of nature, and, secondly, over the dispositions of men.
Which of these kinds of progress is most truly progress in civilization? The latter, though it is the least open to observation. Why? For two reasons. First, the supremacy which we secure by reason over external nature represents not unqualified progress, but a progress which brings with its advantages also disadvantages which may work in the direction of barbarism. The reason why the economic circumstances of our time endanger our civilization is to be sought for partly in the fact that we have pressed [pg 037] into our service natural forces which can be embodied in machines. But with that there must be such a supremacy of reason over the dispositions of men that they, and the nations which they form, will not use against one another the power which the control of these forces gives them, and thus plunge one another into a struggle for existence which is far more terrible than that between men in a state of nature.
A normal claim to be civilized can, then, only be reckoned as valid when it recognizes this distinction between what is essential in civilization and what is not.
Both kinds of progress can, indeed, be called spiritual in the sense that they both rest upon a spiritual activity in man, yet we may call the supremacy over natural forces material progress because in it material objects are mastered and turned to man’s use. The supremacy of reason over human dispositions, on the other hand, is a spiritual achievement in another sense, in that it means the working of spirit upon spirit, i.e., of one section of the power of reflexion upon another section of it.
And what is meant by the supremacy of the reason over human dispositions? It means that both individuals and the mass let their willing be determined by the material and spiritual good of the whole and the individuals that compose it; that [pg 038] is to say, their actions are ethical. Ethical progress is, then, that which is truly of the essence of civilization, and has only one significance; material progress is that which is not of the essential at all, and may have a twofold effect on the development of civilization. This moral conception of civilization will strike some people as rationalistic and old-fashioned. It accords better with the spirit of our times to conceive of civilization as a natural manifestation of life in the course of human evolution, but one with most interesting complications. We are concerned, however, not with what is ingenious, but with what is true. In this case the simple is the true—the inconvenient truth with which it is our laborious task to deal.
The attempts to distinguish between civilization as what the Germans call “Kultur” and civilization as mere material progress aim at making the world familiar with the idea of an unethical form of civilization side by side with the ethical, and at clothing the former with a word of historical meaning. But nothing in the history of the word “civilization” justifies such attempts. The word, as commonly used hitherto, means the same as the German “Kultur”, viz., the development of man to a state of higher organization and a higher [pg 039] moral standard. Some languages prefer one word; others prefer the other. The German usually speaks of “Kultur”, the Frenchman usually of “civilisation”, but the establishment of a difference between them is justified neither philologically nor historically. We can speak of ethical and unethical “Kultur” or of ethical and unethical “civilisation”, but not of “Kultur” and “civilisation”.
But how did it come about that we lost the idea that the ethical has a decisive meaning and value as part of civilization?
All attempts at civilization hitherto have been a matter of processes in which the forces of progress were at work in almost every department of life. Great achievements in art, architecture, administration, economics, industry, commerce, and colonization succeeded each other with a spiritual impetus which produced a higher conception of the universe. Any ebb of the tide of civilization made itself felt in the material sphere as well as in the ethical and spiritual, earlier, as a rule, in the former than in the latter. Thus in Greek civilization there set in as early as the time of Aristotle an incomprehensible arrest of science and political achievement, whereas the ethical movement only reached its completion in the following centuries in that great work of education which was undertaken in the ancient [pg 040] world by the Stoic philosophy. In the Chinese, Indian and Jewish civilizations ability in dealing with material things was from the start, and always remained, at a lower level than the spiritual and ethical efforts of these races.
