The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
We must eventually think of internationalism on its educational side
as most fundamentally a question of developing in the world the
_international spirit_. We might quite naturally think of this as the
education of social feeling or of the social instinct. This is,
however, not the most productive attitude toward the situation, in our
view, simply because when we think of the education of the feelings we
are likely to be satisfied with the principles of an old static
philosophy of life and of the school. Moral and social feelings, we
believe, grow best in a practical medium. We cannot expand social
feeling at will, or produce a democratic spirit by some simple process
of education. When we try to extend social feeling too far we make the
moral life insincere. To try to expand social feeling and moral
interest so as to make it include the foreign, to try to love our
enemies in advance of all aesthetic and practical relations with the
foreign seems futile. Distance must first be eliminated by
imagination. Social and moral codes must be founded upon intimate
relations. External and distant relations among peoples make for
diplomatic forms and a hypocritical morality. These are substitutes
for social feeling. These purely social relations of nations (like
those of individuals) always hide enmity and jealousy. We cannot
expect, therefore, to create a moral spirit in the relations of
peoples to one another by teaching alone. We cannot hope to change
individualism to altruism merely by exciting feeling. Our main effort
must be directed toward establishing ethical relations, rather than to
stimulating moral sentiments.
It seems useless to preach universal brotherhood either to the child
who lacks entirely the content of experience to make such sentiments
real, or to the working masses who now lack enthusiasm in _all_ the
social relations. At least to depend upon such teaching to create
international spirit is futile. Love for mankind is too ideal and too
remote, as yet, to arouse deep and sincere impulses and feelings. All
teaching, therefore, whether in the school or elsewhere that is
directed exclusively or especially to the moral aspects of peace,
altruistic behavior and internationalism, seems to-day, to say the
least, peculiarly inadequate. Our spirit in education must be broadly
humanistic, and must indeed lay deep foundations for all moral and
social relations, but in so far as it ends in being cultural and
hortatory it can have no deep and lasting effect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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