Aldous Huxley, Essays: Words and Behavior
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. Without them
we should live spasmodically and intermittently. Hatred itself is not
so strong that animals will not forget it, if distracted, even in the
presence of the enemy. Watch a pair of cats, crouching on the brink of
a fight. Balefully the eyes glare; from far down in the throat of each
come bursts of a strange, strangled noise of defiance; as though
animated by a life of their own, the tails twitch and tremble. With
aimed intensity of loathing! Another moment and surely there must be
an explosion. But no; all of a sudden one of the two creatures turns
away, hoists a hind leg in a more than fascist salute and, with the
same fixed and focused attention as it had given a moment before to
its enemy, begins to make a lingual toilet. Animal love is as much at
the mercy of distractions as animal hatred.
The dumb creation lives a life made up of discreet and mutually
irrelevant episodes. Such as it is, the consistency of human
characters is due to the words upon which all human experiences are
strung. We are purposeful because we can describe our feelings in
rememberable words, can justify and rationalize our desires in terms
of some kind of argument. Faced by an enemy we do not allow an itch to
distract us from our emotions; the mere word “enemy” is enough to keep
us reminded of our hatred, to convince us that we do well to be
angry.
Similarly the word “love” bridges for us those chasms of momentary
indifference and boredom which gape from time to time between even the
most ardent lovers. Feeling and desire provide us with our motive
power; words give continuity to what we do and to a considerable
extent determine our direction. Inappropriate and badly chosen words
vitiate thought and lead to wrong or foolish conduct.
Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases
stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For,
consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not
know or fail to understand — because incomprehension allows us, with a
good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities,
because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one
likes, but ought not, to do. Our egotisms are incessantly fighting to
preserve themselves, not only from external enemies, but also from the
assaults of the other and better self with which they are so
uncomfortably associated.
Ignorance is egotism’s most effective defense against that Dr. Jekyll
in us who desires perfection; stupidity, its subtlest stratagem. If,
as so often happens, we choose to give continuity to our experience by
means of words which falsify the facts, this is because the
falsification is somehow to our advantage as egotists.
Consider, for example, the case of war. War is enormously
discreditable to those who order it to be waged and even to those who
merely tolerate its existence. Furthermore, to developed sensibilities
the facts of war are revolting and horrifying. To falsify these facts,
and by so doing to make war seem less evil than it really is, and our
own responsibility in tolerating war less heavy, is doubly to our
advantage. By suppressing and distorting the truth, we protect our
sensibilities and preserve our selfesteem.
Now, language is, among other things, a device which men use for
suppressing and distorting the truth. Finding the reality of war too
unpleasant to contemplate, we create a verbal alternative to that
reality, parallel with it, but in quality quite different from it.
That which we contemplate thenceforward is not that to which we react
emotionally and upon which we pass our moral judgments, is not war as
it is in fact, but the fiction of war as it exists in our pleasantly
falsifying verbiage. Our stupidity in using inappropriate language
turns out, on analysis, to be the most refined cunning. The most
shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are
individual human beings, and that these individual human beings are
condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be
murdered in quarrels not their own, to inflict upon the innocent and,
innocent themselves of any crime against their enemies, to suffer
cruelties of every kind.
The language of strategy and politics is designed, so far as it is
possible, to conceal this fact, to make it appear as though wars were
not fought by individuals drilled to murder one another in cold blood
and without provocation, but either by impersonal and therefore wholly
non-moral and impassible forces, or else by personified abstractions.
Here are a few examples of the first kind of falsification. In place
of “cavalrymen” or “foot-soldiers” military writers like to speak of
“sabres” and “rules.” Here is a sentence from a description of the
Battle of Marengo: “According to Victor’s report, the French retreat
was orderly; it is certain, at any rate, that the regiments held
together, for the six thousand Austrian sabres found no opportunity to
charge home.”
The battle is between sabres in line and muskets in Echelon — a mere
clash of ironmongery.
