The Book of Life Part 30

Would you abolish the compet.i.tion of art, the effort of men to produce work more beautiful and inspiring than has ever been known before? Would you abolish the effort of scientists to overthrow theories which have hitherto been accepted? Obviously not. You make these forms of compet.i.tion seem better by calling them "emulation," but you do not in the least modify the fact that they involve the right of one person to outdo other persons, to supplant them and take away something from them, whether it be property or position or love or fame or power. In that sense, compet.i.tion is indeed the law of life, and you might as well reconcile yourself to it, and learn to play your part with spirit and good humor.

Also, you might as well train your children to it. You will find you cannot develop their powers to the fullest without compet.i.tion; in fact, you will be forced to go back and utilize forms of compet.i.tion which are now out of date among adults. I have told in the Book of the Body how I myself tried for ten years or more to live without physical compet.i.tion, and discovered that I could not; I have had to take up some form of sport, and hundreds of thousands of other men have had the same experience. What is sport? It is a deliberate going back, under carefully devised rules, to the savage struggles of our ancestors. The very essence of real sport is that the contestants shall, within the rules laid down, compete with each other to the limit of their powers.

With what contempt would a player of tennis or baseball or whist regard the proposition that his opponent should be merciful to him, and let him win now and then! Obviously, these things have no place in the game, and to be a "good sport" is to conform to the rules, and take with enjoyment whatever issue of the struggle may come.

But then again, suppose you are competing with a child; obviously, the conditions are different. You no longer play the best you can, you let the child win a part of the time; but you do not let the child know this, or it would spoil the fun for the child. You pretend to try as hard as you know how, and you cry out in grief when you are beaten, and the child crows with delight. And yet, that does not keep you from loving the child, or the child from loving you.

The purpose of this elaborate exposition is to make clear the very vital point that a certain set of social acts may be right under some conditions, and desperately wrong under other conditions. They may be right in play, and not in serious things; they may be right in youth, and not in maturity; they may be right at one period of the world's development, while at another period they are destructive of social existence. If, therefore, we wish to know what are right and wrong actions in the affairs of men, if we wish to judge any particular law or political platform or program of business readjustment, the first thing we have to do is to acquire a ma.s.s of facts concerning the society to which the law or platform or program, is to be applied. We need to ask ourselves, exactly what will be the effect of that change, applied in that particular way at that particular time. In order to decide accurately, we need to know the previous stages through which that society has pa.s.sed, the forces which have been operating in it, and the ways in which they have worked.

But also we must realize that the lessons of history cannot ever be accepted blindly. The "principles of the founders" apply to us only in modified form; for the world in which we live today is different from any world which has ever been before, and the world tomorrow will be different yet. We are the makers of it, and the masters of it, and what it will be depends to some extent upon our choice. In fact, that is the most important lesson of all for us to learn; the final purpose of all our thought about the world is to enable us to make it a happier and a better world for ourselves and our posterity to live in.

CHAPTER L

ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY

(Discusses the idea of superior cla.s.ses and races, and whether there is a natural basis for such a doctrine.)

In the letters of Thomas Jefferson is found the following pa.s.sage:

"All eyes are open or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the ma.s.s of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of G.o.d."

This, which Jefferson, over a hundred years ago, described as a "palpable truth," is still a long way from prevailing in the world. We are trying in this book not to take anything for granted, so we do not a.s.sume this truth, but investigate it; and we begin by admitting that there are many facts which seem to contradict it, and which make it more difficult of proof than Jefferson realized. It is not enough to point out the lack of saddles on the backs, and of boots and spurs on the feet of newly born infants; for the fact is that men are not exploited because of saddles, nor is the exploiting accomplished by means of boots and spurs. It is done by means of gold and steel, banks and credit systems, railroads, machine-guns and battleships. And while it is not true that certain races and cla.s.ses are born with these things on them, they are born to the possession of them, and the vast majority of mankind are without them all their lives, and without the ability to use them even if they had them.

The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of G.o.d. But even as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to decide that women were human beings, and had souls; and today many devout Christians are still uncertain whether j.a.panese and Chinese and Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself, and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock.

For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural and irremovable inferiority of certain races or cla.s.ses, as the aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a blunder. If there are certain cla.s.ses or races which cannot think, or cannot learn to think as well as other cla.s.ses and races, those mentally inferior cla.s.ses and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world, will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the race and aborting its best development.

Is there any such natural and irremovable inferiority in human beings?

When we come to study the question we find it complicated by a different phenomenon, that of racial immaturity, which we have to face frankly and get clear in our minds. One of the most obvious facts of nature is that of infancy and childhood. We have just pointed out that if you are competing with a child, you do it in an entirely different way and under an entirely different set of rules, and if you fail to do this, you are unfair and even cruel to the child. And it is a fact of our world that there are some races more backward in the scale of development than other races. You may not like this fact, but it is silly to try to evade it. People who live in savage huts and beat on tom-toms and fight with bows and arrows and cannot count beyond a dozen--such people are not the mental or moral equals of our highly civilized races, and to treat them as equals, and compete with them on that basis, means simply to exterminate them. And we should either exterminate them at once and be done with it, or else make up our minds that they are in a childhood stage of our race, and that we have to guide them and teach them as we do our children.

