It has scarcely been possible in recent years to open a newspaper
without our eye being arrested by head-lines telling us of racial
strifes or international contentions. One day we read of race riots; on
the next we learn that the inhabitants of a certain area of land demand
separation from all surrounding peoples. By a process of
'self-determination' they demand to be recognized as a separate people
or nation. These racial and national contentions are not restricted to
any particular people or land; we find them in every country. The
politician is too near to these racial and national manifestations of
the modern world to see them in their proper light; even the historian
is not far enough away from them to see them in their right perspective.
You cannot explore the secret sources from which they spring unless you
have grasped the immensity of man's unwritten history. Let me make my
meaning quite clear by an historical example chosen from man's body.
Among our modern populations there are no ailments more prevalent than
those which arise from a disordered working of the great bowel. Why this
part of our bodily machinery should fail us under modern conditions of
diet becomes quite apparent when we survey the history of man's distant
past. For the anthropologist there are only two well-marked phases in
human history. The first phase is that of Natural subsistence--an
infinitely long and monotonous chapter, stretching over a million of
years or more. The second is the phase of Artificial subsistence--a
short chapter covering a period of 10,000 or 12,000 years at the utmost,
but a period crowded with events which have a critical bearing on our
present and future welfare. In the first or long phase mankind was
broken into small and scattered groups which gained as best they could a
sparse, uncertain, and coarse sustenance from the natural produce of
shore and stream, moorland and woodland. In the second or short phase
man conquered nature; by means of cultivation and domestication he
forced from the soil a sure and abundant supply of food, thus rendering
possible the existence of our modern massed populations. Now the
machinery of man's body and the instinctive outfit of his brain, which
had been evolved to answer to the conditions of life presented by the
first long phase of his history, were also those which had to serve him
when he entered the new conditions of the short or modern phase. We need
not be surprised to find, then, that part of his ancient outfit is ill
adapted to modern conditions of life. Man's great bowel, including the
caecum, appendix, and colon, which answered his needs well when his
dietary was coarse and uncooked, is ill contrived to deal with foods
which are artificially prepared and highly concentrated. A school, which
was headed by the late Professor Metchnikoff, even goes so far as to
maintain that man would be improved by the complete removal of his great
bowel--a doctrine with which I totally disagree. We are all alive to the
fact that there is a lack of harmony between the ancient machinery of
our bodies and the modern conditions under which we live, but we are
only now awakening to the fact that what is true of our bodies is also
true of our minds. In that immense first phase of our history an
elaborate mental machinery had been evolved for binding small groups of
mankind into social units. This subconscious or instinctive mental
outfit, we shall see, is part of the machinery which Nature has employed
in the evolution of races of mankind. The mental adaptations which
modern man has inherited from the immensity of his past we may briefly
describe as part of Nature's tribal machinery. The thesis, then, which I
propose to expound to you is that in our modern racial strifes and
national agitations we see man's inherited tribal instincts at war with
his present-day conditions of life. We have broken up, or are attempting
to break up, Nature's ancient tribal machinery and at the present time
are striving to replace her designs by others evolved in the minds of
modern statesmen and politicians. We moderns are like hill sheep turned
into fenced fields with all our wandering instincts still grafted on our
original nature. As in them, our instincts are at war with our
surroundings. It is the most natural thing in the world that we should
blame the barriers which have been set round us because we are scarcely
conscious of the inherited predispositions with which Nature encompasses
her tribal fields. We cannot understand the nature of our modern racial
and national problems until we perceive that in these days we are
endeavouring to build a new world out of the wreckage of an old.