On other occasions there is no question of anything so vulgarly
material as ironmongery. The battles are between Platonic ideas,
between the abstractions of physics and mathematics. Forces interact;
weights are flung into scales; masses are set in motion. Or else it is
all a matter of geometry. Lines swing and sweep; are protracted or
curved; pivot on a fixed point. Alternatively the combatants are
personal, in the sense that they are personifications. There is “the
enemy,” in the singular, making “his” plans, striking “his” blows. The
attribution of personal characteristics to collectivities, to
geographical expressions, to institutions, is a source, as we shall
see, of endless confusions in political thought, of innumerable
political mistakes and crimes.
Personification in politics is an error which we make because it is to
our advantage as egotists to be able to feel violently proud of our
country and of ourselves as belonging to it, and to believe that all
the misfortunes due to our own mistakes are really the work of the
Foreigner. It is easier to feel violently toward a person than toward
an abstraction; hence our habit of making political personifications.
In some cases military personifications are merely special instances
of political personifications. A particular collectivity, the army or
the warring nation, is given the name and, along with the name, the
attributes of a single person, in order that we may be able to love or
hate it more intensely than we could do if we thought of it as what it
really is: a number of diverse individuals.
In other cases personification is used for the purpose of concealing
the fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war. What is absurd and
monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be
trained to murder one another in cold blood. By personifying opposing
armies or countries, we are able to think of war as a conflict between
individuals. The same result is obtained by writing of war as though
it were carried on exclusively by the generals in command and not by
the private soldiers in their armies. (“Rennenkampf had pressed back
von Schubert.”) The implication in both cases is that war is
indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room. Whereas in
reality it is profoundly different. A scrap between two individuals is
forgivable; mass murder, deliberately organized, is a monstrous
iniquity.
We still choose to use war as an instrument of policy; and to
comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would therefore be
inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some
effort to get rid of the abominable thing. Accordingly, when we talk
about war, we use a language which conceals or embellishes its
reality. Ignoring the facts, so far as we possibly can, we imply that
battles are not fought by soldiers, but by things, principles,
allegories, personified collectivities, or (at the most human) by
opposing commanders, pitched against one another in single combat.
For the same reason, when we have to describe the processes and the
results of war, we employ a rich variety of euphemisms. Even the most
violently patriotic and militaristic are reluctant to call a spade by
its own name. To conceal their intentions even from themselves, they
make use of picturesque metaphors. We find them, for example,
clamoring for war planes numerous and powerful enough to go and
“destroy the hornets in their nests” — in other words, to go and throw
thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of
neighboring countries before they have time to come and do the same to
us. And how reassuring is the language of historians and strategists!
They write admiringly of those military geniuses who know “when to
strike at the enemy’s line” (a single combatant deranges the
geometrical constructions of a personification); when to “turn his
flank”; when to “execute an enveloping movement.” As though they were
engineers discussing the strength of materials and the distribution of
stresses, they talk of abstract entities called “man power” and “fire
power.” They sum up the long-drawn sufferings and atrocities of trench
warfare in the phrase, “a war of attrition”; the massacre and mangling
of human beings is assimilated to the grinding of a lens.
A dangerously abstract word, which figures in all discussions about
war, is “force.” Those who believe in organizing collective security
by means of military pacts against a possible aggressor are
particularly fond of this word. “You cannot,” they say, “have
international justice unless you are prepared to impose it by force.”
“Peace-loving countries must unite to use force against aggressive
dictatorships.” “Democratic institutions must be protected, if need
be, by force.” And so on.
Now, the word “force,” when used in reference to human relations, has
no single, definite meaning. There is the “force” used by parents
when, without resort to any kind of physical violence, they compel
their children to act or refrain from acting in some particular way.
There is the “force” used by attendants in an asylum when they try to
prevent a maniac from hurting himself or others. There is the “force”
used by the police when they control a crowd, and that other “force”
which they used in a baton charge. And finally there is the “force”
used in war. This, of course, varies with the technological devices at
the disposal of the belligerents, with the policies they are pursuing,
and with the particular circumstances of the war in question. But in
general it may be said that, in war, “force” connotes violence and
fraud used to the limit of the combatants’ capacity. Variations in
quantity, if sufficiently great, produce variations in quality. The
“force” that is war, particularly modern war, is very different from
the “force” that is police action, and the use of the same abstract
word to describe the two dissimilar processes is profoundly
misleading. (Still more misleading, of course, is the explicit
assimilation of a war, waged by allied League-of-Nations powers
against an aggressor, to police action against a criminal. The first
is the use of violence and fraud without limit against innocent and
guilty alike; the second is the use of strictly limited violence and a
minimum of fraud exclusively against the guilty.)
