We are stock-blind to our own barbarities; we do not realize the
enormities of our life and consider our age and country as civilized and
enlightened. We censure the faults of other societies, but do not notice
our own. Thus Lecky, in describing Roman society, says: “The
gladiatorial games form indeed the one feature which to a modern mind is
almost inconceivable in its atrocity. That not only men, but women, in
an advanced period of civilization,—men and women who not only
professed, but very frequently acted upon a high code of morals—should
have made the carnage of men their habitual amusement, that all this
should have continued for centuries with scarcely a protest, is one of
the most startling facts in moral history. It is, however, perfectly
normal, while it opens out fields of ethical inquiry of a very deep,
though painful, character.”
As in modern times, our college authorities justify the brutalities of
football and prize-fights, so in ancient times the great moralists of
those ages justified their gladiatorial games. Thus the great orator,
the moralizing philosopher, Cicero, in speaking of the gladiatorial
games, tells us: “When guilty men are compelled to fight, no better
discipline against suffering and death can be presented to the eye.” And
it is certainly instructive for us to learn that “the very men who
looked down with delight, when the sand of the arena reddened with human
blood, made the theater ring with applause when Terence in his famous
line proclaimed the brotherhood of men.”
One feeble protest is on record, a protest coming from the mother of
civilization, from ancient Athens. “When an attempt was made to
introduce the games into Athens, the philosopher Demonax appealed
successfully to the better feelings of the people by exclaiming: “You
must first overthrow the altar of pity!”
The philosopher Demonax had not the compromising spirit of the modern
professor. Although the brutal games of our youth and populace need a
Demonax, we certainly should not look for one in our colleges and
universities. Our college authorities assure us that athletic prestige
is indispensable to a good university. In fact, according to some
official statements, football teams are supposed to express the superior
intellectual activities of our foremost colleges. Like Cicero of old, we
claim that “our games are good,—they train men, and no better
discipline can be presented to the eye.”
The fact is, man is bat-blind to the evils of the environment in which
he is bred. He takes those evils as a matter of course, and even finds
good reasons to justify them as edifying and elevating. In relation to
his own surroundings, man is in the primitive condition of the Biblical
Adam,—he is not conscious of his own moral nakedness. Six days in the
week we witness and uphold the wholesale carnage, national and
international, political, economical, in shops, factories, mines,
railroads and on the battlefields, while on the seventh we sing hymns to
the God of mercy, love and peace.
We pick up the first newspapers or popular magazines that come to our
hand, and we read of wars, slaughters, murders, lynchings, crimes and
outrages on life and liberty; we read of strikes, lockouts, of tales of
starvation and of frightful infant mortality; we read of diseases and
epidemics ravaging the homes of our working population; we read of
corporation iniquities, of frauds and corruption of our legislative
bodies, of the control of politics by the criminal classes of the great
metropolis of our land. We read of all that evil and corruption, but
forget them next moment.
Our social life is corrupt, our body politic is eaten through with
cankers and sores, “the whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint.
From the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in
it; but wounds, and bruises and putrefying sores,” and yet we think we
are a civilized people, superior to all countries and to all ages. “The
voice of our brother’s blood crieth unto us from the ground.” How can we
be so callous? How can we be so mole-blind and so stone-deaf?
The truth is, we have but a thin varnish of humaneness, glossing over a
rude barbarism. With our lips we praise the God of love, but in our
hearts we adore the God of force. How much physical force is worshipped
we can realize from the crowds that throng the games of baseball,
football, prize-fights and boxing exhibitions. They go into tens of
thousands. How many would be drawn by a St. Paul, an Epictetus, or a
Socrates?
