Words and Behavior
Words
form the thread on which we string our experiences. Without them we should live
spasmodically and intermittently. Hatred itself is not so strong that animals
will not forget it, if distracted, even in the presence of the enemy. Watch a
pair of cats, crouching on the brink of a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from
far down in the throat of each come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of
defiance; as though animated by a life of their own, the tails twitch and
tremble. With aimed intensity of loathing! Another moment and surely there must
be an explosion. But no; all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns away,
hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with the same fixed and
focused attention as it had given a moment before to its enemy, begins to make
a lingual toilet. Animal love is as much at the mercy of distractions as animal
hatred. The dumb creation lives a life made up of discreet and mutually
irrelevant episodes. Such as it is, the consistency of human characters is due
to the words upon which all human experiences are strung. We are purposeful
because we can describe our feelings in rememberable words, can justify and
rationalize our desires in terms of some kind of argument. Faced by an enemy we
do not allow an itch to distract us from our emotions; the mere word "enemy"
is enough to keep us reminded of our hatred, to convince us that we do well to
be angry. Similarly the word "love" bridges for us those chasms of
momentary indifference and boredom which gape from time to time between even
the most ardent lovers. Feeling and desire provide us with our motive power;
words give continuity to what we do and to a considerable extent determine our
direction. Inappropriate and badly chosen words vitiate thought and lead to
wrong or foolish conduct. Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater
number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For,
consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or
fail to understand - because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience,
to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the
best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do. Our
egotisms are incessantly fighting to preserve themselves, not only from
external enemies, but also from the assaults of the other and better self with
which they are so uncomfortably associated. Ignorance is egotism's most
effective defense against that Dr. Jekyll in us who desires perfection;
stupidity, its subtlest stratagem. If, as so often happens, we choose to give
continuity to our experience by means of words which falsify the facts, this is
because the falsification is somehow to our advantage as egotists.
Consider,
for example, the case of war. War is enormously discreditable to those who order
it to be waged and even to those who merely tolerate its existence.
Furthermore, to developed sensibilities the facts of war are revolting and
horrifying. To falsify these facts, and by so doing to make war seem less evil
than it really is, and our own responsibility in tolerating war less heavy, is
doubly to our advantage. By suppressing and distorting the truth, we protect
our sensibilities and preserve our self-esteem. Now, language is, among other
things, a device which men use for suppressing and distorting the truth.
Finding the reality of war too unpleasant to contemplate, we create a verbal
alternative to that reality, parallel with it, but in quality quite different
from it. That which we contemplate thenceforward is not that to which we react emotionally
and upon which we pass our moral judgments, is not war as it is in fact, but
the fiction of war as it exists in our pleasantly falsifying verbiage. Our
stupidity in using inappropriate language turns out, on analysis, to be the
most refined cunning.
The
most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are
individual human beings, and that these individual human beings are condemned
by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels
not their own, to inflict upon the innocent and, innocent themselves of any
crime against their enemies, to suffer cruelties of every kind.
The
language of strategy and politics is designed, so far as it is possible, to
conceal this fact, to make it appear as though wars were not fought by
individuals drilled to murder one another in cold blood and without
provocation, but either by impersonal and therefore wholly non-moral and
impassible forces, or else by personified abstractions.
Here
are a few examples of the first kind of falsification. In place of
"cavalrymen" or "foot-soldiers" military writers like to
speak of "sabres" and "rules." Here is a sentence from a
description of the Battle of Marengo: "According to Victor's report, the
French retreat was orderly; it is certain, at any rate, that the regiments held
together, for the six thousand Austrian sabres found no opportunity to charge
home." The battle is between sabres in line and muskets in Echelon - a
mere clash of ironmongery.
On
other occasions there is no question of anything so vulgarly material as
ironmongery. The battles are between Platonic ideas, between the abstractions
of physics and mathematics. Forces interact; weights are flung into scales;
masses are set in motion. Or else it is all a matter of geometry. Lines swing
and sweep; are protracted or curved; pivot on a fixed point.