In the movement of civilization which began with the Renaissance, there were both material and spiritual-ethical forces of progress at work side by side, as though in rivalry with each other, and this continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, however, something unprecedented happened: man’s ethical energy died away, while the conquests achieved by his spirit in the material sphere increased by leaps and bounds. Thus for several decades our civilization enjoyed the great advantages of its material progress while as yet it hardly felt the consequences of the dying down of the ethical movement. People lived on in the conditions produced. By that movement without seeing clearly that their position was no longer a tenable one and preparing to face the storm that was brewing in the relations between the nations and within the nations themselves. In this way our own age, having never taken the trouble to reflect, arrived at the opinion that civilization consists primarily in scientific, technical and artistic achievements, and that it can reach its goal without ethics, or, at any rate, with a minimum of them.
Public opinion bowed down before this merely external conception of civilization because it was exclusively represented by persons whose position in society and scientific culture seemed to show them to be competent to judge in matters of the spiritual life.
What was the result of our giving up the ethical conception of civilization, and therewith all attempts to bring reasoned ethical ideals into effective relation with reality? It was that instead of using thought to produce ideals which fitted in with reality, we left reality without any ideals at all. Instead of discussing together the essential elements, such as population, State, Church, society, progress, which decide the character of our social development and that of mankind generally, we contented ourselves with starting from what is given by experience. Only forces and tendencies which were already at work were to be considered. Fundamental truths and convictions which ought to produce logical or ethical compulsion we would no longer acknowledge. We refused to believe that any ideas could be applicable to reality except those derived from experience. Thus ideals which had been knowingly and intentionally lowered dominated our spiritual life and the whole world.
How we glorified our practical common-sense, which was to give us such power in dealing with the world! Yet we were behaving, really, like boys who give themselves up exultingly to the forces of nature and whizz down a hill on their toboggan without asking themselves whether they will be able to steer their vehicle successfully when they come to the next bend or the next unexpected obstacle.
It is only a conviction which is based upon reasoned ethical ideals that is capable of producing free activity, i.e., activity deliberately planned with a view to its object. In proportion as ideals taken from the workaday world are combined with it, reality influences reality. But then the human soul acts merely as an agent of debasing change.
Events which are to produce practical results within us are worked upon and moulded by our mentality. This mentality has a certain character, and on that character depends the nature of those value-judgments which rule our relation to facts.
Normally this character is to be found in the reasoned ideas which our reflection upon reality brings into existence. If these disappear there is not left a void in which “events in themselves” can affect us, but the control of our mentality passes now to the opinions and feelings which hitherto have been ruled and kept under by our reasoned ideas. When the virgin forest is cut down, brushwood [pg 043] springs up where the big trees were formerly. Whenever our great convictions are destroyed their place is taken by smaller ones which carry out in inferior fashion the functions of the former.
With the giving up of ethical ideals which accompanies our passion for reality our practical efficiency is not, therefore, improved, but diminished. It does not make the man of to-day a cool observer and calculator such as he supposes himself to be, for he is under the influence of opinions and emotions which are created in him by facts. All unconsciously he mixes with what is the work of his reason so much of what is emotional that the one spoils the other. Within this circle move the judgments and impulses of our society, whether we deal with the largest questions or the smallest. Individuals and nations alike, we deal indiscriminately with real and imaginary values, and it is just this confused medley of real and unreal, of sober thought and capacity for enthusiasm for the unmeaning, that makes the mentality of the modern man so puzzling and so dangerous.
Our sense of reality, then, means this, that, as a result of emotional and short-sighted calculations of advantage, we let one fact issue immediately in another, and so on indefinitely. As we are not consciously aiming at any definitely planned goal, our activity may really be described as a kind of natural happening.
We react to facts in the most irrational way. Without plan or foundations we build our future into the circumstances of the time and leave it exposed to the destructive effects of the chaotic jostling that goes on amongst them. “Firm ground at last”! we cry, and sink helpless in the stream of events.
The blindness with which we endure this fate is made worse by our belief in our historical sense, which, in this connection, is nothing else than our sense of reality prolonged backwards. We believe ourselves to be a critical generation which, thanks to its thorough knowledge of the past, is in a position to understand the direction which events are destined to take from the present to the future. We add to the ideals which have been taken from existing reality others which we borrow from history.
