Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 21

[Footnote 1: Bonar: _Philosophy and Political Economy in their Historic Relations_, p. 205.]

Malthus's pessimistic prophecy of the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence has been subjected to refutation by various causes. For one thing, among civilized races at least, the birth-rate is declining. Again, intensive agriculture has vastly increased the possibilities of our natural resources. On this point, writes Kropotkin, who is better acquainted with agricultural conditions than are most social reformers:

They [market gardeners] have created a totally new agriculture.

They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine c.r.a.pe from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soils themselves, and make it in such quant.i.ties as to be compelled yearly to seed some of it; otherwise it would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch, every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of gra.s.s on the acre as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same s.p.a.ce; not 51 pounds worth of hay, but 100 pounds worth of vegetables of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots.[1]

[Footnote 1: Kropotkin: _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_, p. 74.]

Of intensive industry the same might be said. Where formerly a man could produce only enough for one man's consumption, under conditions of machine production one man's work can supply quant.i.ties sufficient for many. With a declining birth-rate and the vastly increased productivity of industry and agriculture, there is a greatly reduced danger of the population growing beyond their possible sustenance by the available food supply.

Under certain economic and social conditions there are marked variations in the birth-rate. This may be due to various causes which are, by different writers, variously a.s.signed. The variation of the birth-rate among different cla.s.ses is again a matter of common observation and statistical certainty. Higher standards of living are found regularly to be correlated with a decrease in the number of children in a family. An important factor in the voluntary restriction of population is the desire to give children that are brought into the world adequate education, environment, and social opportunity.

CULTURAL CONTINUITY. To the very young the world seems an unprecedented novelty. It seems scarcely older than their own memories, which are few and short, and their own experience, which is necessarily limited and confined. Through education our experience becomes immeasurably widened; we can vicariously live through the experiences of other people through hearing or reading, and can acquire the racial memory which goes back as far as the records of history, or anthropological research. As we grow older we come to learn that our civilization has a history; that our present has a past.

This past extends back through the countless aeons before man walked upright. The past of human life on earth goes back itself over nearly half a million years. With this long past, the present is continuous, being as it were, additional pages in process of being written.

The physical continuity of the race is insured, as we have just seen, by a mechanism, which, though it may be subjected to rational consideration, is instinctive in its operation. The human beings that people the earth to-day are offspring of human ancestors reaching back to the appearance of the human animal in the long process of the evolution of life on earth. So far as we can see, posterity will be for countless generations physically similar to ourselves, as they certainly will, unless all records or evidences of the fact are obscured, trace their ancestry continuously back to us.

Not only is there continuity of physical descent, however, but continuity of cultural achievement. The past, in any literal temporal sense, is over and done with. The Romans are physically dead, as are the generations of barbarians of the Dark Ages, and all the inhabitants of mediaeval and modern Europe, save our own contemporaries. Yesterdays are irrevocably over. The past, in any real sense, exists only in the form of achievements that have been handed down to us from previous generations. The only parts of the past that survive physically are the actual material products and achievements of bygone generations, the temples and the cathedrals, the sculptures and the ma.n.u.scripts, the roads and the relics of earlier civilizations. Even these exist in the present; they are evidences, memorials, mementos of the past. These heritages from past civilizations may be interesting, intrinsically, as in the case of paintings and statues, or useful, as in the case of roads, reservoirs, or harbors.

But we inherit the past in a more vital sense. We inherit ways of thought and action, social systems, scientific and industrial methods, manners and morals, educational bequests and ideals, all that we have and are. Without these, each generation would have to start anew. If the whole of existing society were destroyed, and a newborn generation could be miraculously preserved to maturity, its members would have to start on the same level, with the same ignorances, uncertainties, and impotences as primitive savages.

In order to make the nature and variety of our abject dependence on the past clear, we have only to consider our language, our laws, our political and social inst.i.tutions, our knowledge and education, our view of this world and the next, our tastes and the means of gratifying them. On every hand the past dominates and controls us, for the most part unconsciously and without protest on our part.

We are in the main its willing adherents. The imagination of the most radically-minded cannot transcend any great part of the ideas and customs transmitted to him. When once we grasp this truth, we shall, according to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves that ... we are permitted to stand on the giant's shoulders, and enjoy an outlook that would be quite hidden to us, if we had to trust to our own short legs; or we may resentfully chafe at our bonds and, like Prometheus, vainly strive to wrest ourselves from the rock of the past, in our eagerness to bring relief to the suffering children of men.

In any case, whether we bless or curse the past, we are inevitably its offspring, and it makes us its own long before we realize it. It is, indeed, almost all that we can have.[1]

[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, pp. 256-57.]

The cultural achievements of the past, which we inherit chiefly as social habits, are obviously not transmitted to us physically, as are the original human traits with which this volume has so far been chiefly concerned. They are not in our blood; they are acquired like other habits, through contact with others and through repeated practice.

