Aristotle - "Ethics"

Father Chiniquy - "The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional"

Various - "The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860"

Israel Zangwill - "Chosen Peoples"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation

T >> Thorstein Veblen >> An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation




There is the essential difference between the two cases that while Japan
is over-populated, so that it becomes the part of a wise government to
find additional lands for occupancy, and that so it is constrained by its
imperial ambitions to displace much of the population in its subject
territories, the Fatherland on the other hand is under-populated--
notoriously, though not according to the letter of the diplomatic
parables on this head--and for the calculable future must continue to be
under-populated; provided that the state of the industrial arts
continues subject to change in the same general direction as hitherto,
and provided that no radical change affects the German birth-rate. So,
since the Imperial government has no need of new lands for occupancy by
its home population, it will presumably be under no inducement to take
measures looking to the partial depopulation of its subject territories.

The case of Belgium and the measures looking to a reduction of its
population may raise a doubt, but probably not a well taken doubt. It is
rather that since it has become evident that the territory can not be
held, it is thought desirable to enrich the Fatherland with whatever
property can be removed, and to consume the accumulated man-power of the
Belgian people in the service of the war. It would appear that it is a
war-measure, designed to make use of the enemy's resources for his
defeat. Indeed, under conditions of settled occupation or subjection,
any degree of such depopulation would entail an economic loss, and any
well-considered administrative policy would therefore look to the
maintenance of the inhabitants of the acquired territories in
undiminished numbers and unimpaired serviceability.

The resulting scheme of Imperial usufruct should accordingly be of a
considerate, not to say in effect humane, character,--always provided
that the requisite degree of submission and subservience ("law and
order") can be enforced by a system of coercion so humane as not to
reduce the number of the inhabitants or materially to lower their
physical powers. Such would, by reasonable expectation, be the character
of this projected Imperial tutelage and usufruct of the nations of
Christendom. In its working-out this German project should accordingly
differ very appreciably from the policy which its imperial ambitions
have constrained the Japanese establishment to pursue in its dealings
with the life and fortunes of its recently, and currently, acquired
subject peoples.

The better to appreciate in some concrete fashion what should, by
reasonable expectation, be the terms on which life might so be carried
on _sub pace germanica_, attention may be invited to certain typical
instances of such peace by abnegation among contemporary peoples.
Perhaps at the top of the list stands India, with its many and varied
native peoples, subject to British tutelage, but, the British apologists
say, not subject to British usufruct. The margin of tolerance in this
instance is fairly wide, but its limits are sharply drawn. India is
wanted and held, not for tribute or revenue to be paid into the Imperial
treasury, nor even for exclusive trade privileges or preferences, but
mainly as a preserve to provide official occupation and emoluments for
British gentlemen not otherwise occupied or provided for; and
secondarily as a means of safeguarding lucrative British investments,
that is to say, investments by British capitalists of high and low
degree. The current British professions on the subject of this
occupation of India, and at times the shamefaced apology for it, is that
the people of India suffer no hardship by this means; the resulting
governmental establishment being no more onerous and no more expensive
to them than any equally, or even any less, competent government of
their own would necessarily be. The fact, however, remains, that India
affords a much needed and very considerable net revenue to the class of
British gentlemen, in the shape of official salaries and pensions, which
the British gentry at large can on no account forego. Narrowed to these
proportions it is readily conceivable that the British usufruct of India
should rest with no extraordinary weight on the Indian people at large,
however burdensome it may at times become to those classes who aspire to
take over the usufruct in case the British establishment can be
dislodged. This case evidently differs very appreciably from the
projected German usufruct of neighboring countries in Europe.

