Out of intimations of dissolution and insecurity has emerged an interest in the properties and values of community that is one of the most striking social facts of the present age. We see this interest in the actions of the market place, in the imaginative labors of the poet and the novelist, and in the most abstract speculations and researches of the sciences of human behavior. In many spheres of contemporary thought the imperatives of community are irresistible. Along with the pervasive vocabulary of alienation, noted in the preceding chapter, there is an equally influential vocabulary of community. Integration, status, membership, hierarchy, symbol, norm, identification, group— these are key words in the intellectual's lexicon at the present time.
There is much warrant for regarding the present wide-spread interest in community as a significant renewal of intellectual conservatism, as an efflorescence of ideas and values that first arose in systematic form as part of the conservative reaction to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. In the writings of such men as Edmund Burke, de Maistre, de Bonald, Chateaubriand, Hegel, and others we find premonitions and insights that bear an extraordinarily close relation to the contemporary ideology of community.1 The French Revolution had something of the same impact upon men's minds in Western Europe at the very end of the eighteenth century that the Communist and Nazi revolutions have had in the twentieth century. In each instance the seizure of power, the expropriation of rulers, and the impact of new patterns of authority and freedom upon old institutions and moral certainties led to a reexamination of ideas on the nature of society.2
For the Philosophical Conservatives the greatest crimes of the Revolution in France were those committed not against individuals but against institutions, groups, and personal statuses. These philosophers saw in the Terror no merely fortuitous consequence of war and tyrannic ambition but the inevitable culmination of ideas contained in the rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment. In their view, the combination of social atomism and political power, which the Revolution came to represent, proceeded ineluctably from a view of society that centered on the individual and his imaginary rights at the expense of the true memberships and relationships of society. Revolutionary legislation weakened or destroyed many of the traditional associations of the ancien régime—the guilds, the patriarchal family, class, religious association, and the ancient commune. In so doing, the Conservatives argued forcefully, the Revolution had opened the gates for forces which, if unchecked, would in time disorganize the whole moral order of Christian Europe and lead to control by the masses and to despotic power without precedent.
It was this view of the Revolution as the work primarily of disorganization and insecurity that separated conservatism from the dominant liberal and individualistic philosophies of the early nineteenth century. From this basic conception of the effects of the Revolution upon traditional society, the conservatives proceeded to a view of man and society that stressed not the abstract individual and impersonal relations of contract but personality inextricably bound to the small social group; relationships of ascribed status and tradition; the functional interdependence of all parts of a society, including its prejudices and superstitions; the role of the sacred in maintaining order and integration; and, above all, the primacy of society to the individual.
The family, religious association, and local community—these, the conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man's thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demonic fears and passions. Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.3
Two
The conservatism of our own age of thought is new only in context and intensity. Through the writings of such intermediate figures as Comte, Tocqueville, Taine, Maine, Arnold, and Ruskin, the root ideas and values of early nineteenth-century conservatism have found their way straight to our own generation and have become the materials of a fresh and infinitely diversified veneration for community. The present revolt against individualistic rationalism bears striking resemblance to the revolt produced by the French Revolution.
In many areas of contemporary thought lie evidences of a positive regard for community and status that contrasts sharply with the general emphasis upon release and individuation which so dominated Protestant theology, moral philosophy, imaginative literature, and the social sciences until quite recently. Always behind the major theoretical problems of an age lie the less tangible but no less potent moral aspirations which give meaning and relevance to theoretical preoccupations. And at the present time it is, plainly, the aspiration toward moral certainty and social community that gives relevance to so much of the theoretical and imaginative work of the age.
