Twentieth Century Socialism Part 30

The two virtues peculiarly stimulated by Greek religion were courage in man and chast.i.ty in woman; these singularly correspond to the qualities that characterize solitary carnivora--ferocity in the male and compulsory fidelity in the female. They are the virtues that attend individualism, and individualism so impregnated Greek civilization that it prevented the Greek cities from ever combining into a Greek nation, and ultimately left them a prey to the invader.

And those two individualistic virtues--courage and chast.i.ty--became still more emphasized under the Roman rule in the soldier and the vestal.

Christianity introduced a new element into civilized life; Christ deprecated exhibitions of courage by inculcating humility; He tempered the fierce demand for fidelity by bidding "him who was without sin cast the first stone at her." The virtue He taught above all was the virtue of Love; not love in the sense of natural affection, but love in the sense of sacrifice; not love confined to the family, but love extended from the family to the neighbor: "Love your neighbor as yourself." And so under the dispensation of Christ all men, being the children of a common Father, became as brothers one to another; the early Christians carrying out this theory into practical life, abandoned the acquisition of private wealth and brought all their earnings into a common stock, giving to everyone according to his need.

Unfortunately, the prosperity of the Church under Constantine converted it into a political machine as unconscionable in its methods, and as effectual in results, as the so-called rings which govern many cities to-day. The Church forgot the virtues which it was inst.i.tuted to teach; and our Western civilization has ever since been distracting us by encouraging the fighting virtues of the Roman soldier on the one hand, and the altogether inconsistent humility of the Christian saint on the other.

But men and women cannot live close to one another for centuries, without having social virtues forced upon them; and while the compet.i.tive system which prevails in our industrial and international relations has stimulated the fighting qualities in us, the teaching of Christ has preserved in our hearts ideas of happiness which have more or less unconsciously created a tendency to replace compet.i.tion by cooperation wherever possible.

The joint effect of Roman and Christian rules of conduct has been to subst.i.tute for the qualities that we observe in Nature--the l.u.s.t and ferocity of the carnivore and the servility of the ant--new qualities altogether different, and in some respects almost opposite. For l.u.s.t has been replaced by a conception of the conjugal relation which converts marriage into a sacrament; ferocity has yielded to the courage of the medieval knight and the modern gentleman; servility tends to disappear and be replaced by respect for laws; and fear has been lifted by religion into reverence--"The fear of G.o.d is the beginning of wisdom."

The fact that these virtues are held up to us as desirable and that we are trained to conform thereto, is of dominating importance in considering the character of human environment; and were there nothing in human inst.i.tutions to render the universal practice of these virtues impossible, we should a.s.suredly enjoy the happiness that must result therefrom.

Unfortunately there are two reasons why we cannot practice these virtues though we would:

We are divided into nations, each striving against all the rest to secure for its citizens the largest possible share of the good things of this world. Every nation is composed of individuals or families, each engaged in a similar strife.

The first, the international conflict, gives rise to a peculiar virtue called patriotism, which, in so far as it teaches a man to love the country to which he belongs, and the people amongst whom he lives, is altogether good, but in so far as it teaches him to hate and occasionally slay those of other nations is altogether bad.

The second, the intranational conflict, gives rise to a quality which, though not recognized as a virtue, should, if measured by the rewards it receives, be a.s.suredly regarded as the greatest of all--acquisitiveness; for the fortunate few who possess this quality gather unto themselves all the good things in the world at the expense of all the rest.

Let us briefly study each of these formidable obstacles to virtue and happiness:

As regards the international conflict, the world is so large, and is peopled by races of men so different, that it would be quite impossible to include them all under the same government. The Red Indian is incapable of adopting our civilization; he would rather die.

The Chinese has a conception of government so different from ours that he has no word in his language for patriotism. The Oriental, who has occupied the Danubian provinces for five centuries, is still so foreign to us that he cannot live amongst Christians except either as a conqueror in Turkey or a subject in Hindoostan.

So long as these differences exist, there must be separate nations; and the smoke of international conflict must occasionally burst into a flame.

