The causes for which wars are fought, or which are asserted to be the
causes, make one of the important psychological problems of war.
Sometimes these causes are elusive, sometimes they may give occasion
for cynicism and a pessimistic view of national morals; again we see
self-deception, again ideals seeking for light, peoples trying to find
something to live for or to die for. We see in the recent great war as
in other wars, a great variety of causes for which men are said to be
fighting. Some would say that the war was entirely a war of
principles; some take a purely political point of view and say that
principles are not involved at all, and others that nothing was
displayed at all of motives except primitive passions which are
equally devoid of moral issues or any principles.
It would be interesting from the psychological point of view to make,
if possible, a complete collection and classification of the causes
that have been brought forward as the fundamental things fought for in
the late war. Many widely different and divergent views are held. The
forms in which the issues of the war have been stated are almost
innumerable. New definitions and new statements of old conventional
ideas appear continuously. Every writer seems to see the war from a
different point of view from all others. Eventually, we may suppose,
all this will be clear, since these "causes" of the war will be one of
the great themes of future philosophical history. At present we can
only formulate such a view as may be suggestive with reference to
general interpretations of the place of principles and causes in war.
Let us examine a few of the opinions about the issues fought for in
the recent war. MacFall (56) says that the whole strategy of the
civilized world is bent upon creating permanent peace.
Many speak of
the war as a war to overcome war; we are told that one of the most
conscious motives of the soldiers in the field has been to make the
great war the last war the world should ever see.
Something of the
same idea is involved in the view each nation has that it was
attacked, and that the purpose of the war was to defeat and punish
aggressors. Apparently every nation and every army engaged in the war
has had the feeling that it was fighting in the interests of world
peace.
The German explanations of the war and of its issues have been very
numerous and widely varied. The German has had his own interpretation
of the "white man's burden," Tower (57) calls attention to the German
hybrid word "Sahibthum," expressing the mission of a people. Each
nation has its essence, which becomes a deep impulse.
The German's
impulse is translatable in the words "Be organized." The German has
been eager to organize the world. He-believed in all seriousness that
he was fighting the fight of order against chaos. It was the fight of
the spirit against that which is dead and inefficient.
The German
believed that the systematic exploitation of the world was his
peculiar mission. Ostwald is the great apostle of this view. He said
that the war was a battle of the higher life against the lower
instincts. Germany represents European civilization. The German
emperor said that Germany should do for Europe what Prussia had done
for Germany--organize it. In the German philosophy of life this
principle of order had become a serious principle. An inefficient and
disorderly world had need of Germany. Everywhere there was waste and
stupidity, and a want of reason in the world. System was to be the
cure. The fundamental fault in all this disorder the German mind
recognized as an excessive individualism. Individual instinct and the
social order were in eternal conflict, as Dietzel expressed the issue,
and Germany stood for the social order, for reason, since reason is
precisely the denial of the instincts and the desires of the
individual in the interest of a foreseen result.
Shortly after the beginning of the war, we remember, a manifesto
appeared signed by three thousand German university professors and
other teachers, saying that they, the signers, firmly believed that
the salvation of the whole of European civilization depended upon the
victory of German militarism. Hintze (49) said that Germany was
fighting for the freedom of everybody, meaning presumably according to
the German principle that freedom consists in voluntarily submitting
to order. This freedom is also in Hintze's view a principle of freedom
and equal rights for all nations, in so far as these nations have
reached the necessary stage of civilization. The mission of the coming
central management of mankind
(_Menschheitzentralverwaltung_) implied in the most ideal theory of Germany's mission is the true German
burden. Haeckel says that the work of the German people to assure and
develop civilization gives Germany the right to occupy the Balkans,
Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia, and to exclude from those
countries the races that occupy them. Schellendorf says that Germany
must not forget her civilizing task, which is to become the nucleus of
a future empire of the west. Koenig says that the spiritual life of
Europe is at stake, Germany's fight is the fight of civilization
against barbarism--against Russian barbarism he means.
This ought to
be the cause of all Western Europe, but England and France have
betrayed the western civilization into the hands of the East. This
belief gave to Germany's cause a deep impulsion (12).