Reality is a succession of concrete and particular situations. When we
think about such situations we should use the particular and concrete
words which apply to them. If we use abstract words which apply
equally well (and equally badly) to other, quite dissimilar
situations, it is certain that we shall think incorrectly. Let us take
the sentences quoted above and translate the abstract word “force”
into language that will render (however inadequately) the concrete and
particular realities of contemporary warfare. “You cannot have
international justice, unless you are prepared to impose it by force.”
Translated, this becomes: “You cannot have international justice
unless you are prepared, with a view to imposing a just settlement, to
drop thermite, high explosives and vesicants upon the inhabitants of
foreign cities and to have thermite, high explosives and vesicants
dropped in return upon the inhabitants of your cities.” At the end of
this proceeding, justice is to be imposed by the victorious party —
that is, if there is a victorious party. It should be remarked that
justice was to have been imposed by the victorious party at the end of
the last war. But, unfortunately, after four years of fighting, the
temper of the victors was such that they were quite incapable of
making a just settlement.
The Allies are reaping in Nazi Germany what they sowed at Versailles.
The victors of the next war will have undergone intensive bombardments
with thermite, high explosives and vesicants. Will their temper be
better than that of the Allies in 1918? Will they be in a fitter state
to make a just settlement? The answer, quite obviously, is: No. It is
psychologically all but impossible that justice should be secured by
the methods of contemporary warfare. The next two sentences may be
taken together. “Peace-loving countries must unite to use force
against aggressive dictatorships. Democratic institutions must be
protected, if need be, by force.” Let us translate. “Peace-loving
countries must unite to throw thermite, high explosives and vesicants
on the inhabitants of countries ruled by aggressive dictators. They
must do this, and of course abide the consequences, in order to
preserve peace and democratic institutions.” Two questions immediately
propound themselves. First, is it likely that peace can be secured by
a process calculated to reduce the orderly life of our complicated
societies to chaos? And, second, is it likely that democratic
institutions will flourish in a state of chaos? Again, the answers are
pretty clearly in the negative.
By using the abstract word “force,” instead of terms which at least
attempt to describe the realities of war as it is today, the preachers
of collective security through military collaboration disguise from
themselves and from others, not only the contemporary facts, but also
the probable consequences of their favorite policy. The attempt to
secure justice, peace and democracy by “force” seems reasonable enough
until we realize, first, that this noncommittal word stands, in the
circumstances of our age, for activities which can hardly fail to
result in social chaos; and second, that the consequences of social
chaos are injustice, chronic warfare and tyranny.
The moment we think in concrete and particular terms of the concrete
and particular process called “modern war,” we see that a policy which
worked (or at least didn’t result in complete disaster) in the past
has no prospect whatever of working in the immediate future. The
attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by means of a “force,”
which means, at this particular moment of history, thermite, high
explosives and vesicants, is about as reasonable as the attempt to put
out a fire with a colorless liquid that happens to be, not water, but
petrol.
What applies to the “force” that is war applies in large measure to
the “force” that is revolution. It seems inherently very unlikely that
social justice and social peace can be secured by thermite, high
explosives and vesicants. At first, it may be, the parties in a civil
war would hesitate to use such instruments on their fellow-countrymen.
But there can be little doubt that, if the conflict were prolonged (as
it probably would be between the evenly balanced Right and Left of a
highly industrialized society), the combatants would end by losing
their scruples. The alternatives confronting us seem to be plain
enough. Either we invent and conscientiously employ a new technique
for making revolutions and settling international disputes; or else we
cling to the old technique and, using “force” (that is to say,
thermite, high explosives and vesicants), destroy ourselves. Those
who, for whatever motive, disguise the nature of the second
alternative under inappropriate language, render the world a grave
disservice. They lead us into one of the temptations we find it
hardest to resist — the temptation to run away from reality, to
pretend that facts are not what they are. Like Shelley (but without
Shelley’s acute awareness of what he was doing) we are perpetually
weaving, “A shroud of talk to hide us from the sun Of this familiar
life.”
