Joseph A. Tainter’s name will be familiar to readers of Yggdrasil’s site. Yggdrasil recommends Tainter’s 1988 book ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ as instructive of how today’s Empire may come to grief: when the economic benefits of citizenship become outweighed by high taxation as the Empire invests more and more resources simply in holding its fractured diversity together constituent groups will withdraw their allegiance.
There is substantial overlap between the book and this later article so if Yggdrasil piqued your interest about this book but you never got around to reading it this article can fill the breach for now. Its themes seem especially topical in Europe following the recent elections, for example this quote could be found almost unchanged in many recent newspapers: ‘Institutions that fail to solve problems lose legitimacy and support, as many governments (such as that of the former Soviet Union) have learned’.
Problem solving: Complexity, history, sustainability
Joseph A Tainter. Population and Environment. New York: Sep 2000.Vol.22, Iss. 1; pg. 3
Abstract
Sustainability or collapse follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions. The factors that lead to long-term success or failure in problem solving have received little attention, so that this fundamental activity is poorly understood.
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Sustainability or collapse follow from the success or failure of problem-solving institutions. The factors that lead to long-term success or failure in problem solving have received little attention, so that this fundamental activity is poorly understood. The capacity of institutions to solve problems changes over time, suggesting that a science of problem solving, and thus a science of sustainability, must be historical. Complexity is a primary problem-solving strategy, which is often successful in the short-term, but cumulatively may become detrimental to sustainability. Historical case studies illustrate different outcomes to long-term development of complexity in problem solving. These cases clarify future options for contemporary societies: collapse, simplification, or increasing complexity based on increasing energy subsidies.
Organizational problem solving is typically addressed to the affairs of the moment, and we rarely consider its long-term consequences. Problems, of course, perennially confront human existence at scales from common challenges to the great dilemmas of nations and the world. Human institutions, including nations and empires, have disappeared because their members did not understand the development of problem solving (Tainter, 2000). The fields of organizational decision making (March & Simon, 1958; March & Olsen, 1986; Simon, 1997), organizational ecology (Aldrich, 1979, Hannan & Carroll, 1992; Baum & Singh, 1994a, 1994b), and learning organizations (Senge, 1990) have done much in recent years to clarify why institutions thrive or stagnate. As Peter Senge (1990, pp. 23, 57) notes, decision-makers rarely foresee the full consequences of their actions. Problem solving can have pernicious effects, for a solution that is successful now can contribute to failure later on. It is important to understand how problem-solving systems develop over time periods stretching from decades to centuries. A science of institutional problem solving is above all a historical science. Regrettably, few studies of institutions extend beyond a few decades. The vast human experience of previous efforts at problem solving remain largely untapped in organizational research.
This essay mainly concerns problem solving by large institutions, of which the successes and failures of nations and empires provide some of history's most poignant examples. Three such cases, illustrating different trajectories of problem solving, are presented. Since the purpose is to understand general principles, the results can be (and have been) applied to other problem-solving institutions, such as businesses, agencies, or nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Tainter, 1997). The purpose is not to understand history per se, but to use history to formulate an understanding of problem solving that can clarify our situation today.
CONSTRAINTS TO ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS AND DURABILITY
Certain factors constrain all large institutions in their development and problem-solving effectiveness. These include the structure of an institution's environment (including other like institutions), the efficiency of internal transactions, and limits to human cognition and information processing.
The numbers of a type of organization tend to grow slowly at first, then accelerate until a point is reached beyond which further growth is not possible. Beyond this point the numbers will decline somewhat, then fluctuate. This process is regulated by two different mechanisms: legitimization and competition (Hannan & Carroll, 1992). Proliferation of a type of organization increases its legitimacy, so that there is less resistance to establishing more of them. As Renfrew noted in regard to early states, "The specific state is legitimised in the eyes of its citizens by the existence of other states which patently do function along similar lines" (1982, p. 289 [emphasis in original]). At the same time, increasing the numbers of a type of organization ultimately hits the limit of available resources. Thereafter competition for resources limits further proliferation and organizational mortality increases.
In a large, complex system, constraints internal to the organization are as crucial as those external, and often more immediate. R. H. Coase (1937) argued that business firms exist to reduce transaction costs by internalizing diverse services. Hierarchy always simplifies, and within a firm internalizing services reduces the cost of establishing their prices. Yet as firms become larger there are diminishing returns to scale. Transaction costs increase as information channels become congested (Rosen, 1991, p. 82), waste increases, and the cost of organizing further internal transactions grows. Until recently, hierarchies proliferated in the business sector as easily as they did in government (Bendix, 1956, p. 216). Ancient states also experienced transaction costs. The early Roman Empire, for example, externalized parts of its own defense by allowing client states to buffer its periphery (Luttwak, 1976). Those states were in time absorbed, internalizing defense and administration, until the costs of continued expansion grew too high relative to the benefits of further internalization (Tainter, 1994; see below).
Problem solvers are always constrained by bounded rationality (March & Simon, 1958; Simon, 1997). The behavior of organizations appears to be goal oriented (Aldrich, 1979, p. 4) and is intended to be rational (Simon, 1997, pp. 88-89). Yet humans can rarely absorb all the complexities of a problem, and decide on the basis of rules or models that simplify complexity (March & Simon, 1958: 169-171, 203; Simon, 1997, p. 119). Decision making in a complex system may be surrounded by such confusion as to make the linkage between problem and solution tenuous (March & Olsen, 1986, p. 16). Decisions have system-wide consequences that may manifest themselves years or decades later (Senge, 1990, p. 23). This crucial fact has long been overlooked: in the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer observed that, "Every active force produces more than one change-every cause produces more than one effect" (1972, p. 47 [emphasis in original]). This lesson will emerge clearly in the cases described here.
The literature on organizations leads, then, to several suppositions: that institutions inherently attract challenges; that they face problems both of internal structure and cost, and of external threat; and that, with inadequate understanding, decision-makers must devise solutions whose consequences ramify unpredictably.
DEVELOPMENT OF PROBLEM SOLVING
Human societies and their institutions must, among other characteristics, be problem-solving systems. They respond to challenges that range from the mundane to international crises and global change. Families, firms, government and its agencies-each exists to solve problems, and to continue to exist must do so successfully. Institutions that fail to solve problems lose legitimacy and support, as many governments (such as that of the former Soviet Union) have learned.
Our ahistorical society is largely unaware that over time societies can become ineffective at confronting challenges or solving problems. Yet in earlier societies, such as among the writers of antiquity and the Renaissance, the idea was not only acceptable, it was a truism (e.g., Alcock, 1993). The Greek historian Polybius, in one of history's most remarkable predictions, foresaw the collapse of the Roman Empire 600 years before it actually fell (Polybius, 1979, p. 310).
For nearly three millennia scholars and philosophers have sought to understand why societies fail to preserve themselves. Recently it has been argued that complexity is a primary factor linking problem solving to the success or collapse of societies and institutions. Over the long run it may be the most important factor (Tainter, 1988, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2000; Allen, Tainter, & Hoekstra, 1999). The evolution of complexity is a significant part of the history of problem solving and accordingly the primary focus of this essay.
Human societies often seem to become progressively more complex, that is, comprised of more parts, more kinds of parts, and greater integration of parts. This process began with our hunter-gatherer ancestors (e.g., Price & Brown 1985), and has accelerated over the past 12,000 years. There have been episodes like the European Dark Ages when complexity collapses, but the trend they interrupt is so constant that we see these periods as aberrations (Tainter, 1999). This is curious, for truly complex societies are quite recent. Hominids have been discovered as old as about four million years, yet the most complex societies-states-did not appear until a little more than five thousand years ago. In the full spectrum of hominid history, complexity is rare.
We seem often to be averse to complexity. The reasoning behind sayings like "Keep it simple" is universally understood. The so-called "complexity of modern life" is a favorite topic of journalists and their readers. One reason why we have such low participation in elections is that the value of a single vote does not appear to offset the cost of mastering complex issues. Much of the discontent with government stems from the fact that governments increase the complexity of people's lives. People resent governmentally-imposed complexity to such a degree that politicians build careers opposing it while journalists compete to expose it.
In science, the Principle of Occam's Razor states that simplicity in explanation is superior to complexity. Christopher Toumey, who studies the role of science in popular American life, has shown that the incorporation of scientific values into American culture has varied with the complexity of science (1996, pp. 11-20). When science was so simple that its main requirements were fundamental education and an inquisitive spirit, it was considered worthy (even divinely sanctioned) to pursue knowledge of the natural world. When science grew complex and specialized it diverged so sharply from American values that public attitudes began to range from skepticism to hostility. Alexis de Tocqueville commented upon this trend as early as 1834.
Every increase of complexity has a cost. While we may appreciate complexity in some spheres (e.g., art), we are averse when it is ourselves who must bear the costs. People oppose governmentally-imposed complexity not just because of abstract notions of liberty, but also because of the costs it carries-taxes levied or time spent filling in forms or standing in queues. The cost of supporting complexity is the energy, labor, time, or money needed to create, maintain, and replace a system that grows to have more and more parts and transactions, to support specialists, to regulate behavior so that the parts of a system all work harmoniously, and to produce and control information. The anthropologist Leslie White once estimated that a society activated primarily by human energy (bands of hunter-gatherers, for example), could generate only about 1/20 horsepower per capita per year (1949, p. 369; 1959, pp. 41-42). This is all the energy such a simple society needs. Today such a quantity of energy can produce scarcely a fleeting moment of industrial life. No society can become more complex without increasing its consumption of high-quality energy (Hall, Cleveland, & Kaufmann, 1992), human labor, time, or money.
If complexity costs and we are averse to paying for it, why then don't we still live as simple foragers? Our ancestors did for nearly all of our history. The reason is that although complexity costs, it has great utility in problem solving. We attribute our success as a species to such things as upright posture, an opposable thumb, and a large and richly-networked brain. These attributes allow us rapidly to increase the complexity of our problem solving. Without the ability quickly to alter our problem-solving behavior we would be hardly more capable than other species, which must entrust their continuity to the slow process of biological evolution.
The development of complexity is thus one of the wonderful dilemmas of human history. Over the past 12,000 years (when the complexity of human societies began to increase significantly) we have frequently adopted strategies of problem solving that cost more energy, labor, time, and money, and that often go against deep inclinations. For much of this time the cost was increased human labor: people worked harder to support complexity. We have done this for a simple reason: most of the time complexity works. It is a fundamental problem-solving tool. In its early phases, complexity can generate positive feedback and increasing returns (Tainter, 1988; Allen, Tainter, & Hoekstra, 1999). Confronted with challenges, we often respond by strategies such as developing more complex technologies, adding more elements to an institution (specialists, bureaucratic levels, controls, etc.), increasing organization or regulation of transactions, or gathering and processing more information. Each such action represents increasing complexity. Their effectiveness comes in part because changes in these dimensions can be enacted rapidly. While humans may be complexity averse when we personally bear the cost, our problem-solving institutions can be powerful complexity generators. All that is needed for growth of complexity is a problem that requires it. Since problems always arise, complexity seems to grow inexorably.
Since complexity is an adaptive problem-solving strategy that has costs, it can be viewed as an economic function. Societies invest in complexity. In any system of problem solving, the initial strategies tend to be both effective (they work) and cost-effective (giving high returns per unit of investment). This is a normal economic process: simple, inexpensive solutions are adopted before more complex and expensive ones. So in the history of human efforts to feed ourselves, labor-sparing hunting and gathering gave way to more labor-intensive agriculture, which itself became more intensive as populations grew.
Increasingly, subsistence agriculture is being replaced by industrialized food production that consumes more energy than it produces (Boserup, 1965; Clark & Haswell, 1966; Cohen, 1977). Whenever possible we produce minerals and energy from the most economical sources-ones that are least costly to find, extract, process, and distribute. As Herbert Spencer (e.g., 1972, pp. 39-46) and others have noted, our societies have changed from egalitarian relations, economic reciprocity, ad hoc leadership, and generalized social roles to social and economic differentiation, specialization, inequality, and full-time leadership. These arrangements are the essence of social complexity.
Complex solutions may for a time produce positive returns (Tainter, 1988; Allen, Tainter, & Hoekstra, 1999). Unfortunately, no society (or smaller institution such as an agency or firm) can forever enjoy stable or increasing returns to complexity in specific areas of problem solving. In any organization, increasing size and differentiation exacerbate the problem of internal transaction costs (Coase, 1937). Hierarchies differentiate (Bendix, 1956, p. 216) as opportunities or problems are perceived. Information be comes less coherent as it becomes more abundant, so that simplified models must substitute for the richness of actual processes (March & Simon, 1958, p. 203; Rosen, 1991, p. 82; Simon, 1997, p. 119). Decisions have unforeseen consequences (Spencer, 1972, p. 47; Senge, 1990, p. 23), and as will be discussed below, often drive up costs. The link between problem and solution is often tenuous (March & Olsen, 1986, p. 16). Because of the problems of transaction costs, rational, omniscient decision makers will reduce internal transactions when the cost of an extra internal transaction equals the cost of an external one (Coase 1937, pp. 394-395). The problem is that decision makers are typically not omniscient, and cannot foretell the future. Thus they inevitably make decisions that inadvertently increase costs. We tend to view the microprocessor industry as an exception to this problem, exemplified, for example, in Moore's Law. Microprocessor producers have enjoyed positive feedback and increasing returns. Yet even this industry must devise ever-more-clever solutions to physical constraints (e.g., Service 1997), which it cannot do indefinitely as easily as it has to date. Even economically-rational organizations cannot forever avoid diminishing returns to complexity, and certainly not institutions (such as ancient states) that are economically naive.
As highest-return solutions are exhausted, only more costly approaches remain to be adopted. As the highest-return ways to produce resources, conduct transactions, process information, and organize society are progressively implemented, adaptive problems must be addressed by more costly and less effective responses. As the costs of solutions grow, the point is reached where further investments in complexity do not give a proportionate return. Increments of investment begin to yield smaller and smaller increments of return. The marginal return (that is, the return per extra unit of investment) declines. This is the central problem: diminishing returns to complexity. Carried far enough it brings on economic stagnation and ineffective problem solving. In its most severe form it has made societies vulnerable to collapse, and historically has led to conditions that are colloquially called "dark ages" (Tainter, 1988, 1999). A prolonged period of diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving is a major part of what makes a society unsustainable (Tainter, 1995, 1996b; Allen, Tainter, & Hoekstra, 1999).
This thesis can be illustrated in two principle areas of problem solving: producing resources and producing information. In the examples to follow, people solve the problems of obtaining resources and information in economically rational ways. They prefer behavior and institutions that are simple rather than complex. They prefer to conserve labor and other types of energy. When problems require them to adopt new institutions or ways of meeting their needs, they experience increasing complexity and diminishing returns. These examples illustrate the evolution of many problem-solving adaptive systems: increasing complexity with initially positive returns, then diminishing returns to complexity and increasing costliness.
Producing Resources
People typically pluck the lowest apple first. That is, provided that they have knowledge, people initially use sources of food, raw materials, and energy that are easiest to acquire, process, distribute, and consume. As problems arise in the form of growing consumption and/or exhaustion of inexpensive resources, people turn to supplies that are more difficult to acquire, process, distribute, or consume. Often this requires greater effort while yielding no greater return (although, as will be shown, sometimes this is not the case).
We are socialized today to think that among the most desirable goals of life are to produce and acquire as much as possible. Yet this is a recent development: our ancestors typically produced much less than they were capable of, as many people still do. Hobbes's description of hunter-gatherer life as "nasty, brutish, and short" has accustomed us to think of simple subsistence production as a continuous struggle. Yet anthropologist Richard Lee found that the !Kung San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert (a landscape not very productive) need to work only about 2.5 days per week to obtain all the food they need (Lee, 1968, 1969). Because of this example, simple foragers such as the !Kung have been labeled the original leisure society.
Subsistence agriculturalists also seem to work rather little, and it is particularly noticeable that often they produce less than they might. Labor seems to be abundant, underutilized, and inefficiently deployed, so that subsistence farmers characteristically under-produce. The Kapauku Papuans of New Guinea, for example, according to research by Leopold Posposil, work about two hours a day at agricultural tasks, even during the peak labor season. Similarly, Robert Carneiro observed in the Amazon Basin that Kuikuru men spend about 2 hours a day on agricultural work and 90 minutes fishing. They spend the rest of the day dancing, wrestling, or resting. With a little extra effort they could produce much more than they do. Many households in such societies do not produce even enough to live on; they are supported by others (Sahlins, 1972). Thus farmers working only a couple of hours a day may be supporting even more households than their own.
Colonial administrators, confronted with such underproduction (and in ignorance of both economics and human diversity), often concluded that the native people they supervised were inherently lazy. Yet subsistence farmers in more economically developed places follow similar strategies, including peasants of pre-revolutionary Russia. The Russian economist A. V. Chayanov (1966) studied the intensity of labor among 25 farm families in Volokolamsk. Plotting intensity of labor against the relative number of workers per household, Chayanov found economies of scale: the larger the relative number of workers per household the less effort each person puts forth. Productive intensity varies inversely with productive capacity (Sahlins, 1972, p. 91). Even under the harsh conditions in which they lived, Russian peasants under-produced. Those able to produce the most actually under-produced the most. They valued leisure more highly than the marginal return to extra labor.
To account for this contradiction between the availability of labor and the failure to apply it beyond basic sufficiency, Ester Boserup wrote her classic work The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965). The key she found to persistent underproduction is the marginal return to increasing labor-a subtle concept brought forth by the sustained effort of Western economic science, but understood all along by the lazy natives and conservative peasants. Simply put, while agricultural intensification (in non-mechanized cultivation) causes the productivity of land to increase, it causes the productivity of labor to decline. Each extra unit of labor produces less output per unit than did the first unit of labor. The natives and peasants produce less than they might for the simple reason that increasing production yields diminishing returns to labor.