Another way in which Germany's cause was frequently stated was that
Germany was a pure, virile and young race which was fighting the
older civilizations of the world. Vigor was assured of victory in any
case, but young life had a duty to perform--that of clearing the way
for new growth. This has found numerous forms of expression among
German writers, some of them highly dramatic and exaggerated; as, for
example, that the human race is divided into two species or kinds, the
male and the female, assuming that the German is the male among the
national spirits.
With these views of the nature of the German ideal or cause there have
gone, of course, interpretations of the conscious motives and
principles of other nations. In general other nations had no
principle. German writers have tended to believe that both England and
America were hypocritical and that their pretended democratic cause
was at heart only party and political aspiration. These nations, they
said, claimed to desire the world to enjoy the rights of democracy,
but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that
democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the
purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid
interests, that they are capable of fighting only for advantage and
material gain.
Many of these German views of the war imply a principle that runs
through many fields of German thought--that values are something to be
determined objectively. It is a scientific principle.
Its conclusions
rest upon proof, rather than upon subjective principles of valuation.
There is another argument which is in part based upon an interpretation of scientific principles, but is in part also a
fatalistic doctrine--confidence in the issues of battle as a means of
testing the right and the validity of culture. The right will prevail,
on this theory, because the right is the stronger or because in some
sense strength _is_ the right, and because the method of selection of
the best by struggle is a basic principle, and may be applied to
everything that is living or is a product of life.
If the German interpretation of the German cause has been dominated by
an ideal of objective proof, we hear on the other side much about
subjective rights and subjective evaluations--the right, for example,
of every people to determine its own life, to have its own culture, to
decide upon its own nationality. The Allies have believed that they
were fighting to establish this principle throughout the world, and
that this principle is diametrically opposed to the German principle.
The thought of centralization, of a hierarchy of nations and the like,
is wholly foreign to this democratic principle. Bergson (17) finds in
the idea of industry the cause of the war and the principle of
opposition in it. The Allies, he says, have been fighting against
materialism with the forces of the spirit. Germany's forces are
material. A mechanism is fighting against a self-renewing spirit. The
ideal of force is met by the force of the ideal.
Boutroux (13) says that France, in the war, has had before her eyes
the idea of humanity; France was fighting for the recognition of the
rights of personality--rights of each nation to its own existence.
France is a champion of freedom; she wants all the legitimate
aspirations of peoples to be realized. Germanism, with its ideal of
force, is contrasted with the ideal of Greek and Christian culture and
philosophy. A cult of justice and modesty is contrasted with the cult
of power; in the former, sentiment and feeling have a place as
criteria of values; in the latter the appeal is to science and to
reason.
Hobhouse (34) says that the war is a conflict of the spirit of the
West against the spirit of the East (precisely the same as the German
view, we see, but with a very different identification of the
champions). Germany has never felt the spirit of the West. The war is
for something far deeper than national freedom; it is a war to justify
the primary rules of right. Burnet (18) thinks that the great conflict
was a conflict between Kultur as nationalistic, and humanism as
something international--that Germany, in recent years, had abandoned
an ideal of culture for that of specialization in the service of the
State. England's answer to the call was not to the specific need and
appeal of Belgium, but because England felt that there was something
in Germany incompatible with Western civilization.
Le Bon (42) says that we must always remember that the Teuton is the
irreconcilable enemy of the civilization of the French and of all it
stands for, and that he must always be kept at a distance. Durkheim's
view is that Germany's ambition and energy and will antagonize the
freedom of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world felt this
and the war was the consequence. Dillon (55) says that the future for
which Germany has been striving is a future incompatible with those
ideals which our race cherishes and reveres, and that we must make a
definite choice between our philosophy and religion and our code on
one side and those of the German on the other.
Drawbridge (19) says
that the war has been a conflict between the ideals of gentleness and
tact, on one side, and of brutality and ruthlessness on the other. It
is the Christian spirit against the Nietzschean.
Again we have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy
against democracy, of mediævalism against modern life, of progress
against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the
Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more
personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was
fighting solely to retain mastery of her own genius, in order to draw
from it noble joys and just profits.