A case that may be more nearly in point would be that of any one of the
countries subject to the Turkish rule in recent times; although these
instances scarcely show just what to expect under the projected German
regime. The Turkish rule has been notably inefficient, considered as a
working system of dynastic usufruct; whereas it is confidently expected
that the corresponding German system would show quite an exceptional
degree of efficiency for the purpose. This Turkish inefficiency has had
a two-fold effect, which should not appear in the German case. Through
administrative abuses intended to serve the personal advantage of the
irresponsible officials, the underlying peoples have suffered a
progressive exhaustion and dilapidation; whereby the central authority,
the dynastic establishment, has also grown progressively, cumulatively
weaker and therefore less able to control its agents; and, in the second
place, on the same grounds, in the pursuit of personal gain, and
prompted by personal animosities, these irresponsible agents have
persistently carried their measures of extortion beyond reasonable
bounds,--that is to say beyond the bounds which a well considered plan
of permanent usufruct would countenance. All this would be otherwise and
more sensibly arranged under German Imperial auspices.

One of the nations that have fallen under Turkish rule--and Turkish
peace--affords a valuable illustration of a secondary point that is to
be considered in connection with any plan of peace by submission. The
Armenian people have in later time come partly under Russian dominion,
and so have been exposed to the Russian system of bureaucratic
exploitation; and the difference between Russian and Turkish Armenia is
instructive. According to all credible--that is unofficial--accounts,
conditions are perceptibly more tolerable in Russian Armenia. Well
informed persons relate that the cause for this more lenient, or less
extreme, administration of affairs under Russian officials is a
selective death rate among them, such that a local official who
persistently exceeds a certain ill-defined limit of tolerance is removed
by what would under other circumstances be called an untimely death. No
adequate remedy has been found, within the large limits which Russian
bureaucratic administration habitually allows itself in questions of
coercion. The Turk, on the other hand, less deterred by considerations
of long-term expediency, and, it may be, less easily influenced by
outside opinion on any point of humanity, has found a remedy in the
systematic extirpation of any village in which an illicit death occurs.
One will incline to presume that on this head the German Imperial
procedure would be more after the Russian than after the Turkish
pattern; although latterday circumstantial evidence will throw some
sinister doubt on the reasonableness of such an expectation.

It is plain, however, that the Turkish remedy for this form of
insubordination is a wasteful means of keeping the peace. Plainly, to
the home office, the High Command, the extinction of a village with its
population is a more substantial loss than the unseasonable decease of
one of its administrative agents; particularly when it is called to mind
that such a decease will presumably follow only on such profligate
excesses of naughtiness as are bound to be inexcusably unprofitable to
the central authority. It may be left an open question how far a
corrective of this nature can hopefully be looked to as applicable, in
case of need, under the projected German Imperial usufruct.

It may, I apprehend, be said without offense that there is no depth of
depravity below the ordinary reach of the Russian bureaucracy; but this
organisation finds itself constrained, after all, to use circumspection
and set some limits on individual excursions beyond the bounds of
decency and humanity, so soon as these excesses touch the common or
joint interest of the organisation. Any excess of atrocity, beyond a
certain margin of tolerance, on the part of any one of its members is
likely to work pecuniary mischief to the rest; and then, the
bureaucratic conduct of affairs is also, after all, in an uncertain
degree subject to some surveillance by popular sentiment at home or
abroad. The like appears not to hold true of the Turkish official
organisation. The difference may be due to a less provident spirit among
the latter, as already indicated. But a different tradition, perhaps an
outgrowth of this lack of providence and of the consequent growth of a
policy of "frightfulness," may also come in for a share in the outcome;
and there is also a characteristic difference in point of religious
convictions, which may go some way in the same direction. The followers
of Islam appear on the whole to take the tenets of their faith at their
face value--servile, intolerant and fanatic--whereas the Russian
official class may perhaps without undue reproach be considered to have
on the whole outlived the superstitious conceits to which they yield an
expedient _pro forma_ observance. So that when worse comes to worst, and
the Turk finds himself at length with his back against the last
consolations of the faith that makes all things straight, he has the
assured knowledge that he is in the right as against the unbelievers;
whereas the Russian bureaucrat in a like case only knows that he is in
the wrong. The last extremity is a less conclusive argument to the man
in whose apprehension it is not the last extremity. Again, there is some
shadow of doubt falls on the question as to which of these is more
nearly in the German Imperial spirit.

