Wartime support and dissent

This is a Hungarian antiwar poster from the First World War that I especially like

Looking back into Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) for an earlier post reminded me of one of the books he cites, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916; revised second edition 1919) by Wilfred Trotter, an English surgeon who was also the brother-in-law of Ernest Jones, one of Freud's closest collaborators. Freud said of Trotter's book "thoughtful" though "my only regret is that it does not entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the recent great war."

Freud was engaging far more in scholarly restraint there than in the blunt speaking for which Germans and Austrians are so well known, as Freud himself often was. Even in the second edition, Trotter argued that the events of the war had confirmed his earlier hypothesis:

... that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilization.

This judgment had more to do with British chauvinism and popular stereotypes of Germans in the Anglo-Saxon world than they did with observation of facts.

Like all generalizations about nations or national groups, it's very easy even for careful researchers to let their analysis get way out in front of the facts. According to Trotter, the Great War showed that the "morale of the German people was of a special kind, and essentially dependent for the remarkable vigour it then showed upon the possibility of continued successful aggression." He proceeds to illustrate this judgment by the decision of the German General Staff to adapt a strategy of aggressive counterattack in 1918.

This is where "morale" gets tricky. Germany had only the bare outlines of democratic government at the beginning of that war, though there was a strong, vital tradition of democratic dissent and advocacy for democracy. And whether conservatives like to remember it so or not, the chief advocate of democratic government in Germany was the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

But by 1918, Germany was essentially run by a military junta under Generals Paul von Hindenburg (who as president in 1933 would appoint Adolf Hitler Chancellor) and Erich Ludendorff. Making generalizations about national morale based on the military decisions of a military government is a huge conceptual leap. Even more problematic is his observation, in which his uses "moral" as we would use "morale", that the "completeness of the moral collapse which accompanied [Germany's] beating seems to have been found remarkable and astonishing by very many."

Complete collapse of morale? Between the stupidity of Kaiser Bill (Wilhelm II), the boneheaded generals leading their army to defeat and the overwhelming force Germany confronted after American entry into the war, its hard to see how "moral collapse" can be blamed as the main cause for the German surrender. The democratic revolution of 1918 led by the SPD was certainly helped by anger over the war, as was the more radical Bolshevik Revolution in Russia the previous year. But it was scarcely exclusively a sign of "moral collapse".

Although to the extent that the Western Allies saw it that way, that might help explain why the Allies didn't have better sense than to force a humiliating peace onto the newly-democratic German government. But I'm not going to go into the many faults of the Peace of Versailles here.

The point I wanted to make is that morale has to be examined more carefully than just assuming that because the government at the time got away with doing something that it necessarily reflected popular enthusiasm for the actions. Fast-forwarding to our own time and place, the Iraq War lost majority public support at least two years ago and that majority opposition has been expressed now in majority votes in both houses of Congress. But the war goes on. So far as I'm aware, the Army in Iraq hasn't collapsed. Morale, in other words, is much more complicated than people deciding, "I like this policy."

There was certainly an outburst of popular support at the beginning of the war. Traditional German history-writing has assumed that there was a strong, general feeling of solidarity and optimism than may have even in some ways contributed to the strengthening of democratic aspirations.

For all its limitations, though, Trotter's book still has some valuable observations. In the following passage he talks about the way in which "the apprehended danger of the given war", by which he means in our current terms the degree to which one believes the war is vital to the national interest, has a decisive effect on the degree of public cohesion behind the war effort:

The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted.

What he observed, though, was also that even those in the minority opinion are affected by the intensity of the war: "Thus we may say that in a country at war every citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state."

In the cases Trotter is discussing, those in the minority opinion were presumed to be those who opposed their own country's military action. (In the case of the Iraq War in the US, it is now the minority that supports the war policy.)

But whoever is in the minority or the majority, a certain anthropological/instinctual impulse works mightily on both:

Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character [the minority's] as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness [sic] a herd can give. ... In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellow, and in him who belongs to a dissentient [sic] minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more - if no less - liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war all opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.

This gets to a broader issue, but it's worth mentioning in this regard that ideological conservatives in the US, especially the Christian Right, promote the feeling of themselves as an isolated and persecuted minority, even while insisting that they represent the good judgment of the majority.

Trotter notes that "is is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war." Let's be optimistic and take this as a sign that reason and revulsion at the results of war do play a role in the public's attitudes toward war.

But, as important as the concept of the just war has been in putting some kind of limits on the extremes of war, Trotter's observation is also grimly true:

If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor - the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question - it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people's response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914-1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. (my emphasis)

As we've learned again these last few years, a sense of certainty and self-righteousness can also lead to creating a state of belligerency.

But that observation just quoted has to be balanced against the reality of dissent that Trotter describes with historical examples:

A war regarded as not dangerous [i.e., a war in which the threat is not perceived as substantial enough to justify war] produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less[er] degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899-1902 [aka, the Boer War] was not apprehended as dangerous in this country [Britain], and in consequence though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914-1918 [the First World War], regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War [of 1905] provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous.

Some of Trotter's usages sound odd in today's terms, e.g., "apprehended danger" of a war to mean perceived national interest in the war; "anti-national" to mean antiwar. But if you can get past the awkward wording, he has some decent observations.

This provides at least a note of optimism for our warlike species. This phenomenon shows that despite our inevitable inclination to revert to primitive us-against-them instincts in war, there is room for reason and reality-based thinking to overcome an irrational commitment to a war. Trotter writes, "The essential factor in stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it." (my emphasis)

Tags: deutschland, erster weltkrieg, germany, hindenburg, ludendorff, wilfred trotter, wilhelm ii