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions,
ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to
know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have
the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension,
possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and
tolerate the most monstrous crimes:
The poor wretch who has learned his only prayers From curses, who
knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly
Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in
victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms
which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions,
empty sounds to which We join no meaning and attach no form! As if the
soldier died without a wound: As if the fibers of this godlike frame
Were gored without a pang: as if the wretch Who fell in battle, doing
bloody deeds, Passed off to Heaven translated and not killed; As
though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him.
The language we use about war is inappropriate, and its
inappropriateness is designed to conceal a reality so odious that we
do not wish to know it. The language we use about politics is also
inappropriate; but here our mistake has a different purpose. Our
principal aim in this case is to arouse and, having aroused, to
rationalize and justify such intrinsically agreeable sentiments as
pride and hatred, self-esteem and contempt for others. To achieve this
end we speak about the facts of politics in words which more or less
completely misrepresent them. The concrete realities of politics are
individual human beings, living together in national groups.
Politicians — and to some extent we are all politicians — substitute
abstractions for these concrete realities, and having done this,
proceed to invest each abstraction with an appearance of concreteness
by personifying it. For example, the concrete reality of which
“Britain” is the abstraction consists of some forty-odd millions of
diverse individuals living on an island off the west coast of Europe.
The personification of this abstraction appears, in classical fancy-
dress and holding a very large toasting fork, on the backside of our
copper coinage; appears in verbal form, every time we talk about
international politics. “Britain,” the abstraction from forty millions
of Britons, is endowed with thoughts, sensibilities and emotions, even
with a sex — for, in spite of John Bull, the country is always a
female. Now, it is of course possible that “Britain” is more than a
mere name — is an entity that possesses some kind of reality distinct
from that of the individuals constituting the group to which the name
is applied. But this entity, if it exists, is certainly not a young
lady with a toasting fork; nor is it possible to believe (though some
eminent philosophers have preached the doctrine) that it should
possess anything in the nature of a personal will.
One must agree with T. H. Green that “there can be nothing in a
nation, however exalted its mission, or in a society however perfectly
organized, which is not in the persons composing the nation or the
society. . . We cannot suppose a national spirit and will to exist
except as the spirit and will of individuals.” But the moment we start
resolutely thinking about our world in terms of individual persons we
find ourselves at the same time thinking in terms of universality.
“The great rational religions,” writes Professor Whitehead, “are the
outcome of the emergence of a religious consciousness that is
universal, as distinguished from tribal, or even social. Because it is
universal, it introduces the note of solitariness.” (And he might have
added that, because it is solitary, it introduces the note of
universality.) “The reason of this connection between universality and
solitude is that universality is a disconnection from immediate
surroundings.”
And conversely the disconnection from immediate surroundings,
particularly such social surrounding as the tribe or nation, the
insistence on the person as the fundamental reality, leads to the
conception of an all-embracing unity. A nation, then, may be more than
a mere abstraction, may possess some kind of real existence apart from
its constituent members. But there is no reason to suppose that it is
a person; indeed, there is every reason to suppose that it isn’t.
Those who speak as though it were a person (and some go further than
this and speak as though it were a personal god) do so, because it is
to their interest as egotists to make precisely this mistake.
In the case of the ruling class these interests are in part material.
The personification of the nation as a sacred being, different from
and superior to its constituent members, is merely (I quote the words
of a great French jurist, Léon Duguit) “a way of imposing authority by
making people believe it is an authority de jure and not merely de
facto.” By habitually talking of the nation as though it were a person
with thoughts, feelings and a will of its own, the rulers of a country
legitimate their own powers. Personification leads easily to
deification; and where the nation is deified, its government ceases to
be a mere convenience, like drains or a telephone system, and,
partaking in the sacredness of the entity it represents, claims to
give orders by divine right and demands the unquestioning obedience
due to a god.