The same temper of mind that has led the imaginative writer, the novelist, the poet, and the dramatist to seize so tenaciously upon the lost individual as the characteristic figure of the century, and upon processes of disillusionment and defeat, has led him also to seek, through intuitive vision, the basis of redemptive community. This literary search may end, as it did typically in the nineteen-thirties, in the predestined proletariat. Or, it may end, as it does in certain more recent works, in the church—or in the monastery, in class, in the tranquil countryside, in party, or even in the army. Man's integration with fellow man, his identification with race, culture, religion, and family, as escapes from aloneness become intolerable—these are rich themes at the present time. Even where the vision of community lacks certainty and clarity, we still cannot overlook the almost complete collapse of that literary revolt against the village, church, class, and community so spectacular in American writing a generation or two ago. Who now can read with undistracted attention of the efforts of a Carol Kennicott to escape the tyrannies of Main Street when the efforts of so many people are seemingly directed toward a recapture of the small town with all its cohesions and constraints? It is hard not to conclude that the theme of community and status exerts upon the literary mind of today a fascination every bit as intense as that exerted a generation or more ago by the idols of release and revolt. Belonging, not escape, is the imperative moral value.
The same is to be seen in much of the literary criticism of the present time. The major idols of criticism are no longer, as they were in the earlier decades of the century, free expression, sheer individuality, and emancipation from the past. Tradition, authority, and formal discipline have to a very large extent replaced the earlier values. Problems of form, structure, and technique in literary criticism and philosophy have a suggestive analogy to theoretical problems of structure and integration in the social sciences and psychology. The profound concern with the technical aspects of structure and method, with standards and canons of literary morality, and with the innumerable problems of symbolism and imagery and roots, may be no more than a significant chapter in the history of critical taste. But, like some of the technical problems in moral philosophy and the social sciences at the present time, they have a wider context, a context that is created by the preoccupation with intellectual and moral community. The basic problem of the writer's relation to what Sir Osbert Sitwell has called “the strange proletarian cosmopolis of the twentieth century” has many manifestations, ranging from the most technical of formal analyses to the most stridently sermonistic. But none of these manifestations is very far away from the towering moral problem of the age, the problem of community lost and community regained.4
Similarly, in a great amount of contemporary theological writing we are struck by an analogous intensity of the ethic of community. The same perceptions that lead, as we have seen, to a theological recognition of multitudes of distracted, spiritually isolated individuals in modern society lead also to an ever profounder concern with such matters as religious symbolism, liturgy, hierarchy, and general problems of religious discipline and tradition. The historic tendency in Protestantism toward a general depreciation of the external symbolic and associative properties of religion has, in very considerable measure, been reversed. More and more Protestant leaders now turn with new respect to traditional doctrines that bear the mark of Catholic or Jewish orthodoxy. The power of a religion—one that is rich in ritual and symbolism—to inspire and to integrate, especially in mass industrial society, has not been missed by such Protestant leaders as Reinhold Niebuhr. Deeply Protestant as Niebuhr is, he is yet willing to agree with such non-Protestant theologians as Maritain, Buber, and Demant that a religion which neglects the external communal ties between man and man is a religion likely to offer nothing in support of the man-God relationship. Niebuhr is not alone. In many quarters the imperative of community has become as evocative as was, in former ages, the imperative of individual faith. “The language of the Kingdom,” writes the Anglican Demant, “the language of the family, of sonship, and fatherhood and membership, and also the language of friendship, is the language of status.”5
Nowhere, however, is the concern for community more striking at the present time than in the social sciences. It has a directive force in the choice of significant problems and in the formulation of hypotheses that is at least equal to that exerted by the idea of change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 Research projects tend to center increasingly on problems of individual assimilation within groups, classes, and cultures. The astonishing spread of the study of group structure, group dynamics, interpersonal relations, and of associative components in economic and political behavior bears rich testimony to the change that has taken place in recent decades in the type of problem regarded as significant. If, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, economic and political problems were generally predominant, supplemented by problems of individual instinct and motive force, it is manifestly the social problem that now holds the field—social in the precise sense that it pertains to man's primary relations with man. The social group has replaced the individual as the key concept in a great deal of social science writing, and it is almost as apt to observe that social order has replaced social change as the key problem. Beyond count are the present speculations, theories, and projects focused on the mechanics of group cohesion, structure, function, and the varied processes of assimilation and adjustment.
