All of us who have had occasion to discuss this subject are familiar with the catchphrases with which the whole matter is so often dismissed. “You cannot change human nature,” “What man always has been during thousands of years, he always will be,” are the sort of dicta generally delivered as self-evident propositions that do not need discussion. Or if, in deference to the fact that very profound changes, in which human nature is involved, have taken place in the habits of mankind, the statement of the proposition is somewhat less dogmatic, we are given to understand that any serious modification of the tendency to go to war can only be looked for in “thousands of years.”
What are the facts? They are these:
That the alleged unchangeability of human nature in this matter is not borne out; that man’s pugnacity though not disappearing, is very visibly, under the forces of mechanical and social development, being transformed and diverted from ends that are wasteful and destructive to ends that are less wasteful, which render easier that cooperation between men in the struggle with their environment which is the condition of their survival and advance; that changes which, in the historical period, have been extraordinarily rapid are necessarily quickening—quickening in geometrical rather than in arithmetical ratio.
With very great courtesy, one is impelled to ask those who argue that human nature in all its manifestations must remain unchanged how they interpret history. We have seen man progress from the mere animal fighting with other animals, seizing his food by force, seizing also by force his females, eating his own kind, the sons of the family struggling with the father for the possession of the father’s wives; we have seen this incoherent welter of animal struggle at least partly abandoned for settled industry, and partly surviving as a more organized tribal warfare or a more ordered pillaging, like that of the Vikings and the Huns; we have seen even these pillagers abandon in part their pillaging for ordered industry, and in part for the more ceremonial conflict of feudal struggle; we have seen even the feudal conflict abandoned in favor of dynastic and religious and territorial conflict, and then dynastic and religious conflict abandoned. There remains now only the conflict of States, and that, too, at a time when the character and conception of the State are being profoundly modified.
Human nature may not change, whatever that vague phrase may mean; but human nature is a complex factor. It includes numberless motives, many of which are modified in relation to the rest as circumstances change; so that the manifestations of human nature change out of all recognition. Do we mean by the phrase that “human nature does not change” that the feelings of the paleolithic man who ate the bodies of his enemies and of his own children are the same as those of a Herbert Spencer, or even of the modern New Yorker who catches his subway train to business in the morning? If human nature does not change, may we therefore expect the city clerk to brain his mother and serve her up for dinner, or suppose that Lord Roberts or Lord Kitchener is in the habit, while on campaign, of catching the babies of his enemies on spearheads, or driving his motorcar over the bodies of young girls, like the leaders of the old Northmen in their ox-wagons.
What do these phrases mean? These, and many like them, are repeated in a knowing way with an air of great wisdom and profundity by journalists and writers of repute, and one may find them blatant any day in our newspapers and reviews; yet the most cursory examination proves them to be neither wise nor profound, but simply parrot-like catchphrases which lack common sense, and fly in the face of facts of everyday experience.
The truth is that the facts of the world as they stare us in the face show that, in our common attitude, we not only overlook the modifications in human nature, which have occurred historically since yesterday—occurred even in our generation—but we also ignore the modification of human nature which mere differences of social habit and custom and outlook effect. Take the case of the duel. Even educated people in Germany, France, and Italy, will tell you that it is “not in human nature” to expect a man of gentle birth to abandon the habit of the duel; the notion that honorable people should ever so place their honor at the mercy of whoever may care to insult them is, they assure you, both childish and sordid. With them the matter will not bear discussion.
Yet the great societies which exist in England, North America, Australia—the whole Anglo-Saxon world, in fact—have abandoned the duel, and we cannot lump the whole Anglo-Saxon race as either sordid or childish.
That such a change as this, which must have conflicted with human pugnacity in its most insidious form—pride and personal vanity, the traditions of an aristocratic status, every one of the psychological factors now involved in international conflict—has been effected in our own generation should surely give pause to those who dismiss as chimerical any hope that rationalism will ever dominate the conduct of nations.
Discussing the impossibility of allowing arbitration to cover all causes of difference, Mr. Roosevelt remarked, in justification of large armaments: “We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who fails to resent an insult.”56 Mr. Roosevelt seems to forget that the duel with us is extinct. Do we, the English-speaking people of the world, to whom presumably Mr. Roosevelt must have been referring, despise a man who fails to resent an insult by arms? Would we not, on the contrary, despise the man who should do so? Yet so recent is this charge that it has not yet reached the