We are thus to a very large extent conditioned by the past.

It is as if we had inherited a fortune composed of various kinds of properties, houses, books, automobiles, warehouses, musical instruments, and in addition, trade concessions, business secrets, formulaes, methods, and good-will. Our activities will be limited in measure by the extent of the property, its const.i.tuent items, and the repair in which we keep it. We may squander or misinvest our princ.i.p.al, as when we use scientific knowledge for dangerous or dubious aims, for example, for conquest or rapine. We may add to it, as in the development of the sciences and industrial arts. We may, so to speak, live on the income. Such is the case when a society ceases to be progressive, and fails to add anything to a highly developed traditional culture, as happened strikingly in the case of China. Again we may have inherited "white elephants,"

which may be of absolutely no use to us, enc.u.mbrances of which we cannot easily rid ourselves, influential ideas which are no longer adequate to our present situation, obsolete emotions, methods, or inst.i.tutions. We may allow our cultural inheritance, through bad education, to fall into disrepair and decay.

Since we are so dependent on the past, our att.i.tude toward it, which in turn determines the use we make of it, is of the most crucial significance. The several characteristic and varying att.i.tudes toward the past which are so markedly current are not determined solely by logical considerations. For individuals and social groups particular features of their heritage have great emotional a.s.sociations. The living past is composed of habits, traditions, values, which are vivid and vital issues to those who practice them. Traditions, customs, or social methods come to have intrinsic values; they become the center of deep attachments and strong pa.s.sion. They are a rich element of the atmosphere of the present; they are woven into the intimate fabric of our lives. The awe which we feel in great cathedrals is historical as well as religious. Those vast solemn arches are the voices of the past speaking to us. The moral appeal of tradition appears with beautiful clarity in the opening chapter of Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circ.u.mstance of daily life--that _conscience_, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, had become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly Puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he pa.s.sed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an aged laborer in the field: an upright stone, still with moldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a great seriousness, an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circ.u.mstances of family fellowship--of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth from labor on which they live, really understood by him as gifts--a sense of religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear, of mult.i.tudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms.[1]

[Footnote 1: Walter Pater: _Marius the Epicurean_ (A. L. Burt edition), pp. 3-4.]

To the past, as it is made familiar to us through song, study, and traditional practice, we may experience a piety amounting almost to religious devotion. In some individuals and in some nations, this sense for tradition is very strong.

Every one has felt more or less keenly this sense of being a link in a great tradition, whether of a college, family, or country.

Sometimes this sense for tradition takes an aesthetic form, as in the case of ritual, whether social or religious. Old streets, ivied towers, ancient rooms, become symbols of great and dignified achievements; ceremonies come to be invested with a serious beauty and memorable charm. They become reminders of a "torch to be carried on," of a spirit to be cherished and kept alive, of a history to be carried on or a purpose or an ideal to be fulfilled. As we shall see in a moment, this sense for the past, which, as Santayana says, makes a man loyal to the sources of his being, has both its virtues and vices.

It is of immense value in preserving continuity and cultural integration, in keeping many men continuously moving toward a single fixed end. It may also wrap dangerously irrelevant habits and inst.i.tutions in a saving--and illusive--halo.

There are, on the other hand, individuals with very little sense for tradition. This may be accounted for in some cases by a marked aesthetic insensibility, which sees in ritual, ceremony, or habit, merely the literal, without any appreciation at all of its symbolic significance.[1] In other cases, individuals are unsusceptible and hostile to tradition, because they have themselves been socially disinherited. This is ill.u.s.trated not infrequently in the case of foreigners who, for one reason or another, have left and lost interest in their native land, and become men without a country.

[Footnote 1: This is ill.u.s.trated by the cra.s.s excesses of certain radical satirists of religious forms. Those who are the enemies of religion for economic, social, or intellectualistic reasons combine a singular sense of the literal absurdities of religious forms with a marked insensibility to their symbolic values. One may find interesting examples, from Voltaire to Robert Ingersoll.]

There are others by temperament rebellious and iconoclastic, who combine a keen sense of present difficulties and problems with small reverence, use for, or interest in the past, and small imaginative sympathy with it. The past is to them a "sea of errors." They regard all past achievements as bad scribblings which must be erased, so that we may start with a clean slate. There have been included among such, great historical reformers. Bentham's enthusiasm for progress led him into most intemperate attacks on history and historical method. The most noted of the eighteenth-century philosophers saw nothing but evil in tradition. Such sentiments were echoed in the early nineteenth century by Sh.e.l.ley, G.o.dwin, and their circle, as expressed, for example, in Sh.e.l.ley's "h.e.l.las":

"The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

"Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendor of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright can live, All earth can take or Heaven can give."