The most significant intellectual revolt in the social sciences against rationalistic individualism is not the drive toward political collectivism that Dicey observed half a century ago. It is now a conservative revolt and is to be seen in those approaches to the study of man where the individual has been replaced by the social group as the central unit of theoretical inquiry and ameliorative action; where organicism and its offspring, functionalism, hold sway in the interpretation of behavior and belief; where there is a dominant interest in themes and patterns of cultural integration, in ritual, role, and tradition, and in the whole range of problems connected with social position and social role. Granted the personal detachment and the purely analytical objectives which characterize most of these studies, the conclusion is plain that the problems themselves, like analogous problems in other spheres of theory, reflect a set of deep moral urgencies. In the same way that older theoretical problems of change and mobility had behind them, historically and logically, moral aspirations to progress, so contemporary theoretical problems of social statics are given meaning and drive by moral aspirations toward community.
Three
The theorist seeks to discern patterns of thought, like patterns of culture, in modern society only at his peril. What I have here called the image of community in modern thought has, obviously, many exceptions. Individualism is far from dead. The often bitter controversies that characterize the contemporary interest in status and community and cohesion make this absolutely clear. If, today, it is the functional anthropologist or the industrial sociologist who is subjected to attack by latter-day individualists, tomorrow it will be the New Critic, and the day after the neoorthodox Protestant theologian. Individualism dies slowly. What is left, often clamant, is the individualist conscience.
Despite this, I cannot help thinking that the concern for community, its values, properties, and means of access, is the major intellectual fact of the present age. Whatever evidence remains of the individualist conscience and the rationalist faith, it is hard to miss the fact that individualism and secularism are on the defensive. New imperatives are the order of the day. And these are not confined to the ranks of intellectuals.
Is not the most appealing popular religious literature of the day that which presents religion, not in its timeless role of sharpening man's awareness of the omnipresence of evil and the difficulties of salvation, but as a means of relief from anxiety and frustration? It enjoins not virtue but adjustment. Are not the popular areas of psychology and ethics those involving either the theoretical principles or the therapeutic techniques of status and adjustment for the disinherited and insecure? “In what other period of human existence,” asks Isaiah Berlin, “has so much effort been devoted not to the painfully difficult task of looking for light, but to the protection…of individuals from the intellectual burden of facing problems that may be too deep or complex?”7 Every age has its literature of regeneration. Our own, however, is directed not to the ancient desire of man for higher virtue but to the obsessive craving of men for tranquillity and belonging.
For an ever-increasing number of people the conditions now prevailing in Western society would appear to have a great deal in common with the unforgettable picture Sir Samuel Dill has given us of the last centuries of the Roman Empire: of enlarging masses of individuals detached from any sense of community, status, or function, turning with a kind of organized desperation to exotic escapes, to every sort of spokesman for salvation on earth, and to ready-made techniques of relief from nervous exhaustion. In our own time we are confronted by the spectacle of innumerable individuals seeking escape from the very processes of individualism and impersonality which the nineteenth-century rationalist hailed as the very condition of progress.
Nostalgia has become almost a central state of mind. In mass advertising, the magazine story, and in popular music we cannot fail to see the commercial appeal that seems to lie in cultural themes drawn from the near past. It is plainly a nostalgia, not for the greater adventurousness of earlier times but for the assertedly greater community and moral certainty of the generations preceding ours. If the distinguishing mark of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was transgression, that of the mid-twentieth century would appear to be the search for the road back.
Increasingly, individuals seek escape from the freedom of impersonality, secularism, and individualism. They look for community in marriage, thus putting, often, an intolerable strain upon a tie already grown institutionally fragile. They look for it in easy religion, which leads frequently to a vulgarization of Christianity the like of which the world has not seen before. They look for it in the psychiatrist's office, in the cult, in functionless ritualizations of the past, and in all the other avocations of relief from nervous exhaustion.