Boserup's general principle has been amply verified. In northern Greece, for example, labor applied at an annual rate of about 200 hours per hectare is roughly 15 times more productive (in returns per hour of labor) than labor applied at 2000 hours per hectare. The latter farmer will certainly harvest more per hectare, but will harvest less per hour of work (Clark & Haswell, 1966; Wilkinson, 1973).
If extra labor is so inefficient, why undertake it? Boserup suggests (although here her thesis is somewhat oversimplified) that the factor that has historically driven agricultural intensification is population growth. Phrased in the terms of this essay, growth of population straining food supply presents an adaptive problem that can be addressed by intensifying food production, whether by adopting agriculture to supplement foraging (Cohen, 1977) or by applying greater labor to existing agriculture. In some cases subsistence intensification may amount only to the application of labor, while in other cases it involves increasing the complexity of labor (by adding extra steps such as field preparation, weeding, manuring, fallowing, or irrigation). Both strategies institutionalize higher costs in the production system.
Intensification of production leads to several outcomes. At its best it alleviates the shortfall and all is well. At its worst-directed from above by rulers to seek to maximize production for political purposes-it can destabilize productive systems and make an entire society vulnerable to collapse. On occasion it is serendipitous, bringing great increases in prosperity. There are telling historical examples.
Early states and empires had such capacity to mobilize labor and resources that we still marvel today at the monuments they built. Yet in these societies information about productive capacity seems to have been less developed than production itself. Rulers often seem not to have understood the capacity of the land and peasants to intensify production. They appear to have felt that compelling peasants to greater labor would always compensate for the declining productivity of land. The result was societies that underwent long periods of political growth, followed by economic stagnation, conquest by another state, or collapse. The Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2100-2000 B.C.) is a particularly dramatic example.
In southern Mesopotamia, bringing irrigation to the desert soils initially produces high yields along with prosperity, security, and stability. This was the strategy of the Third Dynasty of Ur. It extended irrigation and encouraged population and settlement growth. It established a complex bureaucracy to collect the revenues generated by high production. All was well for a few generations-at least for the rulers.
After a few years of over irrigating Mesopotamian soils, saline groundwater rises and ruins the soil. The Third Dynasty of Ur was destroyed by its own strategy for raising revenues-part of its problem solving efforts. Before the Third Dynasty of Ur, in the period ca. 2900 to 2300 B.C., crop yields had averaged about 2030 liters per hectare. By the end of the third millennium B.C. they had declined to 1134 liters. This decline in production (and hence in state revenues) seems to have been the problem that the Third Dynasty tried to overcome by intensifying production and increasing governmental complexity. Thus as yields declined and costs rose, farmers had to intensify their production to support a costlier state structure. It was clearly a course of diminishing returns to complexity.
The Third Dynasty of Ur persisted through five kings and then collapsed. The state had built an irrigation regime and administrative apparatus, and encouraged population levels, that could not be sustained without central government. When the administrative apparatus collapsed it took the countryside with it. By 1700 B.C. yields were down to 718 liters per hectare. More than one-fourth of the fields still in production yielded on average only about 370 liters per hectare. For equal efforts cultivators took in harvests less than one-fourth as large as those 800 years earlier. By the end of the second millennium B.C. the number of settlements had dropped by 40 percent and the settled area had contracted by 77 percent. Population densities did not grow again to the level of Ur III for nearly 2500 years, when a new regime tried again to maximize production (Adams, 1978, 1981; Yoffee, 1988).
Happily, solving problems by intensifying production and increasing complexity does not always yield catastrophic results. The law of diminishing returns is occasionally superseded by the law of unintended consequences. In one of the most significant works of economic history, Richard Wilkinson (1973) described how the people of England responded to the problems of population growth and deforestation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Population growth throughout this era led progressively to agricultural intensification and deforestation. As forests were cut to provide food and fuel for more and more people, the supply of wood no longer sufficed as it once had. Coal began increasingly to be used for heating and cooking. For several reasons this was done reluctantly. Coal was polluting, and it was not to be found everywhere. Entire new systems had to be devised to distribute it-canals and railways. Digging a fuel from the ground costs more than cutting a standing tree. Coal overall cost more per unit of heat than did wood, and had to be purchased with cash. Those forced to rely on coal, in at least its initial phases of adoption, experienced a decline in their financial well-being. Solving the problem of insufficiency of wood by using coal instead was at first another experience of diminishing returns to intensification and complexity. People solved their problems, but were worse off for it.
As the importance of coal grew its most accessible deposits were depleted. The cost of coal rose. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper until groundwater limited further mining. This was a vexatious problem, but it stimulated greatly the development of the steam engine. In time the steam engine was perfected enough to pump water efficiently from mines. The coal-based economy came to be institutionalized.
The remarkable part of this story is that, with the emergence of an economy based on coal, the development of a distribution network of canals and railways, and the refinement of the steam engine, several of the most important elements of the Industrial Revolution were in place. Coal, which initially produced diminishing returns and declining welfare, came with further technological refinement to subsidize increasing returns and great growth of welfare. The secret of the success was an energy source that could be developed to subsidize far more human activity than is possible solely by harvesting the products of photosynthesis, such as wood. Solving the problems of extracting and distributing coal raised transaction costs, but this was more than offset by the prosperity arising from positive feedback and technological development. The outcome could not have been more different from what happened in ancient Mesopotamia. It is one of history's great ironies that industrialism, the great generator of economic well-being, emerged in part from solving the problem of resource depletion, which so often generates poverty and collapse.
The problem of producing resources confronts every human institution. Being rational and complexity (i.e., cost)-averse, humans always prefer to use resources that they know can be economically found, harvested, and put to use. We prefer to pluck the lowest fruit first. As such "first-line" resources become insufficient, the problem of producing more resources tends to raise complexity and increase costs, and thus decreases economic efficiency. Thus most of us now work far more than the two hours per day of simple cultivators. On occasion this intensification of production may generate an unexpected benefit, as in the deployment of coal, but often it leads to working harder just to maintain a constant income of resources.
Producing Knowledge
We see in the development of industrialism that producing knowledge (of, for example, steam engines and transportation) has as great a role in adaptive problem solving as producing resources. We are taught to think that knowledge is a good thing, and for the most part of course it is. Yet, except for those who must fund education or research, we rarely realize that knowledge has costs. Moreover, increasing knowledge is not always cost effective. As knowledge grows more complex, its production also becomes subject to diminishing returns. Bounded rationality and simple overproduction further reduce the effectiveness of information (March & Simon, 1958, p. 203; Rosen, 1991, p. 82; Simon, 1997, p. 119).
As any society increases in complexity it becomes more dependent on information, and its members require higher levels of education. In 1924 S. G. Strumilin evaluated the productivity of education in the newly-formed Soviet Union. The first two years of education, Strumilin found, raise a worker's skills an average of 14.5 percent per year. Adding a third year causes the productivity of education to decline, for skills rise only an additional eight percent. Four to six years of education raise workers' skills only a further four to five percent per year (Tul'chinskii, 1967, pp. 51-52). Education beyond the first two years in this case yielded diminishing returns.
In the United States a comprehensive study of the costs of education was published by Fritz Machlup (1962). In 1957-58, home education of pre-school children cost the United States $886,400,000 per year for each age class from newborn through five. (This cost is primarily potential income foregone by parents.) In elementary and secondary school the costs increased to $2,564,538,462 per year per age class (for ages 6 through 18). For those who aspired to higher education (33.5 percent of the eligible population in 1960), a 4-year course of study cost the nation $3,189,250,000 per grade per year. Thus the monetary cost of education between pre-school, when the most general and broadly useful education takes place, and college, when the learning is most specialized, increased in the late 1950s by 1075 percent per capita. Yet from 1900 to 1960 the productivity of this investment for producing specialized expertise declined throughout (Fig. 1) (Machlup, 1962, pp. 79, 91, 104-105). As S. G. Strumilin found in the Soviet Union in 1924, higher levels of educational investment yield declining marginal returns.
Contemporary science, humanity's ultimate exercise in problem solving, shows parallel trends. The knowledge developed early in a scientific discipline tends to be generalized and inexpensive to produce. Thereafter the work becomes increasingly specialized. Specialized research tends to be more costly and difficult to resolve, so that increasing investments yield declining marginal returns. Walter Rostow once argued that marginal productivity first rises and then falls in individual fields of research (1980, pp. 170-171). Even the great physicist Max Planck noted that ". . . with every advance [in science] the difficulty of the task is increased" (Rescher, 1980, p. 80). Nicholas Rescher has called this "Planck's Principle of Increasing Effort." As easier questions are resolved, science moves inevitably to more complex research topics and to more costly organizations (Rescher, 1980, pp. 93-94). Rescher suggests that "As science progresses within any of its specialized branches, there is a marked increase in the over-all resource-cost to realizing scientific findings of a given level [of] intrinsic significance . . ." (1978, p. 80). The size and costliness of science must grow exponentially just to maintain a constant rate of progress (Rescher, 1980, p. 92). Derek de Solla Price observed in 1963 that science was growing faster than either the population or the economy, and of all the scientists who had ever lived, 80-90 percent were still alive at that time (Price, 1963).
Scientists rarely think about the benefit/cost ratio to investment in their research. If we evaluate the productivity of our investment in science by some measure such as the issuance of patents (Fig. 2), however, the historical productivity of science appears to be declining. Patenting is a controversial measure of productivity (e.g., Machlup, 1962, pp. 174-175; Schmookler 1966; Griliches, 1984), but there is good evidence in a field of applied science where the return to investment can be readily determined: medicine. Over the 52-year period shown in Fig. 3, the productivity of the United States health care system for improving life expectancy declined by nearly 60 percent.
The declining productivity of the U.S. health care system illustrates clearly the historical development of problem-solving systems. Rescher points out:
Once all of the findings at a given state-of-the-art level of investigative technology have been realized, one must move to a more expensive level. . . . In natural science we are involved in a technological arms race: with every "victory over nature" the difficulty of achieving the breakthroughs which lie ahead is increased. (1980, pp. 94, 97)
The productivity of medicine is declining because the inexpensive diseases and ailments were conquered first. The basic research that led to penicillin, for example, cost no more than $20,000. The remaining maladies are more difficult and costly to cure (Rescher, 1978, pp. 85-86; 1980, p. 52). As each increasingly expensive disease is conquered, the increment to average life expectancy becomes ever smaller. The marginal return to medical investment progressively declines.
Problem-solving, whether involving resources or information, commonly evolves along a path of increasing complexity and positive returns, then higher costs and diminishing returns (Tainter, 1988, 1995, 1996b). A system of problem-solving that follows such a trajectory cannot be sustained indefinitely, as the rulers of the Third Dynasty of Ur found to their collective dismay. Ultimately fiscal weakness and popular disaffection cause such systems to be terminated or to collapse. Yet commonly when the solution to a problem is decided upon, it is seen as a rational short-term measure. The higher complexity and higher cost of implementing the solution may appear only to be incremental and affordable. As Spencer would have predicted, cumulative and long-term effects, which typically are unforeseen, do the damage.
ADAPTIVE PROBLEM SOLVING: LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES
Complexity has unintended consequences over the long term in part because it is cumulative. Each increment of complexity builds on what has gone before, so that complexity seems to grow exponentially. Moreover, each increment to complexity appears at its adoption to be a rational response to a problem. The additional cost seems reasonable and affordable. The fact that the problem was a short-term one is often forgotten, and so complexity comes to grow. This is the key to understanding the development of unsupportable complexity: it grows by small steps, each necessary, each a reasonable solution to a problem. Yet the first case study shows how cumulatively, over long periods of time, complex problem solving grows to a point of such costliness that it becomes unsupportable. This process is a powerful stimulus to social and economic change. It may enrich people, impoverish them, or even kill many of them (Tainter, 1988, 1999).
Governments are problem-solving systems that inherently attract challenges, which is one reason why they seem always to grow in size and complexity. It is not strictly correct to talk of institutions having goals (Aldrich, 1979, p. 4) -such a metaphor suffers from reification - but all long-term institutions incorporate mechanisms to ensure their continuity. These mechanisms include socializing members to a common set of values, and making the welfare of individuals congruent with or even dependent upon the continuity of the institution. In this way the members of institutions set, and work toward, the goal of continuity. It is rare for an institution that has survived for a long time, or is intended to, voluntarily to disband. There is much to learn from the history of problem-solving institutions, of which the Roman Empire is one of the best examples.
The Western Roman Empire
The Roman Empire is paradoxically one of history's great successes and one of its great failures (Tainter, 1994). The fact that it could be both is understandable in the context of how its main problem-solving institutions - the government and army - experienced changing economies that ultimately affected millions of people both within the empire and without.
The Romans' early success came from a means of expansion that was fiscally self-perpetuating. Defeated peoples gave the economic basis, and some of the manpower, for further expansion. It was a strategy with positive economic returns. In 167 B.C., for example, the Romans were able to eliminate taxation of themselves and still expand the empire.
Empires eventually reach or even exceed a sustainable size. In the pre-industrial era this occurred when the distance from the capital would grow so great that communication with the frontiers became slow and uncertain; or when insurmountable geographical barriers were reached; or when peoples were found whose conquest was uneconomical or impossible (Tainter, 1988, pp. 148-149). For Rome, the most efficient empire would have consisted of the Mediterranean fringe, which could be administered easily by sea. Once the Romans had the Mediterranean, though, the lands they held were always threatened by new enemies further inland. To alleviate these threats the Romans expanded into the interior of Asia, to the Danube and beyond, and into north-western Europe. In these places the empire found, or even exceeded, its limits of both territory and economy, for administration by land travel was always less efficient than by sea. Attempts at further conquest - in Scotland, central Europe, and Mesopotamia - showed that continued expansion would be too costly. Only a salient known as Dacia was held across the Danube, from the early second century until the early 270s. The Romans were correct in the threats that they perceived, for it was from precisely these areas that raids and invasions were repeatedly launched in later centuries.
Cicero once complained that of all Rome's conquests, only Asia yielded a surplus. There is a point worth examining in this exaggeration, for the economics of empire are seductive but illusory. The returns to any campaign of conquest are highest initially, when the accumulated surpluses of the conquered peoples are appropriated. Thereafter the conqueror assumes the cost of administering and defending the province. In the case of Rome these responsibilities lasted for centuries, and had to be paid for from year-to-year agricultural surpluses. The Roman Empire was powered by solar energy, which provides an economy with little surplus production per capita (Jones, 1964, pp. 841-844; 1974, pp. 37-39, 83, 138; Tainter, 1988, p. 149; 1994). Once the phase of conquest is over, the cost of empire rises and benefits decline. Even the first emperor, Augustus (27 B.C.-14 A.D.), complained of fiscal shortages, and made up state deficits from his own purse (Gibbon, 1776-88, p. 140; Hammond, 1946, p. 75; Frank, 1940, pp. 7-9, 15).
The government financed by agricultural taxes barely sufficed for ordinary administration. When extraordinary expenses arose, typically during wars, the precious metals on hand frequently were insufficient. Facing the costs of war with Parthia and rebuilding Rome after the Great Fire, Nero (54-68) began in 64 A.D. a policy that later emperors found irresistible. He debased the primary silver coin, the denarius, reducing the alloy from 98 to 93 percent silver. It was the first step down a slope that resulted two centuries later in a currency that was worthless and a government that was insolvent (Fig. 4).
After decades of relative stability the empire's position deteriorated sharply during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161-180). Invasions of Parthians from the east and Germans from the north coincided with an outbreak of plague that killed from one-fourth to one-third of the population (Boak, 1955, p. 19; Mazzarino, 1966, p. 152; McNeill, 1976, p. 116; Russell, 1958, pp. 36-37). The empire survived these challenges, but hereafter the currency was debased more frequently. In 194-195 the emperor Septimius Severus (193-211), in what is called the Great Debasement, lowered the silver to about 56 percent (Walker, 1978).
The half-century from 235 to 284 was a time of unparalleled crisis, during which the empire nearly came to an end. There were foreign and civil wars, which followed one upon another almost without interruption. Over this period there were 26 legitimate emperors, and as many as 50 usurpers or about 1 insurrection per year. Germans and Persians invaded repeatedly. Cities were sacked and frontier provinces devastated. The empire shrank in the 260s (temporarily, as it turned out) to Italy, the Balkans, and North Africa. By prodigious effort and sacrifice the empire survived the crisis, but at great cost. It emerged at the turn of the fourth century A.D. as a very different organization.
Great changes were needed in the government and the political system. Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine (306-337) responded with sweeping political and economic changes that transformed the empire. The government they designed was larger, more complex, and more highly organized. They doubled the size of the army, so that it may have stood as high as 650,000 by the end of the fourth century. To pay for this the government taxed its citizens more heavily, conscripted their labor, and dictated their occupations. It became a coercive, omnipresent state that tabulated and amassed all resources for its own survival.
Many internal transactions came to be closely regulated. Diocletian established Rome's first budget, and each year a tax rate was calculated to provide the revenue. The tax was established from a master list of the empire's people and lands, tabulated down to individual households and fields. Taxes apparently doubled between 324 and 364. Villages were responsible for the taxes on their members, and one village could even be held liable for another. The government conscripted men for the army and requisitioned services from guilds. Occupations were made hereditary and obligatory. Positions that had once been eagerly sought, such as in city senates, became burdensome as leading citizens were held responsible for tax deficiencies.
Despite several monetary reforms a stable currency could not be found (Fig. 5). As masses of worthless coins were produced, prices rose higher and higher. In the second century a modius of wheat (about nine liters) had sold during normal harvests for about 1/2 denarius. In Diocletian's Edict on Prices (301) the price was set at 100 denarii. In 335 a modius of wheat sold in Egypt for over 6000 denarii, and in 338 for over 10,000 (Jones, 1964, pp. 27, 119). Money-changers in the east would not convert imperial currency, and the government refused to accept its own coins for taxes. Much of a soldier's pay was provided in supplies rather than in the worthless coins (Meyer, 1987; Van Meter, 1991, p. 47; Jones, 1964, p. 27; 1974, p. 201; Duncan-Jones, 1990, p. 115; Williams, 1985, p. 79; Mattingly, 1960, pp. 222-223; Hodgett, 1972, p. 38).