On the whole, the case of China is more to the point. By and large, the
people of China, more particularly the people of the coastal-plains
region, have for long habitually lived under a regime of peace by
non-resistance. The peace has been broken transiently from time to time,
and local disturbances have not been infrequent; but, taken by and
large, the situation has habitually been of the peaceful order, on a
ground of non-resisting submission. But this submission has not commonly
been of a whole-hearted kind, and it has also commonly been associated
with a degree of persistent sabotage; which has clogged and retarded the
administration of governmental law and order, and has also been
conducive to a large measure of irresponsible official corruption. The
habitual scheme of things Chinese in this bearing may fairly be
described as a peace of non-resistance tempered with sabotage and
assassination. Such was the late Manchu regime, and there is no reason
in China for expecting a substantially different outcome from the
Japanese invasion that is now under way. The nature of this Japanese
incursion should be sufficiently plain. It is an enterprise in
statecraft after the order of Macchiavelli, Metternich, and Bismarck. Of
course, the conciliatory fables given out by the diplomatic service, and
by the other apologists, are to be taken at the normal discount of
one-hundred percent. The relatively large current output of such fables
may afford a hint as to the magnitude of the designs which the fables
are intended to cover.

The Chinese people have had a more extended experience in peace of this
order than all others, and their case should accordingly be instructive
beyond all others. Not that a European peace by non-resistance need be
expected to run very closely on the Chinese lines, but there should be
a reasonable expectation that the large course of things would be
somewhat on the same order in both cases. Neither the European
traditions and habitual temperament nor the modern state of the
industrial arts will permit one to look for anything like a close
parallel in detail; but it remains true, when all is said, that the
Chinese experience of peace under submission to alien masters affords
the most instructive illustration of such a regime, as touches its
practicability, its methods, its cultural value, and its effect on the
fortunes of the subject peoples and of their masters.

Now, it may be said by way of preliminary generalisation that the
life-history of the Chinese people and their culture is altogether the
most imposing achievement which the records of mankind have to show;
whereas the history of their successive alien establishments of mastery
and usufruct is an unbroken sequence of incredibly shameful
episodes,--always beginning in unbounded power and vainglory, running by
way of misrule, waste and debauchery, to an inglorious finish in abject
corruption and imbecility. Always have the gains in civilisation,
industry and in the arts, been made by the subject Chinese, and always
have their alien masters contributed nothing to the outcome but misrule,
waste, corruption and decay. And yet in the long run, with all this
handicap and misrule, the Chinese people have held their place and made
headway in those things to which men look with affection and esteem when
they come to take stock of what things are worth while. It would be a
hopeless task to count up how many dynasties of masterful barbarians,
here and there, have meanwhile come up and played their ephemeral role
of vainglorious nuisance and gone under in shame and confusion, and
dismissed with the invariable verdict of "Good Riddance!"

It may at first sight seem a singular conjuncture of circumstances, but
it is doubtless a consequence of the same conjuncture, that the Chinese
people have also kept their hold through all history on the Chinese
lands. They have lived and multiplied and continued to occupy the land,
while their successive alien masters have come and gone. So that today,
as the outcome of conquest, and of what would be rated as defeat, the
people continue to be Chinese, with an unbroken pedigree as well as an
unbroken line of home-bred culture running through all the ages of
history. In the biological respect the Chinese plan of non-resistance
has proved eminently successful.

And, by the way, much the same, though not in the same degree, is true
for the Armenian people; who have continued to hold their hill country
through good days and evil, apparently without serious or enduring
reduction of their numbers and without visible lapse into barbarism,
while the successive disconnected dynasties of their conquering rulers
have come and gone, leaving nothing but an ill name. "This fable
teaches" that a diligent attention to the growing of crops and children
is the sure and appointed way to the maintenance of a people and its
culture even under the most adverse conditions, and that eventual death
and shameful destruction inexorably wait on any "ruling race." Hitherto
the rule has not failed. The rule, indeed, is grounded in the heritable
traits of human nature, from which there is no escape.