The achievements of historical science reached by the nineteenth century do, indeed, deserve our admiration, but it is another question whether our generation, for all its possession of an historical science, possesses a true historical sense.
Historical sense, in the full meaning of the term, implies a critical objectivity in the face of far-off and recent events alike. To keep this faculty free from the bias of opinions and interests when we are [pg 045] estimating facts is a power which even our historians do not possess. As long as they are dealing with a period so remote that it has no bearing on the present they are critical so far as the views of the school to which they belong allow it. But if the past stands in any real connection with “to-day”, we can perceive at once in their estimate the influence of their particular standpoint, rational, religious, social or economic.
It is significant that while during the last few decades the learning of our historians has, no doubt, increased, their critical objectivity has not. Previous investigators kept this ideal before their eyes in much greater purity than have those of to-day; we have gone so far that we no longer seriously make the demand that in scientific dealings with the past there shall be a suppression of all prejudices which spring from nationality or creed. It is quite common nowadays to see the greatest learning bound up with the strongest bias. In our historical literature the highest positions are occupied by works written with propagandist aims.
So little educative influence has science had on our historians that they have often espoused as passionately as anyone the opinions of their own people instead of calling the latter to a thoughtful estimate of the facts, as was their duty to their profession; they have remained nothing but men [pg 046] of learning. They have not even started on the task for which they entered the service of civilization, and the hopes of civilization, which in the middle of the nineteenth century rested on the rise of a science of history, have been as little fulfilled as those which were bound up with the demand for national States and democratic forms of government.
The generation that has been brought up by teachers such as these has naturally not much idea of an elevated or active conception of events. Accurately viewed, its characteristic feature is not so much that we understand our past better than earlier generations understood theirs, but rather that we attribute to the past an extraordinarily increased meaning for the present. Now and again we actually substitute it for the latter. It is not enough for us that what has been is present in its results in what now is; we want to have it always with us, and to feel ourselves determined by it.
In this effort to be continually experiencing our historical process of becoming, and to acknowledge it, we replace our normal relation to the past by an artificial one, and wishing to find within the past the whole of our present, we misuse it in order to deduce from it, and to legitimize by an appeal to it, our claims, our opinions, our feelings and our passions. Under the very eyes of our historical learning there springs up a manufactured history for popular use, [pg 047] in which the current national and confessional ideas are unreservedly approved and upheld, and our school history books become regular culture beds of historical lies.
The misuse of history is a necessity for us. The ideas and dispositions which rule us cannot be justified by reason; nothing is left for us but to give them foundations in history.
It is significant that we have no real interest in what is valuable in the past. Its great spiritual achievements are mechanically registered, but we do not let ourselves be touched by them. Still less do we accept them as a heritage; nothing has any value for us except what can be squared with our plans, passions, feelings, and æsthetic moods of to-day. With these we live ourselves by lies into the past, and then assert with unshaken assurance that we have our roots in it.
This is the character of the reverence we pay to history. Blinded by what we consider or declare to be past and done with, we lose all sense for what is to happen, so that of nothing can we say: “It is finished,” nothing now gets accomplished. Again and again we let what is past rise up artificially in what is present, and endow bygone facts with a persistence of being which makes wholly impossible the normal development of our peoples. Just as our sense of reality makes us lose ourselves in [pg 048] present-day events, so does our historical compel us to do the same in those of the past.
From these two things, our sense of reality and our historical sense, is born the nationalism to which we must refer the external catastrophe in which the decadence of our civilization finds its completion.
What is nationalism? It is an ignoble patriotism, exaggerated till it has lost all meaning, which bears the same relation to the noble and healthy kind as the fixed idea of an imbecile does to normal conviction.
How does it develop among us?