The tax system supporting the more complex government and larger army had unforeseen consequences. After the plagues of the second and third centuries conditions were never favorable for population to recover. Peasants could not support large families. Despite government edicts, marginal lands went out of cultivation. In some provinces, up to one-third to one-half of arable lands came to be deserted by the late empire. There were shortages of labor in agriculture, industry, the military, and the civil service. Faced with taxes, peasants would abandon their lands and flee to the protection of a wealthy landowner, who was glad to have the extra labor. Feudal relations emerged, and in lieu of peasants the landowners offered vagabonds or even slaves for military service (McNeill, 1976, p. 116; Russell, 1958, p. 140; Boak, 1955; Jones, 1964, 1974; MacMullen, 1976, pp. 182-183; Wickham, 1984). By 400 A.D. most of Gaul and Italy were owned by less than a dozen senatorial families (Williams, 1985, p. 214), who had the power to defy the government's tax demands.
From the late fourth century the barbarians could no longer be kept out. They forced their way into Roman lands in western Europe and North Africa, initially causing great destruction. The government had no choice but to acknowledge them as legitimate rulers of the territories they occupied. The Germanic kings kept the revenues of these territories and, although they defended what was left of the empire, they did not do so reliably. Throughout the fifth century the western empire was in a negative feedback loop tending toward collapse. Lost or devastated provinces meant lower government income and less military strength. Lower military strength in turn meant that more areas would be lost or ravaged. By 448 Rome had lost most of Spain (Barker, 1924, pp. 413-414). After 461 Italy and Gaul had little connection. The empire shrank to Italy and adjacent lands. The most important ruler in the West was no longer the Roman Emperor but the Vandal King, Gaiseric, in North Africa (Ferrill, 1986, p. 154; Wickham, 1981, p. 20).
In the 20 years following the death of Valentinian III (455), the Roman army proper dwindled to nothing. The government came to rely almost exclusively on troops from Germanic tribes. Finally these could not be paid. They demanded one-third of the land in Italy in lieu of pay. This being refused, they revolted, elected Odoacer as their king, and deposed the last emperor in Italy, Romulus Augustulus, in 476. The Roman Senate informed the Eastern Emperor, Zeno, that an emperor in Italy was no longer needed (Jones, 1964, p. 244).
The strategy of the later Roman Empire was to respond to a near-fatal challenge in the third century by increasing the size, complexity, power, and costliness of the primary problem-solving system - the government and its army. Limited by bounded rationality, Roman officials could not foresee the consequences of this strategy. The higher costs were undertaken not to expand the empire or to acquire new wealth, but to sustain the status quo. The benefit/cost ratio of imperial government declined as it lost both legitimacy and support (Tainter, 1988, 1994). In the end the Western Roman Empire could no longer afford the problem of its own existence.
The Early Byzantine Recovery
The debacle in Western Europe during the fifth century meant the end of the Western Roman state, but the Eastern Roman Empire (usually known as the Byzantine Empire) persisted under its own emperors, changing greatly and coming to an end only when the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. For much of its history it lost territory, so that by the end the state consisted only of the city itself. Yet during the tenth and early eleventh centuries Byzantium was on the offensive, and doubled the territory under its control. There is a lesson in complexity and problem solving in the steps that made this possible.
The most urgent needs of the eastern emperors were to develop the economic base on which military security depended, and to improve the effectiveness of the army. Both tasks were begun by Anastasius (491-518). He established a sound coinage in the copper denominations on which daily life depended, thereby revitalizing commerce. As part of his financial reforms, Anastasius gave the army cash to buy rations, uniforms, and arms, rather than issuing these. The allowances were evidently generous, so that the army attracted large numbers of native volunteers. Barbarian mercenaries and their generals continued to be employed, but became much less important (Treadgold, 1996). Within a few decades these economic and military reforms had produced such results that Justinian (527-565) could both increase the size of the follis (the most valuable of the copper coins) and, after defeating Persia, attempt to recover the western provinces.
An army sent to North Africa in 532 conquered the Kingdom of the Vandals within a year. Almost immediately, the Byzantine general, Belisarius, was sent to reconquer Italy. He had taken Rome and Ravenna, captured the Ostrogothic King, and conquered all of Italy south of the Po when he was recalled in 540 to fight the Persians again.
In 541, just when the job in Italy seemed about done, bubonic plague swept over the empire. It had not been seen before in the Mediterranean, and took four years to run its course. Like any disease introduced to a population with no resistance, the effects were devastating. Just as in the fourteenth century, the plague of the sixth century killed from one-fourth to one-third of the population.
The enormous loss of taxpayers caused immediate financial problems. A reserve of 29 million gold solidi amassed by Anastasius and Justin (518-527) was soon gone. Army pay fell into arrears, and troops either mutinied or handed conquests (even the city of Rome) back to the enemy. The Ostrogoths recovered and retook most of Italy. The field army of Byzantine Italy had to be rebuilt twice. The Moors took much of Byzantine Africa.
The population was so depleted by plague that more barbarian mercenaries had to be recruited, and these had to be paid in gold. By debasing the currency and slashing expenditures, the Emperor was able to send another army to Italy in 552, and even to back a rebellion against the Visigothic king of Spain. Italy was reconquered by 554, but the last Ostrogoths held out until 561. In 558, though, the plague returned, and again military pay fell short. Justinian managed to conquer only about the southern fifth of Spain.
At his death in 565 Justinian left a greatly enlarged empire, but the new conquests proved hard to hold with population and treasury both depleted. Within four years the Visigoths attacked in Spain and the Moors in Africa. The Lombards invaded Italy and took most of the interior by 572. War resumed with Persia. Slavs and Avars (a coalition of tribes related to the Huns) crossed the Danube. The Byzantines again defeated the Persians, but the Slavs raided all the way to Greece. To pay for these wars, the alloy of the gold solidus had to be debased by adding silver, and the weight of the copper follis was regularly reduced (Fig. 6, Harl, 1996, pp. 195-197).
The wars also took a toll on the Persians, and in 590 rebels overthrew the Persian king. The Byzantine Emperor Maurice Tiberius (582-602) put the king's son on the Persian throne, but had to attend to problems in the Balkans. Byzantine troops defeated the Avars and Slavs, and by 599 practically cleared them from the Balkans. But the empire's resources were stretched by these conflicts. After the campaigns against Persia and in the Balkans, there was no money to send troops to Italy. In 602 Maurice ordered his troops to winter north of the Danube. They mutinied, marched on Constantinople, and killed the emperor. The Persian King Khosrau II vowed to avenge his benefactor and, grasping at the pretext, began to snatch Byzantine provinces. Thus began a crisis that lasted for over a century and nearly brought the empire to an end.
The empire was so disorganized by these troubles that there was a general military breakdown in the Balkans and Asia. The Slavs and Avars overran the Balkans again. The Persians spread through Asia Minor. North Africa and Egypt successfully rebelled and placed Heraclius (610-641) on the Byzantine throne. The empire he took over lay in ruins and was financially exhausted. The Persians reached the Bosporus (opposite Constantinople) in 615. In 619 they began the conquest of Egypt, the empire's richest province. Constantinople was besieged from 618 to 626.
Existing resources could not fund a recovery. In 615 church treasures were melted down to meet government expenses, from which silver coins were issued with the inscription "God save the Romans." Heraclius cut the pay of troops and officials by half in 616. Bronze was needed for arms and armor, so Heraclius followed his predecessors by further lowering the weight of the follis (Fig. 6). Many times the mint simply took larger coins minted in the sixth century, chiseled them into fragments, and restruck each piece as a follis. The strategy was clearly inflationary.
Heraclius' economic measures bought time for his military strategy to work. He counterattacked with increasing success starting in 622. In 626 the siege of Constantinople was broken, and the following year the emperor began to advance into Persian territory. In 627 Heraclius destroyed the Persian army and in 628 occupied the Persian king's favorite residence. The Persians had no choice but to agree to peace. The Byzantines got all their lost territory returned. The war had lasted 26 years, and resulted in no more than restoration of the status quo of a generation earlier.
The empire was exhausted by the struggle and Heraclius's great victory was not to last. Arab forces, newly converted to Islam, broke into imperial territory in 634 and two years later defeated the Byzantine army decisively. Syria and Palestine, which had taken 18 years to recover, were lost again. Egypt was taken in 641. The wealthiest provinces were permanently gone, and soon the empire was reduced to Anatolia, Armenia, North Africa, Sicily, and parts of Italy. The Persians fared even worse, for the Arabs conquered their empire completely.
Under Constans II (641-668) and throughout the seventh century, the strategic situation continued to deteriorate. The Arabs built their first fleet in 641, and with it took the capital of Cyprus. They ravaged Rhodes in 654, and defeated the Byzantine fleet the next year. The Arabs raided Asia Minor nearly every year for two centuries. Constantinople itself was besieged each year from 674 to 678. The Bulgars, a new enemy, broke into the empire from the north. The Arabs took Carthage in 697. From 717 to 718 an Arab force besieged Constantinople continuously for over a year. The city was saved in the summer of 718, when the Byzantines ambushed reinforcements sent through Asia Minor. It was a turning point in a centuries-long struggle. The Arabs had to withdraw and were never again able to mount such a threat.
In the century before the victory of 718 the political and economic life of the eastern Mediterranean had been utterly transformed. The huge empire that the Romans had assembled was almost gone. Debasements and inflation had ruined monetary standards and the fiscal and economic institutions which depended on them. There were no longer standard weights to copper coins and monetary exchange was undermined. Around 659 Constans cut military pay in half again. With army pay by the 660s cut to one-fourth its level of 615, the government no longer pumped coins into the economy. By 700 most people within or formerly within the empire no longer used coins in everyday transactions. In most Mediterranean lands the economy ceased to have a monetary basis. The economy developed into its medieval form, organized around self-sufficient manors (Harl, 1996).
One can scarcely imagine the magnitude of the transformation required to save what was left of Byzantium. A way of life to which the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean had been accustomed for over a millennium had to be given up. As discussed in the previous section, the emperors of the late third and early fourth centuries had responded to a similar crisis by complexification. They increased the complexity of administration, the regimentation of the population, and the size of the army. This was paid for by levels of taxation so harmful that lands were abandoned and peasants could not replenish the population. Constans II and his successors could hardly impose more of the same exploitation on the depleted population of the shrunken empire. Instead they adopted a strategy that is truly rare in the history of complex societies: simplification.
Arab civil war from 659 to 663 caused the caliph in Syria to purchase a truce. The respite allowed Constans II to undertake fundamental transformations. The government had lost so much revenue that even at one-fourth the previous rate it could not pay its troops. Constans' solution was to devise a way for the army to support itself. He lacked ready cash but the imperial family had vast estates - perhaps one-fifth of the land in the empire. There was also much land abandoned from the Persian attacks. Such lands were divided among the troops. In Asia Minor and other parts of the empire, divisions of troops - called themes - were settled in new military zones. Soldiers (and later sailors) were given grants of land on condition of hereditary military service. It was apparently at this time that Constans halved military pay, for he now expected the troops to provide their own livelihood through farming (with a small monetary supplement). Correspondingly the Byzantine fiscal administration was greatly simplified.
The transformation ramified throughout Byzantine society, as any fundamental economic change must. Both central and provincial government were simplified, and the transaction costs of government were reduced. In the provinces, the civil administration was merged into the military. Cities across Anatolia contracted to fortified hilltops. Aristocratic life focused on the imperial court. There was little education beyond basic literacy and numeracy, and literature itself consisted of little more than lives of saints (Haldon, 1990; Treadgold, 1988, 1995, 1997). The period is sometimes called the Byzantine Dark Age.
The results of the simplification were evident almost immediately. The system of themes rejuvenated Byzantium. A class of peasant-soldiers was formed across the empire. The new farmer-soldiers had obligations to no landowners, only to the state. They became producers rather than consumers of the empire's wealth. They formed a new type of army in which military obligation, and the lands that went with it, were passed to the eldest son. From this new class of farmers came the force that sustained the empire. By lowering the cost of military defense the Byzantines secured a better return on their most important investment.
Byzantines forces began to put up stiffer resistance to the Arabs, as evident in the victories of 678 and 718. The empire began to lose land at a much slower rate. The Arabs continued to raid Anatolia but were unable to hold any of it for long. Soldiers were always near at hand. Fighting as they were for their own lands and families, they had much greater incentive and performed better. After the establishment of the themes the Arabs made progress in Anatolia only when the empire had internal troubles from 695 to 717. By 745 Constantine V was able to invade the Caliphate, the first successful invasion of Arab territory in a generation.
During the next century, campaigns against the Bulgars and Slavs gradually extended the empire in the Balkans. Greece was recaptured. Pay was increased after 840, yet gold became so plentiful that in 867 Michael III met an army payroll by melting down 20,000 pounds of ornaments from the throne room. When marines were added to the imperial fleet it became more effective against Arab pirates. In the tenth century the Byzantines reconquered parts of coastal Syria. Overall after 840 the size of the empire was nearly doubled. The process culminated when Basil II (963-1025) conquered the Bulgars and extended the empire's boundaries again to the Danube. In two centuries the Byzantines had gone from near disintegration to being the premier power in Europe and the Near East, an accomplishment won by decreasing the complexity and costliness of problem solving.
The Development of Modern Europe
Arms races are the classic example of diminishing returns to complexity. Any competitive nation will quickly match an opponent's advances in armaments, personnel, logistics, or intelligence, so that investments in these areas typically yield no lasting advantage or security. In an arms race, each competitor strives for advantage over its rivals, while the rivals strive to counter these and develop advantages of their own. Usually no state can gain an overwhelming advantage that lasts very long. More and more money, resources, and personnel are spent on that most fleeting of products: military advantage. The costs of being a competitive state continuously rise, while the return on investment inexorably declines. All the while a state must search continuously for the resources to remain competitive, and develop an organization to deploy those resources effectively. The unfolding of this process in Europe of the last millennium altered not only European societies, but ultimately changed the entire world. I will outline the development of this process from the fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
Europe before 1815 was almost always at war somewhere. From the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries France was at war from a low of 47 percent of years in some centuries, to a high of 77 percent in others. For England the range was 48 to 82 percent; for Spain, 47 to 92 percent. Even in the most peaceful centuries these nations were at war, on average, nearly every other year. In the whole of the sixteenth century there was barely a decade when Europe was entirely at peace. The seventeenth century enjoyed only 4 years of total peace; the eighteenth century, 16 years (Parker, 1988, p. 1; Rasler & Thompson, 1989, p. 40).
In the fifteenth century, siege guns ended the advantage of stone castles, and required changes in the strategies and technology of defense. From the early fifteenth century, builders designed fortifications that could support defensive cannon. A short time later walls were built that could also survive bombardment. By 1560 all the elements of the trace italienne had been developed, a fortification system of low, thick walls with angled bastions and extensive outworks. It was effective but expensive. In 1553 the city of Siena found it so costly to build such fortifications that no money was left for its army or fleet. Siena was annexed by Florence, against which, ironically, its fortifications had been built (Creveld, 1989, pp. 101-103; Parker, 1988, pp. 7, 9, 12).
Trace italienne fortifications, if one could afford them, were a worthy investment. It could take months or years to capture a place defended in this way. Offensive tacticians responded with more complicated siege methods, and their costs rose as well. A force of perhaps 50,000 besiegers had to be kept in place for weeks or months. Such a force needed 475 tons of food per day, to which was added ammunition, powder, and building materials. From this time on, local lords could not afford to build and defend an effective fortress, nor to attack one. The resources for war had now to be sought in capitalist towns rather than in the feudal countryside (Creveld, 1989, 106-108; Parker, 1988, p. 13). The scale of conflict developed from local or regional to national.
Open-field warfare also developed greater complexity. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries massed archers and the pike phalanx made the armored knight obsolete. These were in turn superseded by firearms. To make effective use of firearms took organization and drill. Infantry had to be drawn up in closely coordinated ranks. Those in the rear would reload while the lead musketeers fired, and quick changes of position gave an uninterrupted application of fire (Creveld, 1989, pp. 89-91; Kennedy, 1987, p. 21; Parker, 1988, pp. 16-20). Tactics were developed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of firing. Textbooks of military drill were published across the continent. Training and battlefield coordination became more important: ranks had to open and close on signal, while uneducated soldiers had to be familiar with what were, at the time, history's most advanced weapons. Victory came to depend not on simple force, but on the right combination of infantry, cavalry, firearms, cannon, and reserves (Creveld, 1989, pp. 92-94; Parker, 1988 pp. 18-23).
War came to involve ever-larger segments of society and became progressively more burdensome. Several European states saw the sizes of their armies increase tenfold between 1500 and 1700. Louis XIV's army stood at 273,000 in 1691. Five years later it was at 395,000, and nearly one-fourth of all adult Frenchmen were in the military. Between 1560 and 1659 Castile lost about eleven percent of its adult male population in the constant wars (Sundberg et al., 1994, p. 13). Each day, a field army of 30,000 needed 100,000 pounds of flour, and 1500 sheep or 150 cattle. Only the largest cities required more (Creveld, 1989, pp. 112-113; Parker, 1988, pp. 2, 45-46, 75).
