The Book of Life Part 29

What interest has society in the restriction of divorce? What affair is it of any other person if I choose to get a divorce and marry a new wife once a month? There are many reasons, not in any way based upon religious superst.i.tion or conventional prejudice. In the first place, there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for every child a home with a father and a mother in it. Second, there are property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement of which the law should always oversee. Third, there is the question of venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep down, by every reasonable restriction upon s.e.xual promiscuity. And finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love. It seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on the street.

There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce law, based upon common sense and not upon superst.i.tion. A couple wish to break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles. He gives them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three months to think it over. At the end of three months, if they still desire a divorce, they meet with him again. If he still thinks there is a chance of reconciliation, he has the right to require them to wait another three months. But if at the end of this second period they are still convinced that the case is hopeless, and that they should part, the judge is required to grant the divorce. You may note that this is exactly what I have suggested concerning young couples who become engaged. In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel. Except for grave offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months, nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of such a delay.

Next, what are we going to say to the right, or the claim to the right, on the part of a man or woman, to be married once a year throughout a lifetime? In order to ill.u.s.trate this problem, I will tell you about a certain man known to me. In his early life he spent a couple of years in a lunatic asylum. He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and uses the language of the highest idealism known. He is a man of culture and good family, and thus exerts a peculiar charm upon young women of refinement and sensitiveness. To my knowledge he was three times married in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child. In addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother and child to starve. For ten years or so I used to see him about once in six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing process of discovering his moral and mental derangement. Yet there was absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying upon lovely young girls wherever he went.

This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on the road. Nor are they confined to the males; the world is full of women who use their s.e.x charms for predatory purposes, and some of them are far too clever for any law that you or I can contrive at present. But I think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world. If any man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each time, we have a right to a.s.sume that the fault must lie with that person, and not with the three partners.

I think we may go further yet; having made wise laws of love and marriage, taking into consideration all human needs, we have a right to require that men and women shall obey the laws. At present the great ma.s.s of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore. But when we have made s.e.x laws that we know are just and sensible--then we shall consider that we have the right to restrain s.e.x criminals, and in extreme cases we shall avail ourselves of the skill of science to perform a surgical operation which will render him unable in future to prey upon the love needs of people who are placed at his mercy by their best qualities, their unselfishness and lack of suspicion.

We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein. There lives in California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their s.e.x-life to our own purposes. We can perform what to our ignorant ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and survive forever if we give them proper care. In other words, Luther Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."

There flash back upon my memory all those dull, weary, sick human creatures, who have repeated to me that dull, weary, sick old formula, "You cannot change human nature." I do not think I am indulging either in religious superst.i.tion or in blind optimism, but am speaking precisely, in saying that whenever human beings get ready to apply experimental science to themselves, they can change human nature just as they now change plant nature. By putting human bodies together in love, we make new bodies of children more beautiful than any who have yet romped on the earth; and in the same way, by putting minds and souls together, we can make new kinds of minds and souls, different from those we have previously known, and greater than either the man-soul or the woman-soul alone.

Also, by that magic which is the law of mind and soul life, each new creation can be multiplied to infinity, and shared by all other minds and souls that live in the present or may live in the future. We have shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the art of love. Consider the great lovers, the true lovers, of history--how they have enriched the lives of us all. It does not make any difference whether these men and women lived in the flesh, or in the brain of a poet--we learn alike from Dante and Beatrice, from Abelard and Helose, from Robert and Elizabeth Browning, from Tristan and Isolde, from Romeo and Juliet, what is the depth and the splendor of this pa.s.sion which lies hidden within us, and how it may enrich and vivify and glorify all life.

PART FOUR

THE BOOK OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE EGO AND THE WORLD

(Discusses the beginning of consciousness, in the infant and in primitive man, and the problem of its adjustment to life.)

We have now to consider the relationship of man to his fellows, with whom he lives in social groups. Upon this problem floods of light have been thrown by the new science of psycho-a.n.a.lysis. I will try to give, briefly and in simple language, an idea of these discoveries.