The American point of view has been expressed in several forms by the
President of the United States. For example, he has said that we are
one of the champions of the rights of mankind. The world must be made
safe for democracy. And again, that America is fighting for no selfish
purpose, but for the liberation of peoples everywhere from the
aggression of autocratic powers. This view that the war was remedial,
that it was in the interest of progress, to prevent that which is
belated in civilization from gaining the upper hand, and that it is on
the part of America a war of participation and aid in a cause which
though supremely good might otherwise be lost, is the prevailing idea.
That this spirit of the championship of causes and of justice to other
nations is a stronger motive in the Anglo-Saxon peoples than in others
appears to be an opinion that history on the whole can confirm.
It is relatively easy to obtain the opinion of philosophers about the
"causes" represented in the war; it would be of interest also to know
what the millions of men in the field think. Data are not altogether
wanting, but there appear to be no general studies. That many men, in
more than one army, have no clear knowledge of any cause for which
they have fought, except as these causes are nationalistic is certain.
That there is ignorance even among the men of our own army in regard
to the causes and purposes of the war has been made evident. Knowledge
and enlightenment can hardly have been greater elsewhere. German
soldiers are credited with believing that they are defending Germany
from attack. The French soldier was fighting for France.
The invasion
of his country left him no doubt and no choice. The English soldier
has often said that he was doing it for the women and the children,
and one writer says that the deepest motive of two thirds of the
British army was to make this war the last. The American soldier, from
the nature of the circumstances under which he himself entered the war
has been more conscious of a motive of helpfulness and of comradeship
with other peoples who are in distress and danger.
Probably the idea
of America's honor, and the more abstract idea still of the cause of
freedom, even though this idea has been, so to speak, our watchword,
have not been the most influential motives in the mind of the
individual. Germany was attacking people who were in distress, and
the American soldier went over to make the scales turn in the
direction of victory for the oppressed.
There is, of course, a literature of the war produced by the soldier
in the field, in which there are expressed high ideals, abstract
conceptions and firm principles. The French soldier has written about
liberty, the German soldier has had considerable to say about a Kultur
war. An American volunteer in the British army has written, "I find
myself among the millions of others in the great allied armies
fighting for all I believe right and civilized and humane against a
power which is evil and which threatens the existence of all the right
we prize and the freedom we enjoy" (24). But in general the
consciousness of the soldier, from all the evidence we have, was
concerned, as presumably was that of most of us, mainly with the most
obvious qualities of opposing forces, their concrete actions, and the
personal motives of rulers.
Leaving aside so far as one can one's own partisanship and mores
(which is not a very easy task), what causes can we say, with a
considerable degree of certainty, have actually been issues in the
present war? To some extent what one thinks these causes are will
remain matters of personal opinion and preference. Are there also
principles which, when once observed, will be accepted as the
fundamental "causes" of the war? There seem to be three at least which
characterize wide differences in the ideals and the civilization of
the opposing forces.
There is, first of all, an issue between the ideals of a relatively
autocratic form of government and a relatively more democratic form of
government. This was a cause of the intellectuals, but it was also a
popular cause. Men in general like the form of government under which
they live. From the standpoint of those who hold that a democratic
form of government is right, the war seemed to be a conflict between a
modern and progressive régime and an old and vicious one. So far as
this autocratic principle aimed to suppress the rights of individuals,
or to menace the liberties of small nations, so far as it was
aggressively militaristic and had imperial ambitions, which could be
achieved only by force, it stood clearly opposed to democracy.
Democracy and autocracy were plainly at war with one another, and yet
if we look closely we shall see that neither one can offer any actual
demonstration of its validity as the most superior or the final form
of government. In part they may appeal to the observable course of
history for their justification, but the final source of judgment
seems to rest in the mass of opinion in the world.
Questions of form
and taste are not wholly absent. But the believer in democracy and the
believer in autocracy will both assert that deep differences in
principle are involved. They will not admit that democracy and
autocracy are superficial forms, and are questions of taste, and they
will not agree with Munsterberg, who says that the two forms tend
inevitably toward a compromise, by a process of alternation in which
first one and-then the other is the dominant form in the world.
