Collective Unreason

I

THREE years ago the Atlantic Monthly published in two numbers a clever fantasy called ‘Utopia Interpreted.’ It was presumably written in 1995, and set forth the methods by which the social conditions of the civilized world had been wholly and permanently changed.

‘The suicidal patience of the poor had come to an end,’ and with it poverty had ended. ‘The screaming horrors of the Strenuous Age’ were over, and had taken with them, let us hope, all needless noises, longdistance noises especially. ‘The Institute of Sharing’ had made life pleasant for everybody. The last criminal had been hanged, the last child spanked. All was well with the wrongdoers of the world.

This kind of writing holds a fascination for sanguine souls. They have only to conceive of human nature as radically changed, and life changes with it. But what gave Miss Cleghorn’s work its value to attentive readers was the depth of her insight into mental contagion, and her heroic boldness in delineating it.

Her first ‘Sharers’ begin — with a show of reason — by leaving their homes and going to live among the poor, to share the burden of poverty. As the movement spreads, ‘Prison Sharers’ make their appearance. These, being harshly excluded from jails, confine themselves in cellars or in ‘area enclosures,’ and refuse to be liberated until the prisons are emptied. Next come along the ‘Death Sharers’ (women all of them), who propose to commit suicide, one by one, whenever a lawbreaker is lynched. Finally a band of Frenchwomen pledge themselves to die by their own hands whenever their soldier husbands cause, ‘by direct slaughter or by blockade,’ the death of an enemy. These last Sharers strike such a popular note that their numbers swell to many thousands throughout Europe, Asia, and South America.

It sounds mad; but the threat to commit suicide if soldiers fight is akin to the threat of refusing to bear children unless war be ‘outlawed.’ To be sure the Utopian Frenchwomen, being fictitious, really did the deed, whereas the agitated Americans, being real, made no appreciable dent in the birth rate of their prolific country. Nevertheless any form of hysteria carries its peril. What gives perverted emotions their strength is that they are immune from reason and from logic.

Miss Cleghorn demonstrated the perfection of her analysis by the skill with which she detached her Sharers from normal or primitive sympathies. They were brimful of pity for the imprisoned or the lynched criminal, but not for his innocent victim. The ‘ fighting jeweler,’ that poor little New York Jew, who, having been twice robbed, had the desperate courage to fire at the third band of assailants, and fell, riddled by bullets, at the door of his ravaged shop, would have made no appeal to their sensibilities. The death of an enemy in battle could be expiated only by suicide. The death of a countryman went for nothing. This twisted passion of pity is the essence of the abnormal. It finds a typical expression in Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s annoyance with Christ because Judas betrayed Him with a kiss.

II

The impulse to take our own lives, or to outrage our own bodies, by way of atonement, by way of resistance, by way of argument or entreaty, is as old as the East, where it has known many phases and has been duly honored. Even now a Japanese officer or diplomat will commit hara-kiri to mark his just grief and resentment at an insult offered to his country. The deed is done with dignity and dispatch; and we are left marveling at a sense of honor we do not understand, a physical courage we do not share, a process of reasoning we cannot follow, and a neatness of execution which, in the unavoidable absence of practice, savors of the miraculous.

It is in Russia, where the mind is receptive and the will plastic, that collective unreason has oftenest taken the form of suicide or self-inflicted injuries. M. Maurice Paléologue, whose opportunities for study and observation were fairly adequate, says that in no other country except the Mohammedan East are the masses so incapable of resisting this species of contagion. Nowhere else do psychic waves travel so fast and so far. He cites strange frenzies that for centuries have seized upon the peasantry, driving them to deeds of horror. The Red Death followed the trail of an illiterate muzhik named Basil Volosatz, who was born in Sokolsk in 1630. A sombre man, thoughtful, observant, and devout, he passionately resented the poverty of the serfs, the violence of the nobles, the subservience of the Church. Now what was the remedy he proposed? A crusade? A rising, like that of the Jacquerie in France, or the Bundschuh in Germany? A brave fight and a faint, thin chance of victory? No, his counsel was for self-destruction — death by fire, because fire purified the soul of sin.