One of the laws of biology is that every individual, in his development, reproduces the history of the race; so that impulses and mental states of a child reveal to us what our far-off ancestors loved and feared. The same thing is discovered to be true of neurotics, people who have failed in adjusting themselves to civilized life, and have gone back, in some or all of their mental traits, to infantile states. If we a.n.a.lyze the unconscious minds of "nervous patients," and compare them with what we find in the minds of infants, and in savages, we discover the same dreams, the same longings and the same fears.

The mental life of man begins in the womb. We cannot observe that life directly, but we know that it is there, because there cannot be organic life without mind to direct it, and just as there is an unconscious mind that regulates the bodily processes in adults, so in the embryo there must be an unconscious mind to direct the flow of blood, the building of bones, muscle, eyes and brain. The mental life of that unborn creature is of course purely egotistical; it knows nothing outside itself, and it finds this universe an agreeable place--everything being supplied to it, promptly and perfectly, without effort of its own.

But suddenly it gets its first shock; pain begins, and severe discomfort, and the creature is shoved out into a cold world, yelling in protest against the unsought change. And from that moment on, the new-born infant labors to adjust itself to an entirely new set of conditions. Discomforts trouble it, and it cries. Quickly it learns that these cries are answered, and satisfaction of its needs is furnished.

Somehow, magically, things appear; warm and dry covering, a trickle of delicious hot milk into its mouth. At first the infant mind has no idea how all this happens; but gradually it comes to realize objects outside itself, and it forms the idea that these objects exist to serve its wants. Later on it learns that there are particular sounds which attach to particular objects, and cause them to function. The sound "Mama," for example, produces a G.o.ddess clothed in beauty and power, performing miracles. So the infant mind arrives at the "period of magic gestures"

and the "period of magic words"; corresponding to a certain type of myth and belief which we find in every race and tribe of human being that now exists or ever has existed on earth. All these stories about magic wishes and magic rings and magic spells of a thousand sorts; and nowhere on earth a child which does not listen greedily to such fancies! The reason is simply that the child has pa.s.sed through this stage of mental life, and so recently that the feelings are close to the surface of his consciousness.

But gradually the infant makes the painful discovery that not everything in existence can be got to serve him; there are forces which are proof against his magic spells; there are some which are hostile, and these the infant learns to regard with hatred and fear. Sometimes hatred and fear are strangely mixed with admiration and love. For example, there is a powerful being known as "father," who is sometimes good and useful, but at other times takes the attention of the supremely useful "mother,"

the source of food and warmth and life. So "father" is hated, and in fancy he is wished out of the way--which to the infant is the same thing as killing. Out of this grows a whole universe of fascinating mental life, which Freud calls by the name "the [OE]dipus complex"--after the legend of the Greek hero who murdered his father and committed incest with his mother, and then, when he discovered what he had done, put out his own eyes. There is a ma.s.s of legends, old as human thought, repeating this story; we cannot be sure whether they have grown out of the greeds and jealousies of this early wish-life of the infant, or whether they had their base in the fact that there was a stage in human progress in which the father really was killed off by the sons.

This latter idea is discussed by Freud, in his book, "Totem and Taboo."

It appears that primitive man lived in hordes, which were dominated by one old male, who kept all the women to himself, and either killed the young males, or drove them out to shift for themselves; so the young men would combine and murder their father. The forming of human society, of marriage and the family, depended upon one factor, the decision of the young victors to live and let live. The only way they could do this was to agree not to quarrel over the women of their own group, but to seek other women from other groups. This may account for what is known as "exogamy," an almost universal marriage custom of primitive man, whereby a man named Jones is barred by frightful taboos from the women named Jones, but is permitted relations with all the women named Smith.