About the beginning of the nineteenth century the course of thought gave the national State its rightful position, starting for this from the axiom that it, as a natural and homogeneous organism, was better calculated than any other to make the ideal of the civilized State a working reality. In Fichte’s addresses to the German nation the nation-State is summoned to the bar of the moral reason and learns that it has to submit in all things to the latter. It gives the necessary promise and straightway receives a commission to bring the civilized State into existence. It is given emphatically to understand that it must recognize as its highest task the [pg 049] continuous and steady development of the purely human element in the nation’s life. It is to seek greatness by representing the ideas which can bring healing to the nations. Its citizens are urged to show their membership of it not through the lower, but through the higher, patriotism, that is, not to overvalue its external greatness and power, but to be careful to take for their aim “the unfolding of what is eternal and Godlike in the world,” and to see that their objects coincide with the highest aims of humanity. Thus national feeling is placed under the guardianship of reason, morality and civilization. The cult of patriotism as such is to be considered as barbarism; it does, indeed, announce itself to be such by the purposeless wars which it necessarily brings in its train.
In this way the idea of nationality was raised to the level of a valuable ideal of civilization. When civilization began to decline, its other ideals all fell also, but the idea of nationality maintained itself because it had transferred itself to the sphere of reality. It incorporated henceforward all that remained of civilization, and became the ideal which summed up all others. Here, then, we have the explanation of the mentality of our age, which concentrates all the enthusiasm of which it is capable on the idea of nationality, and believes itself to possess in that all moral and spiritual good things.
But with the decay of civilization the character of the idea of nationality changed. The guardianship exercised over it by the other moral ideals to which it had hitherto been subordinate now ceased, since these were themselves on trial, and the nationalist idea began a career of independence. It asserted, of course, that it was working in the service of civilization, but it was, in truth, only an idea of reality with a halo of civilization round it, and it was guided by no ethical ideals, but only by the instincts which deal with reality.
That reason and morality shall not be allowed to contribute a word to the formation of nationalist ideas and aspirations is demanded by the mass of men to-day as a sparing of their holiest feelings.
If in earlier times the decay of civilization did not produce any such confusion in the sentiments of the various nations, this was because the idea of nationality had not then been raised in the same way to be the ideal of civilization. It was, therefore, impossible that it should insinuate itself into the place of the true ideals of civilization, and through abnormal nationalist conceptions and dispositions bring into active existence an elaborate system of uncivilization.
That in nationalism we have to do not so much with things as with the unhealthy way in which they [pg 051] are dealt with in the imagination of the crowd, is clear from its whole behaviour. It claims to be following a policy of practical results (Realpolitik); in reality it by no means represents the uncompromisingly businesslike view of all the questions of home and foreign policy, but side by side with its egoism displays a certain amount of enthusiasm. Its practical policy is an over-valuation of certain questions of territorial economic interests, an over-valuation which has been elevated to a dogma and idealized, and is now supported by popular sentiment. It fights for its demands without having established any properly thought-out calculation of their real value. In order to be able to dispute the possession of millions of value, the modern State loaded itself with armaments costing hundreds of millions. Meaning to care for the protection and extension of its trade, it loaded the latter with imposts which imperilled its power of competing with its rivals much more than did any of the measures taken by those rivals.
Its practical politics were, therefore, in truth impracticable politics, because they allowed popular sentiment to come in, and thereby made the simplest questions insoluble. This style of politics put economic interests in the shop window, while it kept in the warehouse the ideas about greatness and conquest which belong to nationalism.
Every civilized State, in order to increase its power, gathered allies wherever it could. Thus half-civilized and uncivilized races were summoned by civilized ones to fight against the civilized neighbours of the latter, and these helpers were not content with the subordinate rôle which had been assigned to them. They acquired more and more influence on the course of events, till they were at last in a position to decide when the civilized nations of Europe should begin to fight each other about them. Thus has Nemesis come upon us for abandoning our wishes and betraying to the uncivilized world all that we still possessed of things that were of universal value.