Nevertheless, even to-day human effort can do much to diminish occasions for war; witness the Tribunal of The Hague and the daily multiplying treaties of arbitration; witness, too, the gradual extension of solidarity between workingmen beyond national frontiers and the growing disposition to organize regardless of them.

As regards the intranational conflict--between individuals belonging to the same country--there is much more to be said, for although the total elimination of occasions of conflict between citizens of the same nation may still be far off, there is serious reason to believe that a partial elimination of them is immediately possible, and may const.i.tute the most practical of all political programs, and the most vital of all religious faiths. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the problem presented by this intranational conflict is so indispensable to its prosperous solution, that upon this understanding may be said to depend the question whether our civilization is to degenerate.

The intranational conflict is mainly concerned with the acquisition of wealth; and because this conflict has so far inordinately enriched a few and impoverished the ma.s.s, it is the fashion for us to rail against wealth.

But wealth is the necessary product of civilization, and like manure, it is a benefaction when lightly distributed over the right place, though a pest when heavily concentrated in the wrong. The wealthier a community is the happier it ought to be. It is not wealth itself which const.i.tutes our grievance, but the method of its distribution.

Now the unequal distribution of wealth is mainly due to the system of private property under which the few who have the gift of money-making acquire large fortunes, while the many are left in comparative poverty and even want.

Under this system, every man, instead of working for all, is working only for himself, and he who has most acquisitiveness becomes master of those who have less, society being by this single quality divided into a series of cla.s.ses or castes, at the top of which are a few millionaires, and at the bottom the large contingent that after a life of misery end their lives in the almshouse, the prison, or the lunatic asylum--a contingent that has been determined by carefully prepared statistics to const.i.tute one-fifth of the entire population in the richest country in the world.[204]

Private property has played an essential role in the slow enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the people. But just as the coc.o.o.n serves an essential purpose in protecting the worm during its slow development, but becomes a prison which the b.u.t.terfly discards when it attains its final freedom, so private property may turn out to have already served its purpose if we can demonstrate ourselves so far developed as to be fit to cast it aside.

Let us recall what role private property plays in our human environment to-day:

It is the great stimulus which sets each one of us to work for himself, and by working for himself to acc.u.mulate wealth that contributes to the maintenance of all the rest. It furnishes (in theory) a method under which the man who works most effectually gets the highest reward.

Now, as it is essential in every community that every man should contribute to the maintenance of all, and as justice seems to demand that the workers should be rewarded according to results, it is claimed that private property solves the problem of production in a manner both effectual and just.

The compet.i.tive system, however, and the false notion of property to which the compet.i.tive system gives rise by setting every man to work for himself regardless of all the rest, prevents men from proceeding upon the far more economical plan of cooperation.

-- 3. THE EFFECT OF THE COMPEt.i.tIVE SYSTEM ON TYPE

We have seen that under the law of evolution type tends to adapt itself to environment. It must so adapt itself or perish. There is no escape from this iron law. If the climate change from warm to cold, animals must put on blubber or fur; if the climate change from cold to hot, they must throw off blubber or fur. Those who adapt themselves to the change survive; those who do not adapt themselves die.

So also, if in a given community the individual can secure the necessaries of life only on the condition of outdoing his neighbor, it is those who most successfully outdo their neighbors who prevail; those who are outdone sink deeper and deeper into poverty and ultimately join the irreclaimable fifth.

The effect, then, of the compet.i.tive system on type is to stimulate the qualities that go to make up acquisitiveness; selfishness and all the necessary results of selfishness--avarice, greed, envy, injustice, hardness of heart.

It would be by no means fair to maintain that no man can be successful in business who is not cursed with all these vices. On the contrary, some of our greatest philanthropists have been successful business men. But philanthropy sometimes results from the blessed principle of reaction, under which vice, when it gets bad enough, creates a revulsion against evil. Reaction, however, is the eddy in the stream; and it is the stream and not the eddy that in the end counts.

The main, the essential, the inevitable result of private property is to promote selfishness, for the compet.i.tive system creates an artificial environment to which the human type must tend to conform.

