ARMAMENTS FOR DEFENCE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19986, 19 December 1934, Page 6

ARMAMENTS FOR DEFENCE

To the Editor of “ The Timaru Herald ” Sir, —If a person wishes to be rational in argument, he must avoid the use of terms that rouse strong feelings both in himself and in his readers and hearers; the emotional associations such terms possess obviously hinder rational consideration of any question. One would, for example, hardly expect a person who habitually thought and spoke of the natives of parts of Africa as “niggers” to be able to give an explanation of their mentality, racial characteristics, and culture that would convince, say, a well-informed New Zealander like Mr Downie Stewart; his attitude is fired by the term he uses at a crudely simple and consequently irrational level. There are many other similar terms in current use, most of them concerned with the three interests about which men feel most deeply—religion, sex, and politics. While they continue to have their present powerful emotional qualities, “Touchstone” and I, if we are to make good our claim to be rational beings, must forgo their use. Even if both of us could manage to use them without disturbing emotional reactions in ourselves, we should still not be justified in doing so, because it ought to be our concern to ensure an accurate transmission of our meaning to our readers; if therefore our symbols evoke an attitude that prevents the continuance of rational examination of the subject under review, then it is clear that we are failing to convey our meaning correctly. If the reader will read or reread the last paragraph of “Touchsone’s” reply to my letter last week, he will find several examples of language that express strong emotions and cannot be regarded as stating facts. This, for instance: “I say most emphatically that if he were not (a pro-German) he would never have written such a hotch-potch of inaccuracies in order to attempt to bolster up or whitewash Germany’s criminalities. No, Mr ‘Query’ your ostrich like, pacifist notions are in disputabJy proved to be stupid, untrue and

vicious.” First should be observed the use for the second time of the title “Mr” prefixed to the nom-de-plume “Query” which “Touchstone” substitutes for the correct one. “What are the facts?” on the ground that the latter is too long. I leave the reader to judge for himself if that is the true reason, and pass on to suggest that the purpose of the “Mr” is to express and arouse contempt for me, the writer of the letter, that is, it is designed to evoke a prejudice, and has nothing to do with “refuting an argument by an argument.” Its use is an example of the frequent practice of attempting to divert attention from .what is said, which is the only concern of the logician, to the nature of the person who says it, and so prevent the operation of logical reasoning by arousing attitudes. Next I ask the reader to examine dispassionately the expressions —“hotch potch of inaccuracies,” “ostrich-like,” “pacifist,” “whitewash Germany’s criminalities,” “stupid, untrue, and vicious.” I suppose even “Touchstone” would admit that a logician whose concern is with the presentation of rational ideas, and who takes great pains to express them in colourless objective terms, because he knows that only in this way can he be sure of accuracy of expression and comprehension, would not under any circumstances use terms so subjective, so charged with the force of their user’s own feelings as these. But, as it may be asserted by “Touchstone” that after a man has replied to arguments by presenting other soundly rational ones to refute them, he has the right to give expression to his feelings, I shall proceed now to analyse these “rational” arguments he claims to have used. The extract I quoted is intended by the author to show that the arguments by which armaments for defence are justified are illogical. Granting for the purposes of argument that “Touchstone” has succeeded in proving that the Germans are a “guilty race,” and that the demands of their leaders for equality of status and the right to rearm are expressions of an intention to embark on aggressive warfare, I should like to point out to him that the validity of the reasoning in the extract is not thereby upset. The writer is considering the question of the “defence complex” in general terms; his statement that the British are increasing their war aeroplanes because the French are increasing theirs and vice versa, is a sample illustration of the customary national method of procedure. The argument is unaltered if the illustration reads: “The Italians are increasing their fleet because the French are increasing theirs and vice versa.” Other suitable pairs or groups would be Paraguay and Bolivia, America and Japan, Japan and Russia, Japan, America, and Great Britain, Hungary and Jugo-Slavia, and so on. In 1922, when the representatives of the United States of America claimed and obtained the right to parity of naval strength with the British, they stated that the needs of the nation could not be met except by a navy as large as the British one. But what could those needs be other than of defence against Great Britain, since the Americans disclaimed any intention of ever using it to attack Great Britain? The present demand of the Japanese for parity with fhe American and British fleets is based on the same “defence” argument; so is the refusal of the Americans and British to grant it. The Americans, for example, must have a larger navy than the Japanese inorder to defend themselves against —the Japanese. The argument in the quotation is invalidated only if it can be shown either that one of the nations in all of the groups mentioned or any others has definite aggressive intentions towards the other, or that the British nation, or German, or French, or any other nation, is the only virtuous and trustworthy one which speaks the truth, while the others, claiming to have armaments onlv for defence, are palpably insincere. The falsity of the reasoning by which the proof of the second of the above conditions may be attempted is illustrated in “Touchstone’s” refutation of the next argument chosen by him from the quotation. Replying to the statement that “if foreigners are not to be trusted, then any other state is justified in distrusting our statements, because we are foreigners to them,” he declared that “it is analagous to saying that because you cannot trust the word of a liar, a thief, and a murderer, you cannot therefore believe a proved honest, sincere and upright man.” This analogy with the judgments of law in civil life cannot be applied to nations. In civil life a man is judged a criminal only after a trial before trained _ and impartial jurists; if the analogy is to be accurate, there would have to be two trials in civil life, one in which the accused tried and acquitted himself, and another in which his accuser, in his absence, tried and condemned him. There would also be doubt as to who was accused and who accuser. Just as a criminal under such fantastic circumstances would always acquit himself, and his accuser condemn him, so do nations in actual situations declare themselves' innocent and the others guilty. The absence at present of any strong supra-national legal system and the presence of forces that restrict and distort the information available to the ordinary individual member of a nation, would, if it were not already impossible for another reason, make it difficult for him to gain the ordered knowledge necessary to make judgments about the guilt or innocence of his own or any other nation. This other reason is the process of symbolisation by which an over-simplifica-tion of ideas about nations takes place in the mind of the individual unless he is very well informed and emotionally adjusted to present day world conditions. In order to simplify thought, we think and speak of “Britain,” “Germany,” “America” and “her” fleet, etc., as if each were a person with clearly dr fined characteristics. Illustrations of this habit of thought are to be found in the cartoons of a paper like “Punch,” in which the intensely strong emotional meaning is evident. Our re-