’ We shall burn away all that is gross. We shall die unsullied, and with holy faith.’ So welcome was this grim suggestion, so highly acceptable to his brother muzhiks, that whole villages proceeded to carry out his design. In 1685 a group of seven hundred men, women, and children burned themselves in one vast and terrible holocaust.

The severest edicts were issued by Peter the Great, an irascible monarch, against this form of revolt; but a charred body defies the processes of the law. Moreover the stake had been for centuries the supreme penalty imposed by the courts of the world (it was in this very year, 1685, that Elizabeth Gaunt was burned at Tyburn), and when such a death became desirable and desired, there was little left to threaten. Vigorous preachers were dispatched over the country with better results. The unpardonable nature of the sin of suicide was used as a sledge-hammer argument; and the possibility of eternal damnation, of going ‘roaring out of one fire into another,’ as Cotton Mather kindly expressed it thirty years later when a drunken woman was accidentally burned to death, stifled the ardor of fanaticism. Nevertheless, sporadic instances of the Red Death kept reappearing from time to time. As late as 1800 a number of people in Olonetz killed themselves in this awful manner.

More recent and more incredible was the conduct of the peasant population of the village of Tarnov on the Dniester. In 1897 a census was ordered. By some mysterious process of reasoning, the inhabitants of Tarnov associated this census with the approaching reign of Antichrist, an event never remote from the illiterate Russian mind. To avoid being classified as subjects of the lord of evil, the men of the village dug deep pits into which the women, children, and old people entered, and were buried alive. The survivors were then interned, and helped heroically to fill up their own graves. Finally the last man took his place with the dying and the dead. fhe census, so far as the village of Tarnov was concerned, had no names to enter, and Antichrist was cheated of his prey.

The hunger strike has been generally supposed to be of Russian origin. It bears the hallmark of Slavonic melancholy, is more dignified, if less courageous, than making a bonfire of one’s self, and has enjoyed a weird popularity among Occidentals who have been temporarily deprived of reason. There is a story (apocryphal, I am sure) of an American tourist who was shown the Hunger Tower of Pisa, and who asked his guide what prisoners had gone on a strike. Those four bleak roofless walls that tell the world their tale of unrelenting cruelty suggested to his mind only resentful captives refusing to eat their dinners, and solicitous jailors devising ways and means of feeding them.

Indeed, the consternation caused by the hunger strikes was the most singular part of their history. It is a canon of civilization that people may not be permitted to commit suicide. The employees of insane asylums spend their time seeing to it that the inmates are given no chance to take their own unhappy and valueless lives.

An unwarranted attempt was made to claim hunger striking as an inspiration of the English militant suffragists. A Miss Wallace-Dunlop was lauded as a pioneer comparable to Captain Scott of Antarctic fame and tragic memory, because she was ‘the fragile inventor of the hunger strike.’ But apart from the relative merits of the two exploits, Miss Wallace-Dunlop merely adopted a device familiar for centuries to Russia, and which, according to antiquarians, was an ancient and honorable Celtic institution. It flourished in Ireland for centuries before Russia had emerged from barbarism, or could boast of any annalist to report her irrationalities.

A mediæval Irishman who cherished a grievance ‘fasted against’ his hostile neighbor until the grievance was redressed. Mostly he carried his point, because the neighbor feared one of those amazingly fluent curses on which a dying Celt expended his last breath. Strange stories have been told of landless men who fasted until estates were granted them; of a father who fasted against three rebellious sons until he had reduced them to order; of saints who fasted against unjust princes and chieftains; of sinners who fasted against the blessed saints, to wring concessions from them. It was even whispered that Saint Columba fasted against God, and was punished for his presumption by being exiled from Ireland to the bleak Hebrides, there to work out his salvation and bring Iona to the faith.

