When Men Revolt and Why

Harold J. Bershady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351299268
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The environment within which humans interact has changed dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. However, their expectations stem from the same hopes and dreams people have had from the beginning of humankind. When Men Revolt and Why encourages readers to look closer and more deeply into the relationships between humans and the institutions that have originated to help them realize their full potential.The contributors not only examine people, but also the need to change institutions that have outworn their usefulness. When institutions inhibit rather than facilitate everyone's desire to live a full life, the result is likely to be violence. This book offers the ideas of many people who have tried to dig deeper into basic causes of violence. Included in this volume are selections by Aristotle, Tocqueville./Marx and Engels, and Brinton. The ideas they espoused still hold vitality.In his new introduction, James Davies talks about the circumstances under which this book was originally published. In Vietnam, a people were fighting for their autonomy. In the United States, many Americans were protesting against American involvement in the Vietnam War. Blacks were marching for their civil rights. Women were fighting for equality. Time has tempered these conflicts.Davies maintains that we remain ignorant of the elemental forces that impel people and nations to resort to violence. We are usually surprised by their anger and shocked by their violence. Davies asserts that we need to learn more about how humans respond to change so as to prepare ourselves for such responses to change. When Men Revolt and Why is as timely as ever as we deal with uncertainty in various areas of the world - the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Ireland, among others. It is especially pertinent for political scientists, historians, and sociologists.

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Introduction

Introduction

Violence among men goes back to the beginnings of human history, when Cain slew his brother Abel and later asked the question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Violence among citizens, of which revolution is the most extreme sort, probably goes as far back in the history of government. Indeed it may be argued that violence of citizen against citizen, government against citizen, and citizen against government has always come before orderly political processes. If so, political development may be called a movement not from violence to nonviolence but rather from the sharing by all people of the means of violence to a monopoly of violence by those who govern, with the consent of those who are governed. That is, it is a trend from lawless, individual violence toward the kind of violence used only by government acting in accordance with publicly accepted law.

This takes us back to Cain’s question: Am I my brother’s keeper? When government, Cain-like, has used violence to serve the interests of itself and the governing class, citizens have often responded by taking weapons and the law into their own hands. When government has served the interests of all citizens, most citizens have been willing to surrender the use of violence and its instruments to their government.

In this book we are concerned with finding out when and why people withdraw the surrender to government of their power to kill and coerce. In a developed polity the right of government and citizens to do various things is asserted and acknowledged. In every polity the power to do things requires assertion but not recognition. Men have always had the power to use violence against government; governments have always had the power to use violence against citizens. The question is not as to the power but as to the reasons people decide to exercise it. When revolution occurs, it is not people who must conform to the demands of governments but governments that must conform to the demands of people. As we learn basic reasons for revolution, we get a better idea of what are the basic human forces to which governments, laws, and constitutions must conform.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, it appeared that the modern era had at last firmly established orderly political ways of doing things, which were voluntarily accepted by citizens almost everywhere. This illusion was broken. In 1900 China experienced the Boxer Rebellion and five years later Russia exploded. The Boxer Rebellion was turned outward, against the world powers that were colonizing China. The 1905 Russian Revolution was turned inward, against the exploitation of Russians by Russians. Both were prototypes of the violent political action that has typified our century. Since 1900—since two world wars and dozens of decolonizings and revolutions—the governments and social systems of perhaps half the world’s population have been changed by violent means. Disorderly, nonconstitutional political processes have been the dominant mode of our era.

Except for those who glory in human gore, whether spilled actually in conflicts between or within nations or spilled symbolically on television, this has been a discouraging turn of events. It has led some students of politics to talk grievous nonsense about the inevitability of unlawful force and about the very few years in all recorded history that man has not been killing or maiming man, on battlefields or barricades. This supposedly timeless, long range view is really as ephemeral and myopic as the notion at the end of the Victorian era that nonviolence was here to stay.