To return to our infant: he is in the midst of a painful process of adjusting himself to the outside world; discovering that sometimes all his magic words and gestures fail, his wishes no longer come true. There are beings outside him, with wills of their own, and power to enforce them; he has to learn to get along with these beings, and give up his pleasures to theirs. These processes which go on in the infant soul, the hopes and the terrors, the griefs and the angers, are of the profoundest significance for the later adult life. For nothing gets out of the mind that has once got into it; the infantile cravings which are repressed and forgotten stay in the unconscious, and work there, and strive still for expression. The conscious mind will not tolerate them, but they escape in the form of fairy-tales and stories, of dreams and delusions, slips of the tongue, and many other mental events which it is fascinating to examine. Also, if we are weakened by ill health or nervous strain, these infantile wishes may take the form of "neuroses,"

and fully grown people may take to stammering, or become impotent, or hysterical, or even insane, because of failures of adjustment to life that happened when they were a year or two old. These things are known, not merely as a matter of theory, but because, as soon as by a.n.a.lysis these infant secrets are brought into consciousness and adjusted there, the trouble instantly ceases.

So it appears that the whole process of human life, from the very hour of birth, consists of the correct adjustment of men and women in relation to their fellows. Not merely is man a social being, but all the prehuman ancestors of men, for ages upon geologic ages, have been social beings; they have lived in groups, and their survival has depended upon their success in fitting themselves snugly into group relationships. Failure to make correct adjustments means punishment by the group, or by enemies outside the group; if the failure is serious enough, it means death. We may a.s.sert that the task of understanding one's fellow men, and making one's self understood by them, is the most important task that confronts every individual.

And if we look about the world at present, the most superficial of us cannot fail to realize that the task is far from being correctly performed. So many people unhappy, so many striving for what they cannot get! So many having to be locked behind bars, like savage beasts, because they demand something which the world is resolved not to let them have! So many having to be killed, by rifles and machine-guns, by high explosive sh.e.l.ls and poison gas--because they misunderstood the social facts about them, and thought they could fulfill some wishes which the rest of mankind wanted them to repress! As I read the psycho-a.n.a.lyst's picture of the newly born infant with its primitive ego, its magic cries and magic gestures, I cannot be sure how much of it is sober science and how much is mordant irony--a sketch of the mental states of the men and women I see about me--whole cla.s.ses of men and women, yes, even whole nations!

The effort of the following chapters will be to interpret to men and women the world which they have made, and to which they are trying to adjust themselves. More especially we shall try to show how, by better adjustments, men may change both themselves and the world, and make both into something less cruel and less painful, more serene and more certain and more free.

CHAPTER XLVIX

COMPEt.i.tION AND CO-OPERATION

(Discusses the relation of the adult to society, and the part which selfishness and unselfishness play in the development of social life.)

Pondering the subject of this chapter, I went for a stroll in the country, and seating myself in a lonely place, became lost in thought; when suddenly my eye was caught by something moving. On the bare, hot, gray sand lay a creature that I could see when it moved and could not see when it was still, for it was exactly the color of the ground, and fitted the ground tightly, being flat, and having its edges scalloped so that they mingled with the dust. It was a lizard, covered with heavy scales, and with sharp horns to make it unattractive eating. At the slightest motion from me it vanished into a heap of stones, so quickly that my eye could scarcely follow it.

This creature, you perceive, is in its actions and its very form an expression of terror; terror of devouring enemies, of jackals that pounce and hawks that swoop, and also of the hot desert air that seeks to dry out its few precious drops of moisture. Practically all the energies of this creature are concentrated upon the securing of its own individual survival. To be sure, it will mate, but the process will be quick, and the eggs will be left for the sun to hatch out, and the baby lizards will shift for themselves--that is to say, they will be incarnations of terror from the moment they open their eyes to the light.

The jackal seeks to pounce upon the lizard, and so inspires terror in the lizard; but when you watch the jackal you find that it exhibits terror toward more powerful foes. You find that the hawk, which swoops upon the lizard, is equally quick to swoop away when it comes upon a man with a gun. This preying and being preyed upon, this mixture of cruelty and terror, is a conspicuous fact of nature; if you go into any orthodox school or college in America today, you will be taught that it is nature's most fundamental law, and governs all living things. If you should take a course in political economy under a respectable professor, you would find him explaining that such cruelty-terror applies equally in human affairs; it is the basis of all economic science, and the effort to escape from it is like the effort to lift yourself by your boot-straps.

