Part 31 (1/2)
When from this point of view we compare man with the lower animals, so immense is his progress that we are tempted to believe perfection within the reach of his attainment.
Two things, however, suffice to keep alive evil in man:
While at almost every point he has so moulded his own environment as to eliminate the vices that characterize the rest of the animal kingdom, in two respects the predatory system still prevails:
The international conflict keeps nations in perpetual compet.i.tion with one another, and this periodically forces them to war; and the intranational conflict keeps individuals in perpetual conflict with one another, and stimulates all the vices which most interfere with human happiness.
The international conflict seems doomed to continue so long as man remains separated by racial antipathies and commercial interests.
Efforts are being made to diminish occasions for war to the utmost possible, by bringing all races to recognize and aim at the same social ideal. But there would still remain ample occasion for war so long as men are kept in compet.i.tion by conflicting commercial interests. The task first in importance and time, therefore, seems to be to eliminate as much as is advisable the commercial and industrial conflict, which has been already pointed out to be the great intranational obstacle to human perfection and happiness.
Now the intranational conflict has been seen to result from our industrial system. This, as at present organized, is an artificial creation of man; indispensable though it may have been to the gradual evolution of the race, it has always acted, and must always act to keep alive in man the very quality--selfishness--the elimination of which is most essential to the happiness of a community, and the absence of which particularly characterizes natural communities such as those ants and bees.
While, then, man has resisted and in great part subdued Nature in the physical world by science, and in a world which he has himself created--the moral world--by self-restraint, he has added to this artificial environment two inst.i.tutions which tend to counterbalance the advantages already secured. These are national governments that create international conflict, and an industrial system that creates intranational conflict; and we are confronted with the problem whether these two hothouses of crime, hatred, selfishness and vice, can be dispensed with.
Science affords us the encouraging hope that they can. It points out that man has already suppressed many of the most merciless effects of the natural environment; that by virtue of the power through which he can in great part create and certainly modify his own environment, he may still further push on the work of civilization if he will but recognize that the real enemy to human happiness is hatred and the real friend to it solidarity; and if he will return to the Gospel of Christ, which economic conditions have so far compelled him to disregard.
Before closing the study of evolution it is proper to point out that we are now in a position to dispose of the contention that, because natural evolution proceeds upon the principle of the survival of the fittest, therefore human evolution must proceed upon the same lines.
This is the argument that millionaires and individualists set up against those who believe in the possibility of diminis.h.i.+ng human misery by reducing the occasions for human conflict.
It is totally false.
Man has demonstrated his ability to resist Nature and to progress along lines that are diametrically opposed to those of natural evolution. The whole fabric of human civilization is an answer to the millionaire's argument. The natural principle of the survival of the fittest is no longer at work. Man has put an end to it. The lion and the tiger no longer reign in the jungle nor the white ant in the Pampas. Man, alone, determines which animals shall live and which shall disappear. The weak in our own race no longer perish; mercy comes to their rescue. The strong are no longer the only ones to perpetuate the type; marriage protects the weak husband in his marital rights as well as the strong. Climate no longer determines survival; man has made himself master of climate, and indeed works most effectually to-day in lat.i.tudes which at an earlier stage were peopled only by savages.
At every point where man touches Nature he has reversed the natural process.
The unfit no longer perish, the fit no longer alone survive. Man is no longer the necessary result of the natural environment: _he makes his own environment_; and if he be wise enough he can so modify it as to modify himself with it. When, if ever, he so modifies it as to eliminate those elements in it which stimulate vice, then he will have realized the word of the Gospel, ”Ye are G.o.ds.”
-- 5. CAN HUMAN NATURE BE CHANGED BY LAW?