The 20th century is surely one of the most violent in history, possibly the second most violent. Top distinction in violence probably goes to the 16th and early 17th centuries. The century of the Protestant Reformation, which preceded by four hundred years the weapons of nuclear fission and computerized overkill, is believed to have reduced the population of Germany by at least a fourth. No actual 20th century war or sum of wars or revolutions has even come close to this proportion—except that the Jewish population of Germany was virtually wiped out in the 1930s and 1940s.

Before we dissolve into a melancholy impotence about how evil and wretched the human condition is, we should take a careful look at when and why all this violence comes about—in the 16th, 20th, or any century. If we find some valid explanations, we may then gain some assurance that diminishing the causes of civil violence will at least reduce its occurrence. And we can hopefully then avoid the naivete of some governments and citizens who say that certain kinds of people are the cause of revolt and if we eliminate them we will eliminate revolution.

Civil violence, in our ignorance of its causes, often appears to be random, erratic, irrational. This appearance only betokens our ignorance of causes rather than any real randomness of revolutionary behavior. It is the product of natural laws more fundamental than any that men have adopted in writing or by custom—more fundamental than any written or unwritten constitution, any statute or city ordinance against unlawful assembly or disorderly conduct.

Explanations of fundamental, preconstitutional, preinstitutional causes of human behavior have been related to political consequences since Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan. In recent decades these fundamental principles have become far more clearly evident than they were even to Hobbes, that most magnificent integrator of speculative psychology and political theory.

As Aristotle observed in the 4th century before Christ and Hobbes twenty centuries later, we are now again becoming aware that civil disorders and revolutions begin in the minds of men. At least that is where revolutions acquire focus and direction. This assertion is so banal as to seem to need no saying, but the most current single assertion about revolution has been that it begins in group (economic, ethic, or religious) conflict. There has been too little awareness of the human mind as a nodal, elemental factor.

Karl Marx was the most tenacious and prescient student of revolution in the 19th century and the most influential in the 20th. For him the unit of analysis was not the human being or his central nervous system but those vast nonindividual units called social classes. Marx did imply the mind, when he spoke of the class-consciousness of the proletariat. But “class-consciousness” and “the collective unconscious” are inexact shorthand terms, appropriate for easy and often monistic generalizations. Consciousness is more exactly a characteristic of individuals than of groups. Nevertheless, newspaper accounts and even academic studies of the civil disturbances among black people in the United States and university students throughout the world remain largely preoccupied with collectivities, rather than individuals, as the units of analysis. Sometimes such studies say that it all started with the demand in black slums for housing and jobs, or in universities for more and better professors and more student participation in making educational policy. They avoid saying that any individual, deprived of the steady means of physical survival or frustrated by careers that have been blocked without any visible purpose by tradition or by war, will become restless. They avoid looking into the minds of people.

Just why these demands are made by blacks or students is thus seldom considered on any general level. To many, it seems idle to consider that there may be common explanations applicable to the demands of black people and students and of those who made the Protestant Reformation and the great revolutions of the 20th century. To many, it is awesome and fascinating to read or witness disaster, whether it be the Black Death of early modern times in Europe or a lightning-caused fire in the green forest or a rioter-set fire in a black slum. The awe and the fascination produce little but fear and wonder. Seeing people die of the plague or witnessing a fire does not cure the plague or prevent the fire.

If we can get some understanding of when and why men revolt, we may then be better able to produce social and political conditions that reduce tension below the head-cracking point and emancipate men at a cost less bloodily high than revolution. A search for some basic laws of human behavior can tell us what man-made laws men will obey in accordance with their natural demands and what laws they will not obey. We will then be able to develop better customs, better constitutions, better statutes. This seems a more economic, efficient process than attempting fundamentally to restructure either men or Man, trying to cleanse his supposedly dark soul in some kind of massive brain laundry. Chapter 8 in this book indicates that at least some demands have not changed in the past two and a half millennia. The problem is to identify those of the demands that are basic.

