[In this excerpt from The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, Trotter examines man's social instincts in contemporary society.]

If our foregoing discussion has been sound, we may attribute the impermanence of all civilizations of which we have knowledge to the failure of society to preserve with increasing magnitude of its communities a true homogeneity and a progressive integration of its elements.¹ We have seen that there is a type of society—distinguished here as the socialized type—in which a trace of this integrative tendency can be detected at work. Under the threat of war this tendency is accelerated in its action, and can attain a moderate, though very far indeed from a complete, degree of development. In the absence of such a powerful stimulus to homogeneity, however, segregation reasserts itself, and the society, necessarily deprived by its type of the advantages of leadership, becomes confused, disunited, and threatened with disruption. It seems probable, indeed, that the integrative tendency unaided and uncontrolled is too weak to surmount the obstacles with which it has to contend, and to anticipate disruption by welding the elements of society into a common life and common purpose. It has already been repeatedly suggested that these difficulties, due as they are to the human power of various reaction, can be met only by the interposition of the intellect as an active factor in the problem of the direction of society. In other words, the progressive evolution of society has reached a point where the construction and use of a scientific statecraft will become an indispensable factor in further development and the only means of arresting the dreary oscillations between progress and relapse which have been so ominous a feature in human history. We are perhaps in a position today to suggest tentatively some of the principles on which such a statecraft might be built.

It would have to be based on a full recognition of the biological status of man, and to work out the tendencies which as an animal he is pursuing and must pursue. If we have evidence of the only course evolution can follow satisfactorily, then it is clear that any social and legislative effort not in line with that course must be entirely wasted. Moreover, since we are proceeding on the hypothesis that direct conscious effort is now a necessary factor in the process, we must clear our minds of the optimistic determinism which regards man as a special pet of nature and the pessimistic determinism which would reduce him to a mere spectator of his destiny. The trained and conscious mind must come to be regarded as a definite factor in man's environment, capable of occupying there a larger and larger area.

Such a statecraft would recognize how fully man is an instinctive being and how his mental vigor and stability depend entirely upon instinctive expression being adequate. The tyrannous power of the social instinct in repressing and distorting instinctive expression would have to be controlled and directed with the purpose of enlarging the personal and social effectiveness of the individual to the maximum extent; the social instinct would no longer be left to operate on the individual under the random direction of custom and habit, of fashion and social whim, or for the satisfaction of the jealousy of age.

Perhaps most important of all, a scientific statecraft would understand that the social instinct itself is as deep and powerful as any, and hungrily demands intense and positive gratification and expression. The social instinct drives the individual to seek union with some community of his fellows. The whole national body is in the present state of society the smallest unit in which the individual can find complete and permanent satisfaction. As long as the average man's sense of possession in the State is kept so low as it is at present, as long as the sense of moral inequality between himself and his fellows is so vigorously maintained, so long will he continue to make his class rather than his nation the object of social passion, and so long will society continue to breed within itself a principle of death.

The exploration of the psychology of man's social relations has been left almost exclusively to the operation of what we may call the method of prophetic intuition, and there is no branch of knowledge where the fumbling methods of unclarified intuition have introduced more confusion. Intuitions in the sphere of feeling—moral intuitions—have more than the usual tendency of intuitions to appear as half-truths surrounded and corrupted by fantasies of the seer and isolated from correlation with the rest of knowledge. Let us consider, for example, the intuitional doctrine of philosophic anarchism. The nucleus of truth in this is the series of perfectly sound psychological conceptions that all social discipline should be, as experienced by the individual, spontaneous and voluntary, that man possesses the instinctive endowment which renders possible a voluntary organization of society, and that in such a society order would be more effectively maintained than under our present partially compulsory system. This nucleus, which of course is not understood or expressed in these definite psychological terms by the anarchist, is apt to be associated with dogmas which altogether obscure its strictly unassailable truth. Communism, again, is another doctrine which contains its core of psychological truth, namely, that individual property is an economic convention rather than a psychological necessity, and that social inequality is an infirmity of the State rather than its foundation stone. As it is exemplified in practice, however, communism is so deeply tainted by the belief in an inverted class segregation of its own, and by a horror of knowledge, that its elements of reality are wholly obscured and rendered useless.

