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PROGRESS AND PEACE
BY PROFESSOR ROBERT M. YERKES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
LASTING peace among the nations of the earth we must regard as of supreme moment, the discovery of the conditions thereof, as most worthy of human effort. Physical struggle is no longer accepted as either a necessary or a desirable means of settling differences between individuals. Why, then, should it be tolerated to-day in connection with national disagreements? To admit the impossibility or the impracticability of universal peace is to stigmatize our vaunted civilization as a failure. Surely we will not, can not, humble ourselves by such an admission until we have exhausted our energies in searching for the conditions of national amity.
With my whole life I believe in the possibility and value of worldwide friendliness and cooperation. I am writing to discuss not the attainability or the merits of peace, but ways of achieving it; not to criticize present activities on its behalf, but to indicate the promise of a neglected approach and to present a program which should, I believe, find its place in the great "peace movement.''
Must peace be achieved and maintained by brute strength, regardless of sense and sentiment, or may it be gained through intelligence, humanely used? Must the pathway thereto be paved with human skulls, builded with infinite suffering and sacrifice, or may it he charted by scientific inquiry and builded by the joyous labor of mutual service and helpfulness? Is it possible, in the light of the history of the races of man, to doubt that we must place our dependence on intelligence sympathetically employed, not on physical prowess? To me it seems that peace must be achieved peacefully, not by the clash of arms and bloodshed.
But even if we grant that science is our main hope, there remains a choice of methods. On the one hand, there is the way of material progress, physical discovery and feverish haste to apply every new fact to armament; on the other, that of biological research, social enlightenment, and ever-increasing human understanding and sympathy.
Firm believers in each of these possible approaches, through science, to international peace, are at hand. The one group argues that nations, like individuals, must be controlled in all supreme crises by fear; the other contends that civilization has developed in enlightened human sympathy a higher, a more worthy, and a safer control of behavior.
As a biologist and a believer in the brotherhood of man, I wish to present the merits of sympathy, as contrasted with fear, and to plead for larger attention to the biological approach to the control of international relations. For I am convinced that the greatest lesson of the present stupendous world-conflict is the need of thorough knowledge of the laws of individual and social human behavior. Surely this war clearly indicates that the study of instinct, and the use of our knowledge for the control of human relations, is incalculably more important for the welfare of mankind than is the discovery of new and ever more powerful explosives or the building of increasingly terrible engines of destruction.
During the last half-century the physical sciences, technologies, arts and industries, have made marvelous advances. At enormous cost of labor and material resources there have been discovered and perfected means of destroying life and property at once so effective and so terrible to contemplate that preparedness for war seemed a safe guarantee of peace. But who is there now to insist, against the evidence of blood-drenched Europe, that material progress, physical discovery, and armament based thereupon, assure international friendship?
Only if one of the nations should discover, and guard as its secret, some diabolically horrible means of destroying human life and property by wholesale and over materially unbridged distances, can armaments even temporarily put an end to war. In such event—and it is by no means an improbability—the whole world might suddenly be made to bow in terror before the will of the all-powerful nation. Before this approaching crisis, can we do less than earnestly pray that the translation of physical progress into armament may be halted until the brotherhood of man has been further advanced? Dare we stop to contemplate what would happen to-morrow if Germany, with half the civilized world arrayed against her, should come into possession of some imponderable, and to the untutored mind mysterious, means of directing her torpedoes, exploding magazines, mines, shells from distant bases? Undoubtedly we are close upon the employment of certain vibrations for this deadly purpose. Shall we veer in time and take a safer course, or are we doomed to the inevitable?
For the certain result of pushing forward relentlessly on the path of preparation for war—in the name of peace—is the dominance of a single nation and the destruction or subjugation of all others. This is as inevitable as is death. If we would preserve and foster racial and national diversity of traits, promote social individuality as we so eagerly foster the diversity of selves, we must speedily focus attention upon human nature and seek that knowledge of it which shall enable us to control it wisely rather than to destroy it ruthlessly.
