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The Passing of War?
THE
progress of humanity proceeds by a series of imaginations which the Will in the
race turns into accomplished facts and a train of illusions which contain each
of them an inevitable truth. The truth is there in the secret Will and
Knowledge that are conducting our affairs for us and it reflects itself in the
soul of mankind; the illusion is in the shape we give to that reflection, the
veil of arbitrary fixations of time, place and circumstance which that
deceptive organ of knowledge, the human intellect, weaves over the face of the
Truth. Human imaginations are often fulfilled to the letter; our illusions on
the contrary find the truth behind them realised most unexpectedly, at a time,
in ways, under circumstances far other than those we had fixed for them.
Man's
illusions are of all sorts and kinds, some of them petty though not
unimportant;- for nothing in the world is unimportant, - others vast and
grandiose. The greatest of them all are those which cluster round the hope of a
perfected society, a perfected race, a terrestrial millennium. Each new idea,
religious or social, which takes possession of the epoch and seizes on large
masses of men, is in turn to be the instrument of these high realisations; each
in turn betrays the hope which gave it its force to conquer. And the reason is
plain enough to whosoever chooses to see; it is that no change of ideas or of
the intellectual outlook upon life, no belief in God or Avatar or Prophet, no
victorious science or liberating philosophy, no social scheme or system, no
sort of machinery internal or external can really bring about the great desire
implanted in the race, true though that desire is in itself and the index of
the goal to which we are being led. Because man is himself not a machine nor a
device, but a being and a most complex one at that, therefore he cannot be
saved by machinery; only by an entire change which shall affect all the members
of his being, can he be liberated from his discords and imperfections.
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One of the
illusions incidental to this great hope is the expectation of the passing of
war. This grand event in human progress
is always being confidently expected, and since we are now all scientific minds
and rational beings, we no longer expect
it by a divine intervention, but assign sound physical and economical reasons
for the faith that is in us. The first form taken by this new gospel was the
expectation and the prophecy that the extension of commerce would be the
extinction of war. Commercialism was the natural enemy of militarism and would
drive it from the face of the earth. The growing and universal lust of gold and
the habit of comfort and the necessities of increased production and intricate
interchange would crush out the lust of power and dominion and glory and
battle. Gold-hunger or commodity-hunger would drive out earth-hunger, the dharma
of the Vaishya would set its foot on the dharma of the Kshatriya and give it
its painless quietus. The ironic reply of the gods has not been long in coming.
Actually this very reign of commercialism, this increase of production and
interchange, this desire for commodities and markets and , this piling up of a huge burden of
unnecessary necessities has been the cause of half the wars that have since
afflicted the human race. And now we see militarism and commercialism united in
a loving clasp, coalescing into a sacred biune duality of national life and
patriotic aspiration and causing and driving by their force the most
irrational, the most monstrous and nearly cataclysmic, the hugest war of modern
and indeed of all historic times.
Another
illusion was that the growth of democracy would mean the growth of pacifism and
the end of war. It was fondly thought that wars are in their nature dynastic
and aristocratic; greedy kings
and martial nobles driven by earth-hunger and battle-hunger, diplomatists
playing at chess with the lives of men and the fortunes of nations, these were
the guilty causes of war who drove the unfortunate peoples to the battlefield
like sheep to the shambles. These proletariates, mere food for powder, who had
no interest, no desire, no battle-hunger driving them to armed conflict, had
only to become instructed and dominant to embrace each other and all the world
in a free
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and fraternal amity. Man refuses to learn from that
history of whose lessons the wise prate to us; otherwise the story of old
democracies ought to have been enough to prevent this particular illusion. In any
case the answer of the gods has been, here too, sufficiently ironic. If kings
and diplomatists are still often the movers of war, none more ready than the
modern democracy to make itself their enthusiastic and noisy accomplice, and we
see even the modern spectacle of governments and diplomats hanging back in
affright or doubt from the yawning clamorous abyss while angry shouting peoples
impel them to the verge. Bewildered pacifists who still cling to their
principles and illusions, find themselves howled down by the people and, what
is piquant enough, by their own recent comrades and leaders. The socialist, the
syndicalist, the inter- nationalist of yesterday stands forward as a
banner-bearer in the great mutual massacre and his voice is the loudest to cheer
on the dogs of war.