Every doctrine that makes disciples freely must contain in it some embodiment of psychological reality, however exiguous; but where it has been arrived at by the methods of the prophet, there is no reason to expect that stress will be laid on the true more than on the false elements of the doctrinal scheme, and experience shows that the inessential falsity has for the expositor as many, if not more, attractions than the essential truth. An expert statecraft would be able to identify the real elements of discovery that were present in any fresh prophetic appeal to public belief, and would be able at any rate to save the State from the condition of petrified embarrassment into which it now falls when faced by social dogmas and experiments which win attention and adhesion while at the same time they outrage convention and common sense.

The examination of the functional satisfactoriness of society, which has been a chief object of this book, has yielded a certain general body of conclusions. An attempt will now be made to summarize these in a compact and even dogmatic form, and to add what further element of definition seems indispensable for clearness.

1. All societies of which we have any knowledge have shown two general defects—they have proved unable to develop and direct more than a small fraction of the resources they theoretically possess, and they have been impermanent, so that time after time laborious accumulations of constructive effort have been wasted. According to our analysis, these defects are due to the drift of power into the hands of the stable-minded class, and to the derivation of moral power and enterprise from the mechanisms of leadership and class segregation.

2. A society, in order to have stability and full functional effectiveness, must be capable of a continually progressive absorption of its individual members into the general body—an uninterrupted movement towards a complete moral homogeneity.

3. A tendency towards a progressive integration of this kind can be detected in society today by direct observation. It is weak and its effects are fluctuating, so that there is doubt whether it can, unless directly encouraged by human effort, counteract the forces which up till now have always limited social evolution to movements of oscillation rather than of true progress.

4. The only way in which society can be made safe from disruption or decay is by the intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect as a factor among the forces ruling its development.

This last doctrine has been repeatedly stated, but we have perhaps scarcely defined it precisely enough to avoid misunderstanding. Some such definition is our concluding task. Of all the elements we find in a general examination of the whole biological series, the human intellect is the one that most clearly gives the impression of a new and intrusive factor. The instinctive side of man, with its derivatives, such as his morals, his altruism, and his aspirations, falls very easily into line with the rest of the natural order, and is seen to be at work in modes which nowhere show any essential new departure. The intellect, however, brings with it a capacity for purpose as distinct from and additional to desire, and this does apparently introduce a factor virtually new to the biological series. The part that the purposive foresight of the intellect has been allowed to take in human affairs has always been limited by instinctive inhibitions. This limitation has effectually prevented man from defining his situation in the world, and he remains a captive in the house of circumstance, restrained as effectually by the mere painted canvas of habit, convention, and fear as by the solid masonry of essential instinctive needs. Being denied the freedom which is its indispensable source of vigor, the intellect has necessarily failed to get a clear, comprehensive, and temperate view of man's status and prospects, and has, of course, shrunk from the yet more exacting task of making itself responsible for his destiny. Nowhere has been and is the domination of the herd more absolute than in the field of speculation concerning man's general position and fate, and in consequence prodigies of genius have been expended in obscuring the simple truth that there is no responsibility for man's destiny anywhere at all outside his own responsibility, and that there is no remedy for his ills outside his own efforts. Western civilization has recently lost ten millions of its best lives as a result of the exclusion of the intellect from the general direction of society. So terrific an object-lesson has made it plain enough how easy it is for man, all undirected and unwarned as he is, to sink to the irresponsible destructiveness of the monkey.