Even were I able to do so, I should in no degree belittle the achievements of the physical sciences and their technologies, for I believe
Most briefly, the situation may thus be described. In peace and in war there are two large, complex and intricate groups of facts to be dealt with by those who seek the welfare of man. The one group comprises the phenomena of physical nature as the condition of life— environment; the other is constituted by the phenomena of life and the relations of lives. Those who sincerely believe in preparedness for war as a preventive measure, misconceive and attempt to misuse the emotion of fear and its modes of expression. It is as though we should strive tirelessly to develop machinery and methods for educating our children, the while ignorant of the laws of child development and branding as of no practical importance the fundamentals of human nature.
To nations no more than to individuals is it given to live by fear alone. By it a nation may become dominant, and diversity of body, mind, and ideals be eradicated. To base our civilization upon fear entails uniformity, monotony of life; the sacrifice of peoples for the unduly exalted traits and national ideals of a single homogeneous social group—a single all-powerful nation. Knowledge of life, and the sympathy for one's fellow men which springs from it, must control the world if nations are to live in peaceful and mutually helpful relations. If life, whether of the individual or of the social group, is to be controlled, it must be through intimate knowledge of life, not through knowledge of something else. The world must be ruled by sympathy, based upon understanding, insight, appreciation. This is my prophecy, this my faith and my present thesis.
Material as contrasted with purely intellectual or spiritual progress is the pride of our time. We worship technology as reared upon physics and chemistry. But what is our gain, in this progress, so long as we continue to use one another as targets? Would it not be wiser, more far-sighted, more humane, more favorable to the development of universal peace and brotherhood, to give a large share of our time and substance to the search for the secrets of life? As compared with the physical sciences, the biological departments of inquiry are, in general, backward and ill-supported. Why? Because their tremendous importance is not generally recognized, and, still more, because the control of inanimate nature as promised by physical discovery and its applications appeals irresistibly both to our imagination and to our greed. We long for peace—because we are afraid of war—we long for the perfecting
What I have already said and now repeat in other words is that if we really desired above anything attainable on earth the lasting peace of nations, we should diligently foster and tirelessly pursue the sciences of life and seek to perfect and exalt the varied arts and technologies which should be based upon them. Experimental zoology and genetics; physiology and hygiene; genetic psychology and education; anthropology and ethnology; sociology and economics, would be held in as high esteem and as ardently furthered as are the various physical sciences and their technologies.
Does it not seem reasonable to claim that human behavior may be intelligently controlled or directed only in the light of intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the organism, its processes, and its relations to its environment? If this be true, how pitiably, how shamefully, inadequate is our knowledge even of ourselves! How few are those who have a sound, although meager, knowledge of the laws of heredity, of the primary facts of human physiology, of the principles of hygiene, of the chief facts and laws of mental life, including the fundamental emotions and their corresponding instinctive modes of action, the modifiability or educability of the individual and the important relations of varied sorts of experience and conduct, the laws of habit, the nature and rôle of the sentiments, the unnumbered varieties of memory and ideation, the chief facts of social life and their relations to individual experience and behavior. Not one person in a thousand has a knowledge of life and its conditions equal in adequacy for practical demands to his knowledge of those aspects of physical nature with which he is concerned in earning a livelihood. Even those of us who have dedicated our lives to the study of life are humble before our ignorance. But with a faith which can not be shaken, because we have seen visions and dreamed dreams, we insist that the knowledge which we seek and daily find is absolutely essential for the perfecting of educational methods; for the development of effective systems of bodily and mental hygiene; for the discovery, fostering and maintenance of increasingly profitable social relations and organizations. In a word, we believe that biology, of all sciences, can and must lead us in the path of social as contrasted with merely material progress; can and ultimately will so alter the relations of nations that war shall be as impossible as is peace to-day.
Fortunately the biologist may depend, in his efforts to further the study of all aspects of life, not upon faith and hope alone, but also upon works, for already physiology and psychology have transformed our educational practices; and the medical sciences given us a great and steadily increasing measure of control over disease.