Alternatively
the combatants are personal, in the sense that they are personifications. There
is "the enemy," in the singular, making "his" plans,
striking "his" blows. The attribution of personal characteristics to
collectivities, to geographical expressions, to institutions, is a source, as
we shall see, of endless confusions in political thought, of innumerable
political mistakes and crimes. Personification in politics is an error which we
make because it is to our advantage as egotists to be able to feel violently
proud of our country and of ourselves as belonging to it, and to believe that
all the misfortunes due to our own mistakes are really the work of the
Foreigner. It is easier to feel violently toward a person than toward an
abstraction; hence our habit of making political personifications. In some
cases military personifications are merely special instances of political
personifications. A particular collectivity, the army or the warring nation, is
given the name and, along with the name, the attributes of a single person, in
order that we may be able to love or hate it more intensely than we could do if
we thought of it as what it really is: a number of diverse individuals. In
other cases personification is used for the purpose of concealing the
fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war. What is absurd and monstrous
about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder
one another in cold blood. By personifying opposing armies or countries, we are
able to think of war as a conflict between individuals. The same result is
obtained by writing of war as though it were carried on exclusively by the
generals in command and not by the private soldiers in their armies.
("Rennenkampf had pressed back von Schubert.") The implication in
both cases is that war is indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar
room. Whereas in reality it is profoundly different. A scrap between two
individuals is forgivable; mass murder, deliberately organized, is a monstrous
iniquity. We still choose to use war as an instrument of policy; and to
comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would therefore be
inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some effort to
get rid of the abominable thing. Accordingly, when we talk about war, we use a
language which conceals or embellishes its reality. Ignoring the facts, so far
as we possibly can, we imply that battles are not fought by soldiers, but by
things, principles, allegories, personified collectivities, or (at the most
human) by opposing commanders, pitched against one another in single combat.
For the same reason, when we have to describe the processes and the results of
war, we employ a rich variety of euphemisms. Even the most violently patriotic
and militaristic are reluctant to call a spade by its own name. To conceal their
intentions even from themselves, they make use of picturesque metaphors. We
find them, for example, clamoring for war planes numerous and powerful enough
to go and "destroy the hornets in their nests" - in other words, to
go and throw thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of
neighboring countries before they have time to come and do the same to us. And
how reassuring is the language of historians and strategists! They write
admiringly of those military geniuses who know "when to strike at the
enemy's line" (a single combatant deranges the geometrical constructions
of a personification); when to "turn his flank"; when to
"execute an enveloping movement." As though they were engineers
discussing the strength of materials and the distribution of stresses, they
talk of abstract entities called "man power" and "fire power."
They sum up the long-drawn sufferings and atrocities of trench warfare in the
phrase, "a war of attrition"; the massacre and mangling of human
beings is assimilated to the grinding of a lens.
A
dangerously abstract word, which figures in all discussions about war, is
"force." Those who believe in organizing collective security by means
of military pacts against a possible aggressor are particularly fond of this
word. "You cannot," they say, "have international justice unless
you are prepared to impose it by force." "Peace-loving countries must
unite to use force against aggressive dictatorships." "Democratic
institutions must be protected, if need be, by force." And so on.
Now,
the word "force," when used in reference to human relations, has no
single, definite meaning. There is the "force" used by parents when,
without resort to any kind of physical violence, they compel their children to
act or refrain from acting in some particular way. There is the
"force" used by attendants in an asylum when they try to prevent a
maniac from hurting himself or others. There is the "force" used by
the police when they control a crowd, and that other "force" which
they used in a baton charge. And finally there is the "force" used in
war. This, of course, varies with the technological devices at the disposal of
the belligerents, with the policies they are pursuing, and with the particular
circumstances of the war in question. But in general it may be said that, in
war, "force" connotes violence and fraud used to the limit of the
combatants' capacity.
Variations
in quantity, if sufficiently great, produce variations in quality. The
"force" that is war, particularly modern war, is very different from
the "force" that is police action, and the use of the same abstract
word to describe the two dissimilar processes is profoundly misleading. (Still
more misleading, of course, is the explicit assimilation of a war, waged by
allied League-of-Nations powers against an aggressor, to police action against
a criminal. The first is the use of violence and fraud without limit against
innocent and guilty alike; the second is the use of strictly limited violence
and a minimum of fraud exclusively against the guilty.)
