THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION : XI. THE FRUSTRATION OF A
WORLD PAX
By H. G. WELLS
IN comparison with his invasions of, or rather his raids into, historical speculation, Steele's treatment of the problem of World Peace seems remarkably close-knit. His peculiar aversion from negative terms, his flair for negatives disguised as positives, is very much in evidence. It is manifest he does not like the ambiguity of the word Peace for that reason. It is too easily interpreted as the absence of war ; he harps upon the idea that Peace must be as force/id substitute for war.
The gist of his argument is that world peace is some- thing entirely less natural than contention. It requires no effort for a man nowadays to remain a tax-paying obedient citizen of a modern combatant State. He finds himself there. The masses drift to war individually unwill- ing but collectively feeble. When they find themselves in the war-rapids it is too late to resist. Modern war so far as the masses go is not strong action, it is weakness. It is like the screaming and kicking of a person for whom the forces of life arc too much and who falls into a fit of epilepsy. Peace must be imposed upon a weakly warring world. A World Pax must be a .conquest ; not an abdication.
Steele deals very briefly with the vast complex of anti.;. war movements that passed across the mental surface of the world in the period after 1914. They were particu- larly prevalent in the English-speaking and Scandinavian conununitics. " They just said they wanted no more war ; they said it by the hundred thousand, they said it by the million, they passed resolutions, irresolute resolu- tions. they printed tons of books and pamphlets; and they did no more about it." And then he settles down to a long and penetrating analysis of the League of Nations experiment. 11 Socialism was frustrated by an incomplete proposi- tion, the League of Nations, Steele asserts, was brought to futility by bad analogies. Slovenly and inadequate thinking, he declares, is one day a matter of the study and the newspaper-office, and the next a spreading virus of human disaster. The last thing human beings will learn is that it is impossible to get good results from a bad arrangement of ideas. All social misfortunes have their primary cause in intellectual poverty and mental infec- tion. The men who conceived the League of Nations had old-fashioned legalist and not modern biological minds ; they floated on conventions and were incapable of pene- trating to realities. And so the League of Nations, to which great numbers of people looked for saving veracities, never produced anything better than evasive formulae.
For decades two had analogies paralysed the human will for unity. The first of these was the false analogy which paralleled States with human individuals. The personification of States played a large part in human frustration in the early twentieth century. Small States were given such characters as " brave and little," and in the political interplay their " rights " were maintained exactly as the " rights " of small individuals were main- tained against bigger or more powerful associates. But in reality a small State of five million inhabitants is exactly one-twentieth as important as a great State of one hundred millions. It is not an individual at all.
The League of Nations organisation is based on this false analogy. It does not simply ignore, it contradicts, the reality that the whole earth belongs now to all mankind and cannot be treated any longer in a multitude of separate unequal parcels. We cannot tolerate that small com- munities of people should squat on this or that region of• natural resources, claim sovereignty over it, and drive a bargain with the rest of the world, any more than we can tolerate the private ownership of land and natural resources. But the League of Nations recognises, inten- sifies and does its utmost to preserve, the conventions of nationalism and the emotions of patriotism. The primary objective for those who desire a world-order is the replace- ment of patriotic obsessions by the idea of cosmopolitan duty.. We need to replace the " locality-framed " men- talities of the past and present by " function-framed " world-wide mentalities. Until producers are thinking in terms of world-production and distributors in terms of world-transport, until the organisation and restraint of force is thought of as one simple world-wide scheme, there cannot be any organic unity in a World Pax. It will continue to be like one of those long carnival. dragons, in which a number of men, on their separate legs, walk under a cloth with a cardboard head. The internal dissensions• of such a composite monster have furnished the fun for a score of comic films and dramas. Unhappily they are also providing the tragedy in contemporary history.
The second bad analogy contributing to the political futility of the times is the assumption that the political organisation of the contemporary combatant State can be paralleled and imitated in any world organisation. This-assumption is Steele's bete noire. Here I find him' running into what is very much Lenin's line of thought about the "State." The State, so far as it is the organisation of power in the world, will tend to disappear. As Steele sees it, a great economic directorate, a great research, informative and educational system, a hygienic directorate, all three working upon a common scientific conception of the common interest, will co-operate in the co-ordination of human activities, and so the control and application of force will be less and less neces- sary. The existing State organisations are primarily force organisations. They will decline to the level of local racketeering. They will " fade out," as the world federal organisations work more and more efficiently; The combative, litigious and bargaining activities of men will diminish, as their productive and creative activities develop.
