Instincts of the Herd in Peace and WarTrotter, W. (Wilfred)
Science
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War
Trotter, W. (Wilfred)
Collective behavior; Crowds; Social psychology; World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects
To the politician, devoted as he necessarily is to the exclusively
human point of view, it may seem fantastic and scandalous to look for
help in international policy to the conduct of dogs. The gulf between
the two fields is not perhaps so impassably profound as he would
like to think, but, however that may be, the analogy I have drawn is
not unsupported by evidence of a more respectable kind. {201} The
susceptibility of the individual German to a harsh and even brutally
enforced discipline is well known. The common soldier submits to be
beaten by his sergeant, and is the better soldier for it; both submit
to the bullying of their officer apparently also with profit; the
common student is scarcely less completely subject to his professor,
and becomes thereby a model of scientific excellence; the common
citizen submits to the commands of his superiors, however unreasonably
conceived and insultingly conveyed, and becomes a model of disciplined
behaviour; finally the head of the State, combining the most drastic
methods of the sergeant, the professor, and the official, wins not
merely a slavish respect, but a veritable apotheosis.
Germany has shown unmistakably the way to her heart; it is for Europe
to take it.
ENGLAND AGAINST GERMANY—ENGLAND.
It is one of the most impressive facts about the war, that while
Germany is the very type of a perfected aggressive herd, England is
perhaps the most complete example of a socialized herd. Corresponding
with this biological difference is the striking difference in their
history. Germany has modelled her soul upon the wolf’s, and has rushed
through the possibilities of her archetype in fifty feverish years of
development; already she is a finished product, her moral ideal is
fulfilled and leaves her nothing to strive for except the imposition of
it upon the world. England has taken as her model the bee, and still
lags infinitely far behind the fulfilment of her ideal. In the unbroken
security of her land, for near a thousand years, she has leisurely,
perhaps lazily, and with infinite slowness, pursued her path towards a
social integration of an {202} ever closer and deeper kind. She has
stolidly, even stupidly, and always in a grossly practical spirit, held
herself to the task of shaping a society in which free men could live
and yet be citizens. She has had no theory of herself, no consciousness
of her destiny, no will to power. She has had almost no national
heroes, and has always been constitutionally frigid to her great men,
grudging them the material for their experimentations on her people,
indifferent to their expositions of her duty and her imperial destiny,
granting them a chance to die for her with no more encouragement than
an impatient sigh. She has allowed an empire to be won for her by her
restless younger sons, has shown no gratification in their conquests,
and so far from thrilling with the exultation of the conqueror, has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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