It is currently urged and has become a sort of maxim that human nature cannot be changed by law. Not only is this quoted by the bourgeois in his argument against the Socialist, but even Henry George has fallen into this error. Indeed, it is this error that prevented Henry George from adopting Socialism and left him the distinguished founder of an inadequate philosophy. For the most superficial knowledge of history will suffice to demonstrate its untruth. Human nature has already been profoundly changed by law; by the inst.i.tution of marriage, by education, by property. This has already been sufficiently discussed to make it unnecessary further to comment on it.[205] It does not, however, seem sufficient to point out the profound modification of human nature by law in the past in order to persuade the bourgeois that humanity can still further be modified by law in the future; for a thousand instances can be quoted of efforts to change human nature by law that have failed, and it is argued very illogically that because in many instances they have failed, they must always fail.
Then, too, there remains in the minds of all influenced by Herbert Spencer, the profound error that society is an organism and must be allowed to grow; whereas on the contrary, a very little study demonstrates that society differs from an organism in essential points.[206]
No society can exist without some law of a.s.sociation. The law may be a natural one, as in the case of myxomycetes; or it may be an artificial one, as in the case of the United States const.i.tution; or it may be both, as indeed is the case in every human society.
This law of a.s.sociation is called ”government.” Strictly speaking, in a political sense government means only that law of a.s.sociation which is promulgated and enforced by the supreme power of the state; but human society is controlled by a double system of laws--one written, whether in judicial decisions or in express statute, and the other not written, because it resides in the ma.s.s of the citizens under conditions which baffle description. This last is imperfectly rendered in the English word ”custom,” is more definitely expressed in the French word _moeurs_, and is admirably conveyed by Horace in the words
Quid leges sine moribus Vanae proficiunt?
The essential characteristic of custom is that, however controlling it may be in fact, it does not enjoy the sanction of legislative enactment or executive decree; indeed, it often arises out of opposition to law; as where in the Western states game laws remain unenforced, because public opinion supports the ranchman's defence of necessity; and sometimes again where, though a law be in itself proper, a community declines to avail itself of the law, as in the custom that discredited divorce in the early Roman Republic.
Now, the importance of this moral or sometimes immoral sense that makes custom independently of law, must not be underestimated--for it is in many respects superior to law for evil or for good; and it differs from law in the essential fact that it grows almost imperceptibly, whereas law, in the strict sense of the word, is the result of judicial decision or legislative enactment--both acts of deliberation--or so purporting to be. The question naturally arises then whether, in so far as society develops along the line of custom, it does not follow the process of growth rather than that of construction.
It is impossible to deny that custom and public opinion are in a continual state of change; the varying fortunes of political parties sufficiently testify to this; but how far these variations are in civilized communities due to unconscious growth and how far to conscious effort it is not easy to determine. Suffice it to point out that, while opposing forces such as egotism and philanthropy, do continually tend to mould opinion under conditions that baffle inquiry, there are conscious forces at work which are quite as powerful and could be made more so. Chief amongst these is education; and in the word ”education” are included not our schools and universities alone, but all the educating influences of the day--the press, the stage, music, literature, and art. That all these are engaged in moulding public opinion--some in bringing popular government into contempt, some in relaxing public morals, some in holding up low ideals, some in indulging luxurious tastes, while they could be doing just the opposite of all these things--there is no doubt.
The existence of these things is mentioned here because failure to mention them would have left the discussion incomplete. Enough has been said to indicate that there are great forces at work in society which to-day escape the control of government, and that it is not easy to say how far they operate after the haphazard fas.h.i.+on of Nature and how far subject to the deliberate purpose of man. Whatever be the conclusion, it is certain that so far as they are left to Nature's guidance they will result in Nature's handiwork; whereas so far as they are controlled by human wisdom they will bear the fruits of that wisdom.
In conclusion, therefore, a.s.sociations of individuals are characterized in primitive forms of life by unconsciousness; but as the individuals develop, these a.s.sociations seem to become deliberate rather than unconscious, until in man they not only seem deliberate but are so.
The history of human society shows that when it has been allowed to grow unconsciously the development has been in the same direction as under the predatory system of Nature; that is to say, inst.i.tutions have been moulded to benefit individuals presenting the combination of strength and craft best fitted to survive in the artificial environment which the strong and crafty created to that end. When conditions produced by this system of growth under the spur of egotism were replaced by one of construction under the guidance of wisdom, there was progress.