For its long-term biological success, as well as for the continued
integrity of a people's culture, a peace of non-resistance, under good
or evil auspices, is more to be desired than imperial dominion. But
these things are not all that modern peoples live for, perhaps it is
safe to say that in no case are these chief among the things for which
civilised Europeans are willing to live. They urgently need also freedom
to live their own life in their own way, or rather to live within the
bonds of convention which they have come in for by use and wont, or at
least they believe that such freedom is essential to any life that shall
be quite worth while. So also they have a felt need of security from
arbitrary interference in their pursuit of a livelihood and in the free
control of their own pecuniary concerns. And they want a discretionary
voice in the management of their joint interests, whether as a nation or
in a minor civil group. In short, they want personal, pecuniary and
political liberty, free from all direction or inhibition from without.
They are also much concerned to maintain favorable economic conditions
for themselves and their children. And last, but chiefly rather than
least, they commonly are hide-bound patriots inspired with an
intractable felt need of national prestige.

It is an assemblage of peoples in such a frame of mind to whom the
pacifists are proposing, in effect, a plan for eventual submission to an
alien dynasty, under the form of a neutral peace compact to include the
warlike Powers. There is little likelihood of such a scheme being found
acceptable, with popular sentiment running as it now does in the
countries concerned. And yet, if the brittle temper in which any such
proposal is rejected by popular opinion in these countries today could
be made to yield sufficiently to reflection and deliberate appraisal, it
is by no means a foregone conclusion that its acceptance would not be
the best way out of a critical situation. The cost of disabling and
eliminating the warlike Power whose dominion is feared, or even of
staving off the day of surrender, is evidently serious enough. The
merits of the alternative should be open to argument, and should,
indeed, be allowed due consideration. And any endeavour to present them
without heat should presumably find a hearing. It appears to have been
much of the fault of the pacifists who speak for the Peace League that
they have failed or refused to recognise these ulterior consequences of
the plan which they advocate; so that they appear either not to know
what they are talking about, or to avoid talking about what they know.

It will be evident from beforehand that the grave difficulty to be met
in any advocacy of peace on terms of non-resistant subjection to an
alien dynastic rule--"peace at any price"--is a difficulty of the
psychological order. Whatever may be conceived to hold true for the
Chinese people, such submission is repugnant to the sentiments of the
Western peoples. Which in turn evidently is due to the prevalence of
certain habitual preconceptions among modern civilised men,--certain
acquired traits of temper and bias, of the nature of fixed ideas. That
something in the way of a reasonably contented and useful life is
possible under such a regime as is held in prospect, and even some
tolerable degree of well-being, is made evident in the Chinese case. But
the Chinese tolerance of such a regime goes to argue that they are
charged with fewer preconceptions at variance with the exigencies of
life under these conditions. So, it is commonly accepted, and presumably
to be accepted, that the Chinese people at large have little if any
effectual sense of nationality; their patriotism appears to be nearly a
negligible quantity. This would appear to an outsider to have been their
besetting weakness, to which their successful subjection by various and
sundry ambitious aliens has been due. But it appears also to have been
the infirmity by grace of which this people have been obliged to learn
the ways of submission, and so have had the fortune to outlive their
alien masters, all and sundry, and to occupy the land and save the
uncontaminated integrity of their long-lived civilisation.

* * * * *

Some account of the nature and uses of this spirit of patriotism that is
held of so great account among Western nations has already been set out
in an earlier passage. One or two points in the case, that bear on the
argument here, may profitably be recalled. The patriotic spirit, or the
tie of nationalism, is evidently of the nature of habit, whatever
proclivity to the formation of such a habit may be native to mankind.
More particularly is it a matter of habit--it might even be called a
matter of fortuitous habit--what particular national establishment a
given human subject will become attached to on reaching what is called
"years of discretion" and so becoming a patriotic citizen.