Yet despite or because of these developments, land warfare became largely stalemated. There were few lasting breakthroughs. The new technologies, and mercenaries, could be bought by any power with money. No nation could gain a lasting advantage. When a nation such as Spain or France threatened to become dominant, alliances would form against it (Kennedy, 1987, 21-22). Major wars were slow and tedious, and were often decided by cumulative small victories and the slow erosion of the enemy's economic base. Defeated nations quickly recovered, though, and were soon ready to fight again. Warfare evolved of necessity into global flanking operations. European competition expanded into contests for power and influence overseas (Parker, 1988, pp. 43, 80-82).
Europeans employed the wealth from trade and colonization to sustain their ever-more-costly competition (Kennedy, 1987, pp. 24, 27-28, 43, 46-47, 52; Tainter, 1992, pp. 110, 124). The development of sea power and acquisition of colonies became part of the strategy of stalemated European warfare. Because of this, European war ultimately affected and changed the entire world. By 1914 the nations of Europe, and their offshoots, controlled fully 84% of the earth's surface (Parker, 1988, p. 5).
The naval powers of the time were England, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark/Norway, France, and Spain. From 1650 to 1680 the five northern powers increased their navies from 140,000 to 400,000 tons. In the 1630s the Dutch merchant fleet required the building of 300 to 400 new ships each year, about half of which were employed in Baltic trade (from which England imported much of its raw material for naval supplies). Between the 1630s and 1650 the Dutch merchant fleet grew by 533 percent (Sundberg et al., 1994, pp. 38, 42). Yet expanding navies entailed further problems of increasing complexity and cost. In 1511, for example, James IV of Scotland commissioned the building of the ship Great Michael. It took almost one-half of a year's income to build, and ten percent of his annual budget for seamen's wages. It was sold to France three years later, and ended its days rotting in Brest harbor (Parker, 1988, p. 90).
As the size and complexity of armies grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries new fields of specialization were needed, such as surveying and cartography. It was necessary to have accurate clocks and statistical reporting. Some eighteenth-century armies carried their own printing presses. Organization became more complex. Staff and administration were separated. Armies no longer marched as a unit, but could be split into smaller elements that traveled, under instructions, on their own. Battles came to last up to several months (Creveld, 1989, pp. 114, 117-122; Parker, 1988, p. 153).
In 1499 Louis XII asked what was needed to ensure a successful campaign in Italy. He was told that three things alone were required: money, money, and still more money (Sundberg et al., 1994, p. 10). As military affairs grew in size and complexity finance became the main constraint. The cost of putting a soldier in the field increased by 500 percent in the decades before 1630. Nations spent more and more of their income on war, but it was never enough. In 1513, for example, England obligated 90 percent of its budget to military efforts. In 1657 the figure was 92 percent. In the mid eighteenth century Frederick the Great allocated 90 percent of his income to war. In 1643, expenditures of the French government, mainly on war, came to twice the annual income (Kennedy, 1987, pp. 58, 60, 63). England's wars in the 1540s cost about ten times the crown's income (Kennedy, 1987, p. 60).
Sweden financed its wars through a combination of low population, untapped forest reserves, and eager markets for its products. The major states, lacking such advantages, had to rely on credit. Even with riches from her New World colonies, Spain's debts rose from 6 million ducats in 1556 to 180 million a century later. War loans grew from about 18 percent interest in the 1520s to 49 percent in the 1550s. Both France and Spain often had to declare bankruptcy, or force a lowering of the rate of interest. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries the Dutch, followed by the English, overcame these fiscal constraints by gaining access to reliable short-term and long-term credit. Being careful to pay the interest on loans, they were granted more favorable terms than other nations. They used this advantage to defeat opponents, France and Spain, that were wealthier but poor credit risks (Parker, 1988, p. 63-67; Rasler & Thompson, 1989, pp. 91, 94, 96, 103).
The wars raised permanently the cost of being a competitive state, and war-induced debt levels persisted long after the fighting ceased. Power always shifts, and victorious nations were never able to dominate for very long (Kennedy, 1987; Rasler & Thompson, 1989, pp. 106, 175-176). Many people of the time understood the futility of European wars, but arms races are especially difficult to break. In 1775 Frederick the Great eloquently described the state of affairs:
The ambitious should consider above all that armaments and military discipline being much the same throughout Europe, and alliances as a rule producing an equality of force between belligerent parties, all that princes can expect from the greatest advantages at present is to acquire, by accumulation of successes, either some small city on the frontier, or some territory which will not pay interest on the expenses of the war, and whose population does not even approach the number of citizens who perished in the campaigns. (Quoted in Parker [1988, p. 149])
As land warfare in Europe produced no lasting advantages, the expansion of competition to the global arena was a logical consequence. Competition expanded to include trade, capturing overseas territories, establishing colonies, attacking adversaries' colonies, and intercepting shipments of bullion and valuables. Yet even the foreign wealth could not meet the cost of some campaigns. In 1552 the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V spent 2.5 million ducats on a campaign at Metz, an amount equal to 10 times his American income. By the 1580s Phillip II was receiving 2 million ducats a year from American mines, but the ill-fated armada of 1588 cost five times that (Kennedy, 1987, pp. 46-47). Even with this massive transfer of bullion from the New World, Spain's debt grew 3,000 percent in the century following 1556, and bankruptcy caused Spanish military operations to fail. Clearly they would have failed much earlier (or not been undertaken) if Spain had not been able to draw upon New World wealth.
European competition stimulated great complexity in the form of technological innovation, development of science, political transformation, and global expansion. To subsidize European competition it became necessary to secure the produce of foreign lands (and later fossil fuels). New forms of energy, and non-local resources, were channeled into this small part of the world. This concentration of global resources allowed European conflict to reach heights of complexity and costliness that could never have been sustained with European resources alone (Tainter, 1992, pp. 123-125). For better or worse the repercussions of centuries of European war are a legacy in which we still participate, and will for the foreseeable future.
PROBLEM SOLVING AND SUSTAINABILITY: DIVERGENT OUTCOMES
These cases were chosen to illustrate quite different outcomes to long-term, adaptive, organizational problem solving. There is one case of collapse (the Western Roman Empire), one of sustainability through simplification (the early Byzantine recovery), and one of sustainable problem solving based on growing complexity and energy subsidies (Europe). There are lessons in these cases for the problem solving efforts of any institution, today or in the future, that is intended to last.
The Western Roman Empire
The lessons of the Western Roman Empire are that (a) a society or other institution can be destroyed by the cost of sustaining itself, and (b) complexity in problem solving does its damage subtly, unforeseeably, and cumulatively over the long term.
The Roman Empire, like all empires, was founded on the expectation of high returns to conquest. Yet by the second century A.D Rome's enemies had grown stronger while the empire had stopped expanding. Fighting increasingly took place within the empire itself, and ordinary budgets often would not suffice to defend the state. The problems became acute in the third century when forces of Persians, Germanic war bands, and contending Romans crossed and ravaged the empire. A primary strategy to meet the costs of these crises (mainly military costs) was to debase the currency. There was no choice: the crises had to be contained whatever the true cost to the future.
Victories in the late third century gave a respite to implement a longer-term strategy, which was to increase the size and complexity of the problem-solving system (government and its army), and to organize the empire to produce the resources this required. To gain the required revenues every unit of production was counted, whether person, land, ship, or cart. Levels of taxation were established and the empire's agents were sent to ensure collection. Nothing was allowed to interfere. If peasants abandoned their fields they were returned to work, or the lands assigned to others. Essential occupations were made hereditary. The survival of the empire took precedence over the well-being of its producers. Each of these controls exacerbated transaction costs.
The irony is that each step to ensure continuity - whether debased currency, larger army, frozen labor, or increased control - was a rational solution to an immediate problem. Had any of these steps not been taken the empire would not have survived as long as it did. Yet each step degraded the well-being of the producers on whom survival depended. In time the productive system declined, lands were abandoned, and the peasant population first declined and then stagnated. Emperors, constrained by bounded rationality, could not foresee these ramifications. In the end the costliness and complexity of the problem-solving system made collapse inevitable.
The Early Byzantine Recovery
Rulers of the ancient world had been accustomed to ordering resources and having them delivered. It took a crisis of unprecedented proportions to convince the rulers of this empire that they could no longer live and compete as they formerly did. The Byzantines perceived this during the crises of the seventh century, during which they lost half their empire and seemed about to lose the rest. The population had not recovered from the sixth century plague when the Persian invasion of the early 600s destroyed urban life in Asia Minor, and both the Persians and later the Arabs took into slavery as many of the remaining inhabitants as they could catch. Taxes dwindled and the government could no longer support the army. Arab victory seemed inevitable.
The Byzantine Empire responded with one of history's only examples of a complex society simplifying. Much of the structure of ranks and honors, based on urban life, disappeared. Civil administration simplified and merged in the countryside with the military. Governmental transaction costs were reduced. The economy contracted and there were fewer artisans and merchants. Elite social life focused on the capitol and the emperor, rather than on the cities that no longer existed. Literacy, writing, and education declined. Barter and feudal social relations replaced the millennium-old monetary economy.
Most fundamentally, the Byzantine government cut dramatically the cost of its most expensive part, the army, while simultaneously making it more effective. No longer did peasants have to support themselves and a recently ineffectual army. The army became landholders and producers much like the peasants. The land soldiers defended was their own. The people they defended were kin and neighbors. Accordingly they fought better than before and the government obtained a better return on their cost. Almost immediately the army began to perform better. The empire stopped losing land so rapidly and in time took the offensive. In this case the problem-solving strategy was not complexity, but simplification after a long period of increased complexity.
Europe
Sustainability in the case of warring Europe was richly complex. Here is a case that had all the ingredients of disaster - increasing complexity, high costs, military stalemate, and an impoverished support population - yet it contributed to the industrial world that we know today and to history's most capable systems of problem solving. War is such a consumer of wealth (as seen in the Roman, Byzantine, and European cases) that modern Europe (and its offshoots and imitators) might never have come to be. War consumes wealth not only through physical destruction, but more insidiously through the costs of preparing for and conducting it. Complexity and costs are driven ever higher. European wars had to be supported by a peasantry that grew ever more desperate. If there was ever a political system that should have been vulnerable to collapse from its own costs, it was Europe of the last millennium.
There are two primary reasons why today's prosperity emerged from so many centuries of misery. The first is that the competition forced Europeans continuously to innovate in technological prowess, organizational abilities, and systems of finance. They were forced to become more adept at manipulating and distributing matter and energy. The second reason is that they got lucky: they stumbled upon great subsidies. Over the ocean they found new lands that could be conquered, and their resources turned to European advantage. European prowess at war meant that the peoples and governments of those lands were rather easily overwhelmed. More recently new subsidies (fossil and nuclear fuels) were developed that fund complexity, problem solving, and welfare today. Thus from the fifteenth century on Europe found the resources to develop levels of complexity that would have been impossible to support by the solar energy falling on Europe alone. Without these subsidies (that is, without this luck), Europe and the world today would be quite different.
CONCLUSIONS
We have learned much about the success and failure of institutions from the fields of organizational decision-making, organizational ecology, and learning organizations. The problems of bounded rationality, unforeseeable consequences, and transaction costs underlie the approach developed here. These fields have been limited, though, to the study of short-term change. In the case of organizations such as states, to look for proximate reasons for failure is to look only at the tail end of a long process. The science of organizations must become historical.
Complexity is a long-term paradox of problem solving. It facilitates the resolution of problems in the short run while undermining the ability to solve them in the long term. Maintaining a society or other kind of institution requires that the problem-solving system itself be sustainable. The case studies of this essay allow us to describe possible outcomes to long-term trends in problem solving.
1. The Roman Model. Problem solving drives increasing complexity and costs that cannot be subsidized by new sources of energy. In time there are diminishing returns to problem solving. Problem solving continues by extracting higher levels of resources from the productive system. Fiscal weakness and disaffection of the population in time compromise problem solving and initiate collapse.
2. The Byzantine Model. The institution, perhaps no longer having sufficient resources to increase complexity, deliberately simplifies. Costs are greatly reduced and, perhaps more importantly, the productive system is enhanced. It is a strategy that in the Byzantine case allowed for fiscal recovery and eventually for expansion. This is also the strategy employed by many American firms over the past 20 years, where simplification of management and elimination of costs contributed to competition and recovery.
3. The European Model. Uncontrolled competition can lead to ever increasing complexity. It drives consumption of resources regardless of long-term cost, for the immediate alternative may be extinction. It is a risky situation that can lead to the collapse of all contenders, as it seems to have done in the case of the southern lowland Classic Maya (Tainter, 1988, 1992). The Europeans averted this trap in part through competition-induced ingenuity, but largely also through luck.
The point of examining these outcomes is both to understand the consequences of complexity and problem solving and to peer into our possible futures. Our societies and institutions have increased greatly in complexity over the past few centuries. This complexity is sustained by our current energy subsidies, primarily fossil fuels. We do not know how long this dependency can continue. Campbell and Laherre`re (1998) argue that the petroleum basis for our present complexity may begin to diminish within a few years. We can prepare for this with a full understanding of how problem solving systems develop, cognizant of the options of (a) complexity and diminishing returns, (b) simplification, or (c) growing complexity based on further subsidies. Or we can hope for a repeat of the luck enjoyed by Europeans and some of the colonies they established. The only thing that is certain about the future is that it will present challenges. We can gamble that our problem-solving institutions will suffice to meet those challenges, and accept the consequences if they do not. Or we can increase our chances of being sustainable by understanding problem solving itself, the trends by which it develops, and the factors that make it successful or not. The consequences are enormous: had European luck proved otherwise the dilemma of complexity in problem solving might have been described by a future scholar who would lump Renaissance Europe with the Western Roman Empire as another example of collapse.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am pleased to express my thanks to Virginia Abernethy and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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[Author Affiliation]
Joseph A. Tainter
United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service
Please address correspondence to Joseph A. Tainter, Rocky Mountain Reasearch Station, 2205 Columbia SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106.
Friday, 12 June 2009
Chesterton on ‘The Patriotic Idea’
The essay reproduced below was written by G.K. Chesterton for inclusion in the book England: A Nation: Being the Papers of the Patriot’s Club, edited by Lucian Oldershaw and published by R. Brimley Johnson: London and Edinburgh, 1904.
G.K. Chesterton: The Patriotic Idea
I
The scepticism of the last two centuries has attacked patriotism as it has attacked all the other theoretic passions of mankind, and in the case of patriotism the attack has been interesting and respectable because it has come from a set of modern writers who are not mere sceptics, but who really have an organic belief in philosophy and politics. Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest of living Europeans, has succeeded in founding a school which, whatever its faults (and they are neither few nor small), has all the characteristics of a great religion. Like a great religion, it is positive, it is public, above all, it is paradoxical. The Tolstoyan enjoys asserting the hardest parts of his belief with that dark and magnificent joy which has been unknown in the world for nearly four hundred years. He enjoys saying, “No man should strike a blow even to defend his country,” in the same way that Tertullian enjoyed saying,“Credo quia impossible.”
This important and growing sect, together with many modern intellectuals of various schools, directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind. To them, in not a few instances, every man is the rival of mankind. And they bear a dim and not wholly agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of people who go about saying that nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches.
Suppose that two men, lost upon some gray waste in rain and darkness, were to come upon the light of a porch and take shelter in some strange house, where the household entertained them pleasantly. It might be that some feast or entertainment was going forward; that private theatricals were in preparation, or progressive whist in progress. One of these travellers might lend a hand instinctively and heartily, might play his cards at whist in a fighting spirit, might black his face in theatricals and make the children laugh. And this he would do because he felt kindly towards the whole company. But the other man would say: “I love this company so much that I dislike its being divided into factions by progressive whist; I love so much the human face divine that I do not wish to see it obscured with soot or grease-paint; I will not take a partner for the lancers, for that would involve selecting one woman for special privilege, and I love you all alike.” The first man would undoubtedly amuse the whole company more. And would he not love the whole company more?
Every one of us has, indeed, been lost in a gray waste of eternity, and strayed to the portal of this earth, over which the lamp is the sun. We find inside the company of humanity engaged in certain ancient festivals and forms, certain competitions and distinctions. And, as in the other case, two kinds of love can be offered to that society. The prig will profess to join in their unity; the good comrade will join in their divisions.
If the stray guests see something utterly immoral in the distinctions, something utterly wicked in the ritual, doubtless they must protest; but they should never protest because the distinctions are distinctions, and therefore in one sense exclusive, or because the ritual is ritual, and therefore in one sense irrational. If the stranger in the house has a moral objection, for instance, to playing for money, he ought to decline, though he ought not to enjoy declining. But he must not ask, “Why am I arbitrarily made a partner with So-and-so?” He must not say, “What rational difference is there between spades and diamonds?” If he really loves his kind, he will, as far as he can, and in the great mass of things, play the parts given him. He will preserve this gay and impetuous conservatism; he will throw himself into the competitive sports of nationality; he will walk with relish in the ancient theatricals of religion.
Because the modern intellectuals who disapprove of patriotism do not do this, a strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.
The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings. The man who loves his own children is much more universal, is much more fully in the general order, than the man who dandles the infant hippopotamus or puts the young crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving his own children he is doing something which is (if I may use the phrase) far more essentially hippopotamic than dandling hippopotami; he is doing as they do. It is the same with patriotism. A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity. The man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of compliments - imitation.
The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.