The professor calls this cruelty-terror by the name "compet.i.tion"; and he creates for his own purposes an abstract being whom he names "the economic man," a creature who acts according to this law, and exists under these conditions. One of the professor's formulas is the so-called "Malthusian law," that population presses always upon the limits of subsistence. Another is "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture,"

that you can get only so much product out of a certain piece of land, no matter how much labor and capital you put into it. Another is Ricardo's "iron law of wages," that wages cannot rise above the cost of living.

Another is embodied in the formula of Adam Smith, that "Compet.i.tion is the life of trade." The professor enunciates these "laws," coldly and impersonally, as becomes the scientist; but if you go into the world of business, you find them set forth cynically, in scores of maxims and witticisms: "Dog eat dog," "the devil take the hindmost," "business is business," "do others or they will do you."

Evidently, however, there is something in man which rebels against these "natural" laws. In our present society man has set aside six days in the week in which to live under them, and one day in the week in which to preach an entirely different and contradictory code--that of Christian ethics, which bids you "love your neighbor," and "do unto others as you would they should do unto you." Between these Sunday teachings and the week-day teachings there is eternal conflict, and one who takes pleasure in ridiculing his fellow men can find endless opportunity here. The Sunday preachers are forbidden to interfere with the affairs of the other six days; that is called "dragging politics into the pulpit." On the other hand, incredible as it may seem, there are professors of the week-day doctrine who call themselves Christians, and believe in the Sunday doctrine, too. They manage this by putting the Sunday doctrine off into a future world; that is, we are to pounce upon one another and devour one another under the "iron laws" of economics so long as we live on earth, but in the next world we shall play on golden harps and have nothing to do but love one another. If anybody is so foolish as to apply the Sermon on the Mount to present-day affairs, we regard him as a harmless crank; if he persists, and sets out to teach others, we call him a Communist or a Pacifist, and put him in jail for ten or twenty years.

In the Book of the Mind, I have referred to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," which I regard as one of the epoch-making books of our time. Kropotkin clearly proves that compet.i.tion is not the only law of nature, it is everywhere modified by co-operation, and in the great majority of cases co-operation plays a larger part in the relations of living creatures than compet.i.tion. There is no creature in existence which is entirely selfish; in the nature of the case such a creature could not exist--save in the imaginations of teachers of special privilege. If a species is to survive, some portion of the energies of the individual must go into reproduction; and steadily, as life advances, we find the amount of this sacrifice increasing. The higher the type of the creature, the longer is the period of infancy, and the greater the sacrifice of the parent for the young. Likewise, most creatures make the discovery that by staying together in herds or groups, and learning to co-operate instead of competing among themselves, they increase their chances of survival. You find birds that live in flocks, and other birds, like hawks and owls and eagles, that are solitary; and you find the co-operating birds a thousand times as numerous--that is to say, a thousand times as successful in the struggle for survival. You find that all man's brain power has been a social product; the supremacy he has won over nature has depended upon one thing and one alone--the fact that he has managed to become different from the "economic man," that product of the imagination of the defenders of privilege.

It is evident that both compet.i.tion and co-operation are necessary to every individual, and the health of the individual and of the race lies in the proper combination of the two. If a creature were wholly unselfish--if it made no effort to look after its own individual welfare--it would be exterminated before it had a chance to reproduce.

If, on the other hand, it cannot learn to co-operate, its progeny stand less chance of survival against creatures which have learned this important lesson. We have a nation of a 110,000,000 people, who have learned to co-operate to a certain limited extent. Some of us realize how vastly the happiness of these millions might be increased by a further extension of co-operation; but we find ourselves opposed by the professors of privilege--and we wish that these gentlemen would go out and join the lizards of the desert sands or the sharks of the sea, creatures which really practice the system of "laissez faire" which the professors teach.

The plain truth is that we cannot make a formula out of either compet.i.tion or co-operation. We cannot settle any problem of economics, of business or legislation, by proclaiming, for example, that "Compet.i.tion is the life of trade." Compet.i.tion may just as well turn out to be the death of trade; it depends entirely upon the kind of compet.i.tion, and the stage of trade development to which it is applied.