It is not surprising that men with an eye fixed on the future should develop a contempt or an obliviousness of the past.

Utopians nearly always start with "a world various and beautiful and new."

Perhaps the chief ingredient in such discounting of all past history is the rebel temperament which wants to break away from what it regards as the chains, the dead weight, the ruts of tradition. It cheerfully says, "Nous changerons tout cela,"

and does not stop to discriminate between the _roads_ and the _ruts_ that have been made by people in the past.

These two temperaments,[1] play a large part in determining att.i.tudes toward the past. The one regards with awe and reverence past achievement, and rests his faith on the experiments which have been tested and proved by time. The other, to state the position extremely, regards each day as the possible glorious dawn of a completely new world. The first att.i.tude, when intemperately preached and practiced, becomes an uncritical veneration of the past; the second, an uncritical disparagement. We shall briefly examine each.

[Footnote 1: One is reminded of the song of the sentry before the House of Parliament in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe";

"'T is strange how Nature doth contrive That every little boy or gal, That's born into the world alive, Is either a little Liberal, Or else a little Conservative!"]

UNCRITICAL VENERATION OF THE PAST. The extreme form of uncritical veneration of the past may be said to take the position that old things are good simply because they are _old_; new things are evil simply because they are _new_. Inst.i.tutions, Ideas, Customs are, like wines, supposed to attain quality with age. A custom, a law, a code of morals is defined or maintained on the ground of its ancient--and honorable--history, of the great span of years during which it has been current, of the generation after generation that has lived under its auspices. The ways of our fathers, the old time-tested ways, these, we are told, must be our ways.

The psychological origins of this position have in part been discussed. There is in some individuals a highly developed sentiment and reverence for tradition as such, and an aesthetic sensibility to the mellowness, ripeness, and charm that so often accompany old things.[1] The new seems, as it often is, loud, bra.s.sy, vulgar, and hard. But there are other and equally important causes. Men trust and cherish the familiar in ideas, customs, and social organization, just as they trust and cherish old friends. They know what to expect from them; they have their well-noted excellences, and, while they have their defects, these also are definitely known and can be definitely reckoned with. The old order may not be perfect, but it is an order, and an order whose outlines and possibilities are known and predictable. Change means change to the unaccustomed and the unfamiliar. And the unaccustomed and the unfamiliar, as already pointed out, normally arouse fear. One of the conventional phrases (which has become conventional because it is accurate) with which changes have been greeted is the _cliche_, "we view with alarm." No small part of genuine opposition to change comes from the cautious and conscientious types of mind which will not sanction the reckless taking of chances, especially where the interests of large groups are concerned, which want to know precisely where a change will lead. Such a mind holds off from committing society to making changes that will put a situation beyond control and lead to unforeseen and uncontrollable dangers. Especially is this felt by the administrator, by the man who has experience with the difficulties of putting ideas in practice, who knows how vastly more difficult it is to operate with people than with paper.[2] The man of affairs knows how easy it is to check and change ideas in one's mind, but knows also the uncontrollable momentum of ideas when they are acted upon by vast numbers of men.

[Footnote 1: "Oxford," said a distinguished visitor to that venerable inst.i.tution, "looks just as it ought to look." And one is reminded of the story of the American lady who, admiring the smooth lawns at Oxford, asked a gardener how they managed to give them that velvet gloss. "We roll them, madam," he said, "for eight hundred years."]

[Footnote 2: Thus writes Catharine II, in a letter to Diderot, the French philosopher and humanitarian: "M. Diderot, in all your schemes of reform, you entirely forget the difference in our position; you work only on paper, which endures all things; it offers no obstacle, either to your pen or your imagination.

But I, poor Empress that I am, work on a far more delicate and irritable substance, the human skin."]

Again, the maintenance of ways that have been practiced in the past has a large hold over people, for reasons already discussed in the chapter on Habit. The old and the accustomed are comfortable and facile; change means inconvenience and frustration of habitual desires. This is in part the explanation of the increasing conservatism of men as they grow older. Not only do they have a keener sense of the difficulty of introducing changes, but their own fixed habits of mind and emotion make part of the difficulty.

They like the old ways and persist in them just as they like and keep old books, old friends, and old shoes.

ROMANTIC IDEALIZATION OF THE PAST. Reverence for the past may also be due to a romantic idealization of it. In such cases, it is not an interest in maintaining the present order; it is rather a contempt for the present and wistful yearning for the "good old days." Everyone indulges more or less in such idealization. Such halos are made possible because we retain the pleasant rather than the painful and dreary aspects of our past experience. The college alumnus returning to the campus tells of the since unsurpa.s.sed intellectual and athletic feats of the freshman cla.s.s of which he was a member. The elderly gentleman sighs over his newspaper at the bad ways into which the world is degenerating, and yearns for the old days when the plays were better, conversation more interesting, houses more comfortable, and men more loyal. In similar trivial instances we are all inclined to indulge in such mythology. The universality and age of this tendency has been well described by a student of Greek civilization.

