Nationalism and Culture (79 page)

Let us compare these utterances with the estimate of these same Germans by the Dominican Father Didon in his book, Les Allemands:

I have never encountered among present day Germans, not even at that age when men are most accessible to chivalrous ideas, any sublime emotion that reached beyond the horizon of the German fatherland. The frontier shuts the Germans in body and soul. Self-interest is their highest law. Their greatest statesmen are merely clever utilitarians. Their self-seeking policy, which is more avid of profit than of glory, has never felt the slightest misgivings about the country which unresistingly and blindly accepts its oracles. The Germans make allies for themselves but no friends. Those whom they bind to themselves are impelled either by interest or fear; they are thinking of the difficulties of the future. How can men be free from fear when they are at the mercy of a power that is not inspired by justice and when the dominance of self-interest is unlimited? . . . Germany's preponderance in Europe means universal militarism, a rule of terror, violence and selfishness. Times beyond number have I tried to discover among them any kind of sympathy for other nations; I have never been so fortunate as to find it.

The two judgments utterly destroy one another, but without doubt— each in its own way—they have influenced public opinion in France. There is, of course, a certain explanation for the sweeping contradiction which we find here. The two estimates come from two different men; one was uttered before, the other after, the Franco-German war of 1870-71. Then, in the "great period of shams," which hot-headed boobies called the "steel bath of the folk rejuvenation," people were quicker at the trigger in passing judgment and had learned besides to modify a judgment to fit

the circumstances. Thus, the Popolo d' Italia, the organ of the later dictator Mussolini, laid down the following admirable estimate of the Rumanians before they had entered into the War and declared themselves upon the side of the allies:

Let us finally quit calling the Rumanians our sister nation. They are no Romans even if they adorn themselves with that noble name. They are a mixture of those barbarian primitive peoples who were subjugated by the Romans, with Slavs, Pecheneges, Chazars, Avars, Tatars, Mongols, Huns, Turks and Greeks, and one can easily imagine what sort of ragbag that produced. The Rumanian is still today a barbarian and inferior individual, who, to the universal scornful amusement of Frenchmen, apes the Parisians and likes to fish in muddy waters when there is no danger that he will get himself into trouble. He showed this clearly in 1913.

Hardly, however, had the Rumanians entered the war on the side of the allies when this same journal of Mussolini's wrote of them:

The Rumanians have now proved gloriously that they are worthy sons of the ancient Romans from whom, like ourselves, they are descended. They are, therefore, our next of kin, who now, with that courage and determination which distinguishes them, have joined in the struggle of the Latin and Slavic races against the German, in other words, the struggle for freedom, culture and right against Prussian tyranny, arbitrary rule, barbarism and selfishness. And just as the Rumanians showed in 1877 what they were capable of at the side of our brave Russian allies against Turkish barbarism, so will they now also throw their sharp sword into the scale against Austrian-Hungarian-German barbarism and unculture and bring these to their knees. Of course, nothing else was to be expected of a people which has the honor to belong to the Latin race, which once ruled the world.^

It would be a grateful task carefully to gather and contrast with one another similar estimates which were made of the various nations during the world war. Such a collection would furnish better evidence of the worldliness of our time than the finest commentaries of our historians.

If the judgment of the so-called race-or folk-psychologists about foreign nations is as a rule unjust, one-sided and artificially constructed, the continued glorification of a man's own nation to the derogation of all others affects one as utterly silly and childish, provided one still has any feeling for such things. Let us think of a man who misses no opportunity to parade himself as the very paragon of wisdom, talent and virtue, and while thus burning incense to himself disparages all others and treats them as inferiors. One would certainly take him for a vain booby or an imbecile and treat him accordingly. But when our own nation is concerned

^ We take these two citations from the clever essay, Rasse und Politik, by Prof. Julius Goldstein, p. 152.

we take up with the wildest delusions and are not at all ashamed to deck ourselves in all the virtues and to regard the others as peoples of the second rank—as if it were by our own merit that we came into the world as Germans, Frenchmen or Chinese. Even discriminating minds are subject to this weakness, and the Scottish philosopher, Hume, knew what he was saying when he declared: '

When our nation gets into a war with another we abhor the hostile nation with all our heart and call it cruel, faithless, unjust and violent; we ourselves, however, and our allies we hold to be honorable, reasonable and gentle. We designate our treacheries as cleverness, our cruelties become for us necessities. In short, our faults seem to us small and insignificant, and not infrequently we call them by the name of that virtue which is most like them.

Every collective psychology suffers from these defects and is compelled by the logic of its own assumptions to proclaim empty wishes as concrete facts. By this it arrives automatically at conclusions of the sort for which self-deception smooths the way. It is especially unfortunate to speak of a "national culture" in which the special "mind" or the special "soul" of each people allegedly finds expression. The belief in the national culture-soul rests upon the same illusion as the "historical mission" of Bossuet, Fichte, Hegel and their numerous successors.

Culture as such is never national, because it always extends beyond the political frame of the state structure and is confined by no national frontier. A brief glance at the various fields of cultural life will easily confirm this. We will disregard any artificial distinction between civilization and culture for the reasons earlier advanced. Our survey will extend, rather, over all the fields in which man's conscious attack upon the crude natural course of events has found expression—from the material structure of economic life to the most highly developed forms of intellectual creativeness and artistic activity j for what Karol Capek has so beautifully clothed in words holds good also for us:

Every human activity which has as its purpose the perfecting, the enlightening and the ordering of our life is cultural. There is no yawning cleft between culture and everything else. I would not assert that the roar of the motors is the music of the present. But the roar of the motors is one of the voices in the polyphony of the cultural life, just as the heavenly notes of the violin, or the words of the orator, or the shouting on the field of sport are voices in this polyphony. Culture is not a section or a fragment of life, it is its sum and center.

