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
This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It
is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life,
that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side
the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a
surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a mass interest in
rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses
that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their
origin in the city. The city represents, with all its evil, the higher
life and the line of progress. Progress passes through the city. The
city is the symbol of creativeness and achievement. Industrialism, the
essential spirit of the city, is the condition, normal and necessary
we must conclude, out of which the necessity of international order
arises. It is a phase of the process by which nations become dependent
upon one another by being specialized and becoming densely populated.
It is also a factor in the cause of wars without and revolutions
within.
The mood of the city is thus in a sense the essence of life, but it is
also the source of disease and death in the national life. It is the
price that is paid for civilization that the city tends to become the
hardened artery of national life. The control of the city moods by
educational forces we may believe is one of the most fundamental of
all the problems of conscious evolution. It is the control at the
fountain-head of the forces out of which internationalism is to be
made that we undertake when we try to educate the life of the city,
with reference to its good and its evil. The too rapid urbanizing of
the life of nations, the production, in the cities, of powers too
great and too rapidly growing to be controlled by the civilizing
forces in a country is the great danger in modern life. So great
indeed are the dangers in the accelerated growth of industrialism in
all the great countries and the increased specialization in the
industrial life, that something radical must be done, in our view, to
counterbalance this movement, and especially to control and to raise
to higher levels the psychic factors of city life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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