There is, moreover, another broad distinction, which inclines us to side with those who support the abstract idea of patriotism against those who oppose it. There are two methods by which intelligent men may approach the problem of that temperance which is the object of morality in all matters—in wine, in war, in sex, in patriotism; that temperance which desires, if possible, to have wine without drunkenness, war without massacre, love without profligacy, and patriotism without Sir Alfred Harmsworth. One method, advocated by many earnest people from the beginning of history, is what may roughly be called the teetotal method; that is, that it is better, because of their obvious danger, to do without these great and historic passions altogether. The upholders of the other method (of whom I am one) maintain, on the contrary, that the only ultimate and victorious method of getting rid of the danger is thoroughly to understand and experience the passions. We maintain that with every one of the great emotions of life there goes a certain terror, which, when taken with imaginative reality, is the strongest possible opponent of excess; we maintain, that is to say, that the way to be afraid of war is to know something about war; that the way to be afraid of love is to know something about it; that the way to avoid excess in wine is to feel it as a perilous benefit, and that patriotism goes along with these. The other party maintains that the best guarantee of temperance is to wear a blue ribbon; we maintain that the best guarantee is to be born in a wine-growing country. They maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to take a celibate vow; we maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to fall in love. They maintain that the best guarantee of avoiding a reckless pugnacity is to forswear fighting; we maintain that the best guarantee is to have once experienced it. They maintain that we should care for our country too little to resent trifling impertinences; we maintain that we should care too much about our country to do so. It is like the Mohammedan and Christian sentiment of temperance. Mohammedanism makes wine a poison; Christianity makes it a sacrament.
Many humane moderns have a horror of nationality as the mother of wars. So in a sense it is, just as love and religion are. Men will always fight about the things they care for, and in many cases quite rightly. But there is another thing which should not be altogether forgotten, and that is this: that in so far as men increase in intelligence they must see that a quite primary and mystical affection is a foolish thing to put into violent competition with another thing of the same kind. Men may fight about a rational preference, because there victory may prove something. But an irrational preference is far too fine a thing to fight about, because there victory proves nothing.
When men first become conscious of splendid and disturbing emotions, it is their natural instinct, their first and most natural and most reasonable instinct, to kill people. Thus, for instance, the sentiment of romantic love went through the same historical evolution as the sentiment of patriotism. When a medieval knight or troubadour realized that there was an intensity in a pure and monogamous sentiment which was quite beyond anything in merely animal appetites, he immediately took a long spear and rushed round the neighbourhood offering to kill anybody who denied that he had fallen in love with precisely the right person. I do not think that it can be reasonably maintained that romantic love has decayed in the centuries succeeding this; what has happened has been that people have perceived not that love is too insignificant to fight about, but that it is too important to fight about. Men have perceived, that is to say, that in these matters of the affections all combat is ineffective, since no combatant would ever accept its issue. Each of us thinks his own country is the best in the world, just as each of us might think his own mother the best in the world. But when we think this we do not proceed, or in the least desire to proceed, to the bellicose test. We do not set our mothers to fight each other in an ampitheatre, and for the excellent reason that if one mother overcame the other mother, it would not make the least difference to anybody. That is the only serious objection to the institution of the duel. That the duel kills men seems to me a comparatively trifling matter; football and fox-hunting and the London hospitals very frequently do that. The only rational objection to the duel is that it invokes a most painful and sanguinary proceeding in order to settle a question, and does not settle it. It is our belief, therefore, that the right way to avoid the incidental excesses of patriotism is the same as that in the cases of sex or war—it is to know something about it. Just as, according to our view, there will always be in some degree the power of sex and the use of wine, so there will always be the possibility of such a thing as patriotic war. But just as a man who has been in love will find it difficult to write a whole frantic epic about a flirtation, so all that kind of rhetoric about the Union Jack and the Anglo-Saxon blood, which has made amusing the journalism of this country for the last six years, will be merely impossible to the man who has for one moment called up before himself what would be the real sensation of hearing that a foreign army was encamped on Box Hill. The light and loose talk about national victories impresses those who think with me merely as a mark of the lack of serious passion. The average reasonable citizen, of whatever political colour, would admit that such talk shows too much patriotism. We should say that it shows too little.
To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who professes to love humanity and hate local preference, we shall reply: “How can you love humanity and hate anything so human?” If he replies that in his eyes local preference is a positive sin, is only human in the sense that wife-beating is human, we shall reply that in that case he has a code of morality so different from ours that the very use of the word “sin” is almost useless between us. If he says that the thing is not positive sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply that this is a matter of impression, and that to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow to the point of suffocation. And we shall pray for him, hoping that some day he will break out of the little stifling cell of the cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the open fields and infinite sky of England. Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one place rather than another, and that he does not know what is a nation and what is not, we shall say: “By this sign you are conquered; your weakness lies precisely in the fact that you do not know a nation when you see it. There are many kinds of love affairs, there are many kinds of song, but all ordinary people know a love affair or a song when they see it. They know that a concubinage is not necessarily a love affair, that a work in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you do not understand vague words, go and sit among the pedants, and let the work of the world be done by people who do.” It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world.
II
Tolstoyanism, then, with all its earnestness, with all its honourable lucidity, we find, from our point of view, to be a frigid and arbitrary fancy, incomparable in its moral value to that intensity which has bound living men to an actual and ancient soil. It suffers in the comparison from the profound sense that we have that the former opinion is superficial, and the latter vital; that is to say, we have no doubt at all that an ordinary man, born in England, might profess himself a Tolstoyan and an opponent of patriotism with every mark of reason and sincerity; we also have no doubt at all that if he saw the Russian flag run up in Trafalgar Square he would go white to the lips. But this humanitarian theory of the wrongness of the national sentiment, though important, is by no means the most powerful opponent of that sentiment today. Another force is in the field, which is by its nature quite equally antagonistic to patriotism, and which is, unlike the other, equipped with power, with wealth, and with a fair chance of triumph in practical politics. This second enemy of patriotism is, I need hardly say, the idea commonly called Imperialism. Imperialism seeks to destroy patriotism, not by sketching a remote and unattainable fusion between different peoples, but by pointing out how and where at a particular moment such fusion may be made. Imperialism is an opportunist cosmopolitanism. It says in its rational moods (for it has perfectly rational moods, and of these only is it fair to speak): “We do not say we would annex Spain for fun or pick a quarrel with Norway for the sake of doing so. But wherever circumstances lead us more or less naturally to the opportunity of effacing a distinction, of pulling down a flag, of destroying a nationality, we will do so. Wherever we can turn some separate kingdom or republic, with special memories and symbols, into a part of the British or Russian or German Empire, and make it accept our memories and symbols, we will do so. We believe that civilization is on our side, and we enforce it against Fins or Boers, against Poles or Irishmen. We are Imperialists; we are not the reckless enemies of patriotism, but we are its enemies.” That is the voice of sane and educated Imperialism. I am aware that in the late confusion of political parties the cause of Imperialism was to some extent strengthened by appeals to the immortal sentiment of patriotism. But this is merely one of those electioneering bewilderments common in all practical politics, and especially in English politics. The patriotic feeling is used in favour of Imperialism just as the hatred of tyrants might have been used against the French Revolution, or the letter of the constitution against Pym and Hampden—that is, used quite honestly and with some reasonable significance, but without any reference to the real divisions between great ideas. It is perfectly evident when we consider the matter fundamentally that it is impossible to have an Imperial patriotism; that is to say, it is impossible to have towards a sprawling and indeterminate collection of peoples of every variety of goodness and badness precisely that sentiment which is evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the contemplation of the peculiar customs of his ancestors and the peculiar land of his birth. Of course, it is quite reasonable to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism for the Empire, just as it is permissible to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism of humanity, or such a phrase as having fallen in love with Rouen Cathedral. But the perfectly legitimate sentiment which leads a man to support, on political grounds, a huge cosmopolitan confederation has about as much resemblance to the passion which has made men sing of and die for a strip of land as an admiration for the architecture of Normandy has to the hunger in the heart of Romeo. I am not saying at this point in the discussion that this old and special attachment to some individual soil or blood is a correct sentiment. Perhaps the political theory which unites Jews like Disraeli or Germans like Lord Milner to a large modern civilization is a more rational sentiment than the old sentiment of patriotism. Perhaps patriotism is a brutal fancy of primitive man which it is possible for the world to outgrow. All this I shall discuss later. What I am concerned to point out at the moment is the more or less self-evident fact that this Imperial idea or plan for the consolidation and identification of an increasing number of different commonwealths cannot seriously be called patriotism according to any sense that the word has ever actually had among men. If patriotism does not mean a defined and declared preference for certain traditions or surroundings, it means nothing whatever. A thing like an empire, like the Roman Empire, which contained Greeks and Goths and ancient Britons; a thing like the British Empire, which contains Dutchmen and Negroes and Chinamen in Hong Kong, may be a perfectly legitimate object of a certain kind of intellectual esteem, but it is ludicrous to call it patriotism, or invoke the ancient deities of the hearth and the river and the hill. There may be good reason for supporting Mr. Beit in South Africa, but to ask us in the name of patriotism to remember that he is of our people is about as accurate as asking us in the name of family feeling to remember that he is our great-aunt.
Across the path of Imperialism as interpreted in a patriotic sense there lies the most insurmountable of human obstacles, an impossibility which is more than a political and more than a financial impossibility - a psychological impossibility. An empire has all the characteristics that render national attachments impossible. It is huge, it is mostly remote, it is everywhere diverse and contradictory. Above all, it is utterly undefined and unlimited. Not to see how this frustrates genuine enthusiasm is not to know the alphabet of the human heart. There is one thing that is vitally essential to everything which is to be intensely enjoyed or intensely admired—limitation. Whenever we look through an archway, and are stricken into delight with the magnetic clarity and completeness of the landscape beyond, we are realizing the necessity of boundaries. Whenever we put a picture in a frame, we are acting upon that primeval truth which is the value of small nationalities. Wherever we write or read with pleasure the story of a man living adventurously and happily upon an island, we have hold of the truth which broke the Roman Empire, and will always break Imperialism. All Imperial poetry, even the very best (as in the earlier work of Rudyard Kipling) must be psychologically false, for when a man really loves a thing he dwells not on its largeness, but its smallness. The very psychology of patriotism is in the patriotism of Shakespeare, above all in that hackneyed and admirable passage in “Richard II” which is the very ecstasy of the little Englander. It is indescribably significant that Shakespeare, in glorifying his country, compares it to two things - a fortress and jewel -
This precious stone, set in a silver sea,
Which serves it for the purpose of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house.
A fort is a thing which appeals both to the boyish and the practical instinct as characterized by a certain quality which can only be called coziness. A jewel is a thing the intense value of which is enhanced by its being both rare and minute. A fortress not upon its defence, a jewel multiplied over the earth like the pebbles of the shore, changes the note of feeling finally and beyond recovery. Imperialism is the opening of Shakespeare’s fort and the cheapening of his jewel. Shakespeare was right in this particular kind of love-poetry, as in all other kinds. While the anaemic moderns are trying to evoke passion by raving about size and space and eternity, the gigantic Elizabethan remembers in the matter of patriotism also the great psychological verity that all love-poetry tends to diminutives.
It is instructive to compare this graphic Little England patriotism of Shakespeare with the best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. That best work is very beautiful literature, but it is always at its truest and most beautiful when the writer is speaking of cosmopolitanism, of the sensations of the traveller in many lands. The point of John of Gaunt’s utterance is that England satisfies; the point of the “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” is that nothing satisfies, hardly even the whole globe:
Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done,
Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.
So write, before I die, “’E liked it all!
That is real poetry, and sentiment too, but it is the very reverse of patriotism. It is the light and not inhumane melancholy of the man who has paid his vows to many gods and many women. Shakespeare’s patriotism has the joy and pain of a passionate lover; Mr. Kipling’s has the gaiety and sadness of a philanderer among the nations.
Spiritually, then, we hold that a healthy man does not demand cosmopolitanism, and does not demand empire. He demands something which is more or less roughly represented by Nationalism. That is to say, he demands a particular relation to some homogeneous community of manageable and imaginable size, large enough to inspire his reverence by its hold on history, small enough to inspire his affection by its hold on himself. If we were gods planning a perfect planet, if we were poets inventing a Utopia, we should divide the world into communities of this unity and moderate size. It is, therefore, not true to say of us that a cosmopolitan humanity is a far-off ideal; it is not an ideal at all for us, but a nightmare.
And now, having this purely idealistic faith in loyalties of this scope and groups of this kind, we have to turn from pure ethics and poetry to the discussion of the earth as it is at this moment. Hitherto I have attempted to suggest that the national idea is more noble and pleasing in the abstract than either the cosmopolitan or the Imperial idea, if, indeed, Imperialism can be imagined as anything but cosmopolitan. But now let us turn to the practical people - convertimur in gentes.
Now, having this belief, that communities of a size much smaller than empires are the healthy homes for men, that they are better than either a cosmopolitan anarchy or Imperialism, we look out at practical history, and discover a rather remarkable fact. We discover that the civilization which has in practical politics led the world has not only, as a fact, branched or broken into communities of this type, but has made the outline and character of them a sacred thing. Europe, which is the most practical civilization, is also the only Nationalist civilization. Imperialism is Asiatic. We see it at its very best and most intellectual in a thing like the Chinese civilization. In Europe only is there this sense of the sanctity of nation. In other places men fight for the independence of their own tribe. In our Nationalist Europe only is there any notion of respecting the independence of another tribe. And this is, of course, the only test of the existence of a religion. It is no proof that a man holds life sacred that he wishes to save his own life; it is some proof of it if he refrains from murdering his enemy. And this was the whole of our objection to the annexation of the Transvaal, that it was a crime committed against the European virtue of patriotism. For a man has clearly no more right to say that his British patriotism obliges him to destroy the Boer nation than he has to say that his sense of the sanctity of marriage makes him run away with his neighbour’s wife.
There is undoubtedly a general notion abroad at the present time that small nationalities are dying out. There is a general notion that empires are living or destined to a continual life, that nationalities are dead or destined to die. Such an idea as this can only have arisen from ordinary ignorance of the history of Europe. It is true that empire often looks strong and nationality often looks weak, but that is merely because all the things that are eternal always look weak. That simple discovery has been the seed of all religions.
The practical truth is that the empires have been the light and transient things, brief as the butterfly; the nations have been the hard and solid and triumphant things, which nothing could break. The largest empire is really only a fashion. But the smallest nation is something greater than a fashion - it is a custom. Imperialism is not either a glorious discovery of the English, as some Englishmen think, or a wicked invention of the English, as other Englishmen think. It is a tiresome old European fad or fashion, coming round to us after having been tried and found wanting by nearly all the kindred nations. It neither starts anything nor ends anything; it merely recurs, like the crinoline. But while Imperialism goes out and in, like the crinoline, nationality remains, like the habit of wearing clothes.
Spain was once a colonial empire, far more brilliant and original than ours. Its empire has vanished, but there are still men who will die for Spain; there are still men who will strike you in the face if you say that they are not Spaniards. France had an empire covering all Europe after the great ecstasy of the Revolution. It vanished utterly, and all its ideas are at a low ebb in Europe. But there are still men who will die for France. And when from our mortal nation also this immortal fallacy is passed, when all the colonies of England have gone the wild way of the colonies of Spain, when some strange and sudden Waterloo has made the little dream of Beaconsfield as mad as the great dream of Napoleon, something will remain, I am very certain, which matters more than all these levities. There will still be men who will die for England.
If any ordinary Englishman wishes to feel the difference between the unreality of Imperialism and the reality of Nationalism - I do not mind whether he is an Imperialist or anything else—let him try one simple test. Let him say first of all to himself such a sentence as this: “It was largely due to the influence of England that Australia was ceded to Germany.” Such a sentence will no doubt fill him with a not illegitimate fury. He may rank it with Majuba, and call it a scandalous example of his country’s weakness. But then let him say to himself this sentence: “It was largely due to the influence of Australia that England was ceded to Germany.” He will not think that means the weakness of his country. He will think it means that he has no longer any country to be weak. He will not think that means Majuba, but Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.
It is just because our modern Imperialists do not see the enormous abyss between the claim of the nation and the claim of the mere empire that their philosophy is so superficial and so insincere. It is no exaggeration at all to say that there is as much difference between asking an Englishman to give up his empire and asking him to give up his England as there is between asking him to alter the shape of his hat and asking him to alter the shape of his head. The two things lie geographically very near together, and for persons with pedantic minds the frontier between hat and head may, for all I know, be the subject of elaborate negotiation.
The people who live in our large towns, and read our large newspapers - probably the most credulous people who have ever existed upon earth—have got an idea into their heads that such things as the annexation of the Transvaal are parts of a normal historic process. They believe that big European empires have always been eating up small European nations, just as whales have always been eating up herrings. This, again, is because they know no history. When we come to look at the facts, the really extraordinary thing is that the absorption of white nations should not have happened oftener. In this wild and wicked world the keenest Nationalist would expect it often to happen, and often to succeed.
As a fact, it has seldom happened: it has never succeeded. Fragments of nations have been bitten off, as in Alsace and Lorraine, and even those have not been easy to chew. Wild tribes, in a chaotic period, with no national sentiment at all in the European sense - tribes such as existed in Europe once, and exist in Asia still - have overrun and eaten up each other; but a nation is a thing quite different to these. Some Christian nations have been swallowed; not one has ever been digested. The chunks of Poland still lie heavy on the stomachs of the Central Empires; Ireland has been a perpetual dyspeptic pain. For living nations were not meant by Nature to be our food.
In the whole circle of Christian history and the Christian world there is one instance, and one instance only, of a patriotic European people living contentedly with their Government transferred to another capital. That instance is Scotland; and if ever there were on earth an exception that proved the rule it is here, for Scotchmen have held their heads up after absorption for precisely the same reason that Switzers hold their heads up after liberation - the fact that they were never conquered. If anyone wishes to make the case of the Transvaal a parallel to the case of Scotland, the step required is simple enough. Let Edward VII leave his crown to President Steyn, and we will answer for the loyalty of the Dutch in South Africa.
We contend, then, that this Nationalism is, at any rate, an unbroken fact of our Europe. It is no more probable that the British Empire will outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Africa than it was probable that the Spanish Empire would outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Europe. Nations are tenacious, empires are slovenly. And now we come to that other matter which is important, the question of whether empires, strong or weak, and nations, strong or weak, do good or harm. In supporting the Spanish Empire or the British Empire, are we supporting something likely to do good to mankind? For, of course, we should be quite willing in that case to side with their weakness, and their forlorn hope of resistance against the enduring tyranny of nationality.
