Part 17 (1/2)
Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle disguise. Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the present day in masquerading as love. Not only many modern egotists, but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans, barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality they manifested nothing but s.e.xual self-love, the woman in the case being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not have its selfish indulgence. By way of example let us take what Pallas says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes:
”The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the same time perform slavish duties for their husbands, who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to antic.i.p.ate all their desires.”
The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these ”amorous evenings,” that he ”loved” his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appet.i.tes. In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest indication of love--that is, of affection--for her. It is all egoism, and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism. Not that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love. Romantic love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are subdued and overpowered by the latter, and s.e.xual pa.s.sion is not love unless the altruistic ingredients are present. It is these altruistic ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which is the entering wedge of altruism.
DELIGHT IN THE TORTURE OF OTHERS
Sympathy means sharing the pains and pleasures of another--feeling the other's joys and sorrows as if they were our own, and therefore an eagerness to diminish the other's pains and increase the pleasures.
Does uncivilized man exhibit this feeling? On the contrary, he gloats over another's anguish, while the other's joys arouse his envy. Pity for suffering men and animals does not exist in the lower strata of humanity. Monteiro says (_A. and C._, 134) that the negro
”has not the slightest idea of mercy, pity, or compa.s.sion for suffering. A fellow-creature, or animal, writhing in pain or torture, is to him a sight highly provocative of merriment and enjoyment. I have seen a number of blacks at Loanda, men, women, and children, stand round, roaring with laughter, at seeing a poor mongrel dog that had been run over by a cart, twist and roll about in agony on the ground till a white man put it out of its misery.”
Cozzens relates (129-30) an instance of Indian cruelty which he witnessed among the Apaches. A mule, with his feet tied, was thrown on the ground. Thereupon two of these savages advanced and commenced with knives to cut the meat from the thighs and fleshy parts of the animal in large chunks, while the poor creature uttered the most terrible cries. Not till the meat had been cut clean to the bone did they kill the beast. And this hideous cruelty was inflicted for no other reason than because meat cut from a live animal ”was considered more tender,”
Custer, who knew the Indian well, describes him as ”a savage in every sense of the word; one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.” In the _Jesuit Relations_ (Vol.
XIII., 61) it takes _ten_ pages to describe the tortures inflicted by the Hurons on a captive. Theodore Roosevelt writes in his _Winning of the West_ (I., 95):
”The nature of the wild Indians has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot so much as look another in the face and speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger-nails split off backwards, finger-joints chewed off, eyes burned out--these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others, equally normal and customary, which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims.”
In his famous book, _The Jesuits in North America_, the historian Parkman gives many harrowing details of Indian cruelty toward prisoners; harmless women and children being subjected to the same fiendish tortures as the men. On one occasion he relates of the Iroquois (285) that
”they planted stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side.
Then, as they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings.”
On page 248 he relates another typical instance of Iroquois cruelty.
Among their prisoners
”were three women, of whom the narrator was one, who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt, their captors took the infants from them, tied them to wooden spits, placed them to die slowly before a fire, and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications, and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them were met with mockery and laughter.”
Later on all the prisoners were subjected to further tortures
”designed to cause all possible suffering without touching life. It consisted in blows with sticks and cudgels, gas.h.i.+ng their limbs with knives, cutting off their fingers with clamsh.e.l.ls, scorching them with firebrands, and other indescribable tortures.”
They cut off the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of one of the women and compelled her to eat them. Then all the women were stripped naked, and forced to dance to the singing of the male prisoners, amid the applause and laughter of the crowd.
If anyone in this hostile crowd had shown the slightest sympathy with the victims of this satanic cruelty, he would have been laughed at and insulted; for to the American Indians ferocity was a virtue, while ”pity was a cowardly weakness at which their pride revolted.” They were deliberately trained to cruelty from infancy, children being taught to break the legs of animals and otherwise to torture them. Nor were the women less ferocious than the men; indeed, when it came to torturing prisoners, the squaws often led the men. In the face of such facts, it seems almost like mockery to ask if these Indians were capable of falling in love. Could a Huron to whom cruelty was a virtue, a duty, and whose chief delight was the torture of men and women or animals, have harbored in his mind such a delicate, altruistic sentiment as romantic love, based on sympathy with another's joys and sorrows? You might as well expect a tiger to make romantic love to the Bengal maiden he has carried into the jungle for his supper. Cruelty is not incompatible with appet.i.te, but it is a fatal obstacle to love based on affection. Facts prove this natural inference. The Iroquois girls were coa.r.s.e wantons who indulged in free l.u.s.t before marriage, and for whom the men felt such pa.s.sion as is possible under the circ.u.mstances.
The absurdity of the claim that these cruel Indians felt love is made more glaringly obvious if we take a case nearer home; imagining a neighbor guilty of torturing harmless captive women with the obscene cruelty of the Indians, and yet attributing to him a capacity for refined love! The Indians would honor such a man as a colleague and hero; we should send him to the penitentiary, the gallows, or the madhouse.
INDIFFERENCE TO SUFFERING
It would be foolish to retort that the savage's delight in the torture of others is manifested only in the case of his enemies, for that is not true; and where he does not directly exult over the sufferings of others, he still shows his lack of sympathy by his indifference to those sufferings, often even in the case of his nearest relatives. The African explorer Andersson (_O.R._, 156) describes the ”heart-rendering sorrow--at least outwardly,” of a Damara woman whose husband had been killed by a rhinoceros, and who wailed in a most melancholy way:
”I heartily sympathized with her, and I am sure I was the only person present of all the members a.s.sembled ... who at all felt for her lonely condition. Many a laugh was heard, but no one looked sad. No one asked or cared about the man, but each and all made anxious inquiries after the rhinoceros--such is the life of barbarians. Oh, ye sentimentalists of the Rousseau school--for some such still remain--witness what I have witnessed, and do witness daily, and you will soon cease to envy and praise the life of the savages.”
”A sick person,” writes Galton (190), ”meets with no compa.s.sion; he is pushed out of his hut by his relations away from the fire into the cold; they do all they can to expedite his death, and when he appears to be dying, they heap oxhides over him till he is suffocated. Very few Damaras die a natural death.”