At least two men, as different in intellectual equipment, habits of
The one of these prophets among biologists, President G. Stanley Hall, has lived to see his faith in the practical importance of the intensive study of childhood and adolescence justified by radical reforms in school and home. Hall should be revered by all lovers of youth as the apostle to adolescents. The other, Professor William McDougall, has done much to convince the thinking world that all of the social sciences and technologies must be grounded upon an adequate genetic psychology— a genetic psychology which shall take as full and intelligent account of behavior as of experience; of the life of the ant, monkey, ape as of that of man; of the savage as of civilized man; of the infant, child, adolescent as of the adult; of the moron, imbecile, idiot, insane, as of the normal individual; of social groups as of isolated selves. It is to McDougall we owe a most effective sketch—in his introduction to Social Psychology of the primary human emotions in their relations to instinctive modes of behavior.
Hall, McDougall and such sociologists—lamentably few, I fear—as Graham Wallas would agree that for the attainment of peace we must depend upon some primary human instinct. I venture the prediction that no one of them would select fear as the safe basis. Instead, they surely would unite upon sympathy.
Among animals preparedness for struggles is a conspicuous cause of strife. The monkey who stalks about among his fellows with muscles tense, tail erect, teeth bared, bespeaking expectancy of and longing for a fight, usually provokes it. We may not safely argue that lower animals prove the value of preparedness for war as a preventive measure! Among them, as among human groups, the only justification of militarism is protection and aggression. Preparedness for strife is provocative rather than preventive thereof.
As individual differences, and resulting struggles, are due to ignorance, misunderstanding, lack of the basis for intelligent appreciation of ideals, motives and sympathy, so among nations knowledge of bodily and mental traits, of aims, aspirations, and national ideals fosters the feeling of kinship and favors the instinctive attitude of sympathetic cooperation.
Every student of living things knows that to understand the structure, habits, instincts, of any creature is to feel for and with it. Even the lowliest type of organism acquires dignity and worth when one becomes familiar with its life. Children in their ignorance and lack of understanding are incredibly cruel. So, likewise, are nations. The treatment of inferior by superior races throughout the ages has been
Selfishness, the essential condition of individualism and nationalism, must be supplanted by the sympathy of an all inclusive social consciousness and conscience if lasting peace is to be attained.
To further the end of this transformation of man we should become familiar with the inborn springs to action, those fundamental tendencies which we call instincts, for we live more largely than is generally supposed by instinct and less by reason. All of the organic cravings, hungers, needs, should be thoroughly understood so that they may be effectively used. And, finally, the laws of intellect must be at our command if we are to meet the endlessly varying and puzzling situations of life profitably and with the measure of adequacy our reason would seem to justify.
Clearly, then, the least, and the most, we can do in the interest of peace is to provide for the study of life, but especially for the shamefully neglected or imperfectly described phenomena of behavior and mind, in the measure which our national wealth, our intelligence and our technical skill make possible. For one thing, it is open to us to establish institutes for the thorough study of every aspect of behavior and mind in relation to structure and environment, comparable with such institutions for social progress as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The primary function of such centers for the solution of vital problems should be the comparative study, from the genetic, developmental, historical, point of view of every aspect of the functional life of living things, to the end that human life may be better understood and more successfully controlled. Facts of heredity, of behavior, of mind, of social relations, should alike be gathered and related, and thus by the observation of the most varied types, developmental stages, and conditions of living creatures there should be developed a science of behavior and consciousness which should ultimately constitute a safe basis for the social sciences, for all forms of social endeavor, and for universal and permanent peace.
I submit that such centers of research as the psycho-biological institute I have so imperfectly described are sorely needed. For it is obvious
May it be granted us to work intelligently, effectively, tirelessly for world-wide peace and service. not by the suppression of racial and national diversities, the leveling of the mass to a deadly sameness, but through steadily increasing appreciation of racial and national traits. May the world, even sooner than we dare to hope, be ruled by sympathy instead of by fear.
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