Such ostensible direction as societies obtain derives its sanction from one or more of three sources—the hereditary, the representative, and the official. No direction can be effective in the way needed for the preservation of society unless it comes from minds broad in outlook, deep in sympathy, sensitive to the new and strange in experience, capable of resisting habit, convention, and the other sterilizing influences of the herd, deeply learned in the human mind and vividly aware of the world. Plainly enough, neither of the classes enumerated above is any more likely to possess these characteristics than any one else. To the representative and official classes there even attaches, at any rate theoretically, the suspicion that the methods by which they are chosen and promoted, while they obviously in no way favor fitness, may actually tend to favor unfitness. Of the hereditary class it may at any rate be said that while it does not in any special degree include the fit, its composition is random and in no way tainted by popular standards of suitability or by the prejudices and conventions of the examination room.

It would seem, then, that none of the methods by which society appoints its directors shows any promise of working towards the effective intervention of the intellect in social affairs. In reaching this conclusion we have perhaps passed too lightly over the claims of the trained official as a possible nucleus of an ultimate scientific statecraft. The present-day controversies as to the nationalization of various industries give an especial interest to this very problem, and illustrate how unpromising a source of knowledge is political discussion. One group of advocates points to the obvious economies of conducting industry on the great scale and without the destructive effects of competition; the other group points to the infirmities which have always infected officially conducted enterprises. Both sides would seem to be perfectly right so far, and both to be wrong when the first goes on to affirm that governments as they now are can and do conduct industrial affairs quite satisfactorily, and the second goes on to affirm that the only mechanism by which society can get its work effectively done is commercial competition, and that the only adequate motive is greed. It seems to have escaped the notice of both parties to the controversy that no civilized country has evolved, or begun to evolve, or thought of evolving a method of selecting and training its public servants that bears any rational relation to their fitness for the art of government. It is not here denied that selection and training are both of them severe in many countries. Mere severity, however, as long as it is quite without relevance, is manifestly worthless. We are forced to the conclusion, therefore, that to expect an effective statecraft to be evolved from the official, whether of the Chinese, the Prussian, or any other type, is a mere dream. To encourage such a hope would be to strengthen the grip of the unsatisfactory stable-minded class upon the gullet of society.

The evidence, then, shows that among the mechanisms whereby the directors of society are chosen there is none that favors that intervention of the conscious and instructed intellect that we have suggested is necessary to the effective evolution of civilization. Nowhere in the structure of society is there a class tending to develop towards this goal. Since from the point of view of social effectiveness segregation into classes has been entirely random, the appearance of such a class would have been indeed an extraordinary accident. Good as are the grounds for hoping that human society may ultimately mature into a coherent structure possessed of comprehensive and intelligent direction, it would be no more than idle optimism to suppose that there is any institution or class now existing which promises to inspire a fundamental reconstruction. If the effective intrusion of the intellect into social affairs does happily occur, it will come from no organ of society now recognizable, but through a slow elevation of the general standard of consciousness up to the level at which will be possible a kind of freemasonry and syndicalism of the intellect. Under such circumstances free communication through class barriers would be possible, and an orientation of feeling quite independent of the current social segregation would become manifest.

Throughout the enormously long period during which modern man has been established on the earth, human society has been left to the uncontrolled contention of constructive and destructive forces, and in the long run the destructive have always proved the stronger. Whether the general level of consciousness will reach the height necessary to give a decisive predominance to constructive tendencies, and whether such a development will occur in time to save western civilization from the fate of its predecessors, are open questions. The small segment of the social process of which we have direct knowledge in the events of the day has no very encouraging appearance. Segregation has reasserted itself effectively; the dominion of the stable and resistive mind is as firmly established as ever, and no less dull and dangerous; while it is plain how far, in the atmosphere of relaxation and fatigue, the social inspiration of the common man has sunk from the high constancy of spirit by which throughout the long pilgrimage of war so many weary feet have been upborne, so many dry lips refreshed.

Note

1. From the second (1919) edition of “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,” the first edition of which appeared in 1916. (Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, New York, and Ernest Benn Limited, London.)