This is the belief of the old school of every age--there was once a "good" time; and it matters not at all in the study of moral ideals that no such time can be shown to have existed. The men of the fourth century [B.C.] say that it was in the fifth; those of the fifth say it was in the sixth; and so on infinitely. The same ideal was at work when William Morris looked to the thirteenth century, forgetting that Dante looked to a still earlier period; and both forgot that the men of that earlier period said the same--"not now, indeed, but before us men were happy." So simpler men incline to say that their grandfathers were fine fellows, but the "old college is going to the dogs," or "the House of Commons is not what it was once," for reverence and faith and manliness once ruled the world. The old school lives upon an ignorance of history; it is genuinely moved by a simple moral ideal of life and character which its own imagination has created. And when evil becomes obvious, it is the new-fangled notions that are to blame. "Trying new dodges" has brought Athens down in the world--as Aristophanes in 393 B.C. makes his protagonist say:

"And would it not have saved the Athenian state, If she kept to what was good, and did not try Always some new plan?"[1]

[Footnote 1: C. Delisle Burns: _Greek Ideals_, pp. 118-19.]

On a large scale the romantic idealization of the past has been made into a philosophy of history. The "golden age,"

instead of being put in a roseate and remote future, is put in an equally remote and roseate past. The Greek legends were fond of a golden age when the G.o.ds moved among men. The Garden of Eden is the Christian apotheosis of the world's perfections. Various philosophers have pointed out the fallacy of finding such a mythological locus for our ideals, and evolution and the general revelations of history have indicated the completely mythical character of the golden age. History may, in general, be said to reveal that, whatever the imperfections of our own age, we have immeasurably improved in many p.r.o.nounced respects over conditions earlier than our own. The idealized picture of the Middle Ages with its guardsmen and its courtly knights and ladies, is coming, with increasing historical information, to seem insignificant and untrue in comparison with the unspeakable hardships of the ma.s.s of men, the evil social and sanitary conditions, the plagues and pestilences which were as much a part of it. The picture of the ideally gentle and benevolent att.i.tude of the master to his slaves is by no means regarded as a typical picture of conditions of slave labor in the South. We know, positively, on the other hand, that our medicine and surgery, our scientific and industrial methods, our production and our resources are incomparably greater than those of any earlier period in history, as are the possibilities of the control of Nature still unrealized.

If there were time I might try to show that progress in knowledge and its application to the alleviation of man's estate is more rapid now than ever before. But this scarcely needs formal proof; it is so obvious. A few years ago an eminent French _litterateur_, Brunetiere, declared science bankrupt. This was on the eve of the discoveries in radio-activity which have opened up great vistas of possible human readjustments if we could but learn to control and utilize the inexhaustible sources of power that lie in the atom. It was on the eve of the discovery of the function of the white blood corpuscles, which clears the way for indefinite advance in medicine. Only a poor discouraged man of letters could think for a moment that science was bankrupt. No one ent.i.tled to an opinion on the subject believes that we have made more than a beginning in penetrating the secrets of the organic and inorganic worlds.[1]

[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, p. 262.]

Even in the face of these facts, reverence for the past may amount to such religious veneration that change may come literally to be regarded as sacrilegious. In primitive tribes the reasons for this insistence are clear. Rites and rituals are used to secure the favor of the G.o.ds and any departure from traditional customs is looked upon as fraught with actual danger.

But the past, as it lives in established forms and practices, is still by many, and in highly advanced societies, almost religiously cherished, sustained, and perpetuated. Every college, religion, and country has its traditional forms of life and practice, any infringement of which is regarded with the gravest disapproval.[2] In social life, generally, there are fixed forms for given occasions, forms of address, greeting, conversation, and clothes, all that commonly goes under the name of the "conventions" or "proprieties." In law, as is well known, there is developed sometimes to an almost absurd degree a ritual of procedure. In religion, traditional values become embodied in fixed rituals of music, processional, and prayer.

In education, especially higher education, there has developed a fairly stable tradition in the granting of degrees, the elements of a curriculum, the forms of examination, and the like. To certain types of mind, fixed forms in all these fields have come to be regarded as of intrinsic importance. Love of "good form," the cla.s.sicist point of view at its best, may develop into sheer pedantry and Pharisaism, an insistence on the fixed form when the intent is changed or forgotten, a regard for the letter rather than the spirit of the law. In a large number of cases, the fixed modes of life and practice which are our inheritance come to be regarded as symbols of eternal and changeless values. Thus many highly intelligent men find ritual in religion and traditional customs in education or in social life freighted with symbolic significance, and any infringement of them as almost sacrilegious in character.