We have still, it would seem, the instincts which led men, before their behaviour had become deliberate, to live in small tribes, with a sharp antithesis of internal friendship and external hostility.
Wars, which originally were wars of extermination, gradually became--at least in part--wars of conquest; the vanquished, instead of being put to death, were made slaves and compelled to labour for their conquerors....Nineveh and Babylon ruled over vast territories, not because their subjects had any instinctive sense of social cohesion with the dominant city, but solely because of the terror inspired by its prowess in war. From those early days down to modern times war has been the chief engine in enlarging the size of communities, and fear has increasingly replaced tribal solidarity as a source of social cohesion.
Always when we pass beyond the limits of the family it is the external enemy which supplies the cohesive force. In times of safety we can afford to hate our neighbour, but in times of danger we must love him.
It is this that makes the difficulty of devising means of world-wide unity. A world state, if it were firmly established, would have no enemies to fear, and would therefore be in danger of breaking down through lack of cohesive force.....Religion, morality, economic self-interest, the mere pursuit of biological survival, all supply to our intelligence unanswerable arguments in favour of world-wide co-operation, but the old instincts that have come down to us from our tribal ancestors rise up in indignation, feeling that life would lose its savour if there were no one to hate.....
Alexander, Atilla, and Jenghiz Khan had vast empires which broke up at their death, and in which unity had depended entirely upon the prestige of a great conqueror. These various empires had no psychological unity, but only the unity of force. Rome did better, because Graeco-Roman civilization was something which educated individuals valued and which was sharply contrasted with the barbarism of tribes beyond the frontier. Until the invention of modern techniques it was scarcely possible to hold a large empire together unless the upper sections of society throughout its length and breadth held some common sentiment by which they were united. And the ways of generating such a common sentiment were much less understood than they are now. the psychological basis of social cohesion, therefore, was still important, although needed only among a governing minority...
But since the coming of steam and the telegraph it has become much easier than it was before to hold a large territory, and since the coming of universal education it has become easier to instill a more or less artificial loyalty throughout a large population....
Rome's attempt to unify the civilized world came to grief largely because, perhaps through being both remote and alien, it failed to bring any measure of instinctive happiness even to prosperous citizens. In its last centuries there was universal pessimism and lack of vigour.....
From the fifteenth century to the present time the power of the State as against the individual has been continually increasing, at first mainly as a result of the invention of gunpowder...The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a remarkable degree of success in increasing State power to what was necessary for the preservation of order, and leaving in spite of it a great measure of freedom to those citizens who did not belong to the lowest social grades....
There is over a large part of the earth's surface something not unlike a reversion to the ancient Egyptian system of divine kingship, controlled by a new priestly caste. Although this tendency has not gone so far in the West as it has in the East, it has, nevertheless, gone to lengths which would have astonished the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both in England and in America. Individual initiative is hemmed in either by the State or by powerful corporations, and there is a great danger lest this should produce, as in ancient Rome, a kind of listlessness and fatalism that is disastrous to vigorous life....
Government, from the earliest times at which it existed, has had two functions, one negative and one positive. Its negative function has been to prevent private violence, to protect life and property, to exact criminal law and secure its enforcement. But in addition to this it has had a positive purpose, namely, to facilitate the realization of desires deemed to be common to the great majority of citizens... There is first of all education....Then there are vast industrial enterprises. Even in the United States, which attempts to limit the economic activities of the State to the utmost possible degree, governmental control over such enterprises is rapidly increasing. And as regards industrial enterprises there is little difference, from the psychological point of view, between those conducted by the State and those conducted by large private corporations. In either case there is a government which in fact, if not in intention, is remoter from those whom it controls. It is only the members of the government, whether of a State or of a large corporation, who can retain the sense of individual initiative, and there is inevitably a tendency for governments to regard those who work for them more or less as they regard their machines, that is to say, merely as necessary means....
It may be that the present tendencies towards centralization are too strong to be resisted until they have led to disaster, and that, as happened in the fifth century, the whole system must break down, with all the inevitable results of anarchy and poverty, before human beings can again acquire that degree of personal freedom without which life loses its savour.
This type of development followed by ossification is to be found in China and India, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in the Graeco-roman world. The end comes usually through foreign conquest...
At the apex of each cycle, the area governed by one State is larger than at any former time, and the degree of control exercised by authority over the individual is more intense than in any previous culmination. The Roman Empire was larger than the Babylonian and Egyptian empires, and the empires of the present day are larger than that of Rome.
Since the earth is of finite size, this tendency, if unchecked, must end in the creation of a single world State. But as there will then be no external enemy to promote cohesion through fear, the old psychological mechanisms will no longer be adequate. There will be no scope for patriotism in the affairs of the world government; the driving force will have to be found in self-interest and benevolence, without the potent incentives of hate and fear. Can such a society persist?...
It may be that under the stress of war...the parts of the world where some degree of individual liberty survives may grow fewer...And it would bring with it a recrudescence of ancient evils: slavery, bigotry, intolerance, and abject misery for the majority of mankind...For this reason, emphasis upon the value of the individual is even more necessary now than at any former time.
There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free. This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society.
...The function of the world government is to prevent war, and it should have only such powers as are necessary to this end. This involves a monopoly of armed force, a power to sanction and revise treaties, and the right to give decisions in disputes between States. But the world government should not interfere with the internal affairs of member States, except in so far as is necessary to secure the observance of treaties. In like manner the national government should leave as much as possible to County Councils,....
People do not always remember that politics, economics, and social organization generally, belong in the realm of means, not ends....But a society does not, or at least should not, exist to satisfy an external survey, but to bring a good life to the individuals who compose it. It is in the individuals, not in the whole, that ultimate value is to be sought. A good society is a means to a good life for those who compose it, not something having a separate kind of excellence on its own account.
There are some among philosophers and statesmen who think that the State can have an excellence of its own, and not merely as a means to the welfare of the citizens. I cannot see any reason to agree with this view. 'The State' is an abstraction; it does not feel pleasure or pain, it has no hopes or fears, and what we think of as its purposes are really the purposes of individuals who direct it. When we think concretely, not abstractly, we find, in place of 'the State,' certain people who have more power than falls to the share of most men. And so glorification of 'the State' turns out to be, in fact, glorification of a governing minority. No democrat can tolerate such a fundamentally unjust theory.
Survival in the world that modern science and technique have produced, demands a great deal of government. But what is to give value to survival must come mainly from sources that lie outside government.
Bertrand Russell. Authority and the Individual.
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