There is not yet consensus about the basic characteristics of men’s mental processes, about the nature of man. Indeed until recent years a common assumption has been that man had no nature. By some strange means, man with his highly developed brain was supposed to act like other forms of life whose brains and behavior patterns are less complex and much less amenable to self-analysis and self-control. Man seemed to become Pavlov’s dog, nothing but a bundle of conditioned responses to stimuli that together seemed to make him—as Marx put it—the ensemble of his social relations. Even among some people willing to consider the notion that man may have species-wide behavioral tendencies, there have been voices saying that supposed nature is of no concern to social scientists. The idea that the organism contains determinants only messes up their diagrams of political behavior. Just feed into the black box (man’s no longer canine but now computerized mind) a class status, a religion, a few other artifacts of culture; then press the computer start button. Out will come the behavior that pops spontaneously from the black box into which you feed the artifacts.

If some social scientists are so programmed by their own preconceptions as to become computers rigorously receiving and rejecting raw data at one end and emitting truth at the other, men at least are not so constructed. Inside the black box, the central nervous system of each individual human being is an enormously complicated but highly integrated and discriminating set of processes that take place systematically in the great network of nerve cells. It has been estimated there are about twenty billion neurons in man. These neurons respond to stimuli not only from the external environment that Marx talked about, but also from the internal environment consisting of the other parts of the anatomy (endocrines, viscera, muscles, bones) other than the brain. The discriminatory and integrative responses, including the decision-making process as it relates to all action including the political, takes place in the brain, which causes the body to act. The inputs into the mind may include a stomach that is empty, a love that is frustrated, adrenalin or noradrenalin which in some summating way demands action. The action may take the form of revolt.

Marx said that man, or at least the proletariat in capitalist society, would revolt when he became so degraded that his share of the product of industry allowed him merely to survive. That is, Marx said man would revolt when his survival was threatened. This would all be very well if chronically hungry men were usually rebels. But hungry men are usually just plain hungry—too hungry to be concerned with anything other than food. They are usually too hungry, when in the condition that Marx described, to form that measure of social solidarity necessary for them to work together to overthrow their government. So hungry men usually live out their truncated lives and die, their annals being short, simple, and, until Marx called the attention of well-fed people to the poor, unnoticed. Revolutions always get recruits from briefly hungry people who break into bakeries and granaries, but they seldom get recruits from those too malnourished to outrun the cops when someone yells “Stop, thief.”

Something other than hunger appeared to be behind not only the profound revolution that the Protestant Reformation amounted to but also the more recent great American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. The awesome manifest acts of particular revolutions take our attention away from underlying causes. A stamp tax is not a corvée—is not the tsar’s troops firing on workers on 22 January 1905—is not the bloody killing of Communists in Shanghai in 1927, or the cruelty of Japanese or Kuomintang troops as they laid waste a resistant Chinese village.

But the British stamp tax was taxation without representation. The French corvée was an unreasonable, unequal, discriminatory exaction of labor from peasants who got little benefit from the heavy public construction work they performed. When troops fired on peaceful petitioners in Petrograd, human beings were being treated like wild beasts—and so they were when Chinese villagers were killed en masse because they refused to do the bidding of Chinese or Japanese troops. What these various acts of “constituted” governments have in common is the affront to the equal dignity of human beings, who variously happened to receive the affront in America, France, Russia, and China.

When Jefferson premised the argument in 1776 for independence from British rule with the statement that “all men are created equal,” he was making an assertion about man’s nature. Men who have been denied equality have been highly responsive to the demand by their leaders for equality and have made revolutions to get it. Whether the language was Lutheran, Wesleyan, Calvinist, Jeffersonian, Rousseauean, or Marxian, the frustrated expectation of equality has been a major factor in all major revolutionary upheavals since Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the Wittenberg church door. Indeed, since long before that.

“Even as you do it unto these, the least of my brethren, you do it unto me,” said Christ nearly two thousand years ago. “Friendship [or love or affection] is among equals,” wrote Aristotle some four hundred years before Christ—and as we shall see, he saw a link between equality and revolution. And some seven hundred years before Christ, it was written in a great Jewish law book (Leviticus 19:18): “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

It may be that the desire for equality is acquired in the process of putting on the garment of culture. It may be that the idea became imprinted in the mind of Christ by some learned scholar who forgot to footnote the Aristotelian or Hebraic source. It may be that Marx’s anger at the brutalizing effects of unbridled capitalism was another Pavlovian product of unconscious conditioning. It may be that Marx could have been conditioned with the notion that all men are or should be unequal. The 19th century culture offered much support for a devout belief in inequality. But such an explanation via cultural determinism is far less plausible than the idea that men naturally desire equality.

