3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.
What is the meaning of war in life?
War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with
the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between
animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized
in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also a
co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and
development within the war-making group.
War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as
between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing social
group. Through war and military organization, and through war and
military organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.
This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal
development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable
condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more
vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and
make the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker
individual must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That
means in practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the
latter until some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that
killing is invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the
beasts for food and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue
of its replacement by new forms of competition. With the development of
primitive war we have such a replacement. The competition becomes a
competition to serve and rule in the group, the stronger take the
leadership and the larger share of life, and the weaker co-operate in
subordination, they waive and compromise the conflict and use their
conjoint strength against a common rival.
Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not know
if so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these
confessions. Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human
synthesis I have not sufficiently insisted upon the part played by
competition in that synthesis. But the implications of the view that I
have set forth are fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is an
experiment for the synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my
system of conduct so far as it is a system is built. Manifestly the
individual's function is either self-development, service and
reproduction, or failure and an end.
With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for
life has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition
that is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful,
I desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and
devoted, men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making
their utmost contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end
content to abide by a verdict.
The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the
development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and
moral atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel
nor wasteful. If the test is not to be 'are you strong enough to kill
everyone you do not like?' that will only be because it will ask still
more comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other
than brute killing power, 'are you adding worthily to the synthesis by
existence and survival?'
I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I
admit that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of
organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must
show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with
the quality and amount of an individual's social contribution, and so
far I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be
claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far
more thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We owe that to our movement
and the world.
It is no adequate answer to our antagonists to say, indeed it is a mere
tu quoque to say, that the existing system does not present such a
correlation, that it puts a premium on secretiveness and self-seeking
and a discount on many most necessary forms of social service. That is a
mere temporary argument for a delay in judgment.
The whole history of humanity seems to me to present a spectacle of this
organizing specialization of competition, this replacement of the
indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for life by an organized
and collectively intelligent development of life. We see a secular
replacement of brute conflict by the law, a secular replacement of
indiscriminate brute lust by marriage and sexual taboos, and now with
the development of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady replacement
of blind industrial competition by public economic organization. And
moreover there is going on a great educational process bringing a
greater and greater proportion of the minds of the community into
relations of understanding and interchange.
Just as this process of organization proceeds, the violent and chaotic
conflict of individuals and presently of groups of individuals
disappears, personal violence, private war, cut-throat competition,
local war, each in turn is replaced by a more efficient and more
economical method of survival, a method of survival giving constantly
and selecting always more accurately a finer type of survivor.
I might compare the social synthesis to crystals growing out of a fluid
matrix. It is where the growing order of the crystals has as yet not
spread that the old resource to destruction and violent personal or
associated acts remains.
But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals
have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in
some particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try
again. I see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which
are indeed paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation
and literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting
themselves and the social structure together, year after year and age
after age, halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. And it
seems to me that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of
waste and futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger
in the world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the
world's system of collective organization to the purpose before them.
It follows from this very directly that only one thing can end war on
the earth and that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the
development of the idea of the world commonweal in the collective mind.
The only real method of abolishing war is to perceive it, to realize it,
to express it, to think it out and think about it, to make all the world
understand its significance, and to clear and preserve its significant
functions. In human affairs to understand an evil is to abolish it; it
is the only way to abolish any evil that arises out of the untutored
nature of man. Which brings me back here again to my already repeated
persuasion, that in expressing things, rendering things to each other,
discussing our differences, clearing up the metaphysical conceptions
upon which differences are discussed, and in a phrase evolving the
collective mind, lies not only the cures of war and poverty but the
general form of all a man's duty and the essential work of mankind.