There is one faith which many good men have in Imperialism which must not be despised, but which must respectfully be shattered. Many good men believe that a great conglomeration of peoples, like the British Empire, may be a unification of varied merits. They believe that by it may be extracted the best from the Sepoy, the Australian, the Irishman, the Dutchman, the negro, and the Cockney. All these, they say, may thus grow in one orchard, and civilization can gather the best fruit from each.
Now, this kind of empire has many beauties; it is varied, fascinating, and instructive. But it has one defect: it does not exist. It is emphatically not true that when we conquer peoples we get the good out of them. So far from that, the reverse is rather true: when we conquer peoples we lose them for ever. Take an instance. Nothing has more profoundly interested us of late years, whether we are philosophers or children, than the study of the great mythologies. Nearly every baby is now brought up among the gods of Greece and the gods of Scandinavia. Many schoolboys could pass an examination as to who was the uncle of Mercury or the second cousin of Loki. We have ransacked every cranny of Olympus and Asgard, and all this time there existed in Europe another great mythology, as vast and varied, as powerful and as perfect.
The chief mark of such a great mythology is that the mere phrases of it are enough to establish its greatness. The mere phrase “The Son of man” is enough to prove Christianity to be a great religion if no other trace remained of the personality of Christ. The mere phrase “The Twilight of the Gods” is enough to prove that the Norsemen were poets and philosophers also. And as clearly and certainly a whole universe of primal imagination is revealed by such a mere phrase as “The Country of the Young.” And the mythology of which “The Country of the Young” is an example, of which other examples are such unfathomable conceptions as the Secret Rose, or the Black Boar, who in his brutal simplicity typifies the primitive darkness of things; - where, in what corner of Europe, in what crevice of the Caucasian mountains, has this sumptuous mythology been discovered? It has been discovered in Ireland. It has been discovered in that country of all countries which was nearest to us and most despised, which we conceived as the withered limb of our Empire. Why did we know so much about German mythology and nothing about Irish mythology? Any person with even the simplest knowledge of the world as it is must realize that the reason lies in the fact that our material conquest of Ireland put us in an utterly artificial position towards everything Irish. The Irish would not sing to us any more than the Jews, as described in their stern and splendid psalm, would sing to the Babylonians. I find it difficult to believe that there can be anyone so ignorant of practical existence as not to know that any attempt on the part of the Irish for centuries after their conquest to say to us what they had to say about their history and legends would have been met with nothing except jokes about Brian Baroo. We all know in reality that England would never have consented to learn from Ireland. It has learnt from France because it failed to conquer her. If Edward III or Henry V had succeeded in adding France to the Empire, we may be absolutely certain that we should have learnt as little from the song of Roland as we have from the legend of Maive, and that we should have profited as little from the genius of Mirabeau as we did from the genius of Parnell.
Or take another instance on a somewhat different plane. For centuries all European nations, and England as much as any of them, have been running round and round the metaphysical problem of being, of pessimism and optimism, of variety and unity. And all the time there existed in India an immense and lucid philosophy which, true or false, was, in the case of many English philosophers, the very thing that they were seeking; in the case of many of them, the very thing that they were saying. The eighteenth century was full of sad speculations and wild speculations; but they could not entertain quite so wild a speculation as that their sad philosophy had been reduced to its clearest elements by naked brown men in the wilds of Asia. It is strange to think that when poor Robert Clive stood with the pistol in his hand, and asked himself the value of life and death, he might have learnt from some ragged fakir, whom he treated as dirt, a pessimism infinitely deeper and infinitely more rational than his own. Englishmen could not find it out, could not even realize that it was there. The discovery of the greatest of all philosophical schemes for the absorption of personality was left for Schopenhauer, a German. His hands were not tied with the utter helplessness of empire.
Experience, then, is wholly against the idea that by conquering a people we can reach or use the good in them. The idea that an empire absorbs the Irish qualities when it conquers the Irish, or possesses the Indian wisdom when it conquers India, is one of the thousand delusions which are characteristic of world politics. It is like the notion of the cannibals that it is possible to become brave by eating a brave man, or experts at horsemanship by eating an elegant horseman. We can no more get the secret of Chinese stoicism by annexing China than a savage could become a good actor by dining on Sir Charles Wyndham. And the reason is very evident. The relations of a subject to a ruling race are in themselves false relations, and neither can know anything valuable of the other. They are very like the relations a man bears to his footman or his housemaid. If anybody told us that a duchess must know more of the soul of the butler than of her personal friends, because she saw the butler every day, and there was only a floor between them, we should not entertain a high opinion of that person’s knowledge of the world. But it has never occurred to us that this is the reason why we have reaped profit from the French temperament, and no profit from the Irish temperament. The truth is, of course, that the friendship of nations is like the friendship of individuals. No such thing is possible unless both parties are free. National independence is as much needed if peoples are to be genuine friends as it is if they are to be genuine enemies. Often as we have heard of liberty, equality, and fraternity, we do not remember enough that the two things essential to fraternity are liberty and equality.
The English people, who are upon the whole the most generous people in the world, have this defect in their generosity - that they cannot be persuaded that there are any people in the world who do not want their commodities. In fact, the English have a peculiar and even mystical kind of generosity - a generosity which is willing to give all its goods to the poor, but cannot be persuaded to let the poor keep the goods they have already. And consequently, when we begin to speak of self-government and independence and such matters, the typical Englishman always imagines that we mean a Parliament elected on the English system, with green benches and a Speaker wearing a wig; and as he imagines that this is the only possible kind of self-government, he says, with perfect truth, that no nation in the world has done as much for self-government as the English. It does not, however, seem to occur to him that every Government that ever existed in the world was a representative Government, and that every despot was elected silently by universal suffrage. Where a nation has a taste for politics, as in England, its politicians represent it; but where it has a taste rather for war, let us say, its warriors represent it; and where it has a taste for religious meditation, its saints and hermits represent it. Even in England, for instance, where we have some love of politics, and may admit, therefore, that Mr. Chamberlain represents us, we have a much greater love of cricket, and C.B. Fry represents us much better than Mr. Chamberlain.
In the light of this principle our relation to such a problem as that of the politics of India becomes clear. The reason why it is undesirable to extend the franchise to the Hindoos in India is not that it would raise a rebellion or create a ridiculous spectacle, but simply that representative Government in India would not be representative. And the reason that it would not be representative is simply this: that the political faculty not being an Indian faculty, the politicians who would dominate the country would be the most un-Indian Indians who could be found. No suffrage, however wide, no political machinery, however faultless, could make the spouting, ranting, Europeanized, Bengali adventurer represent India. Nothing could alter the fact that he would despise the ancient peasant-life of India, and the ancient peasant-life, with a great deal more justification, would despise him. The political faculty would, of course, be cultivated and brought, perhaps, to a high perfection by certain Hindoos, but it would remain to the eyes of India a unique and elegant and somewhat unnecessary accomplishment. The Bengali politicians would, under whatever democratic forms, inaugurate in India a rule of experts - that is to say, of stupid and fanatical oppressors. India would be about as much really democratized by such a scheme as England would be if we had a General Election every three years to choose the man whom the great soul of the people really believed to be the best player on the trombone.
So that this essentially generous English idea that we must provide all the parts of the earth we can influence with our political institutions is dropped significantly, and dropped, if one may say so, with a crash at the first sight of the greatest British problem, the problem of India. Face to face with India, we are obliged to admit that what is one nation’s meat is another nation’s poison. And the moment we have admitted that, we have broken at a blow the whole conception of that extension of Anglo-Saxon civilization which is the essential of current Imperialism. If our political institutions would not necessarily improve or represent the Hindoo, then the whole thing is a matter of local temperament, and it is quite as possible that our political institutions never have improved or expressed the Irishman, and never will improve or express the Boer. It may be a good thing, of course, in particular cases to give our civilization to these people, but it can no longer be maintained that it is obviously a good thing to give it as it is a good thing to give a loaf to a starving man. The essential principle of Nationalism, that the institutions which are the growth of the soil have an advantage as such, is admitted.
III
Civilization is a good thing, but it is not a thing like the love of God, by its nature infinite. A man may have too much civilization, as he may have too much beer, and the supreme evil of civilization may be expressed in one single phrase. It consists in permitting the human achievements to outrun the human imagination. A man possesses what he can think of, and not an atom more. If a man with twelve thousand millions a month received thirteen thousand million instead, not a farthing would really have been given to him, for he could not even imagine the difference. Similarly, if a citizen of an empire already containing numberless alien and incomprehensible people has added to his heritage another alien and incomprehensible people, no difference has really been made. A man is a citizen of that commonwealth the nature of which he can conceive, and of no other. If that commonwealth is only a street out of the Blackfriars Road, that street is his country, and for that he ought to wear ribbons or shed his blood.
The danger of small commonwealths is narrowness, but their advantage is reality. Now, at any specific stage in the world’s history we ought to ask ourselves whether humanity is in a greater danger from the narrow arrogance of small people, or from the phantasmal delusions of empires. That is the question which confronts the serious European of today, and the answer is not very difficult. It is idle to tell him that Nationalism is sometimes an evil in the confusion of a beptarchy, when the fact stares him in the face that the modern evils arise from remoteness, from unreality, from the circulation of wealth far from its producers, from the waging of wars far from the seat of action, from the wild use of statistics, from the crude use of names, from the investor and the theorist, and the absentee landlord.
We have reached in the modern world a condition of such appalling unreality that everything is done on paper. Men know the destiny of countries when they have never met a native, and professed love and hatred for men whom, if they saw them in the street, they could not tell from Poles or Portuguese. For this immense theoretic method of modern times they have invented an admirable phrase—a phrase that expresses with a searching accuracy and irony of which they are quite unconscious the nature of their political occupation. They have called it “painting the map red.” Like children, they are wholly concerned with the colours in an atlas. So long as they can paint the map red they are quite contented that the countries depicted there should retain until doomsday their own alien and inexhaustible colours of forest and field.
There is a decadence possible for our modern civilization, and it is just at this point that my difference from the Imperialists comes in. They think Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the cure. I think that Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the disease. I ignore for the moment the question of whether, in the abstract, combinations and centralizations and steamboats and Marconi wires are good things or bad. But to attempt to cure the evil of Birmingham and save the soul of Chicago by more combinations and centralizations and more steamboats and more Marconi wires seem to me stark lunacy; it is like a doctor ordering brandy to a man in delirium tremens. It is precisely from these things that we are suffering, from a loose journalism, from a vague geography, from an excitable smattering of everything, from an officious interest in everybody, from a loss of strong national types, of strong religious restraints, of the sense of memory and the fear of God. We are not suffering from any very painful or dangerous resemblance to the arrogant and cruel zealots who ruled in Sparta or died in the fall of Jerusalem. We are suffering from a resemblance to the mob in decaying Rome.
Is there anyone today who can reasonably doubt that what led us into error in our recent South African politics was precisely our Imperialism, and not our Nationalism? was precisely not our ancient interest in England, but our quite modern and quite frivolous interest in everywhere else? Millions of instances might be quoted to show how utterly at sea we were and are still about the soul of South Africa. It is as well, perhaps, to concentrate them into two examples.
President Kruger and Mr. Cecil Rhodes had both great talents, great ambitions, and exciting lives; they both had many sincere sympathizers in England, and each one of them at the supreme crisis of his life did things which mystified and appalled their English supporters. No English Rhodesian could ever defend the Raid; no English Pro-Boer has ever explained the Ultimatum. The reason is that neither Rhodes nor Kruger were English politicians. We cannot understand them; probably they understood each other.
It is true that it is sometimes alleged that such things as telegraphy and journalism have really abolished distance. This is not only an error, but a horribly dangerous one. Telegraphy and journalism can indeed convey some things easily, but these are precisely the things that do not matter—the mere names, dates, and incidents. At the worst, journalism supplies us with falsehoods; at the best, only with facts. And facts, taken apart from their atmosphere, local sentiment, and place in life, are quite as false as falsehoods. We know that a man is shot by a Boer policeman; but what is the use of knowing that? What we need to know is whether the thing was typical, whether it was exceptional, whether it was planned, whether it was excused, whether it was excusable. We want to know whether it was a thing like a German duel or a thing like a Whitechapel murder. And all this we could only know by living in the community. Our newspapers could not tell it to us, even if our newspapers were honest.
Or take the instance of newspapers themselves. How can that subtle thing, the prestige of a newspaper, be felt, except at close quarters? We know that the editor of the Canadian Tomahawk has impeached Lord Dundonald, but what ordinary Englishman will be dishonest enough to pretend that he knows whether this means the Times or the Daily Express? We shall never know how much of a fool Mr. Chamberlain may have made of himself over the French caricatures of Queen Victoria, because we do not live in France, and feel the flavour and position of Le Rire. But how great a fool he may, perhaps, have made of himself we can easily imagine by supposing that the Kaiser made a speech tomorrow calling on God and his brave Brandenburg because there had been a paragraph about him in Modern Society.
We must at all costs get back to smaller political entities, because we must at all costs get back to reality. We must get nearer and nearer again to love and hate and mother-wit, to personal judgments and the truth in the faces of men. As it is, the game of world-politics is an enormous game of cross purposes. In the fantastic sunset of a decadence the shadows of men are far larger than themselves.
President Roosevelt is accepted in England as something much greater than he is in America. Mr. Seddon is taken much more seriously by Mr. Chamberlain than he is by New Zealand. The really bad work of Cecil Rhodes was not his influence on colonial politicians, whom he understood, but his influence on English gentlemen, whom he could not understand.
It is characteristic of this vast bewilderment which we call world-politics that it so constantly leaves out of account the most important matters even in its own line. For instance, it perpetually tells us that the English race has a talent for colonization, and adjures it to find fresh continents and fresh islands in the seas of sunset or dawn. Yet there is one island which the English could colonize most easily, and which they are not permitted to colonize—England. In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges and driven along rights-of-way. England does not belong to them at all; belongs to them far less than the Transvaal before the war belonged to the Uitlanders. And it is in the main that very class whose immense and absurd estates make impossible the colonization of England which urges the English people to colonize something else, preferably something on the other side of the world. These owners very naturally desire what they call a spirited foreign and colonial policy. They desire that every lonely old theocratical State from the Transvaal to Thibet should be invaded by the English; for all these enterprises put off the dreadful day when the English shall invade England.
But do not let us admit for a moment that in thus turning English loyalty to England we are serving merely England or ourselves. We are taking the turn which our great Christian civilization must take if it is to live. It is an old civilization, and it is for a season tired—tired of civilization, tired of cheap culture, tired of scepticism, tired of talk, tired of hearsay, tired, in a word, of Imperial politics. And it must return, as it did in the adoption of Christianity, to intensity and humility, to a devotion to particular things. About our European Imperialism let us remember primarily one thing, that it has all happened before. The end of the world happened a thousand years ago. At the end of the Roman era everything that was Roman seemed to have gone stale for ever. The world was with infinite agony made young again, because there were some tribes the Empire had never conquered, and some Scriptures that it had never read. The Empire and the continent were just saved by the failures of Imperialism. Strange religions came out of the virgin East, strange races came out of the virgin North, and became useful because they had been neglected. Such was the issue of the happy failure of Imperialism; the human mind dares scarcely imagine its success. Who can face the notion of a power which has destroyed everything but itself suddenly growing sick of itself? What pessimist could have pictured the great Empire, at the very instant when it had discovered Roman roads and Roman trophies to be vanity, stretching out its arms to the East and to the West, and finding nothing but its own intolerable omnipresence—finding nothing but Roman trophies and Roman roads?
G.K. Chesterton: The Patriotic Idea
I
The scepticism of the last two centuries has attacked patriotism as it has attacked all the other theoretic passions of mankind, and in the case of patriotism the attack has been interesting and respectable because it has come from a set of modern writers who are not mere sceptics, but who really have an organic belief in philosophy and politics. Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest of living Europeans, has succeeded in founding a school which, whatever its faults (and they are neither few nor small), has all the characteristics of a great religion. Like a great religion, it is positive, it is public, above all, it is paradoxical. The Tolstoyan enjoys asserting the hardest parts of his belief with that dark and magnificent joy which has been unknown in the world for nearly four hundred years. He enjoys saying, “No man should strike a blow even to defend his country,” in the same way that Tertullian enjoyed saying,“Credo quia impossible.”
This important and growing sect, together with many modern intellectuals of various schools, directly impugn the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of the love of humanity. To them the particular is always the enemy of the general. To them every nation is the rival of mankind. To them, in not a few instances, every man is the rival of mankind. And they bear a dim and not wholly agreeable resemblance to a certain kind of people who go about saying that nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches.
Suppose that two men, lost upon some gray waste in rain and darkness, were to come upon the light of a porch and take shelter in some strange house, where the household entertained them pleasantly. It might be that some feast or entertainment was going forward; that private theatricals were in preparation, or progressive whist in progress. One of these travellers might lend a hand instinctively and heartily, might play his cards at whist in a fighting spirit, might black his face in theatricals and make the children laugh. And this he would do because he felt kindly towards the whole company. But the other man would say: “I love this company so much that I dislike its being divided into factions by progressive whist; I love so much the human face divine that I do not wish to see it obscured with soot or grease-paint; I will not take a partner for the lancers, for that would involve selecting one woman for special privilege, and I love you all alike.” The first man would undoubtedly amuse the whole company more. And would he not love the whole company more?
Every one of us has, indeed, been lost in a gray waste of eternity, and strayed to the portal of this earth, over which the lamp is the sun. We find inside the company of humanity engaged in certain ancient festivals and forms, certain competitions and distinctions. And, as in the other case, two kinds of love can be offered to that society. The prig will profess to join in their unity; the good comrade will join in their divisions.