Perhaps it was the absence of such interesting traditions that made the hunger strike so ineffective in our sentimental but unimaginative land. Perhaps our tormenting sense of humor weakened its authority. Perhaps we do not set so high a value upon life — which is snuffed out daily on a liberal scale by motors — as do older and less reckless nations. Moreover, the American hunger strikers were few in number, and never achieved the notoriety which rewarded similar efforts in Great Britain and Ireland. When George Lansbury fasted against His Majesty’s harassed government, he was quickly released to save trouble in ihe East End. When the Irish prisoners of 1923 fasted against the deeply perplexed authorities, twenty thousand people assembled outside of Mountjoy jail and prayed aloud for them, a highly dramatic episode, and a perfect illustration of the mental unity which is the law of crowds. Even Mrs. Pankhurst, although her adventures seem puerile to us now, managed in her day to focus public attention. She threw civilization into the discard, and went straight back to the old, old instinct which has made countless human beings assault themselves by way of coercing their neighbors. She did this, being a very able woman, with great efficiency and a steady eye to effect. Her example was necessarily contagious. It had all the qualities which make for contagion — courage, emotionalism, and unreason.

Mr. Zangwill is responsible for the statement that in the winter of 1913 ‘a lady militant of wealth and station’ marked her sense of injustice by committing suicide at the entrance of the Derby. He was himself much moved by the incident he related, asserting that ‘Englishmen were not so brutish that they could bear the sight of martyred innocence ’ — a curious choice of words.

As a rule, however, the militants wisely preferred injuring their neighbors’ property to injuring themselves. They were few in numbers, they operated for only a short time; but they managed in that time to do an incredible amount of mischief. It was unfortunate that they were as a rule women of education who knew what was valuable and beautiful; and who, after the first wild outbreaks of wdndow-smashing, turned their attention to the destruction of things best worth preserving. If they went for a church, it was a church of dignified tradition. There were hundreds of pictures in the Royal Academy that called for demolition; but the iconoclasts passed them by in favor of Sargent’s incomparable portrait of Henry James — a choice bitterly resented by Americans. So loud indeed was our indignation that Mr. James expressed a fleeting hope that it might, find a practical vent in the purchase of his books. The large surfaces of the Albert Memorial were left unscratched; but the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey was blown up, and the famous Stone of Scone on which Saint Columba pillowed his blessed head, and which holds the fortunes of the British monarchy in its keeping, was wrecked, with no visible consequences.

The two marvelous things about English militancy were its abrupt cessation with the proclamation of war, and the fact that it never leaped the seas. It stopped as suddenly as if a strong wind had blown away a miasmal mist, or a cold douche had cured hysteria. The call to arms, the peril which beset England, the stern realities she faced, left no room for artificial excitements in the minds of English men or women. But I never understood why the contagion, while it lasted, made no longer strides. Americans failed to catch it. The French seemed immune. They gazed at their undesecrated treasures, they listened to the tale of England’s misfortunes, and they echoed Tennyson’s thanksgiving with a complacency which matched his own: —

III

The long, long history of the Church has given us countless instances of saints — and very great saints — who courted ill health and pain as assets in the spiritual life, and as weapons in the warfare against sin. There were others of a more robust nature who valued their bodies as working partners. When Saint Theresa, in a moment of pardonable petulance, bade her novices keep their shoes and mend their wits, she was not decrying asceticism. The order of Discalced Carmelites was of her foundation. The nuns were expected to walk barefooted through the world. But the mental attitude which lifted the absence of shoes from a sign and a symbol to the reality of the thing it represented was singularly trying to this brilliant and holy woman. She had the distaste of the balanced mind for superlatives.

And superlatives were the order of her day; a fierce, cruel, sincere, and ardent day that had barely emerged from the emotional instabilities of the Middle Ages. Only thirty years before Saint Theresa was born, the last of the Flagellants were slowly disappearing in northern Europe. For two centuries these self-tormentors had cropped up intermittently in Italy, Spain, Flanders, Holland, and Bohemia. Coldly received in England, they had swept Germany into a religious frenzy. Thousands of men, women, and children moved in processions through the towns, scourging themselves with leather thongs. The streets were red with their blood. For thirty-three days they were sworn to endure these tortures; and every day brought fresh aspirants to share their honors and their pain.

Bishops fulminated decrees against this dramatic fanaticism. Popes condemned it. Civil authorities strove to close their streets to the offenders. It was of no more use than when the King of France, backed by the University of Paris, brought all the authority of Church and State to halt the Children’s Crusade. A mediæval crowd took a fearful joy in the Flagellants, and endorsed the protest it embodied, a protest against the too manifest imperfections of rulers and of ruled. The thing was as contagious as the plague, and, like the plague, it kept reappearing decade after decade, wherever the seeds of the disease had germinated.