Environmental determinism and simple stimulus response psychology leave the black box closed. They neglect what goes on between the time when the stimulus goes in and when the organism acts in response. Pavlov conditioned the response of drooling when his hungry dogs became accustomed to associate the symbolic bell with the reward of real food. The response became established: the hungry dog drooled when the bell rang. And the response became extinguished after a time, when the ringing of the bell was not followed by food. The dogs began to discriminate in their response when the symbolic world lost its link to the real world.

People do indeed respond to symbols far more complexly than dogs. But they do so with relation to things that they want independently of the symbols. If people associate words that express the idea of equality with the practice of equality, they do so because they want real equality. When symbols diverge from practice, the voicing of symbols by priests, prelates, parliamentarians, courtiers, kings, and politicians loses its ability to produce the approving conditioned response. Luther denounces priests and the Church, when their discriminatory acts belie their nondiscriminatory universalist and egalitarian ethic. Lenin calls religion (but not equality itself) the opiate of the people. In Chapter 7 we shall see the progression of Mao Tse-tung’s growing hatred for his father and his native government.

We can as yet only hypothesize that the desire for equality is innate in all men. But we do know that people who have been degraded and discriminated against (at least since the slave revolts in ancient Rome) are rather likely to join a revolution against the government that is degrading them and discriminating against them.

The need for equality is not the only basic need that relates to revolution. The contemporary American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, has specified a set of basic needs: the physical, security, social or affectional, self-esteem, and self-actualization needs. He orders these basic categories of needs into a hierarchy, saying that the physical needs, when unsatisfied, predominate over all others, even when the others are unsatisfied. The common sense of the idea is evident when you realize what you would concentrate on if you were drowning. It would not likely be love of your fellow man, a demand for a fair trial, an urge to write a poem, or anything other than your desire to breathe.

The editor of this reader believes the Maslow need hierarchy—with the exception of his postulated need for security—to be a very useful starting point in the search for causes of revolution. People who are momentarily hungry will join food riots, as in France in 1789. People who feel socially isolated will join revolutionary movements, as did Hitler when he became a Nazi and drew social rejects (and many others) to the movement that became his own. People whose equal dignity has been denied will become rebellious once they have become fairly well fed and somewhat socially integrated, like relatively well-off blacks in America in the 1960s or Indians in British India in the 1920s. People who are insecure in the satisfaction of their physical, social-affectional, or dignity needs form the dry tinder of revolutions. And people whose supply of food, social acceptance, and equal dignity are all quite secure will join revolutions when their career expectations are frustrated—as did many landowners in France in 1789 and Russia in 1905 when the bourgeoisie began to displace them from their accustomed power and prestige—and as did Lenin, the lawyer whose career prospects were destroyed within a few years after his brother was executed as a plotter against the tsar. And as do American college students in the 1960s, when faced not with a challenging career, but with military duty in a conflict in Southeast Asia whose goals have long since been lost from sight.

Without the postulate that people who revolt are doing so in response to very strong, very basic drives, it is impossible to explain their commitment to action so fraught with danger. Without the postulate that such needs are hierarchically arranged, it is at least difficult to explain the collaboration in revolution of people whose immediate hunger is for food with those who have plenty to eat, of people who are beloved by parents and family with those who are not, or who have high self-esteem but cannot pursue the career which they have come to expect they have a right to pursue.

The writings in this collection do not fit a simple theory supporting the idea that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Libris Personae
• 1. Introduction
• 2. How individuals and societies meet the challenge of change
• 3. Some general theory
• 4. Some mental and social antecedents of revolution
• 5. How some social scientists have combined theory and research
• 6. A durable generalization
• An elemental bibliography
• Notes