Rulers seldom find it hard to recognize their friends. Hegel, the man
who elaborated an inappropriate figure of speech into a complete
philosophy of politics, was a favorite of the Prussian government. “Es
ist,” he had written, “es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, das der
Staat ist.” The decoration bestowed on him by Frederick William III
was richly deserved. Unlike their rulers, the ruled have no material
interest in using inappropriate language about states and nations. For
them, the reward of being mistaken is psychological. The personified
and deified nation becomes, in the minds of the individuals composing
it, a kind of enlargement of themselves. The superhuman qualities
which belong to the young lady with the toasting fork, the young lady
with plaits and a brass soutien-gorge, the young lady in a Phrygian
bonnet, are claimed by individual Englishmen, Germans and Frenchmen as
being, at least in part, their own. Dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori. But there would be no need to die, no need of war, if it had not
been even sweeter to boast and swagger for one’s country, to hate,
despise, swindle and bully for it. Loyalty to the personified nation,
or to the personified class or party, justifies the loyal in indulging
all those passions which good manners and the moral code do not allow
them to display in their relations with their neighbors.
The personified entity is a being, not only great and noble, but also
insanely proud, vain and touchy; fiercely rapacious; a braggart; bound
by no considerations of right and wrong. (Hegel condemned as
hopelessly shallow all those who dared to apply ethical standards to
the activities of nations. To condone and applaud every iniquity
committed in the name of the State was to him a sign of philosophical
profundity.) Identifying themselves with this god, individuals find
relief from the constraints of ordinary social decency, feel
themselves justified in giving rein, within duly prescribed limits, to
their criminal proclivities. As a loyal nationalist or party-man, one
can enjoy the luxury of behaving badly with a good conscience. The
evil passions are further justified by another linguistic error — the
error of speaking about certain categories of persons as though they
were mere embodied abstractions.
Foreigners and those who disagree with us are not thought of as men
and women like ourselves and our fellow-countrymen; they are thought
of as representatives and, so to say, symbols of a class. In so far as
they have any personality at all, it is the personality we mistakenly
attribute to their class — a personality that is, by definition,
intrinsically evil. We know that the harming or killing of men and
women is wrong, and we are reluctant consciously to do what we know to
be wrong. But when particular men and women are thought of merely as
representatives of a class, which has previously been defined as evil
and personified in the shape of a devil, then the reluctance to hurt
or murder disappears.
Brown, Jones and Robinson are no longer thought of as Brown, Jones and
Robinson, but as heretics, gentiles, Yids, niggers, barbarians, Huns,
communists, capitalists, fascists, liberals — whichever the case may
be. When they have been called such names and assimilated to the
accursed class to which the names apply, Brown, Jones and Robinson
cease to be conceived as what they really are — human persons — and
become for the users of this fatally inappropriate language mere
vermin or, worse, demons whom it is right and proper to destroy as
thoroughly and as painfully as possible. Wherever persons are present,
questions of morality arise.
Rulers of nations and leaders of parties find morality embarrassing.
That is why they take such pains to depersonalize their opponents. All
propaganda directed against an opposing group has but one aim: to
substitute diabolical abstractions for concrete persons. The
propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that
certain other sets of people are human. By robbing them of their
personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral obligation. Mere
symbols can have no rights — particularly when that of which they are
symbolical is, by definition, evil.
Politics can become moral only on one condition: that its problems
shall be spoken of and thought about exclusively in terms of concrete
reality; that is to say, of persons. To depersonify human beings and
to personify abstractions are complementary errors which lead, by an
inexorable logic, to war between nations and to idolatrous worship of
the State, with consequent governmental oppression.
All current political thought is a mixture, in varying proportions,
between thought in terms of concrete realities and thought in terms of
depersonified symbols and personified abstractions. In the democratic
countries the problems of internal politics are thought about mainly
in terms of concrete reality; those of external politics, mainly in
terms of abstractions and symbols. In dictatorial countries the
proportion of concrete to abstract and symbolic thought is lower than
in democratic countries.
Dictators talk little of persons, much of personified abstractions,
such as the Nation, the State, the Party, and much of depersonified
symbols, such as Yids, Bolshies, Capitalists. The stupidity of
politicians who talk about a world of persons as though it were not a
world of persons is due in the main to self-interest.
In a fictitious world of symbols and personified abstractions, rulers
find that they can rule more effectively, and the ruled, that they can
gratify instincts which the conventions of good manners and the
imperatives of morality demand that they should repress. To think
correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a
moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable
temptations.
(From The Olive Tree)
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