There must have been people then as now with soft hearts and tender flesh to whom the sight of suffering was abhorrent. There must have been people then as now with an inborn and ineradicable sanity. But, as Henry Adams mildly observed five centuries later, ‘perfect balance does not greatly interest the world.’ It did not interest the fasters of Ireland, or the Russian peasants busily preparing to burn themselves. It did not interest the Spanish cross-bearers of New Mexico, or the penitentes who bound themselves to crosses in defiance of civil and ecclesiastical mandates. It can never interest the collective mind, that dim jungle, penetrable to rays of pity, generosity, and emotionalism, but not to the north light of reason.

As a matter of fact it has been observed by psychologists that a crowd is most to be feared when it takes to reasoning. An instance occasionally quoted is the action of the French Revolutionists who, in September 1792, were employed to clear out the prisons of Paris, and who, in the discharge of this duty, killed fifty children, detained for what is now known as juvenile delinquency. No especial animosity was felt toward these children as toward the unfortunate aristocrats, or still more unfortunate bourgeoisie, who were savagely slashed to death. No sympathy was felt for them, as for some lucky prisoners found guiltless of offense, and escorted to freedom amid cries of rejoicing and good will. The rude court that sat in judgment decided coldly and with considerable acumen that the youthful offenders, who ranged from twelve years of age to seventeen, would probably make trouble later on, and to save the Republic from future annoyance they were butchered then and there.

This kind of calculation was, happily, rare during the Reign of Terror. For an illustration of the true mob spirit we must turn to Delphine de Custine, the lovely daughter of Madame de Sabran, who came out of the Hall of the Tribunal to face an infuriated mob, and was saved from assault by a fishwoman who — simplest of devices — lent her a baby to carry. The throng, swept by sentiment as a field of grain is swept by the wind, parted to let her pass. That was not one of its lapses into reason.

IV

It has been frequently said that the World War was a case of contagion, a sort of mental measles on a large scale. I have seen it casually alluded to as ‘war neurosis,’as ‘national nervousness,’ as ‘alarm-engendered disorder’ (which sounds mild), and as ‘a spontaneous combustion resulting from excessive fears and hatreds.’

It is so much easier to write in this fashion than to study facts and balance evidence that humanitarians may be forgiven for rejecting details that are not to their taste. A great deal has been forgotten in thirteen years; the reluctance with which England roused herself to battle, the piteous protests of Russia, the careful calculations of Italy. As for the invaded countries, they needed no hypnotism. Neither does the word ‘nervousness’ exactly describe their condition. The reaction of an assaulted nation is as automatic as the reaction of an assaulted man, or the reaction of an assaulted cat. Out goes the arm of the man. Up goes the back of the cat. Hence the fortunate survival of the human and of the feline race.

The prolonged and brave defense of hearth and home is something more than a primitive instinct. It is the development of that instinct into the highest form of reasoned activity. It is man’s sacrifice of self, and his supreme dedication to duty. All hope of peace, all aspiration toward goodness and conciliating kindness, must rest on this sure foundation. That ‘odd weakness for the enemies of their country,’ which Mr. Guedalla has observed in ‘progressive persons,’ fails of its influence when men and women hear the rattling of guns at their gates, or see the destroyers’ aircraft overhead. The Daughters of the Dove of Peace would forget their spiritual parentage under such conditions. The awful necessity of ‘holding on’ lifted unheroic French soldiers to incredible heights of heroism. ‘The moral triumph of Belgium,’ said Cardinal Mercier, ‘is an ever memorable tale for history and civilization.’

With a few unforgettable facts firmly fixed in our minds, and with a few formidable situations irremovable from our present outlook, the wave of sentiment which assumes that confidence will create good will seems without substance or support. ‘Les nations n’ont pas de cousins,’and Russia and China make no coy claim to relationship. Neither of these countries is living under reasonably successful conditions, neither of them is fulfilling its own artistic, intellectual, and spiritual nature. Consequently to neither is war the anomaly it should be to nations that have achieved some sparse measure of serenity. China’s far-flung and legitimate aspirations have not united her people, or modified the uncivilized cruelty that has been part of her civil code. Russia’s grievances are as thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa. Her public utterances are shrill with resentment. Her great principle of shifting blame has developed an astounding ingenuity in domestic as well as in foreign affairs. It has permeated her law courts, which are probably the most dramatic in the world.