There is no more useful person than the wise and kind teacher. But suppose we saw some one pretending to be a teacher to our children, while in reality enslaving and exploiting them, or secretly robbing and corrupting them--what would we say about that kind of teacher? The name of that teacher is capitalist commercialism, and his profession is known as "the white man's burden"; his abuse of power is the cause of our present racial wars and revolts of subject peoples. A fair-minded man, desirous of facing all the facts of life, hardly knows what stand to take in such a controversy; that is, hardly knows from which cause the colored races suffer more--the white man's exploitation, or their own native immaturity.

To say that certain races are in a childhood stage, and need instruction and discipline, is an entirely different thing from saying they are permanently inferior and incapable of self-government. Whether they are permanently inferior is a problem for the man of science, to be determined by psychological tests, continued possibly over more than one generation. We have not as yet made a beginning; in fact, we have not even acquired the scientific impartiality necessary to such an inquiry.

In the meantime, all that we can do is to look about us and pick up hints where we can. In places like Ma.s.sachusetts, where Negroes are allowed to go to college and are given a chance to show what they can do, they have not ousted the white man, but many of them have certainly won his respect, and one finds charming and cultured men among them, who show no signs of prematurely closed up skulls. And one after another we see the races which have been held down as being inferior, developing leadership and organization and power of moral resistance. The Irish are showing themselves today one of the most vigorous and high-spirited of all races. The Hindus are developing a movement which in the long run may prove more powerful than the white man's gold and steel. The Egyptians, the Persians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, are all devising ways to break the power of capitalist newspaper censorship. How sad that the subject races of the world have to get their education through hatred of their teachers, instead of through love!

Of course, these rebel leaders are men who have absorbed the white man's culture, at least in part; practically always they are of the younger generation, which has been to the white man's schools. But this is the very answer we have been seeking--as to whether the race is permanently inferior, or merely immature and in need of training. It is not only among the brown and black and yellow races that progress depends upon the young generations; that is a universal fact of life.

In the course of this argument we shall a.s.sume that the Christian or democratic theory has the weight of probability on its side, and that nature has not created any permanently and necessarily inferior race or cla.s.s. We shall a.s.sume that the heritage of culture is a common heritage, open to all our species. We shall not go so far as the statement which Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created free and equal"; but we shall a.s.sert that they are created "with certain inalienable rights," and that among these is the right to maintain their lives and to strive for liberty and happiness. Also, we shall say that there will never be peace or order in the world until they have found liberty, and recognition of their right to happiness.

CHAPTER LI

RULING CLa.s.sES

(Deals with authority in human society, how it is obtained, and what sanction it can claim.)

It is possible to conceive an order of nature in which all individuals were born and developed exactly alike and with exactly equal powers.

Such is apparently the case with lower animals, for example the ants and the bees. But among human beings there are great differences; some are born idiots and some are born geniuses. Even supposing that we are able to do away with blindness and idiocy, it is not likely that we can ever make a race of uniform genius. There will always be some more capable minds, who will discover new powers of life, and will compel the others to learn from them. It is to the interest of the race that this learning should be done as quickly as possible. In other words, the great problem of society is how to recognize superior minds and put them in authority.

We look back over history, and discover a few wise men, and many rulers; but very, very rarely does it happen that the ruler is a wise man, or a friend of wise men. Far more often we find the ruler occupied in suppressing the wise man and his wisdom. There was a ruler who allowed the mob to crucify Jesus, and another who ordered Socrates to drink the hemlock, and another who tortured Galileo, and another who chopped off the head of Sir Walter Raleigh--and so on through a long and tragic chronicle. And even when the accident of a wise ruler occurs he is apt to be surrounded by a cla.s.s of parasites and corrupt officials who are busy to thwart his will.

The general run of history is this: some group seizes power by force, and holds it by the same means, and seeks to augment and perpetuate it.

Those who win the power are frequently men of energy and practical sense, and do fairly well as governors; but they are never able to hand on their virtues, and their line becomes corrupted by sensuality and self-indulgence, and the subject cla.s.ses are plundered and driven to revolt. Often the revolt fails, but in the course of time it succeeds, and there is a new dynasty, or a new ruling cla.s.s, sometimes a little better than the old, sometimes worse.

How shall one judge whether the new regime is better or worse?

Obviously, this is a most important question; it has to do, not merely with history, but with our daily affairs, our voting. As one who has read some tens of thousands of pages of history, and has pondered its lessons with heart-sickness and despair, I lay down this general law by which revolts and changes of power may be judged: If the change results in the holding of power by a smaller number of people, it is a reaction; but if the change results in distributing the power among a larger group of the community, then that community has made a step in advance.