There is a growing appeal of pseudo-intimacy with others, a kind of pathetic dependence on the superficial symbols of friendship and association. If Hollywood provides us, both in its own life and in its pictures, with the most familiar examples of this pseudo-intimacy, they are assuredly not lacking in other areas of our mass culture. The craving for affection and tangible evidences of accord, which psychiatrists have declared to be so central in contemporary neurotic behavior, has a broad base in popular behavior.
Remedial techniques for the insecure, rootless, apprehensive individual loom large in our mass culture. They are evidenced in the new demands of organized labor in industry, demands that tend now to center on long-term security rather than on the more familiar short-run improvements in wages and hours. They are patent in the growing popular conception of university education as a means less of illumination than as an avenue to social status and intellectual certainty. In less tangible but no less revealing ways the image of community is to be seen in all the fantasy avenues to social belonging—the movie, the radio serial, and popular fiction.
Not a little of that rage for order in industry, education, religion, and government, which seems at times so relentlessly bound to destroy the contexts of individuality in culture, is the product of the devouring search for the conditions of security and moral certainty.
The belief that all important goals of human life are realizable through political and economic planning for large aggregates of the population is as powerful today as it was in the age of the French Enlightenment. But what has been abandoned are the older intellectual goals of political rationalism. These were the socially free individual, moral impersonality, contract, and competition. Their place has been taken in contemporary aspiration by the imperatives of personal status, security, and community.
What gives the current interest in community and psychological adjustment its frequently ominous cast is the combination of increasing social and moral insecurity with the undiminished popularity of certain political techniques of centralization and collectivism. There is widespread belief that the termination of individual insecurity and moral disquietude can come about through a sterilization of social diversity and through an increased political and economic standardization. The undoubted necessity of unity within the individual leads too often to the supposition that this may be achieved only through uniformity of the culture and institutions which lie outside the individual. And external power, especially political power, comes to reveal itself to many minds as a fortress of security against not only institutional conflicts but conflicts of belief and value that are internal to the individual. A peculiar form of political mysticism is often the result.
Four
The image of community may be seen behind certain types of political action in present Western society. It is hard to overlook the fact that the State and politics have become suffused by qualities formerly inherent only in the family or the church. In an age of real or supposed disintegration, men will abandon all truths and values that do not contain the promise of communal belonging and secure moral status. Where there is widespread conviction that community has been lost, there will be a conscious quest for community in the form of association that seems to promise the greatest moral refuge.
In one age of society, for example in the early Middle Ages, this quest may end in the corporate church, or in the extended family or village community. But in the present age, for enlarging masses of people, this same quest terminates in the political party or action group. It is the image of community contained in the promise of the absolute, communal State that seems to have the greatest evocative power. Especially has this become manifest in Europe. And, above all other forms of political association, it is the totalitarian Communist party that most successfully exploits the craving for moral certainty and communal membership. In it we find states of mind and intensities of fanaticism heretofore known only in certain types of religious cult.
Contemporary prophets of the totalitarian community seek, with all the techniques of modern science at their disposal, to transmute popular cravings for community into a millennial sense of participation in heavenly power on earth. When suffused by popular spiritual devotions, the political party becomes more than a party. It becomes a moral community of almost religious intensity, a deeply evocative symbol of collective, redemptive purpose, a passion that implicates every element of belief and behavior in the individual's existence.
The dread spectacle of totalitarianism as an organized movement in every Western country at the present time cannot be divorced from its proffer of community to individuals for whom sensations of dissolution and alienation have become intolerable. “The most obvious symptom of the spiritual disease of our civilization,” declares Robert Birley, “is the widespread feeling among men that they have lost all control of their destinies…. Hitler's answer to that frustration was one of the main secrets of his power.”8
The almost eager acceptance of the fantastic doctrines of the Nazis by millions of otherwise intelligent Germans would be inexplicable were it not for the accompanying proffer of moral community to the disenchanted and alienated German worker, peasant, and intellectual. If moral community came with political conversion, the Nazi proselyte could agree perversely with Tertullian that intellectual impossibility may even be the crowning appearance of truth.