Another
recent illusion was the power of Courts of Arbitration and Concerts of Europe
to prevent war. There again the course that events immediately took was
sufficiently ironic; for the institution of the great Court of International
Arbitration was followed up by a series of little and great wars which led by
an inexorable logical chain to the long-dreaded European conflict, and the
monarch who had first conceived the idea, was also the first to unsheath his
sword in a conflict dictated on both sides by the most unrighteous greed and
aggression. In fact this series of wars, whether fought in Northern or Southern
Africa, in Manchuria or the Balkans, was marked most prominently by the spirit
which disregards cynically that very idea of inherent and existing rights, that
balance of law and equity upon which alone arbitration can be founded. As for
the Concert of Europe, it seems far enough from us now, almost antediluvian in
its antiquity, as it belongs indeed to the age before the deluge; but we can
remember well enough what an unmusical and discordant concert it was, what a
series of fumblings and blunderings and how its diplomacy led us fatally to the
inevitable event against which it struggled. Now it is suggested by many to substitute
a United States of Europe
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for the defunct Concert and for the poor helpless Hague
tribunal an effective Court of International Law with force behind it to impose
its decisions. But so long as men go on believing in the sovereign power of
machinery, it is not likely that the gods either will cease from their studied
irony.
There have
been other speculations and reasonings; ingenious minds have searched for a
firmer and more rational ground of faith. The first of these was propounded in
a book by a Russian writer which had an enormous success in its day but has now
passed into the silence. Science was to bring war to an end by making it
physically impossible. It was mathematically proved that. with modern weapons
two equal armies would fight each other to a standstill, attack would become
impossible except by numbers thrice those of the defence and war therefore
would bring no military decision but only an infructuous upheaval and
disturbance of the organised life of the nations. When the Russo-Japanese war
almost immediately proved that attack and victory were still possible and the
battle- fury of man superior to the fury of his death-dealing engines, another
book was published called by a title which has turned into a jest upon the writer,
the "Great Illusion", to prove that the idea of a commercial
advantage to be gained by war and conquest was an illusion and that as soon as
this was under- stood and the
sole benefit of peaceful interchange realised, the peoples would abandon a method
of settlement now chiefly undertaken from motives of commercial expansion, yet
whose disastrous result was only to disorganise fatally the commercial
prosperity it sought to serve. The present war came as the immediate answer of
the gods to this sober and rational pro- position. It has been fought for
conquest and commercial expansion and it is proposed, even when it has been
fought out on the field, to follow it up by a commercial struggle between the
belligerent nations.
The men who
wrote these books were capable thinkers, but they ignored the one thing that
matters, human nature. The present war has justified to a certain extent the
Russian writer, though by developments he did not foresee; scientific warfare
has brought military movement to a standstill and
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baffled the strategist and the tactician, it has
rendered decisive victory impossible except by overwhelming numbers or an
overwhelming weight of artillery. But this has not made war impossible, it has
only changed its character; it has at the most replaced the war of military
decisions by that of military and financial exhaustion aided by the grim weapon
of famine. The English writer on the other hand erred by isolating the economic
motive as the one factor that weighed; he ignored the human lust of dominion
which, carried into the terms of commercialism means the undisputed control of
markets and the exploitation of helpless populations. Again, when we rely upon
the disturbance of organised national and international life as a preventive of
war, we forget the boundless power of self-adaptation which man possesses; that
power has been shown strikingly enough in the skill and ease with which the
organisation and finance of peace were replaced in the present crisis by the
organisation and finance of war. And when we rely upon Science to make war
impossible, we forget that the progress of Science means a series of surprises
and that it means also a constant effort of human ingenuity to overcome
impossibilities and find fresh means of satisfying our ideas, desires and
instincts. Science may well make war of the present type with shot and shell
and mines and battleships an impossibility and yet develop and put in their
place simpler or more summary means which may bring back an easier organisation
of warfare.
So long as
war does not become psychologically impossible, it will remain or, if banished
for a while, return. War itself, it is hoped, will end war; the expense, the
horror, the butchery, the disturbance of tranquil life, the whole confused
sanguinary madness of the thing has reached or will reach such colossal
proportions that the human race will fling the monstrosity behind it in
weariness and disgust. But weariness and disgust, horror and pity, even the opening
of the eyes to reason by the practical facts of the waste of human life and
energy and the harm and extravagance are not permanent factors; they last only
while the lesson is fresh. Afterwards, there is forgetfulness; human nature
recuperates itself and recovers the instincts that were temporarily dominated.
A long peace, even a certain
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organisation of peace, may conceivably result, but so
long as the heart of man remains what it is, the peace will come to an end; the
organisation will break down under the stress of human passions. War is no
longer, perhaps, a biological necessity, but it is still a psychological
necessity; what is within us, must manifest itself outside.
Meanwhile
it is well that every false hope and confident pre- diction should be answered
as soon as may well be by the irony of the gods; for only so can we be driven
to the perception of the real remedy. Only when man has developed not merely a
fellow- feeling with all men, but a dominant sense of unity and commonalty,
only when he is aware of them not merely as brothers, - that is a fragile bond,
- but as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live, not in his
separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a large universal
consciousness, can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons, pass out of
his life without the possibility of return. Meanwhile that he should struggle
even by illusions towards that end, is an excellent sign; for it shows that the
truth behind the illusion is pressing towards the hour when it may become
manifest as reality.
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