Reality
is a succession of concrete and particular situations. When we think about such
situations we should use the particular and concrete words which apply to them.
If we use abstract words which apply equally well (and equally badly) to other,
quite dissimilar situations, it is certain that we shall think incorrectly.
Let
us take the sentences quoted above and translate the abstract word
"force" into language that will render (however inadequately) the
concrete and particular realities of contemporary warfare.
"You
cannot have international justice, unless you are prepared to impose it by
force." Translated, this becomes: "You cannot have international
justice unless you are prepared, with a view to imposing a just settlement, to
drop thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of foreign
cities and to have thermite, high explosives and vesicants dropped in return
upon the inhabitants of your cities." At the end of this proceeding,
justice is to be imposed by the victorious party - that is, if there is a
victorious party. It should be remarked that justice was to have been imposed
by the victorious party at the end of the last war. But, unfortunately, after
four years of fighting, the temper of the victors was such that they were quite
incapable of making a just settlement. The Allies are reaping in Nazi Germany
what they sowed at Versailles. The victors of the next war will have undergone
intensive bombardments with thermite, high explosives and vesicants. Will their
temper be better than that of the Allies in 1918? Will they be in a fitter
state to make a just settlement? The answer, quite obviously, is: No. It is
psychologically all but impossible that justice should be secured by the
methods of contemporary warfare.
The
next two sentences may be taken together. "Peace-loving countries must
unite to use force against aggressive dictatorships. Democratic institutions
must be protected, if need be, by force." Let us translate.
"Peace-loving countries must unite to throw thermite, high explosives and
vesicants on the inhabitants of countries ruled by aggressive dictators. They
must do this, and of course abide the consequences, in order to preserve peace
and democratic institutions." Two questions immediately propound
themselves. First, is it likely that peace can be secured by a process
calculated to reduce the orderly life of our complicated societies to chaos?
And, second, is it likely that democratic institutions will flourish in a state
of chaos? Again, the answers are pretty clearly in the negative.
By
using the abstract word "force," instead of terms which at least
attempt to describe the realities of war as it is today, the preachers of
collective security through military collaboration disguise from themselves and
from others, not only the contemporary facts, but also the probable
consequences of their favorite policy. The attempt to secure justice, peace and
democracy by "force" seems reasonable enough until we realize, first,
that this noncommittal word stands, in the circumstances of our age, for
activities which can hardly fail to result in social chaos; and second, that the
consequences of social chaos are injustice, chronic warfare and tyranny. The
moment we think in concrete and particular terms of the concrete and particular
process called "modern war," we see that a policy which worked (or at
least didn't result in complete disaster) in the past has no prospect whatever
of working in the immediate future. The attempt to secure justice, peace and
democracy by means of a "force," which means, at this particular
moment of history, thermite, high explosives and vesicants, is about as reasonable
as the attempt to put out a fire with a colorless liquid that happens to be,
not water, but petrol.
What
applies to the "force" that is war applies in large measure to the
"force" that is revolution. It seems inherently very unlikely that
social justice and social peace can be secured by thermite, high explosives and
vesicants. At first, it may be, the parties in a civil war would hesitate to
use such instruments on their fellow-countrymen. But there can be little doubt
that, if the conflict were prolonged (as it probably would be between the
evenly balanced Right and Left of a highly industrialized society), the
combatants would end by losing their scruples.
The
alternatives confronting us seem to be plain enough. Either we invent and
conscientiously employ a new technique for making revolutions and settling
international disputes; or else we cling to the old technique and, using
"force" (that is to say, thermite, high explosives and vesicants),
destroy ourselves. Those who, for whatever motive, disguise the nature of the
second alternative under inappropriate language, render the world a grave
disservice. They lead us into one of the temptations we find it hardest to
resist - the temptation to run away from reality, to pretend that facts are not
what they are. Like Shelley (but without Shelley's acute awareness of what he
was doing) we are perpetually weaving
A shroud of talk to hide us from the
sun
Of this familiar life.