It was significant of the unhealthy character of nationalism’s “practical” politics that it tried in every possible way to deck itself out with a tinsel imitation of idealism. The struggle for power became one for right and civilization; the alliances for the promotion of their selfish interests which various nations made with one another against all the rest were made to appear to be friendships and spiritual affinities. As such they were dated back into the past, even though history had a great deal more to say about hereditary quarrels than about spiritual relationships.
Finally, nationalism was not content with putting aside, in the sphere of politics generally, all attempts to bring into existence a really civilized humanity; it distorted the very idea of civilization itself and talked of national civilization.
Once there was what was known just simply as civilization, and every civilized nation strove to possess it in its purest and most fully developed form. In this respect nationality had in the idea of civilization at that time something much more original and less spoilt than it has in the same idea to-day. If, in spite of this, there was no impulse among the nations to separate the spiritual life of each from that of its neighbours, we have a proof that nationality is not in itself the strong element in the people that demanded this. Such a claim as is made to-day to have a national civilization is an unhealthy phenomenon. It presupposes that the civilized peoples of to-day have lost their healthy nature, and no longer follow instincts, but theories. They percuss and sound their souls to such an extent that these are no longer capable of any natural action. They analyse and describe them so continuously that in thinking of what they ought to be they forget what they actually are. Questions of spiritual differences between races are discussed so subtly, and with such obstinacy and dogmatism, that the talk works like an obsession, and the [pg 054] peculiarities that are said to exist make their appearance like imaginary diseases.
In every department of life more and more effort is devoted to making clearly visible in the results which follow from them the emotions, the ideas, and the reasonings of the mass of the people. Any peculiarity preserved and fostered in this way shows that its natural counterpart has perished. The individual element in the personality of a people no longer, as something unconscious or half conscious, plays with varying lights on the totality of the nation’s spiritual life. It becomes an artifice, a fashion, a self-advertisement, a mania. There is bred in the nation a mass of thought, the serious results of which in every department become more evident year by year. The spiritual life of some of the leading civilized nations has already, in comparison with earlier days, taken on a monotonous tone such as makes an observer feel anxious.
The unnatural character of this development shows itself not only in its results, but in the part which it allows to be played by conceit, self-importance, and self-deception. Anything valuable in a personality or a successful undertaking is attributed to some special excellence in the national character. Foreign soil is assumed to be incapable of producing the same or anything similar, and in most countries this vanity has grown to such a [pg 055] height that the greatest follies are no longer beyond its reach.
It goes without saying that there follows a serious decline in the spiritual element in the national civilization. The spirituality is, moreover, only a kind of disguise; it has in reality an avowedly materialist character. It is a distillation from all the external achievements of the nation in question and appears in partnership with its economic and political demands. While alleged to be grounded in the national peculiarities, nationalist civilization will not, as we should normally expect, remain limited to the nation itself; it feels called upon to impose itself upon others and make them happy! Modern nations seek markets for their civilization, as they do for their manufactures!
National civilization, therefore, is matter for propaganda and for export, and the necessary publicity is secured by liberal expenditure. The necessary phrases can be obtained ready-made and need only be strung together. Thus the world has inflicted on it a competition between national civilizations, and between these civilization itself comes off badly.
The nations of Europe entered the Middle Ages side by side as the heirs of the Greco-Roman world, and lived side by side with the freest mutual intercourse through the Renaissance, the period of the [pg 056] Illuminati, and of the philosophy of more recent times. But we no longer believe that they, with their offshoots in the other continents, form an indivisible unit of civilization. If, however, in this latest age, the differences in their spiritual life have begun to stand out more distinctly, the cause of it is that the level of civilization has sunk. When the tide ebbs, shallows which separate bodies of deep water become visible; while the tide is flowing they are out of sight.
How closely the nations which form the great body of civilized humanity are still interrelated spiritually is shown by the fact that they have all side by side suffered the same decadence.