Marxism as a mass movement is no different. If we wish to understand the appeal of Marxism we should do well to pay less attention to its purely intellectual qualities than to the social and moral values that inhere in it. To a large number of human beings Marxism offers status, belonging, membership, and a coherent moral perspective. Of what matter and relevance are the empirical and logical refutations made by a host of critics as against the spiritual properties that Marx offers to millions. Have not all the world's great religious leaders pointed to a truth that is bigger than, and elusive of, all purely rational processes of thought?
The evidence is strong that the typical convert to Communism is a person for whom the processes of ordinary existence are morally empty and spiritually insupportable. His own alienation is translated into the perceived alienation of the many. Consciously or unconsciously he is in quest of secure belief and solid membership in an associative order. Of what avail are proofs of the classroom, semantic analyses, and logical exhortations to this kind of human being? So long as he finds belief and membership in his Marxism he will no more be dissuaded by simple adjuration than would the primitive totemist.
Until we see that Communism offers today, for many people, something of the inspired mixture of community and assertive individuality offered two thousand years ago, in the cities of the Roman Empire, by the tiny but potent Christian communities, we shall be powerless to combat it. It will not be exorcised by the incantations of individualism, for, paradoxical as it may seem, in the Communist party community, the individual is constantly supported by feelings of almost millennial personal freedom. Here the brilliant words of a recent English reviewer are pertinent and illuminating:
“It is easy—only too easy—to say that these people have sacrificed their individuality and become units in an undifferentiated and soulless mass—that the whole phenomenon is merely another outbreak of what used to be called the ‘herd instinct,’ or what Dr. Erich Fromm calls ‘the flight from freedom,’ the urge to huddle into a safe, warm crowd. A truer psychology may suggest that what has happened is the exact contrary, and that for the primitive millions it has seemed rather an assertion than a denial of individuality…. From the outside, the communist may look like an ant in an anthill, but to himself he may seem to be a comrade helping to carry out a great design—what in another context would be called the Will of God; and the official deterministic philosophy will only operate to inspire a deadly assurance of ultimate success—another of the strange paradoxes that lurk in the vague hinterland of the human mind.”9
We may justly regard the world Communist movement as vicious in its acts, as profoundly evil at its core. But let us not make the fatal mistake of underestimating its nature and appeal. We shall be grotesquely unprepared to combat Communism if we persist in regarding it as the mere summation of all the lesser evils and irrationalities of modern society, and its members as undeviatingly criminal or treasonable in intent. I do not question the fact that Communism, like any other mass movement, in time attracts to itself energies and dispositions which, in other circumstances, would be directed toward the usual outlets of crime and violence. Communism has its gangsters, its men of hard and ruthless intent. But, as a mass movement, it possesses the qualities of spiritual intensity and devotion that have ever gone into organizations and actions of purest intent.