It is through their failure to grasp this essential change in -the structure of the community that people evolve visions of a World President, World Senates and World Assemblies engaging in debates upon " policies " and playing the ancient game of parties and sections upon a mightier scale. But it is almost impossible to imagine any such single political government arising except through the practical conquest of existing States ; it would be a super-State imposed by one or more of them upon the rest. But the- organised world-community must arise by the essentially different and ultimately far less difficult process of federal delegation. Nine- tenths even of our most passionate peace-makers have no rational idea, and will not grasp the need for a clear rational idea, of the way to peace. " You cannot make peace;" he writes, " by mooing like cows at passing soldiers. Making -perpetual peace is a huge, heavy, com- plex, distressful piece of mental engineering."
The mental trouble which frustrates the disposition towards World Peace is not, Steele points out, merely one of logical fallacies. Beneath in the subconscious there are deep and powerful antagonisms to the pacifica- tion of the world. The story of Man is the story of an excessively pugnacious ape being slowly tamed. Man is a suspicious and fearful creature and easily aroused to fight what he distrusts and fears. In the face of every new necessity he struggles with an irrational antagonism to novelty. Treaties, laws and every limitation of his freedom to act spasmodically, move him towards a sort of claustrophobia. The thought of being tied up drives him frantic. And there is considerable justification for this distrust of his. We are treacherous to each other, and our fabric of social order rests on profoundly untrust- worthy supports. We are afraid of each other—and with reason. This fearing, snapping animal is being made into a civilised creature slowly enough by the measure of an individual life, but with incredible rapidity by the biological scale of time.
The tension of the effort to lift up the whole mind and will " above the plane of instinctive personal mortality, to a rationalised immortal universalism of creation," the tension to evoke an order that is " in certain details so unprecedented as to be almost unthink- able," is immense. The mind that really seeks to give itself and its will to the Next Beginning is by the nature of things a mind overstrained. Close to its surface of fair intentions flows the dark converse stream of sup- pressed dread and malignity. This is why there is so much snarling, bickering and suspicion among those who are setting themselves sincerely to shape their general conduct in the form of human service. " One can almost say the nobler in plan, the meaner in detail." The wider you stretch your moral energy the thinner it becomes. The intolerance and general bad manners of the Communists from Marx onward are proverbial. The lives of most. strenuous, honest, wide-thinking men are shot with a snarling jealousy. The naive disciple is puzzled and misled by those almost inevitable ignobili- tics on the part of his prophets and exemplars.
On the other hand, those who have abandoned or never made any attenipt to suppress the combative forms of patriotism, xenophobia and racial self-righteousness, who are guided therefore and protected on every hand by recognised conventions, may escape these stresses. Thackeray's Colonel Newcome is an immortal revelation of the moral eharmingness and richness that accompany such fundamental stupidity. The ultimate result of these conventional conformities is futility and disaster, but meanwhile they sustain a lot of consistent emotional living and extract a dignified, if sentimental, simplicity from the incoherent imperatives and loyalties of their unanalysed purposes.
Finally, Steele takes up the still very large moiety of human beings who definitely like war, know they like war, want it and seek it. They arc people of " coats'* excitability." They experience an agreeable thrill ih bristling up to a challenge. Their blood quickens as conflict approaches them. The sense of militant assertion is very pleasant to them. • A child with a drum can be seen working itself tip to a mood of this sort. Everyone has a certain fear of war or any sort of combat, but iii recruits and soldiers going into battle one can see plainly that they are screwing themselves up to the fight as many people screw themselves up to swim in cold water— because they feel that it is good fir them and. because there is an unprecedented intensity of reaction in it that they feel they will presently like. They arc convinced they will regret it if they shirk. This orgiastic aspect of warfare appeals to nearly all of us, and until we learn to live as strenuously and dangerously in times of peace it will continue to attract. People do not like the risk of being killed in battle, but still less do they like stagnant living. There are urgencies in them more powerful than fear. • Pacifism will continue' to be frustrated until there comes such a dream of peace as will stir men like a trumpet. Peace needs its drum-taps. Peace also must marshal its myriads, not for mere parades but for thrilling collective efforts. Peace must provide social orgasms more grati- fying than warfare.
The human imagination throughout the world, Steele concludes, has to be so educated that war will be seen as a dreary diversion of 'energy from excitements more splendid and satisfying. War is not what it was, and mankind does not understand this yet. Its triumphs have evaporated ; its heroisms disappear. It is a per- version, a slacker's resort, clumsy, violent and fruitless, humanity's self-abuse. The terrible hero-warrior r f old- world imagination becomes a dangerous and dirty sadist with a gas-mask on his face and poison in his fist. When that is seen clearly then—and then only—will the peace of the world be secure.
[Mr. Wells' next article is on " The Frustration of Abundance."]
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