I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American country--Guatemala, I think--which showed 130 revolutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much, some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang.

Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace"

revolutions.

But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling cla.s.s to give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then move backward nearly as far.

We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge, and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the population than before the change took place?

You will note the words "actual, effective power." Nothing is more familiar in human life than for forms to survive after the spirit which created them is dead; and nothing is more familiar than the use of these forms as masks to deceive the populace. There have been many times in history when people have gone on voting, long after their votes ceased to count for anything; there have been many times when people have gone through the motions of freedom long after they have been slaves. Mexico under Diaz had one of the most perfect of const.i.tutions, and was in reality one of the most perfect of despotisms; and we Americans are sadly familiar with political democracies which do not work.

Shall we, therefore, join the pessimists and say that history is a blind struggle for useless power, and that the notion of progress is a delusion? I do not think so; on the contrary, I think it is easily to be demonstrated that there has been a steady increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by the race, and in the spread of this knowledge among the whole population. I think that through most of the period of written history we can trace a real development in human society. I think we can a.n.a.lyze the laws of this development, and explain its methods; and I think this knowledge is precious to us, because it enables us to accelerate the process and to make the end more certain.

This task, the a.n.a.lysis of social evolution, is the task we have next to undertake.

CHAPTER LII

THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

(Discusses the series of changes through which human society has pa.s.sed.)

We have now to consider, briefly, the history of man as a social being, the groups he has formed, and the changes in his group systems.

Everything in life grows, and human societies are no exception to the rule. They have undergone a long process of evolution, which we can trace in detail, and which we find conforms exactly to the law laid down by Herbert Spencer; a process whereby a number of single and similar things become different parts of one complex thing. In the case of human societies the units are men and women, and social evolution is a process whereby a small and simple group, in which the individuals are practically alike, grows into a large and complex group, in which the individuals are widely different, and their relations one to another are complicated and subtle.

There are two powerful forces pressing upon human beings, and compelling them to struggle and grow. The first of these forces is fear, the need of protection against enemies; the second is hunger, the need of food and the means of producing and storing food. The first causes the individual to combine with his fellows and establish some form of government, and this is the origin of political evolution. The second causes him to acc.u.mulate wealth, and to combine industrially, and this is the origin of economic evolution. Because the first force is a little more urgent, we observe in the history of human society that evolution in government precedes evolution in industry.

I made this statement some twenty years ago, in an article in "Collier's Weekly." I wrote to the effect that man's first care was to secure himself against his enemies, and that when he had done this he set out to secure his food supply. "Collier's" called upon the late Professor Sumner of Yale University, a prize reactionary and Tory of the old school, to answer me; and Professor Sumner made merry over my statement, declaring that man sought for food long before he was safe from his enemies. Some years later, when Sumner died, one of his admirers wrote in the New York "Evening Post" that he had completely overwhelmed me, and I had acknowledged my defeat by failing to reply--something which struck me as very funny. It was, of course, possible that Sumner had overwhelmed me, but to say that I had considered myself overwhelmed was to attribute to me a degree of modesty of which I was wholly incapable.

As a matter of fact, I had had my usual experience with capitalist magazines; "Collier's Weekly" had promised to publish my rejoinder to Sumner, but failed to keep the promise, and finally, when I worried them, they tucked the answer away in the back part of the paper, among the advertis.e.m.e.nts of cigars and toilet soaps.

Professor Sumner is gone, but he has left behind him an army of pupils, and I will protect myself against them by phrasing my statement with extreme care. I do not mean to say that man first secures himself completely against his enemies, and then goes out to hunt for a meal. Of course he has to eat while he is countering the moves of his enemies; he has to eat while he is on the march to battle, or in flight from it. But ask yourself this question: which would you choose, if you had to choose--to go a couple of days with nothing to eat, or to have your throat cut by bandits and your wife and children carried away into slavery? Certainly you would do your fighting first, and meantime you would scratch together any food you could. While you were devoting your energies to putting down civil war, or to making a treaty with other tribes, or to preparing for a military campaign, you would continue to get food in the way your ancestors had got it; in other words, your economic evolution would wait, while your political evolution proceeded.

But when you had succeeded in putting down your enemies, and had a long period of peace before you, then you would plant some fields, and domesticate some animals, or perhaps discover some new way of weaving cloth--and so your industrial life would make progress.

It is easy to see why Professor Sumner wished to confuse this issue. He could not deny political evolution, because it had happened. He despised and feared political democracy, but it was here, and he had to speak politely to it, as to a tiger that had got into his house. But industrial democracy was a thing that had not yet happened in the world; it was only a hope and a prophecy, and therefore a prize old Tory was free to ridicule it. I remember reading somewhere his statement--the notion that democracy had anything to do with industry, or could in any way be applied to industry, was a piece of silliness. So, of course, he sought to demolish my idea that there was a process of evolution in economic affairs, paralleling the process of political evolution which had already culminated in democracy.