It is worth quoting our English reviewer again. “If religion is something which gives a meaning to life, which makes it worth living, then communism certainly answers to the definition; and it would be a fatal mistake to ignore its emotional appeal. Multitudes, it is clear, have experienced some thing like a revelation. The Marxian thesis has duly evolved into its antithesis: materialism has given them souls; determinism has freed their wills. For the first time they ‘belong to’ something, to a ‘cause’—good or bad as it may be, but something at any rate which transcends their narrow personal interests and opens up a world in which each has his part to play and all can ‘pull together.’”10
What Ignazio Silone has written of his own early experiences in the Communist party is illuminating here. “The Party became family, school, church, barracks; the world that lay beyond it was to be destroyed and built anew. The psychological mechanism whereby each single militant becomes progressively identified with the collective organization is the same as that used in certain religious orders and military colleges, with almost identical results. Every sacrifice was welcomed as a personal contribution to the price of collective redemption, and it should be emphasized that the links which bound us to the Party grew steadily firmer, not in spite of the dangers and sacrifices involved, but because of them. This explains the attraction exercised by communism on certain categories of young men and women, on intellectuals and on the highly sensitive and generous people who suffer most from the wastefulness of bourgeois society. Anyone who thinks he can wean the best and most serious-minded young people away from communism by enticing them into a well-warmed hall to play billiards, starts from an extremely limited and unintelligent conception of mankind.”11
The greatest appeal of the totalitarian party, Marxist or other, lies in its capacity to provide a sense of moral coherence and communal membership to those who have become, to one degree or another, victims of the sense of exclusion from the ordinary channels of belonging in society. To consider the facts of poverty and economic distress as causes of the growth of Communism is deceptive. Such facts may be involved but only when they are set in the social and moral context of insecurity and alienation. To say that the well-fed worker will never succumb to the lure of Communism is as absurd as to say that the well-fed intellectual will never succumb. The presence or absence of three meals a day, or even the simple possession of a job, is not the decisive factor. What is decisive is the frame of reference. If, for one reason or another, the individual's immediate society comes to seem remote, purposeless, and hostile, if a people come to sense that, together, they are victims of discrimination and exclusion, not all the food and jobs in the world will prevent them from looking for the kind of surcease that comes with membership in a social and moral order seemingly directed toward their very souls.
Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as a kind of secular pattern of redemption, designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated, frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mystery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; Marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of the Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalists hell; Trotsky the devil; and the Communist commonwealth kingdom come.
Five
So, too, in the changing moral character and growing spiritual influence of mass war can we observe the contemporary image of community. It is hard not to conclude that modern populations depend increasingly on the symbolism of war for relief from civil conflicts and frustrations. War strikes instantly at the breast of modern man. It soothes even where it hurts.
The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the twentieth century. In war, innumerable activities that normally seem onerous or empty of significance take on new and vital meaning. Function and meaning tend to become dramatically fused in time of war.
One of the most extraordinary features of the gigantic atomic bomb project during the Second World War was the spectacle of tens of thousands of workers and scientists working for a period of years on a product the nature of which few of them knew or were permitted to discover. Life was almost wholly circumscribed by security regulations, formal organizational patterns, technical instructions, and complicated machines, all pointing toward a goal that was undiscoverable by the individual worker or lesser scientist. Even to look too closely into the identity of fellow workers was not encouraged. The ordinary channels of personal and professional organization were restricted, and the whole endeavor was insulated from popular contact as perfectly as security officers could contrive. Secrecy, individual separation from knowledge of actual function and purpose—these have probably never reached the heights elsewhere that they reached in this extraordinary war project.
What gave the Manhattan Project the possibility of success, not to mention the possibility of existing at all, with its many restrictions upon normal communication, with all its impersonality and enforced anonymity, was the deep moral compulsion of war, of participation in a spiritual crusade against the enemy. When the end of the war came, many of the demands of secrecy and depersonalization became nearly intolerable, leading in turn to disaffection and, if we may believe the testimony of some well-informed scientists, to a serious reduction in efficiency and achievement.
Such an organization is extreme, but it may with fairness be regarded as a kind of dramatic intensification of the position in which more and more industrial and professional people find themselves in the vast, impersonal spaces of modern industrial society. The anonymity and emptiness of so many factory and office existences in peace time become doubly oppressive after they have been temporarily relieved by the experience of a mass moral crusade in which the most routine duties are suffused by the sense of participation in a creative cause.
One of the most impressive aspects of contemporary war is the intoxicating atmosphere of spiritual unity that arises out of the common consciousness of participating in a moral crusade. War is no longer simply an affair of military establishments and matériel and soldiers. It is now something more nearly akin to the Crusades of medieval Europe, but in the name of the nation rather than of the Church.