actions to our own national symbols are usually approval and love, to those uf the foreigners suspicion and fear. There are two explanations of the affective character of these symbols: One is that it is a persistence of the primitive fear of the menace to life and security that came from outside the frontier, from no man’s land. The symbols the people then used to describe the “marauders” and “robbers” who menaced them were strongly coloured with feelings of hate (i.c., anger and fear), and represented them as being all alike in the possession of undesirable and evil qualities. And still, in spite of the inter-communications :, i the world and the spread of knowledge about all parts of it, whenever our nation and another are brought info opposition and the complicated national responses are aroused, we all tend to think of ourselves as righteous and of the other as morally corrupt. This tendency, however, also operates in the relationships between groups and individuals within a nation. Its basis is to be found in the way in which the impulses in the mind of the Individual are organised and controlled. In order to avoid the mental discomfort of admitting the existence of some undesirable qualities in ourselves wo project these on to others. “We personalise our unrecognised failings and hate in others the very faults to which we are secretly addicted.” This principle of what is in psychological terminology called projection is the second explanation of the affective quality of national symbols. It is obvious that it is a fundamentally irrational process and likely to become more so as feeling rises; the errors into

which it will lead us can be avoided only by knowledge of how it works in us, in others, and with nations. “Touchstone” hates pacifists; it would be interesting to know if his nom de plume (which appears not to show any relationship between him and Shakespeare’s jester) conceals a person who is secretly timid. He hates also the “brutality” of the Germans, a clear case in my opinion of the projection of this quality in himself. “Germany as a country could well have been rebuilt in all these details by the entire demobilised British Army in 1918 and onwards, once we had had the commonsense to render any German absolutely impotent.” The implications of this statement made by “Touchstone” in an earlier letter must, I suggest, lead the reader to agree that the explanation I have given is the right one.

“Touchstone’s” dictionary did not serve him well when it gave “the scientific investigation of traditional beliefs” as the definition of “mythology.” The sentence in the extract read: “The conception that a modern state, a Government, which is treated normally as defender and police, can suddenly and, as it were, in a psychological or moral lapse, become an aggressor or criminal, is primitive social mythology.” The obvious relevant definition here is the usual one—“body of myths.” An illustration of the working of this primitive social mythology occurs in the same paragraph of “Touchstone’s” letter in which he gives the wrong definition. He wrote “She (i.e. Germany) has invaded France without any reasonable pretext, once every fifty years on the average, and in doing this she has substantiated the “mythological idea” of a “guilty race.” The symbolic term “she” represents here (1) the intensely emotional nature of “Touchstone’s” attitude to the Germans and (2) a consequent over-simplification of meaning, leading him to regard only the military and national activities of the Germans and to conceive of them as a person who is an habitual criminal. It is clear that a shorthand term like this cannot be regarded as accurate unless it is capable of indefinite expansion in content without change of meaning in both its objective and emotional aspects. For example, if one admits that the Nazi movement is the outcome of many interacting and in-ter-related conditions, that it has been supported by the lower middle classes and the peasants who feared and resented on the one hand the activities of the big business interests and on the other the Communists, by the workmen who felt the desperate economic situation to be due to the injustice of the Peace Treaties, and saw the Socialist elements divided irreconcilably into Social Democrats and Communists and by the Junker class, still smarting more than the rest of the people from the humiliation of defeat, and that it is a form of Fascism, having the same strong emphasis on economic nationalism, and an inevitable development of the stage in economic organisation that capitalism has now reached, he must agree that the meaning “Touchstone” gives his term is so over-simpli-fied as to be quite inadequate.

I now ask the reader to read carefully the following description of the pacifist type: “Peace is the only state for which he is fitted; he will do anything to preserve it; he will endure any humiliation, including loss of property and even the most severe damage to his pocket in order to avoid war. His dim, lustreless eye betokens humility (which does not rule out impertinence), his clumsy body is obviously built for toiling and stooping, his movements are slow 7 and deliberate. This type is the born stay-at-home—looking at the whole world from the standpoint of his little ego and judging accordingly.” Who wrote this? It is in the “Touchstone” manner, but it actually occurs in Professor Banse’s book, “Germany Prepare for War,” from which “Touchstone” quoted. There are two points at least in which he and Professor Banse are very similar; they are intensely nationalistic with accompanying hatred of any people within the nation w 7 ith differing opinions, and they are passonately convinced that the other nation is a criminal. As “Touchstone” judges Germany criminal and Britain virtuous, and Banse judges Britain criminal and Germany virtuous, it is safe to assume not that one is right, but that both are wrong. When I am again in Timaru in a month’s time I shall be able to reply to any arguments “Touchstone” may bring against these. In the meantime may I suggest that he procure and read Glover’s “War, Sadism, Pacificism,” which will throw some light on his own mental processes and those of the pacifist, not to the entire comfort of either. —I am, etc., “WHAT ARE THE FACTS.” Timaru, December 17.