If the stray guests see something utterly immoral in the distinctions, something utterly wicked in the ritual, doubtless they must protest; but they should never protest because the distinctions are distinctions, and therefore in one sense exclusive, or because the ritual is ritual, and therefore in one sense irrational. If the stranger in the house has a moral objection, for instance, to playing for money, he ought to decline, though he ought not to enjoy declining. But he must not ask, “Why am I arbitrarily made a partner with So-and-so?” He must not say, “What rational difference is there between spades and diamonds?” If he really loves his kind, he will, as far as he can, and in the great mass of things, play the parts given him. He will preserve this gay and impetuous conservatism; he will throw himself into the competitive sports of nationality; he will walk with relish in the ancient theatricals of religion.
Because the modern intellectuals who disapprove of patriotism do not do this, a strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity, they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them, touching any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.
The truth is, of course, that real universality is to be reached rather by convincing ourselves that we are in the best possible relation with our immediate surroundings. The man who loves his own children is much more universal, is much more fully in the general order, than the man who dandles the infant hippopotamus or puts the young crocodile in a perambulator. For in loving his own children he is doing something which is (if I may use the phrase) far more essentially hippopotamic than dandling hippopotami; he is doing as they do. It is the same with patriotism. A man who loves humanity and ignores patriotism is ignoring humanity. The man who loves his country may not happen to pay extravagant verbal compliments to humanity, but he is paying to it the greatest of compliments - imitation.
The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song.
There is, moreover, another broad distinction, which inclines us to side with those who support the abstract idea of patriotism against those who oppose it. There are two methods by which intelligent men may approach the problem of that temperance which is the object of morality in all matters—in wine, in war, in sex, in patriotism; that temperance which desires, if possible, to have wine without drunkenness, war without massacre, love without profligacy, and patriotism without Sir Alfred Harmsworth. One method, advocated by many earnest people from the beginning of history, is what may roughly be called the teetotal method; that is, that it is better, because of their obvious danger, to do without these great and historic passions altogether. The upholders of the other method (of whom I am one) maintain, on the contrary, that the only ultimate and victorious method of getting rid of the danger is thoroughly to understand and experience the passions. We maintain that with every one of the great emotions of life there goes a certain terror, which, when taken with imaginative reality, is the strongest possible opponent of excess; we maintain, that is to say, that the way to be afraid of war is to know something about war; that the way to be afraid of love is to know something about it; that the way to avoid excess in wine is to feel it as a perilous benefit, and that patriotism goes along with these. The other party maintains that the best guarantee of temperance is to wear a blue ribbon; we maintain that the best guarantee is to be born in a wine-growing country. They maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to take a celibate vow; we maintain that the best guarantee of purity is to fall in love. They maintain that the best guarantee of avoiding a reckless pugnacity is to forswear fighting; we maintain that the best guarantee is to have once experienced it. They maintain that we should care for our country too little to resent trifling impertinences; we maintain that we should care too much about our country to do so. It is like the Mohammedan and Christian sentiment of temperance. Mohammedanism makes wine a poison; Christianity makes it a sacrament.
Many humane moderns have a horror of nationality as the mother of wars. So in a sense it is, just as love and religion are. Men will always fight about the things they care for, and in many cases quite rightly. But there is another thing which should not be altogether forgotten, and that is this: that in so far as men increase in intelligence they must see that a quite primary and mystical affection is a foolish thing to put into violent competition with another thing of the same kind. Men may fight about a rational preference, because there victory may prove something. But an irrational preference is far too fine a thing to fight about, because there victory proves nothing.
When men first become conscious of splendid and disturbing emotions, it is their natural instinct, their first and most natural and most reasonable instinct, to kill people. Thus, for instance, the sentiment of romantic love went through the same historical evolution as the sentiment of patriotism. When a medieval knight or troubadour realized that there was an intensity in a pure and monogamous sentiment which was quite beyond anything in merely animal appetites, he immediately took a long spear and rushed round the neighbourhood offering to kill anybody who denied that he had fallen in love with precisely the right person. I do not think that it can be reasonably maintained that romantic love has decayed in the centuries succeeding this; what has happened has been that people have perceived not that love is too insignificant to fight about, but that it is too important to fight about. Men have perceived, that is to say, that in these matters of the affections all combat is ineffective, since no combatant would ever accept its issue. Each of us thinks his own country is the best in the world, just as each of us might think his own mother the best in the world. But when we think this we do not proceed, or in the least desire to proceed, to the bellicose test. We do not set our mothers to fight each other in an ampitheatre, and for the excellent reason that if one mother overcame the other mother, it would not make the least difference to anybody. That is the only serious objection to the institution of the duel. That the duel kills men seems to me a comparatively trifling matter; football and fox-hunting and the London hospitals very frequently do that. The only rational objection to the duel is that it invokes a most painful and sanguinary proceeding in order to settle a question, and does not settle it. It is our belief, therefore, that the right way to avoid the incidental excesses of patriotism is the same as that in the cases of sex or war—it is to know something about it. Just as, according to our view, there will always be in some degree the power of sex and the use of wine, so there will always be the possibility of such a thing as patriotic war. But just as a man who has been in love will find it difficult to write a whole frantic epic about a flirtation, so all that kind of rhetoric about the Union Jack and the Anglo-Saxon blood, which has made amusing the journalism of this country for the last six years, will be merely impossible to the man who has for one moment called up before himself what would be the real sensation of hearing that a foreign army was encamped on Box Hill. The light and loose talk about national victories impresses those who think with me merely as a mark of the lack of serious passion. The average reasonable citizen, of whatever political colour, would admit that such talk shows too much patriotism. We should say that it shows too little.
To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who professes to love humanity and hate local preference, we shall reply: “How can you love humanity and hate anything so human?” If he replies that in his eyes local preference is a positive sin, is only human in the sense that wife-beating is human, we shall reply that in that case he has a code of morality so different from ours that the very use of the word “sin” is almost useless between us. If he says that the thing is not positive sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply that this is a matter of impression, and that to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow to the point of suffocation. And we shall pray for him, hoping that some day he will break out of the little stifling cell of the cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the open fields and infinite sky of England. Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one place rather than another, and that he does not know what is a nation and what is not, we shall say: “By this sign you are conquered; your weakness lies precisely in the fact that you do not know a nation when you see it. There are many kinds of love affairs, there are many kinds of song, but all ordinary people know a love affair or a song when they see it. They know that a concubinage is not necessarily a love affair, that a work in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you do not understand vague words, go and sit among the pedants, and let the work of the world be done by people who do.” It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world.
II
Tolstoyanism, then, with all its earnestness, with all its honourable lucidity, we find, from our point of view, to be a frigid and arbitrary fancy, incomparable in its moral value to that intensity which has bound living men to an actual and ancient soil. It suffers in the comparison from the profound sense that we have that the former opinion is superficial, and the latter vital; that is to say, we have no doubt at all that an ordinary man, born in England, might profess himself a Tolstoyan and an opponent of patriotism with every mark of reason and sincerity; we also have no doubt at all that if he saw the Russian flag run up in Trafalgar Square he would go white to the lips. But this humanitarian theory of the wrongness of the national sentiment, though important, is by no means the most powerful opponent of that sentiment today. Another force is in the field, which is by its nature quite equally antagonistic to patriotism, and which is, unlike the other, equipped with power, with wealth, and with a fair chance of triumph in practical politics. This second enemy of patriotism is, I need hardly say, the idea commonly called Imperialism. Imperialism seeks to destroy patriotism, not by sketching a remote and unattainable fusion between different peoples, but by pointing out how and where at a particular moment such fusion may be made. Imperialism is an opportunist cosmopolitanism. It says in its rational moods (for it has perfectly rational moods, and of these only is it fair to speak): “We do not say we would annex Spain for fun or pick a quarrel with Norway for the sake of doing so. But wherever circumstances lead us more or less naturally to the opportunity of effacing a distinction, of pulling down a flag, of destroying a nationality, we will do so. Wherever we can turn some separate kingdom or republic, with special memories and symbols, into a part of the British or Russian or German Empire, and make it accept our memories and symbols, we will do so. We believe that civilization is on our side, and we enforce it against Fins or Boers, against Poles or Irishmen. We are Imperialists; we are not the reckless enemies of patriotism, but we are its enemies.” That is the voice of sane and educated Imperialism. I am aware that in the late confusion of political parties the cause of Imperialism was to some extent strengthened by appeals to the immortal sentiment of patriotism. But this is merely one of those electioneering bewilderments common in all practical politics, and especially in English politics. The patriotic feeling is used in favour of Imperialism just as the hatred of tyrants might have been used against the French Revolution, or the letter of the constitution against Pym and Hampden—that is, used quite honestly and with some reasonable significance, but without any reference to the real divisions between great ideas. It is perfectly evident when we consider the matter fundamentally that it is impossible to have an Imperial patriotism; that is to say, it is impossible to have towards a sprawling and indeterminate collection of peoples of every variety of goodness and badness precisely that sentiment which is evoked in man, rightly or wrongly, by the contemplation of the peculiar customs of his ancestors and the peculiar land of his birth. Of course, it is quite reasonable to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism for the Empire, just as it is permissible to use as a metaphor such a phrase as having a patriotism of humanity, or such a phrase as having fallen in love with Rouen Cathedral. But the perfectly legitimate sentiment which leads a man to support, on political grounds, a huge cosmopolitan confederation has about as much resemblance to the passion which has made men sing of and die for a strip of land as an admiration for the architecture of Normandy has to the hunger in the heart of Romeo. I am not saying at this point in the discussion that this old and special attachment to some individual soil or blood is a correct sentiment. Perhaps the political theory which unites Jews like Disraeli or Germans like Lord Milner to a large modern civilization is a more rational sentiment than the old sentiment of patriotism. Perhaps patriotism is a brutal fancy of primitive man which it is possible for the world to outgrow. All this I shall discuss later. What I am concerned to point out at the moment is the more or less self-evident fact that this Imperial idea or plan for the consolidation and identification of an increasing number of different commonwealths cannot seriously be called patriotism according to any sense that the word has ever actually had among men. If patriotism does not mean a defined and declared preference for certain traditions or surroundings, it means nothing whatever. A thing like an empire, like the Roman Empire, which contained Greeks and Goths and ancient Britons; a thing like the British Empire, which contains Dutchmen and Negroes and Chinamen in Hong Kong, may be a perfectly legitimate object of a certain kind of intellectual esteem, but it is ludicrous to call it patriotism, or invoke the ancient deities of the hearth and the river and the hill. There may be good reason for supporting Mr. Beit in South Africa, but to ask us in the name of patriotism to remember that he is of our people is about as accurate as asking us in the name of family feeling to remember that he is our great-aunt.
Across the path of Imperialism as interpreted in a patriotic sense there lies the most insurmountable of human obstacles, an impossibility which is more than a political and more than a financial impossibility - a psychological impossibility. An empire has all the characteristics that render national attachments impossible. It is huge, it is mostly remote, it is everywhere diverse and contradictory. Above all, it is utterly undefined and unlimited. Not to see how this frustrates genuine enthusiasm is not to know the alphabet of the human heart. There is one thing that is vitally essential to everything which is to be intensely enjoyed or intensely admired—limitation. Whenever we look through an archway, and are stricken into delight with the magnetic clarity and completeness of the landscape beyond, we are realizing the necessity of boundaries. Whenever we put a picture in a frame, we are acting upon that primeval truth which is the value of small nationalities. Wherever we write or read with pleasure the story of a man living adventurously and happily upon an island, we have hold of the truth which broke the Roman Empire, and will always break Imperialism. All Imperial poetry, even the very best (as in the earlier work of Rudyard Kipling) must be psychologically false, for when a man really loves a thing he dwells not on its largeness, but its smallness. The very psychology of patriotism is in the patriotism of Shakespeare, above all in that hackneyed and admirable passage in “Richard II” which is the very ecstasy of the little Englander. It is indescribably significant that Shakespeare, in glorifying his country, compares it to two things - a fortress and jewel -
This precious stone, set in a silver sea,
Which serves it for the purpose of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house.
A fort is a thing which appeals both to the boyish and the practical instinct as characterized by a certain quality which can only be called coziness. A jewel is a thing the intense value of which is enhanced by its being both rare and minute. A fortress not upon its defence, a jewel multiplied over the earth like the pebbles of the shore, changes the note of feeling finally and beyond recovery. Imperialism is the opening of Shakespeare’s fort and the cheapening of his jewel. Shakespeare was right in this particular kind of love-poetry, as in all other kinds. While the anaemic moderns are trying to evoke passion by raving about size and space and eternity, the gigantic Elizabethan remembers in the matter of patriotism also the great psychological verity that all love-poetry tends to diminutives.
It is instructive to compare this graphic Little England patriotism of Shakespeare with the best work of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. That best work is very beautiful literature, but it is always at its truest and most beautiful when the writer is speaking of cosmopolitanism, of the sensations of the traveller in many lands. The point of John of Gaunt’s utterance is that England satisfies; the point of the “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” is that nothing satisfies, hardly even the whole globe:
Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done,
Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.
So write, before I die, “’E liked it all!
That is real poetry, and sentiment too, but it is the very reverse of patriotism. It is the light and not inhumane melancholy of the man who has paid his vows to many gods and many women. Shakespeare’s patriotism has the joy and pain of a passionate lover; Mr. Kipling’s has the gaiety and sadness of a philanderer among the nations.
Spiritually, then, we hold that a healthy man does not demand cosmopolitanism, and does not demand empire. He demands something which is more or less roughly represented by Nationalism. That is to say, he demands a particular relation to some homogeneous community of manageable and imaginable size, large enough to inspire his reverence by its hold on history, small enough to inspire his affection by its hold on himself. If we were gods planning a perfect planet, if we were poets inventing a Utopia, we should divide the world into communities of this unity and moderate size. It is, therefore, not true to say of us that a cosmopolitan humanity is a far-off ideal; it is not an ideal at all for us, but a nightmare.
And now, having this purely idealistic faith in loyalties of this scope and groups of this kind, we have to turn from pure ethics and poetry to the discussion of the earth as it is at this moment. Hitherto I have attempted to suggest that the national idea is more noble and pleasing in the abstract than either the cosmopolitan or the Imperial idea, if, indeed, Imperialism can be imagined as anything but cosmopolitan. But now let us turn to the practical people - convertimur in gentes.
Now, having this belief, that communities of a size much smaller than empires are the healthy homes for men, that they are better than either a cosmopolitan anarchy or Imperialism, we look out at practical history, and discover a rather remarkable fact. We discover that the civilization which has in practical politics led the world has not only, as a fact, branched or broken into communities of this type, but has made the outline and character of them a sacred thing. Europe, which is the most practical civilization, is also the only Nationalist civilization. Imperialism is Asiatic. We see it at its very best and most intellectual in a thing like the Chinese civilization. In Europe only is there this sense of the sanctity of nation. In other places men fight for the independence of their own tribe. In our Nationalist Europe only is there any notion of respecting the independence of another tribe. And this is, of course, the only test of the existence of a religion. It is no proof that a man holds life sacred that he wishes to save his own life; it is some proof of it if he refrains from murdering his enemy. And this was the whole of our objection to the annexation of the Transvaal, that it was a crime committed against the European virtue of patriotism. For a man has clearly no more right to say that his British patriotism obliges him to destroy the Boer nation than he has to say that his sense of the sanctity of marriage makes him run away with his neighbour’s wife.
There is undoubtedly a general notion abroad at the present time that small nationalities are dying out. There is a general notion that empires are living or destined to a continual life, that nationalities are dead or destined to die. Such an idea as this can only have arisen from ordinary ignorance of the history of Europe. It is true that empire often looks strong and nationality often looks weak, but that is merely because all the things that are eternal always look weak. That simple discovery has been the seed of all religions.
The practical truth is that the empires have been the light and transient things, brief as the butterfly; the nations have been the hard and solid and triumphant things, which nothing could break. The largest empire is really only a fashion. But the smallest nation is something greater than a fashion - it is a custom. Imperialism is not either a glorious discovery of the English, as some Englishmen think, or a wicked invention of the English, as other Englishmen think. It is a tiresome old European fad or fashion, coming round to us after having been tried and found wanting by nearly all the kindred nations. It neither starts anything nor ends anything; it merely recurs, like the crinoline. But while Imperialism goes out and in, like the crinoline, nationality remains, like the habit of wearing clothes.
Spain was once a colonial empire, far more brilliant and original than ours. Its empire has vanished, but there are still men who will die for Spain; there are still men who will strike you in the face if you say that they are not Spaniards. France had an empire covering all Europe after the great ecstasy of the Revolution. It vanished utterly, and all its ideas are at a low ebb in Europe. But there are still men who will die for France. And when from our mortal nation also this immortal fallacy is passed, when all the colonies of England have gone the wild way of the colonies of Spain, when some strange and sudden Waterloo has made the little dream of Beaconsfield as mad as the great dream of Napoleon, something will remain, I am very certain, which matters more than all these levities. There will still be men who will die for England.
If any ordinary Englishman wishes to feel the difference between the unreality of Imperialism and the reality of Nationalism - I do not mind whether he is an Imperialist or anything else—let him try one simple test. Let him say first of all to himself such a sentence as this: “It was largely due to the influence of England that Australia was ceded to Germany.” Such a sentence will no doubt fill him with a not illegitimate fury. He may rank it with Majuba, and call it a scandalous example of his country’s weakness. But then let him say to himself this sentence: “It was largely due to the influence of Australia that England was ceded to Germany.” He will not think that means the weakness of his country. He will think it means that he has no longer any country to be weak. He will not think that means Majuba, but Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods.
It is just because our modern Imperialists do not see the enormous abyss between the claim of the nation and the claim of the mere empire that their philosophy is so superficial and so insincere. It is no exaggeration at all to say that there is as much difference between asking an Englishman to give up his empire and asking him to give up his England as there is between asking him to alter the shape of his hat and asking him to alter the shape of his head. The two things lie geographically very near together, and for persons with pedantic minds the frontier between hat and head may, for all I know, be the subject of elaborate negotiation.