In the early eighteenth century, when that formula of Adam Smith was written, compet.i.tion was observed to keep down prices and provide stimulus to enterprise, and so to further abundant production. But the time came when the machinery for producing goods was in excess, not merely of the needs of the country, but of the available foreign markets, and then suddenly the large-scale manufacturers made the discovery that compet.i.tion was the death of trade to them. They proceeded, as a matter of practical common sense, and without consulting their college professors, to abolish compet.i.tion by forming trusts. We pa.s.sed laws forbidding them to do this, but they simply refused to obey the laws. In the United States they have made good their refusal for thirty-five years, and in the end have secured the blessing of the Supreme Court upon their course.

So now we have co-operation in large-scale production and marketing. It is known by various names, "pools," "syndicates," "price-fixing,"

"gentlemen's agreements." It is a blessing for those who co-operate, but it proves to be the death of those who labor, and also of those who consume, and we see these also compelled to combine, forming labor unions and consumers' societies. Each side to the quarrel insists that the other side is committing a crime in refusing to compete, and our whole social life is rent with dissensions over this issue. Manifestly, we need to clear our minds of dead doctrines; to think out clearly just what we mean by compet.i.tion, and what by co-operation, and what is the proper balance between the two.

I have been at pains in this book to provide a basis for the deciding of such questions. It is a practical problem, the fostering of human life and the furthering of its development. We cannot lay down any fixed rule; we have to study the facts of each case separately. We shall say, this kind of compet.i.tion is right, because it helps to protect human life and to develop its powers. We shall say, this other kind of compet.i.tion is wrong because it has the opposite effect. We shall say, perhaps, that some kind was right fifty years ago, or even ten years ago, because it then had certain effects; but meantime some factor has changed, and it is now having a different effect, and therefore ought to be abolished.

There has never been any kind of human compet.i.tion which men did not judge and modify in that way; there is no field of human activity in which ethical codes do not condemn certain practices as unfair. The average Englishman considers it proper that two men who get into a dispute shall pull off their coats, and settle the question at issue by pummeling each other's noses. But let one of these men strike his opponent in the groin, or let him kick his shins, and instantly there will be a howl of execration. Likewise, an Anglo-Saxon man who fights with the fists has a loathing for a Sicilian or Greek or other Mediterranean man who will pull a knife. That kind of compet.i.tion is barred among our breeds; and also the kind which consists of using poisons, or of starting slanders against your opponent.

If you look back through history, you find many forms of compet.i.tion which were once eminently respectable, but now have been outlawed. There was a time, for example, when the distinction we draw between piracy and sea-war was wholly unknown. The ships of the Vikings would go out and raid the ships and seaports of other peoples, and carry off booty and captives, and the men who did that were sung as heroes of the nation.

The British sea-captains of the time of Queen Elizabeth--Drake, Frobisher, and the rest of them--are portrayed in our school books as valiant and hardy men, and the British colonies were built on the basis of their activities; yet, according to the sea laws in force today, they were pirates. We regard a cannibal race with abhorrence; yet there was a time when all the vigorous races of men were cannibals, and the habit of eating your enemies in battle may well have given an advantage to the races which practiced it.

On the other hand, you find sentimental people who reject all compet.i.tion on principle, and would like to abolish every trace of it from society, and especially from education. But stop and consider for a moment what that would mean. Would you abolish, for example, the compet.i.tion of love, the right of a man to win the girl he wants? You could not do it, of course; but if you could, you would abolish one of the princ.i.p.al methods by which our race has been improved. Of course, what you really want is, not to abolish compet.i.tion in love, but to raise it to a higher form. There is an old saying, "All's fair in love and war," but no one ever meant that. You would not admit that a man might compete in love by threatening to kill the girl if she preferred a rival. You would not admit that he might compete by poisoning the other man. You would not admit that he might compete by telling falsehoods about the other man. On the other hand, if you are sensible, you admit that he has a right to compete by making his character known to the girl, and if the other man is a rascal, by telling the girl that.