The European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 Part 30 (1/2)
I asked Prof. Giddings to go beyond economics and to consider the war's probable results in their broader sociological aspects.
”If what I have predicted happens,” he replied, ”the democratic elements of society in all nations will become apprehensive of the loss of liberty.
”They will fear that in the interests of efficiency the perfected social order will impose minute and unwelcome regulations upon individual life and effort, and that a degree of coercive control will be established which will end by making individuals mere cogs in the machine, diminis.h.i.+ng their importance, curtailing their usefulness and initiative far more than is done by the great industrial corporations against which the working cla.s.ses already are protesting so loudly.
”And not only the working people but a large proportion of all other cla.s.ses will develop these fears, especially in those nations which, during the last century, have built up popular sovereignty and democratic freedom, as the terms are understood in England and America.
”We shall hear the argument that the loss of individual initiative and personal self-reliance is too great a price to pay even for supreme efficiency and the maximum production of material comforts.
”The problem which such a conflict of interests and opinions will present may be speculatively defined as that of trying to find a way to reconcile a maximum of efficiency organization with a maximum of individual freedom.
”So stating it, we have to recognize that this has been the biggest problem, in fact the comprehensive problem, that man, has faced throughout human history, and the one which, really, he has been trying to solve by the trial and error method in all his social experiments.
”It is the sociological as distinguished from the merely economic problem.
”Human society exists because early in his career man discovered that mutual aid, or team work, is, on the whole, in the struggle for existence and the pursuit of happiness, a more effective factor than physical strength or individual cleverness.
”Natural selection has acted not only upon individuals, but, in the large sense, upon groups and aggregates of groups. The restrictions upon individual life have developed in the interests of groups, or collective efficiency.
”On the other hand, collective efficiency has no meaning, it serves no purpose apart from the amelioration of individual life and the development of individual personality.
”So long as groups fear one another and fight with one another the restrictions upon individual liberty must be extreme in the interests of the collective fighting efficiency of each group as a whole.
”All the possibilities of personal development, of individual freedom, are involved in the larger possibilities of friendly relations between nation and nation.
”Already the co-operative instinct has so grown that if war and the fear of war could be eliminated, mankind would have relatively little difficulty in working out ways and means of combining Governmental action with individual initiative for purposes of economic production, education, the promotion of the public health, and the administration of justice.
”All those principles and rules which we call Morality are, in fact, mere rules of the game of life. We play the game or do not play it; we are fair or unfair.
”On the whole, most of us try to be fair because it has been found that playing the game with a sense of fairness is the only way in which we can succeed in working together for common ends without the necessity of imposing upon ourselves coercive rules to hold our organization together for possible ma.s.s attack upon the end in view.
”Social life, in this sense of playing the game fairly, has made man the superior of the brutes he sprang from. There is nothing mysterious or recondite about it.
”In order to work together men must understand one another. Therefore, natural selection has picked out the intelligent for survival in the social world; and in order to work together intelligent men must depend on one another, abiding by their covenants.
”Therefore, again, natural selection has picked out what we call Morality for survival in the social world. The whole further progress of mankind would seem to hang upon the possibility that we can find a way to limit and, if possible, to terminate wars between nations, for only in that contingency can we hope to develop a social system in which a supreme efficiency with a maximum of individual liberty can be combined upon a working basis.”
Application of the Facts.
”These are incontrovertible facts, and they find their application to the existing European situation in various ways, the most important of which will appear in the discovery that, valuable as conventions and covenants of nation with nation may be, and intolerable as any violation of them surely is, we cannot hope for general and unfailing observance of them until the feeling of mankind and the whole att.i.tude of the world in respect to international as well as private conduct shall be that the covenants and conventions shall become, in a degree, unnecessary.
”Already it is apparent that the entire world, including the peoples of the nations at war as well as the peoples of the nations remaining happily at peace, have, begun to think these thoughts and reflect upon their momentous importance.
”Shocked and stunned as never before by a calamity for which we find no measure in past human experience, mankind is bound to take at this moment a more sober view, a broader and more rational view, of the problems of responsibility and collective conduct than it hitherto has been able even to attempt.
”The world is sure to ask what things make for sobriety of judgment and integrity of purpose. It is sure in future more carefully to weigh relative values, and will be disposed to count as unimportant many things for which hitherto the armed men of nations have rushed into war.