Two years ago a woman was tried in Yaroslavl for beating her three-yearold child to death. Judge, jury, and counsel all were women. A throng of women crowded the courtroom. The defense offered was that the conditions of misery and oppression under which the working classes had lived during the old régime had deadened all human feeling in the mother’s heart. Consequently, seven years after the slaughter of the Tsar, she had killed her child with unexampled brutality. The fault, if fault there were, must be laid at the Romanovs’ door. The jury, moved to tears by the thought of what the woman had endured seven years earlier, forgot the more recent suffering of the child, and recommended clemency. The sympathetic judge modified the penalty to sixteen months’ imprisonment. The crowd wept freely when sentence was pronounced. It was no more disposed to waste pity on that bruised and battered baby than the London militants were disposed to waste pity on the humble East Side undertaker whose window Mrs. Pankhurst smashed to vindicate her rights.

V

Americans, having positive and practical minds, and being saved from too much thinking by habits of phenomenal activity, are not prone to emotional epidemics. Yet in the past year the suicides among students in schools and colleges grew to disturbing proportions. They verified Gustave Le Bon’s assurance that personal contact is not essential to the spread of such contagion. The self-destroyers were scattered over the length and breadth of the country. Their numbers were relatively small, but each case reported gave us a painful shock because it was so incredible.

A boy seems the last creature on God’s earth to kill himself. That he should ever do it proves that we do not know him yet. It is true that the publication of Werther was followed by a little wave of student suicide in Germany. It is true that overwork has been known to drive German schoolboys to taking their own lives. But from such sources of peril young Americans are wholly and happily exempt.

The publicity given to youthful suicides in this country did all the harm it could. Parents blamed schools, schools blamed parents, clergymen blamed schools and parents, newspapers reported this voluminous censure. A commentator in the Cosmopolitan magazine did his best to encourage the contagion by informing his readers that the commoner sort of mind was not subject to this temptation, and that the one thing clear to our understanding was ‘the exceptionally sensitive natures of these brave adventurers between two worlds,’ these boys and girls ‘ infatuated with infinity.’

The unbalanced mind may be sensitive, but it knows nothing of the strength that lies in delicacy. The foolish egotism of the letters left by these ‘adventurers’ showed the sapping of their moral vitality. They had failed to develop character or will. Nothing is less likely than that the youths who committed suicide could ever have grown into intelligent and useful manhood. Just as the feeble body is unable to resist the germs of physical disease, so the feeble spirit is unable to resist the germs of mental disease. It is said that boys who were forcibly prevented from joining the Children’s Crusade, which was at least a nobly conceived infatuation, sickened and died — so imperious was the call.

Among the youngest of American suicides was a New York lad of thirteen, a quiet, fairly studious boy who had been decently reared, and who was not sick, nor seemingly unhappy. He wasted no time writing morbid and high-flown letters to his family; but hanged himself quietly one Sunday afternoon when he was alone in the house. No motive could be assigned for the deed. The child was too young to suffer from ‘celibacy unduly prolonged,’ a plight to which the Cosmopolitan sage ascribed some such deaths. The Assistant Medical Examiner pronounced the case to be one of ‘imitation student suicide.’

VI

We are told that self-destruction was a crime unknown to the Middle Ages when men had too much trouble keeping alive to doubt the desirability of living. An instinct deeper and wiser than reason kept them from balancing profit and loss. The ‘Open Door’ of Epictetus was closed to them by the Church, and it was the only one of her mandates which cost them no pains to obey. The early Irish fasters meant to break down opposition, not to die of hunger. The Flagellants appear to have mvariably survived their stripes. Fantastic penances were as much a part of existence as were riotous sinning, and virtue undefiled. The reiterated reminder of the mediæval monks, ‘ Brother, we must die,’ meant that even in the cloister men’s hearts were set on life. The inscription on the bronze base of the tomb of the Black Prince at Canterbury reads: ‘De la mort ne pensaije mye.’ It is the expression of the will of his day.