The clear tendency of modern wars is to become ever more closely identified with broad, popular, moral aspirations: freedom, self-determination of peoples, democracy, rights, and justice. Because war, in the twentieth century, has become rooted to such an extent in the aspirations of peoples and in broad moral convictions, its intensity and range have vastly increased. When the goals and values of a war are popular, both in the sense of mass participation and spiritual devotion, the historic, institutional limits of war tend to recede further and further into the void. The enemy becomes not only a ready scapegoat for all ordinary dislikes and frustrations; he becomes the symbol of total evil against which the forces of good may mobilize themselves into a militant community.
This community-making property of war cannot be separated from certain tangible benefits of a social and economic nature. It is a commonplace that nationalism is nourished by the emotions of organized war. We are less likely to notice that many of the historic goals of secular humanitarianism are similarly nourished. More than one historian has observed that it is in time of war that many of the reforms, first advocated by socialists, have been accepted by capitalist governments and made parts of the structures of their societies. Equalization of wealth, progressive taxation, nationalization of industries, the raising of wages and improvements in working conditions, worker-management councils, housing ventures, death taxes, unemployment insurance plans, pension systems, and the enfranchisement of formerly voteless elements of the population have all been, in one country or another, achieved or advanced under the impress of war. The tremendous urge toward unity and the resolution of group differences, which is a part of modern war, carries with it certain leveling and humanitarian measures not to be omitted from the full history of modern warfare. For all the horrors of contemporary war and the genuine abhorrence of war which still exists among populations, its incidental benefits in the realm of social reform cannot be overlooked.
It is the moral element of war, as William James saw so clearly, that makes for the curious dualism in the response of the average person to war. We are all repelled by the horrors of the battlefield; we chafe under the economic sacrifices demanded and the interference with freedom of movement. But there is, undeniably, a spiritual fascination exerted by war in the present century that increasingly rises above the distasteful moments and sacrifices.
Society attains its maximum sense of organization and community and its most exalted sense of moral purpose during the period of war. Since it is always, now, identified with a set of essentially nonmilitary values—democracy, freedom, hatred of fascism, et cetera—there is an inevitable tendency for the nature of war itself to become more spiritualized and to seem more moral. Something of the millennial excitement and moral intoxication that the civil war in Spain produced in the minds of intellectuals in the nineteen-thirties is, when the purposes are more vivid and widespread and the personal stakes greater, communicated to a whole population in time of great war.
With the outbreak of war there is a termination of many of the factionalisms and sectarian animosities which ordinarily reflect the moral perplexities of modern politics. In their place comes what the English philosopher L. P. Jacks has so aptly called “the spiritual peace that war brings.” To remark cynically that such tranquillity is artificial, that it rests upon an unmoral basis, misses the more important point that tranquillity is a foremost goal of modern man and that he is prone to accept it as he finds it. We should be blind indeed if we did not recognize in the war state, in the war economy, and in war morality qualities that stand in the most attractive contrast to the instability and the sense of meaninglessness of modern industrial and political life.
Millions of men and women learned during the recent world war something of the sharp contrast that exists between a society founded seemingly upon economic caprice, political impersonality, and general moral indifference, and a society that suddenly becomes infused with the moral intensity of a crusade and the spirituality of devotion to common ends. The effect of the war was to endow with meaning and excitement activities that ordinarily seemed without meaning or even knowable function. The pressure of mass numbers was lightened, the impersonality of existence was transfigured and, even if a large amount of personal anonymity remained, it was, in a curious and paradoxical way, an identified anonymity.
The centralization and bureaucratic regimentation which have always been native to organized warfare are, in the twentieth century, extended to widening areas of social and cultural life. War symbolism and the practical techniques of war administration have come to penetrate more and more of the minor areas of social function and allegiance. More and more of the incentives of science, education, and industry are made to rest upon contributions to the war effort. Increasingly, humanitarians find themselves defending cherished goals of equality and justice in terms of the strengthening influence these have to the nation preparing for war.