It would be a vain undertaking to prove the national origin or content of the capitalistic economic system under which we live. Modern capital-

ism has carried the monopolizing of the means of production and of social wealth in the interest of small minorities to an unbelievable length and in doing so has delivered the great mass of the working population over to all the cruelties of wage slavery j but it is neither the result of any national undertakings, nor has it, ideologically, the slightest element in common with such undertakings. It is true that the supporters of capitalistic economy under certain circumstances are favorable to national undertakings, but their favor is always a matter of calculation, for the "national interests" to which they commit themselves are always really their own interests. No economic order of the past has so openly and ruthlessly sacrificed all so-called "national principles" to the rapacity of small minorities in society as the capitalistic order.

The shaping of capitalistic economic methods progressed in all countries with such astounding uniformity that one can understand why the economists and economic-politicians constantly harp upon the "determinism" of this development and see in every manifestation of the capitalistic system the inevitable result of iron economic laws, whose effects are stronger than the will of its human agents. In fact, capitalism has shown in every country which it has thus far captured, the same phenomena, the same effects upon the collective life of men without distinction of race or nation. If here and there, small differences are noticeable, this is not the result of peculiar national characteristics but of the various degrees of capitalistic economic development.

This shows itself today very clearly in the development of the great capitalistic industries in Europe, and especially in Germany. It is not long since everywhere strong opinions were based upon the fabulous development of American industry and its methods of work. Men sought to find in these methods the inevitable operation of a peculiar American mentality which could never be harmonized with the temperament of Europeans and especially of Germans. Who today would have the courage, in view of the latest results of our collective economic life, to defend this assertion —as untenable as it is arrogant? The famous, or much better, the notorious rationalizing of industry, with the help of the Taylor system and Ford's continuous operation, has within the last few years made greater advances in Germany than in any other country. We have long understood that Taylorism and Fordism are not at all specific products of the American mentality, but obvious phenomena of the capitalistic economic order as such, the sentimental German promoter is just as receptive to their advantages as the most hard-boiled Yankee, whose purely materialistic attitude we could formerly not sufficiently condemn.

The fact that these methods first arose in America is no proof that they are based on the American mentality and are to be esteemed as peculiar national characteristics. Their methods did not come even to

Ford and Taylor as a special gift from heaven j these men, too, had their predecessors and pacemakers who arose out of capitalistic industry and were certainly not destined for this role by peculiar national endowment. Continuous operation, stop-watch, and "scientific management," as they have christened the minute calculation of every muscular movement in work, have arisen gradually out of capitalistically controlled industry and have been fostered by it. It is of slight significance for the general character of mechanical production whether this or that machine finds its application first in Germany or in America, The same is true of the methods of work which grow out of the development of modern technique.

The endeavor to make production yield the greatest results with the smallest expenditure of power is closely bound up with modern machine production and with capitalistic economy in general. The constantly accelerated harnessing of natural forces and their technical employment, the constant refinement of mechanical apparatus, the industrializing of agriculture and the growing specialization of labor, bear witness to this. That the latest manifestations of industrial capitalism were noticeable in America earlier than elsewhere has not the slightest relation to national influences. In a country which has been so unusually favored by nature, and in which industrial development set out at such a gigantic pace, the extremes of capitalistic economic life necessarily mature earlier and stand out in sharper forms. Fred Taylor, who found his starting point in these fantastic industrial processes and whose mind was restrained by no ancient traditions, recognized with a sure instinct the utterly unlimited possibilities of this development. Constant increase of the productive capacity in industry was the slogan of the time and led to continuous further improvements of the mechanical apparatus. Under these circumstances was it such an unheard of phenomenon that a man hit upon the idea of adjusting the machine of flesh and bones to the rhythm of the machine of steel and iron? From the Taylor system to the traveling belt was only a step. Ford was the beneficiary of Taylor and his much prated genius consists only in his having developed Taylor's methods farther for his own purposes and having adapted them to the new conditions of mass production.

From America these methods gradually spread over all Europe. In Germany rationalization within a few years brought about a complete transformation of industry as a whole. Today, French industry bears its brand. The other countries follow at a little distance—must follow if their economy is not to fall to the rear. Even in Bolshevist Russia they follow in the same path and speak of a "socializing of the Taylor system" without considering that they thus seal the fate of socialis.n, which the Russian Revolution was to realize.

What is true of this latest phase of capitalistic development is true of the development of capitalism in general. It has begun everywhere with

the same attendant phenomena. Neither the national boundaries of the various states nor national and religious traditions were able to check its advance. In India, China, Japan, we observe today the same phenomena which were presented to us by early capitalism in Europe, except that the progress of development is today everywhere much more rapid. In all modern industrial countries the struggle for raw materials and for markets, which is so indicative of the nature of capitalistic economy, leads to the same results and puts its stamp upon the foreign policy of the capitalistic states. These manifestations proceed everywhere with a Strang uniformity, and in almost the same shapes. Nothing, however, nothing at all, in this indicates that forces are here in operation that are traceable to the peculiar national endowment of one or another people.

The transition from private to monopoly capitalism, which we can observe today in every industrial country, goes on everywhere. Everywhere it is shown that the capitalistic world has entered upon a new phase of its development which yet more openly expresses its true character. Capitalism today breaks through all frontiers of the so-called "national economic fields" and works ever more unequivocally for a condition of organized world economy. Capital, which formerly felt itself bound up with certain national interests, develops into world capital and is concerned with building up the exploitation of all mankind on uniform principles. We see today how in place of the earlier national economic groups there are crystallizing out ever more distinctly three great economic entities: America, Europe and Asiaj and there is no reason why the development in this direction should not keep on, so long as the capitalistic system can hold out at all.