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of
abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not
wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have
the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing
which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most
monstrous crimes:
The poor wretch who has learned his
only prayers
From curses, who knows scarcely
words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly
Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and
defeats,
And all our dainty terms for
fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er
our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds
to which
We join no meaning and attach no
form!
As if the soldier died without a
wound:
As if the fibers of this godlike
frame
Were gored without a pang: as if the
wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody
deeds,
Passed off to Heaven translated and
not killed;
As though he had no wife to pine for
him,
No God to judge him.
The
language we use about war is inappropriate, and its inappropriateness is
designed to conceal a reality so odious that we do not wish to know it. The
language we use about politics is also inappropriate; but here our mistake has
a different purpose. Our principal aim in this case is to arouse and, having
aroused, to rationalize and justify such intrinsically agreeable sentiments as
pride and hatred, self-esteem and contempt for others. To achieve this end we
speak about the facts of politics in words which more or less completely misrepresent
them.
The
concrete realities of politics are individual human beings, living together in
national groups. Politicians - and to some extent we are all politicians -
substitute abstractions for these concrete realities, and having done this,
proceed to invest each abstraction with an appearance of concreteness by
personifying it. For example, the concrete reality of which "Britain"
is the abstraction consists of some forty-odd millions of diverse individuals
living on an island off the west coast of Europe. The personification of this
abstraction appears, in classical fancy-dress and holding a very large toasting
fork, on the backside of our copper coinage; appears in verbal form, every time
we talk about international politics. "Britain," the abstraction from
forty millions of Britons, is endowed with thoughts, sensibilities and
emotions, even with a sex - for, in spite of John Bull, the country is always a
female.
Now,
it is of course possible that "Britain" is more than a mere name - is
an entity that possesses some kind of reality distinct from that of the
individuals constituting the group to which the name is applied. But this
entity, if it exists, is certainly not a young lady with a toasting fork; nor
is it possible to believe (though some eminent philosophers have preached the
doctrine) that it should possess anything in the nature of a personal will. One
must agree with T. H. Green that "there can be nothing in a nation,
however exalted its mission, or in a society however perfectly organized, which
is not in the persons composing the nation or the society. . . We cannot
suppose a national spirit and will to exist except as the spirit and will of
individuals." But the moment we start resolutely thinking about our world
in terms of individual persons we find ourselves at the same time thinking in
terms of universality. "The great rational religions," writes
Professor Whitehead, "are the outcome of the emergence of a religious
consciousness that is universal, as distinguished from tribal, or even social.
Because it is universal, it introduces the note of solitariness." (And he
might have added that, because it is solitary, it introduces the note of
universality.) "The reason of this connection between universality and
solitude is that universality is a disconnection from immediate
surroundings." And conversely the disconnection from immediate
surroundings, particularly such social surrounding as the tribe or nation, the
insistence on the person as the fundamental reality, leads to the conception of
an all-embracing unity.
A
nation, then, may be more than a mere abstraction, may possess some kind of
real existence apart from its constituent members. But there is no reason to
suppose that it is a person; indeed, there is every reason to suppose that it isn't.
Those who speak as though it were a person (and some go further than this and
speak as though it were a personal god) do so, because it is to their interest
as egotists to make precisely this mistake.
In
the case of the ruling class these interests are in part material. The
personification of the nation as a sacred being, different from and superior to
its constituent members, is merely (I quote the words of a great French jurist,
Léon
Duguit) "a way of imposing authority by making people believe it is an
authority de jure and not merely de facto." By habitually
talking of the nation as though it were a person with thoughts, feelings and a
will of its own, the rulers of a country legitimate their own powers.
Personification leads easily to deification; and where the nation is deified,
its government ceases to be a mere convenience, like drains or a telephone
system, and, partaking in the sacredness of the entity it represents, claims to
give orders by divine right and demands the unquestioning obedience due to a
god. Rulers seldom find it hard to recognize their friends. Hegel, the man who
elaborated an inappropriate figure of speech into a complete philosophy of
politics, was a favorite of the Prussian government. "Es ist," he
had written, "es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, das der Staat
ist." The decoration bestowed on him by Frederick William III was
richly deserved.