The newspaper, the mirror of our social life, is filled with the names
and exploits of our magnates of high finance, our money-mongers and
usurers. Our journals teem with deeds and scandals of our refined “smart
set” set up as patterns, as ideals, after which our middle class so
longingly craves. Like the Israelites of old we worship golden calves
and sacred bulls. Our daughters yearn after the barbaric shimmer and
glitter of the bejewelled, bespangled, empty-minded, parasitic females
of “the smart set.” Our college boys admire the feats of the trained
athlete and scorn the work of the “grind.” Our very schoolboys crave for
the fame of a Jeffries and a Johnson. If in the depths of space there is
some solar system inhabited by really rational beings, and if one of
such beings should by some miracle happen to visit our planet, he would
no doubt turn away in horror.
V
We press our children into the triumphant march of our industrial
Juggernaut. Over 1,700,000 children under 15 years of age toil in
fields, factories, mines and workshops. The slums and the factory
cripple the energies of our young generation. The slaughter of the
innocents and the sacrifice of our children to the insatiable Moloch of
industry exclude us from the rank of civilized society and place us on
the level of barbaric nations.
Our educators are narrow-minded pedants. They are occupied with the dry
bones of text-books, the sawdust of pedagogics and the would-be
scientific experiments of educational psychology; they are ignorant of
the real vital problems of human interests, a knowledge of which goes to
make the truly educated man.
About the middle of the nineteenth century, Buckle made the prediction
that no war was any more to occur among civilized nations. Henceforth
peace was to reign supreme. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the
leopard shall lie down with the kid; their young ones shall lie down
together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.... Nations shall
beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war
any more.” This prophecy was rather hasty. We have had since the Civil
war, the Franco-Prussian war, the Spanish-American war, the Boer war,
the Russo-Japanese war, not counting the ceaseless wars of extermination
carried on by civilized nations among the various semi-civilized nations
and primitive tribes. Civilized nations do not as yet beat their swords
into ploughshares, but keep on increasing the strength of their “armed
peace,” and are ready to fight bloody battles in the quest of new lands
and the conquest of new markets.
In spite of The Hague conference of peace convoked by the peace-loving
Czar, no other age has had such large standing armies provided with such
costly and efficient weapons of execution ready for instant use. The red
spectre still stalks abroad claiming its victims. We still believe in
the baptism of fire and redemption by blood. The dogma of
blood-redemption is still at the basis of our faith and, consciously or
unconsciously, we brand that sacred creed on the minds of the young
generation.
We are not educated to see and understand the wretchedness, the misery
of our life,—the evil of the world falls on the blind spot of our eye.
In the name of evolution and the survival of the fittest, we justify the
grasping arm of the strong, and even glory in the extermination of the
weak. The weak, we say, must be weeded out by the processes of natural
selection. The strong are the best; it is right that they should survive
and flourish like a green bay tree. The fact is that we are still
dominated by the law of the jungle, the den and the cave. We are still
wild at heart. We still harken to the call of the wild; we are ruled by
the fist, the claw and the tooth.
Love, justice, gentleness, peace, reason, sympathy and pity, all humane
feelings and promptings are with us sentiments of “unnatural” or
supernatural religion which we profess in our churches, but in which we
really have no faith as good for actual life. We mistake brutishness for
courage, and by fight and by war we train the beast in man.
All humane feelings are regarded as so many hindrances to progress; they
favor, we claim, the survival of the weak. We are, of course,
evolutionists, and believe most firmly in progress. We believe that the
luxuries and vices of the strong are conducive to prosperity, and that
the evils of life by the automatic grinding of that grind-organ known as
the process of evolution _somehow_ lead to a higher civilization.
When in the beginning of the eighteenth century Bernard de Mandeville
proclaimed the apparently paradoxical principle that _Private Vices are
Public Benefits_, the academic moralists were shocked at such profane
brutality. Mandeville only proclaimed the leading, the guiding principle
of the coming age of industrial prosperity. We now know better. Are we
not evolutionists? Have we not learned that progress and evolution and
the improvement of the race are brought about by the fierce struggle for
existence, by the process of natural selection, by the merciless
elimination of the weak and by the triumph of the strong and the fit?
What is the use of being sentimental? Like Brennus, the Gaul, we throw
our sword on the scales of blinded justice and shout triumphantly _“Væ
victis!”_