This artificial environment not only promotes selfishness at large, but tends to degrade every inst.i.tution which man has invented in his effort to advance. Among these inst.i.tutions, the two which have sprung from the n.o.blest instincts in man, and ought most to tend to his improvement, are Marriage and the Church. Yet both are demoralized by the compet.i.tive system.

In the state of nature, animals tend to improve through s.e.xual selection. By s.e.xual selection is meant the fight between males for the female, the result of which is that the strongest males are the ones that perpetuate the type.

In the artificial environment produced by private property, a very different process is at work. Marriage tends to be determined by wealth rather than fitness; and the wealthy tend to have few children or none; whereas it is found that in the unwealthy cla.s.ses, the poorest have the most children. Well-to-do people protect themselves and their families from poverty by prudence, whereas, those who despair of escaping from poverty have no reason for refusing themselves what is often almost their only satisfaction; and the result is that while the houses of the rich tend to be desolate through childlessness, those of the poor are crowded with the offspring of despair.

The religious conception of Marriage that it is a sacrament has become practically obsolete; particularly in this so among the rich, whose daughters are annually offered for sale in the market of Mayfair as shamelessly as not long ago were Circa.s.sian girls in that of Istamboul.

The effect of private property on the Church is no less deplorable. It costs money to maintain a church; and the more splendidly a church is maintained the more money it costs. The priest has to live; bishops indeed have to live in a certain state. The Church, then, must have money. In some countries the Church secures money from the government, and is driven thereby into the questionable field of politics; in others, every individual church is thrown upon its own resources, and has either to make its services attractive by ritual, or to depend for its supplies upon one or two of the wealthy members of its congregation. It is not surprising, then, that under this subjection to wealth, Christians have abandoned the teaching of Christ, and forgotten that in early days they sold all and gave to the poor, contributed their earnings to a common stock, and resisted not evil but overcame evil with good.

Yet the Church has rendered, and is still rendering, a priceless service to man. Falter though she may, she has preserved for us the Gospel of Christ.

The blame rests not with the Church, but with the artificial environment which man has himself created, and to which he alone can put an end--the environment that appeals to the selfishness of man, and having made man selfish, insolently a.s.serts that in no other environment can he be otherwise.

Man will be what his environment makes him.

If the environment stimulates selfishness, man will be selfish. If it stimulates unselfishness, he will be unselfish.

But man can by art so alter his environment that it will elicit the n.o.ble in man, instead of the base.

Let us now sum up the difference between human and natural evolution, and arrive at some conclusion regarding the part man has played, and may still play, in his own advancement.

-- 4. BRIEF RESTATEMENT

Before the advent of man animal life prospered or degenerated according as the natural environment was favorable to progress or degeneration. The process of evolution was necessarily unconscious and undeliberate.

With the advent of man a new force appeared upon the face of the world, the power to modify the environment so as to make it serve human needs, and accord with human intention.

Before the advent of man, selection was exercised by Nature or the natural environment; since the advent of man it is man who has selected and not Nature; animals dangerous and useless to man have almost disappeared except in museums; and only those that are useful to him are allowed to survive.

Climate is no longer paramount; man by the use of tools, clothing, architecture, and other arts, contrives to-day to live in climates which were once fatal to him.

By increase of knowledge man has acquired a control of the forces of Nature, which makes him now a master where he was once a slave.

By increase of self-restraint--and self-restraint involves the subjection of natural instincts--man has developed qualities which permit of social existence unknown in any other race.

Without having lost the self-reliance that characterizes the solitary carnivora, he has, by resisting Nature--by such artificial inst.i.tutions as that of marriage, and the education which results from family relations--developed all the social virtues. Ferocity has been tempered; l.u.s.t has been reduced to subjection; in the place of the one we now see courage; in the place of the other chast.i.ty; craft is growing into wisdom; fear into reverence. He has subst.i.tuted for the standard of Nature the standard of Morality, and the subst.i.tution of the standard of Morality for the standard of Nature has permitted men and women to live in the same community safe from the ferocity that drives the larger carnivora to solitude, and from the ma.s.sacre and mutilation which characterize such natural communities as those of bees.