The war, in another aspect of it, has been a conflict between the idea
of nationalism and that of internationalism. It is a conflict between
an ideal of state, represented in the German philosophy of state by
the principle of complete autonomy of the individual nation, and one
which assumes that states, while retaining their rights of sovereignty
are to be governed by laws which regulate their conduct as functioning
members of a society of nations. The difference is that, relatively,
between a state of anarchy among nations and a state of order. To some
extent there has been a conflict between the idea of rights and the
idea of duties of nations. This internationalism is not merely a
sociological principle, something academic and scientific, as a theory
of state or society; it is an ethical principle, which contains some
recognition of justice as a subjective principle. It has some roots
in theory, but it is also based upon the immediate recognition of the
rights of peoples to their own individual lives. Its ideal is a world
containing many nations, coördinated by natural processes and not a
world in which a single nation or a few may hold the supreme place,
except as this supremacy might come by a process of natural
development.
The third conflict of the war was one which we may call a
psychological conflict. It was a conflict between two ideas of life,
one based upon a belief in the supremacy of reason, the other implying
that the final test of values in life remains in the sphere of the
feelings, or is a matter of appreciation. Germany, in her recent
history, has stood conspicuously for the belief that human society may
and indeed must be controlled and regulated by definite principles--principles that must be determined according to the
methods of science. These principles take the place, in this
philosophy of life, of certain typical human reactions that are
believed to be demonstrably irrational. In its visible and most
practical form the application of this principle is through
organization.
This characterization of German life reveals something very much like
a paradox in the principles of the war. We see a conflict in one
direction between a certain mediævalism in government and social forms
and a more modern and progressive type; we see also a conflict of a
modernism of an extreme form, represented by a scientific
civilization, united with this mediævalism, and in opposition to a
conception of life which is in some respects more naïve and more
primitive. The explanation of this paradox is that Germany offers an
illustration of a phenomenon of development that has been seen before
in history, of an excess of development and specialization in a
direction that appears to be off the main line of progress, or at
least is an anachronism. Germany has shown us the effects of
rationalism, some would say a morbid and hypertrophied reason. This
rationalism is certainly in part a product of systematic education and
propaganda, a conscious exploitation of science, and it is in part
temperamental. Such a result is always possible in a small state with
a highly centralized form of government. It is a notorious fact that
Germany's type of civilization can be spread neither by persuasion nor
by force. If we may apply a biological analogy we may say that German
Kultur in its modern form cannot survive. That this German
civilization has been felt by the world at large to be abnormal and of
the nature of a monstrosity we can hardly doubt, and that therefore to
some extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of
Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany,
seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has
been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent.
Germany, governed by the ideals of rationalism, has assumed that
history can be made, wars conducted, life regulated in accordance with
a program. On the other side we see a very general acceptance of a
philosophy of life in which many evils of disorder and waste and the
necessity of an experimental attitude toward life are accepted as
necessary consequences of the life of freedom. We see implied in this
philosophy of life a belief in a morality and a religion that are
based upon feeling rather than upon objective evidences, and a way of
judging conduct more or less naively and simply or according to
methods of appreciation that are essentially æsthetic, using the term
in a wide sense. This mode of life is accepted in the belief that
order in due season will come out of relative disorder, by a natural
process or by a gradually increasing organization and voluntary
adjustment. If we accept the validity of this attitude in life we
shall be inclined to regard rationalism as it is manifested to-day in
German life as an evil. We may believe that in the end the cure for
this rationalism will not be less reason but rather more, but we shall
see also that it is possible for reason to outstrip and pervert life,
and indeed involve life in an absurdity, simply because as a method of
dealing with the whole of life it cannot be sufficiently comprehensive.
Are these and all such issues that we find in war, causes of war? Do
nations fight for principles? Opinions certainly differ on this point.
Some think of wars, we say, as essentially conflicts of principles;
some interpret wars wholly in terms of political issues.
We should say
that the truth lies between these assertions or is the sum of their
half-truths. Wars are not in their origin wars of principle. The
political, the personal, the concrete aspects of the relations of
nations are always in the foreground in causing wars.
Wars become wars
of principle after they have been begun for other reasons. Sanctions
and motives appear after the fact. Fundamental differences of mores
which include the raw material, so to speak, of principles and causes
are factors in wars in so far as they create misunderstanding and
antipathy, but in so far as these differences of nature and of
principle do not enter into the sphere of politics and of national
honor, they do not as such cause wars Those deep moods