THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
(Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show
how the latter came to be.)
Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of
Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the
shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the
diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden
of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and
in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where
the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other
day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman
that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got
mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the
method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do
species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they
change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired
powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its
environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the
fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to
the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy
the history of this long process--these facts are now the basis of all
modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.
You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the
multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to
another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the
emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the
_elan vital_, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The
Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called
it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite
of love.
You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled
"Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality
of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows
as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be
reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading
agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the
essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw
a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference
between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the
difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The
animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it
knows--that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf
knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state
develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like
himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos
which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the
present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy
to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to
those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.
How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the
question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the
factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological
matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the
formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for
the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the
nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth
century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in
tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester
manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a
day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal
mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy
men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it
was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.
But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our
men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her
ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in
Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois
biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human
morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is
the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most
successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or
eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer
for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social
creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the
imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of
mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not
prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast
that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.
By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid
and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of
being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the
herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one
another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops
drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so
many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor
which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys
developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club,
and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon
the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they
had learned solidarity--even as the workers of the world are today
learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.
Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is
true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the
knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of
creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing
moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that
lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he
takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain,
and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is
painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the
tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is
engaged in contriving. In other words, man has come to a time when his
mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed
more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His
ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire
to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane
creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up,
but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is
striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and
to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out
from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he
has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real
happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the
method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.