Unlike
their rulers, the ruled have no material interest in using inappropriate
language about states and nations. For them, the reward of being mistaken is
psychological. The personified and deified nation becomes, in the minds of the
individuals composing it, a kind of enlargement of themselves. The superhuman
qualities which belong to the young lady with the toasting fork, the young lady
with plaits and a brass soutien-gorge, the young lady in a Phrygian
bonnet, are claimed by individual Englishmen, Germans and Frenchmen as being,
at least in part, their own. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. But
there would be no need to die, no need of war, if it had not been even sweeter
to boast and swagger for one's country, to hate, despise, swindle and bully for
it. Loyalty to the personified nation, or to the personified class or party,
justifies the loyal in indulging all those passions which good manners and the
moral code do not allow them to display in their relations with their
neighbors. The personified entity is a being, not only great and noble, but
also insanely proud, vain and touchy; fiercely rapacious; a braggart; bound by
no considerations of right and wrong. (Hegel condemned as hopelessly shallow
all those who dared to apply ethical standards to the activities of nations. To
condone and applaud every iniquity committed in the name of the State was to
him a sign of philosophical profundity.) Identifying themselves with this god,
individuals find relief from the constraints of ordinary social decency, feel
themselves justified in giving rein, within duly prescribed limits, to their
criminal proclivities. As a loyal nationalist or party-man, one can enjoy the
luxury of behaving badly with a good conscience.
The
evil passions are further justified by another linguistic error - the error of
speaking about certain categories of persons as though they were mere embodied
abstractions. Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as
men and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought of as
representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as they have any
personality at all, it is the personality we mistakenly attribute to their
class - a personality that is, by definition, intrinsically evil. We know that
the harming or killing of men and women is wrong, and we are reluctant
consciously to do what we know to be wrong. But when particular men and women
are thought of merely as representatives of a class, which has previously been
defined as evil and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to
hurt or murder disappears. Brown, Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of
as Brown, Jones and Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids, niggers,
barbarians, Huns, communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals - whichever the
case may be. When they have been called such names and assimilated to the
accursed class to which the names apply, Brown, Jones and Robinson cease to be
conceived as what they really are - human persons - and become for the users of
this fatally inappropriate language mere vermin or, worse, demons whom it is
right and proper to destroy as thoroughly and as painfully as possible.
Wherever persons are present, questions of morality arise. Rulers of nations
and leaders of parties find morality embarrassing. That is why they take such
pains to depersonalize their opponents. All propaganda directed against an
opposing group has but one aim: to substitute diabolical abstractions for
concrete persons. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people
forget that certain other sets of people are human. By robbing them of their
personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation. Mere symbols
can have no rights - particularly when that of which they are symbolical is, by
definition, evil.
Politics
can become moral only on one condition: that its problems shall be spoken of
and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete reality; that is to say, of
persons. To depersonify human beings and to personify abstractions are
complementary errors which lead, by an inexorable logic, to war between nations
and to idolatrous worship of the State, with consequent governmental
oppression. All current political thought is a mixture, in varying proportions,
between thought in terms of concrete realities and thought in terms of
depersonified symbols and personified abstractions. In the democratic countries
the problems of internal politics are thought about mainly in terms of concrete
reality; those of external politics, mainly in terms of abstractions and
symbols. In dictatorial countries the proportion of concrete to abstract and
symbolic thought is lower than in democratic countries. Dictators talk little
of persons, much of personified abstractions, such as the Nation, the State,
the Party, and much of depersonified symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies,
Capitalists. The stupidity of politicians who talk about a world of persons as
though it were not a world of persons is due in the main to self-interest. In a
fictitious world of symbols and personified abstractions, rulers find that they
can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can gratify instincts which
the conventions of good manners and the imperatives of morality demand that
they should repress. To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It
is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist
considerable temptations.
(From The Olive Tree)
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