The line between civil and military administration becomes thinner and thinner. It is an easy matter to pass by imperceptible degrees from the primacy of real needs for the war effort to the primacy and dominance of pretended needs for war. Moreover, the traditional austerity, discipline, and unity of military command, together with all its reputed efficiencies, comes to have increasing appeal to large elements of the population. Mere tactical excellences of military officers become converted, through the alchemy of popular adulation, into imagined moral and political wisdom without limit. The military man succeeds in prestige the scholar, the scientist, the businessman, and the clergyman. Inevitably there is a tendency to magnify the importance of civil and moral pursuits by clothing them in military garments, by replacing normal hierarchies of leadership and prestige with the hierarchy of military rank and command. The discipline of war becomes community itself.
So too in the direct experience of war and military organization many millions of men learned even more certainly during the two world wars the contrast between life charged with moral meaning and life that is morally empty. Military society is closely associative. The pressure of numbers may seem at first unbearable to the more sensitive individuals, but in an astonishingly short time such pressure becomes not only tolerable but desirable. Equally unbearable at first may seem the disconcertingly clear and emphatic regulations and customs of the military, but here too, in a manner surprising to many, early misgivings are succeeded by a certain contentment in being in the presence of moral regulations whose very clarity and preciseness of coverage makes more pleasant the “free” areas not covered by the regulations and customs.
One of the most notable capacities of military life is to inspire in the individual soldier a feeling for the warmth of comradeship. Something of that spirit which, during an earlier age of European history, unfolded itself in a great profusion of fellowships and associations, reaching all spheres of social life, permeates the soldier's consciousness. There is an almost medieval hierarchy in military society with the individual's identity passing through the concentric rings of platoon, company, regiment, up to the field army itself. His identification with each of these units, especially the smaller ones, can become intense and morally exhilarating. Add to the institutionalized relationships the organic growing together of individuals who have shared common experiences, rewards, and dangers, who, by the very nature of army life, are thrown together constantly in the performance of duties that have perceptible meaning and function, and the sense of communal belonging becomes perhaps the most cherished of all the soldier's values.
The loss of the sense of belonging, whether in the civilian intellectual whose moral participation has been no less intense for its vicariousness, or in the common soldier for whom it has been immediate and direct, leads not infrequently to deeply disquieting states of nostalgia and vague longing. These may transform themselves into innumerable emotions ranging from simple discontent to bitter alienation. It is not merely that an orderly, predictable world of values has been replaced by the unpredictabilities and moral voids of civil life. Fundamentally it is the loss of a sense of belonging, of a close identification with other human beings.12
The tragedy of contemporary war does not lie in its progressive destructive efficiency, its total mobilization of human beings and ideas, or even in its weakening or brutalization of cultural standards. It lies rather in the fact that the stifling regimentation and bureaucratic centralization of military organization is becoming more and more the model of associative and leadership relationships in time of peace and in nonmilitary organizations. It lies in the fact that military bureaucracy and regimentation tend increasingly to become invested with the attributes of moral community—a sense of identification, of security, and of membership. The result is to endow war with moral satisfactions ordinarily denied to the individual. However deeply man may continue to hate the devastation and killing and mutilation of war, he cannot, being human, forget altogether the superior sense of status, the achievement of humanitarian goals, and, above all, the warming sense of community that comes with war.
Six
In the burning words of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky has given us insight into the appeal of the absolute community.
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men will agree at once to worship it.
For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but find something that all will believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be together in it. This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.”
In the nineteenth century, when these words were written, they could have been regarded by most Western intellectuals only with incredulity or indifference. After all, were not men everywhere progressively escaping this tribalistic togetherness? Was not this escape from community the very essence of modern civilization? But in the present age, few will doubt that the words of the Grand Inquisitor, baleful as they are, have a relevance that is disquieting and ominous.