The analogy of the clam may not be convincing, but it may at least serve
to suggest what may be the share played by habituation in the matter of
national attachment. The young clam, after having passed the
free-swimming phase of his life, as well as the period of attachment to
the person of a carp or similar fish, drops to the bottom and attaches
himself loosely in the place and station in life to which he has been
led; and he loyally sticks to his particular patch of ooze and sand
through good fortune and evil. It is, under Providence, something of a
fortuitous matter where the given clam shall find a resting place for
the sole of his foot, but it is also, after all, "his own, his native
land" etc. It lies in the nature of a clam to attach himself after this
fashion, loosely, to the bottom where he finds a living, and he would
not be a "good clam and true" if he failed to do so; but the particular
spot for which he forms this attachment is not of the essence of the
case. At least, so they say.

It may be, as good men appear to believe or know, that all men of sound,
or at least those of average, mind will necessarily be of a patriotic
temper and be attached by ties of loyalty to some particular national
establishment, ordinarily the particular establishment which is formally
identified with the land in which they live; although it is always
possible that a given individual may be an alien in the land, and so may
owe allegiance to and be ruled by a patriotic attachment to another
national establishment, to which the conventionalities governing his
special case have assigned him as his own proper nation. The analogy of
the clam evidently does not cover the case. The patriotic citizen is
attached to his own proper nationality not altogether by the accident of
domicile, but rather by the conventions, legal or customary, which
assign him to this or that national establishment according to certain
principles of use and wont.

Mere legal citizenship or allegiance does not decide the matter either;
at least not by any means unavoidably; as appears in the case of the
Chinese subject under Manchu or Japanese rule; and as appears perhaps
more perspicuously in the case of the "hyphenate" American citizen,
whose formal allegiance is to the nation in whose land he prefers to
live, all the while that his patriotic affection centers on his
spiritual Fatherland in whose fortunes he has none but a non-resident
interest. Indeed, the particular national tie that will bind the
affections--that is to say the effectual patriotic attachment--of any
given individual may turn out on closer scrutiny to be neither that of
domicile or of formal legal allegiance, nor that of putative origin or
pedigree, but only a reflex of certain national animosities; which may
also turn out on examination to rest on putative grounds--as illustrated
by a subsidiary class of hyphenate American citizens whose affections
have come to be bound up in the national fortunes of one foreign Power
for the simple, but sufficient, reason that, on conventional grounds,
they bear malice against another equally foreign Power.

Evidently there is much sophistication, not to say conventionalised
affectation, in all this national attachment and allegiance. It will
perhaps not do to say that it is altogether a matter of sophistication.
Yet it may not exceed the premises to say that the particular choice,
the concrete incidence, of this national attachment is in any given case
a matter of sophistication, largely tempered with fortuity. One is born
into a given nationality--or, in case of dynastic allegiance, into
service and devotion to a (fortuitously) given sovereign--or at least so
it is commonly believed. Still one can without blame, and without
excessive shame, shift one's allegiance on occasion. What is not
countenanced among civilised men is to shift out of allegiance to any
given nationality or dynasty without shifting into the like complication
of gainless obligations somewhere else. Such a shifting of national or
dynastic base is not quite reputable, though it is also not precisely
disreputable. The difficulty in the case appears to be a moral
difficulty, not a mental or a pecuniary one, and assuredly not a
physical difficulty, since the relation in question is not a physical
relation. It would appear to be of the moral order of things, in that
sense of the term in which conventional proprieties are spoken of as
moral. That is to say, it is a question of conforming to current
expectations under a code of conventional proprieties. Like much of the
conventional code of behavior this patriotic attachment has the benefit
of standardised decorum, and its outward manifestations are enjoined by
law. All of which goes to show how very seriously the whole matter is
regarded.

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