The people who live in our large towns, and read our large newspapers - probably the most credulous people who have ever existed upon earth—have got an idea into their heads that such things as the annexation of the Transvaal are parts of a normal historic process. They believe that big European empires have always been eating up small European nations, just as whales have always been eating up herrings. This, again, is because they know no history. When we come to look at the facts, the really extraordinary thing is that the absorption of white nations should not have happened oftener. In this wild and wicked world the keenest Nationalist would expect it often to happen, and often to succeed.
As a fact, it has seldom happened: it has never succeeded. Fragments of nations have been bitten off, as in Alsace and Lorraine, and even those have not been easy to chew. Wild tribes, in a chaotic period, with no national sentiment at all in the European sense - tribes such as existed in Europe once, and exist in Asia still - have overrun and eaten up each other; but a nation is a thing quite different to these. Some Christian nations have been swallowed; not one has ever been digested. The chunks of Poland still lie heavy on the stomachs of the Central Empires; Ireland has been a perpetual dyspeptic pain. For living nations were not meant by Nature to be our food.
In the whole circle of Christian history and the Christian world there is one instance, and one instance only, of a patriotic European people living contentedly with their Government transferred to another capital. That instance is Scotland; and if ever there were on earth an exception that proved the rule it is here, for Scotchmen have held their heads up after absorption for precisely the same reason that Switzers hold their heads up after liberation - the fact that they were never conquered. If anyone wishes to make the case of the Transvaal a parallel to the case of Scotland, the step required is simple enough. Let Edward VII leave his crown to President Steyn, and we will answer for the loyalty of the Dutch in South Africa.
We contend, then, that this Nationalism is, at any rate, an unbroken fact of our Europe. It is no more probable that the British Empire will outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Africa than it was probable that the Spanish Empire would outlast the patriotism of the Dutch in Europe. Nations are tenacious, empires are slovenly. And now we come to that other matter which is important, the question of whether empires, strong or weak, and nations, strong or weak, do good or harm. In supporting the Spanish Empire or the British Empire, are we supporting something likely to do good to mankind? For, of course, we should be quite willing in that case to side with their weakness, and their forlorn hope of resistance against the enduring tyranny of nationality.
There is one faith which many good men have in Imperialism which must not be despised, but which must respectfully be shattered. Many good men believe that a great conglomeration of peoples, like the British Empire, may be a unification of varied merits. They believe that by it may be extracted the best from the Sepoy, the Australian, the Irishman, the Dutchman, the negro, and the Cockney. All these, they say, may thus grow in one orchard, and civilization can gather the best fruit from each.
Now, this kind of empire has many beauties; it is varied, fascinating, and instructive. But it has one defect: it does not exist. It is emphatically not true that when we conquer peoples we get the good out of them. So far from that, the reverse is rather true: when we conquer peoples we lose them for ever. Take an instance. Nothing has more profoundly interested us of late years, whether we are philosophers or children, than the study of the great mythologies. Nearly every baby is now brought up among the gods of Greece and the gods of Scandinavia. Many schoolboys could pass an examination as to who was the uncle of Mercury or the second cousin of Loki. We have ransacked every cranny of Olympus and Asgard, and all this time there existed in Europe another great mythology, as vast and varied, as powerful and as perfect.
The chief mark of such a great mythology is that the mere phrases of it are enough to establish its greatness. The mere phrase “The Son of man” is enough to prove Christianity to be a great religion if no other trace remained of the personality of Christ. The mere phrase “The Twilight of the Gods” is enough to prove that the Norsemen were poets and philosophers also. And as clearly and certainly a whole universe of primal imagination is revealed by such a mere phrase as “The Country of the Young.” And the mythology of which “The Country of the Young” is an example, of which other examples are such unfathomable conceptions as the Secret Rose, or the Black Boar, who in his brutal simplicity typifies the primitive darkness of things; - where, in what corner of Europe, in what crevice of the Caucasian mountains, has this sumptuous mythology been discovered? It has been discovered in Ireland. It has been discovered in that country of all countries which was nearest to us and most despised, which we conceived as the withered limb of our Empire. Why did we know so much about German mythology and nothing about Irish mythology? Any person with even the simplest knowledge of the world as it is must realize that the reason lies in the fact that our material conquest of Ireland put us in an utterly artificial position towards everything Irish. The Irish would not sing to us any more than the Jews, as described in their stern and splendid psalm, would sing to the Babylonians. I find it difficult to believe that there can be anyone so ignorant of practical existence as not to know that any attempt on the part of the Irish for centuries after their conquest to say to us what they had to say about their history and legends would have been met with nothing except jokes about Brian Baroo. We all know in reality that England would never have consented to learn from Ireland. It has learnt from France because it failed to conquer her. If Edward III or Henry V had succeeded in adding France to the Empire, we may be absolutely certain that we should have learnt as little from the song of Roland as we have from the legend of Maive, and that we should have profited as little from the genius of Mirabeau as we did from the genius of Parnell.
Or take another instance on a somewhat different plane. For centuries all European nations, and England as much as any of them, have been running round and round the metaphysical problem of being, of pessimism and optimism, of variety and unity. And all the time there existed in India an immense and lucid philosophy which, true or false, was, in the case of many English philosophers, the very thing that they were seeking; in the case of many of them, the very thing that they were saying. The eighteenth century was full of sad speculations and wild speculations; but they could not entertain quite so wild a speculation as that their sad philosophy had been reduced to its clearest elements by naked brown men in the wilds of Asia. It is strange to think that when poor Robert Clive stood with the pistol in his hand, and asked himself the value of life and death, he might have learnt from some ragged fakir, whom he treated as dirt, a pessimism infinitely deeper and infinitely more rational than his own. Englishmen could not find it out, could not even realize that it was there. The discovery of the greatest of all philosophical schemes for the absorption of personality was left for Schopenhauer, a German. His hands were not tied with the utter helplessness of empire.
Experience, then, is wholly against the idea that by conquering a people we can reach or use the good in them. The idea that an empire absorbs the Irish qualities when it conquers the Irish, or possesses the Indian wisdom when it conquers India, is one of the thousand delusions which are characteristic of world politics. It is like the notion of the cannibals that it is possible to become brave by eating a brave man, or experts at horsemanship by eating an elegant horseman. We can no more get the secret of Chinese stoicism by annexing China than a savage could become a good actor by dining on Sir Charles Wyndham. And the reason is very evident. The relations of a subject to a ruling race are in themselves false relations, and neither can know anything valuable of the other. They are very like the relations a man bears to his footman or his housemaid. If anybody told us that a duchess must know more of the soul of the butler than of her personal friends, because she saw the butler every day, and there was only a floor between them, we should not entertain a high opinion of that person’s knowledge of the world. But it has never occurred to us that this is the reason why we have reaped profit from the French temperament, and no profit from the Irish temperament. The truth is, of course, that the friendship of nations is like the friendship of individuals. No such thing is possible unless both parties are free. National independence is as much needed if peoples are to be genuine friends as it is if they are to be genuine enemies. Often as we have heard of liberty, equality, and fraternity, we do not remember enough that the two things essential to fraternity are liberty and equality.
The English people, who are upon the whole the most generous people in the world, have this defect in their generosity - that they cannot be persuaded that there are any people in the world who do not want their commodities. In fact, the English have a peculiar and even mystical kind of generosity - a generosity which is willing to give all its goods to the poor, but cannot be persuaded to let the poor keep the goods they have already. And consequently, when we begin to speak of self-government and independence and such matters, the typical Englishman always imagines that we mean a Parliament elected on the English system, with green benches and a Speaker wearing a wig; and as he imagines that this is the only possible kind of self-government, he says, with perfect truth, that no nation in the world has done as much for self-government as the English. It does not, however, seem to occur to him that every Government that ever existed in the world was a representative Government, and that every despot was elected silently by universal suffrage. Where a nation has a taste for politics, as in England, its politicians represent it; but where it has a taste rather for war, let us say, its warriors represent it; and where it has a taste for religious meditation, its saints and hermits represent it. Even in England, for instance, where we have some love of politics, and may admit, therefore, that Mr. Chamberlain represents us, we have a much greater love of cricket, and C.B. Fry represents us much better than Mr. Chamberlain.
In the light of this principle our relation to such a problem as that of the politics of India becomes clear. The reason why it is undesirable to extend the franchise to the Hindoos in India is not that it would raise a rebellion or create a ridiculous spectacle, but simply that representative Government in India would not be representative. And the reason that it would not be representative is simply this: that the political faculty not being an Indian faculty, the politicians who would dominate the country would be the most un-Indian Indians who could be found. No suffrage, however wide, no political machinery, however faultless, could make the spouting, ranting, Europeanized, Bengali adventurer represent India. Nothing could alter the fact that he would despise the ancient peasant-life of India, and the ancient peasant-life, with a great deal more justification, would despise him. The political faculty would, of course, be cultivated and brought, perhaps, to a high perfection by certain Hindoos, but it would remain to the eyes of India a unique and elegant and somewhat unnecessary accomplishment. The Bengali politicians would, under whatever democratic forms, inaugurate in India a rule of experts - that is to say, of stupid and fanatical oppressors. India would be about as much really democratized by such a scheme as England would be if we had a General Election every three years to choose the man whom the great soul of the people really believed to be the best player on the trombone.
So that this essentially generous English idea that we must provide all the parts of the earth we can influence with our political institutions is dropped significantly, and dropped, if one may say so, with a crash at the first sight of the greatest British problem, the problem of India. Face to face with India, we are obliged to admit that what is one nation’s meat is another nation’s poison. And the moment we have admitted that, we have broken at a blow the whole conception of that extension of Anglo-Saxon civilization which is the essential of current Imperialism. If our political institutions would not necessarily improve or represent the Hindoo, then the whole thing is a matter of local temperament, and it is quite as possible that our political institutions never have improved or expressed the Irishman, and never will improve or express the Boer. It may be a good thing, of course, in particular cases to give our civilization to these people, but it can no longer be maintained that it is obviously a good thing to give it as it is a good thing to give a loaf to a starving man. The essential principle of Nationalism, that the institutions which are the growth of the soil have an advantage as such, is admitted.
III
Civilization is a good thing, but it is not a thing like the love of God, by its nature infinite. A man may have too much civilization, as he may have too much beer, and the supreme evil of civilization may be expressed in one single phrase. It consists in permitting the human achievements to outrun the human imagination. A man possesses what he can think of, and not an atom more. If a man with twelve thousand millions a month received thirteen thousand million instead, not a farthing would really have been given to him, for he could not even imagine the difference. Similarly, if a citizen of an empire already containing numberless alien and incomprehensible people has added to his heritage another alien and incomprehensible people, no difference has really been made. A man is a citizen of that commonwealth the nature of which he can conceive, and of no other. If that commonwealth is only a street out of the Blackfriars Road, that street is his country, and for that he ought to wear ribbons or shed his blood.
The danger of small commonwealths is narrowness, but their advantage is reality. Now, at any specific stage in the world’s history we ought to ask ourselves whether humanity is in a greater danger from the narrow arrogance of small people, or from the phantasmal delusions of empires. That is the question which confronts the serious European of today, and the answer is not very difficult. It is idle to tell him that Nationalism is sometimes an evil in the confusion of a beptarchy, when the fact stares him in the face that the modern evils arise from remoteness, from unreality, from the circulation of wealth far from its producers, from the waging of wars far from the seat of action, from the wild use of statistics, from the crude use of names, from the investor and the theorist, and the absentee landlord.
We have reached in the modern world a condition of such appalling unreality that everything is done on paper. Men know the destiny of countries when they have never met a native, and professed love and hatred for men whom, if they saw them in the street, they could not tell from Poles or Portuguese. For this immense theoretic method of modern times they have invented an admirable phrase—a phrase that expresses with a searching accuracy and irony of which they are quite unconscious the nature of their political occupation. They have called it “painting the map red.” Like children, they are wholly concerned with the colours in an atlas. So long as they can paint the map red they are quite contented that the countries depicted there should retain until doomsday their own alien and inexhaustible colours of forest and field.
There is a decadence possible for our modern civilization, and it is just at this point that my difference from the Imperialists comes in. They think Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the cure. I think that Imperialism (otherwise Cosmopolitanism) is the disease. I ignore for the moment the question of whether, in the abstract, combinations and centralizations and steamboats and Marconi wires are good things or bad. But to attempt to cure the evil of Birmingham and save the soul of Chicago by more combinations and centralizations and more steamboats and more Marconi wires seem to me stark lunacy; it is like a doctor ordering brandy to a man in delirium tremens. It is precisely from these things that we are suffering, from a loose journalism, from a vague geography, from an excitable smattering of everything, from an officious interest in everybody, from a loss of strong national types, of strong religious restraints, of the sense of memory and the fear of God. We are not suffering from any very painful or dangerous resemblance to the arrogant and cruel zealots who ruled in Sparta or died in the fall of Jerusalem. We are suffering from a resemblance to the mob in decaying Rome.
Is there anyone today who can reasonably doubt that what led us into error in our recent South African politics was precisely our Imperialism, and not our Nationalism? was precisely not our ancient interest in England, but our quite modern and quite frivolous interest in everywhere else? Millions of instances might be quoted to show how utterly at sea we were and are still about the soul of South Africa. It is as well, perhaps, to concentrate them into two examples.
President Kruger and Mr. Cecil Rhodes had both great talents, great ambitions, and exciting lives; they both had many sincere sympathizers in England, and each one of them at the supreme crisis of his life did things which mystified and appalled their English supporters. No English Rhodesian could ever defend the Raid; no English Pro-Boer has ever explained the Ultimatum. The reason is that neither Rhodes nor Kruger were English politicians. We cannot understand them; probably they understood each other.
It is true that it is sometimes alleged that such things as telegraphy and journalism have really abolished distance. This is not only an error, but a horribly dangerous one. Telegraphy and journalism can indeed convey some things easily, but these are precisely the things that do not matter—the mere names, dates, and incidents. At the worst, journalism supplies us with falsehoods; at the best, only with facts. And facts, taken apart from their atmosphere, local sentiment, and place in life, are quite as false as falsehoods. We know that a man is shot by a Boer policeman; but what is the use of knowing that? What we need to know is whether the thing was typical, whether it was exceptional, whether it was planned, whether it was excused, whether it was excusable. We want to know whether it was a thing like a German duel or a thing like a Whitechapel murder. And all this we could only know by living in the community. Our newspapers could not tell it to us, even if our newspapers were honest.
Or take the instance of newspapers themselves. How can that subtle thing, the prestige of a newspaper, be felt, except at close quarters? We know that the editor of the Canadian Tomahawk has impeached Lord Dundonald, but what ordinary Englishman will be dishonest enough to pretend that he knows whether this means the Times or the Daily Express? We shall never know how much of a fool Mr. Chamberlain may have made of himself over the French caricatures of Queen Victoria, because we do not live in France, and feel the flavour and position of Le Rire. But how great a fool he may, perhaps, have made of himself we can easily imagine by supposing that the Kaiser made a speech tomorrow calling on God and his brave Brandenburg because there had been a paragraph about him in Modern Society.
We must at all costs get back to smaller political entities, because we must at all costs get back to reality. We must get nearer and nearer again to love and hate and mother-wit, to personal judgments and the truth in the faces of men. As it is, the game of world-politics is an enormous game of cross purposes. In the fantastic sunset of a decadence the shadows of men are far larger than themselves.
President Roosevelt is accepted in England as something much greater than he is in America. Mr. Seddon is taken much more seriously by Mr. Chamberlain than he is by New Zealand. The really bad work of Cecil Rhodes was not his influence on colonial politicians, whom he understood, but his influence on English gentlemen, whom he could not understand.
It is characteristic of this vast bewilderment which we call world-politics that it so constantly leaves out of account the most important matters even in its own line. For instance, it perpetually tells us that the English race has a talent for colonization, and adjures it to find fresh continents and fresh islands in the seas of sunset or dawn. Yet there is one island which the English could colonize most easily, and which they are not permitted to colonize—England. In England alone, among all modern countries, the English people are imprisoned between hedges and driven along rights-of-way. England does not belong to them at all; belongs to them far less than the Transvaal before the war belonged to the Uitlanders. And it is in the main that very class whose immense and absurd estates make impossible the colonization of England which urges the English people to colonize something else, preferably something on the other side of the world. These owners very naturally desire what they call a spirited foreign and colonial policy. They desire that every lonely old theocratical State from the Transvaal to Thibet should be invaded by the English; for all these enterprises put off the dreadful day when the English shall invade England.
But do not let us admit for a moment that in thus turning English loyalty to England we are serving merely England or ourselves. We are taking the turn which our great Christian civilization must take if it is to live. It is an old civilization, and it is for a season tired—tired of civilization, tired of cheap culture, tired of scepticism, tired of talk, tired of hearsay, tired, in a word, of Imperial politics. And it must return, as it did in the adoption of Christianity, to intensity and humility, to a devotion to particular things. About our European Imperialism let us remember primarily one thing, that it has all happened before. The end of the world happened a thousand years ago. At the end of the Roman era everything that was Roman seemed to have gone stale for ever. The world was with infinite agony made young again, because there were some tribes the Empire had never conquered, and some Scriptures that it had never read. The Empire and the continent were just saved by the failures of Imperialism. Strange religions came out of the virgin East, strange races came out of the virgin North, and became useful because they had been neglected. Such was the issue of the happy failure of Imperialism; the human mind dares scarcely imagine its success. Who can face the notion of a power which has destroyed everything but itself suddenly growing sick of itself? What pessimist could have pictured the great Empire, at the very instant when it had discovered Roman roads and Roman trophies to be vanity, stretching out its arms to the East and to the West, and finding nothing but its own intolerable omnipresence—finding nothing but Roman trophies and Roman roads?
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