MAN THE REBEL
(Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which
man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)
In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious
existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only
so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the
maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the
competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when
sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly
provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in
harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it
has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection.
But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the
competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his
environment and his reaction thereto.
Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for
his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature
and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there
are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat
animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no
animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But
man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and
also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not
merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a
whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about
this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts,
expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of
his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his
imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained
over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand
monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of
these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops
a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means
of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands,
perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the
colossal structure which we call civilization--in part still healthy and
progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.
What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be
diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it
determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost
and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided
him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the
individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of
it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures
and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing
establishments."
Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall
no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective,
eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There
are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and
pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from
England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned
and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of
learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of
civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide.
Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and
if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established
that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby
shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that
this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the
children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining
this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is
the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.
If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we
have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot
appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her
sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and
fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable
good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and
altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say
that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie
among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of
is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war
cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the
trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud
and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but
we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician,
moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for
our ills that was really "according to nature."
Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature
except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to
live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his
powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot
give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper
tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his
social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth.
To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason
what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to
which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own
will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new
laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to
bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify
himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the
penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.
And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to
nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind
as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she
protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has
invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism."
He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to
break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now
what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from
degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old
mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act
of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I
will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it
damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of
sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the
chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the
best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is
based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my
fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without
sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy
while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my
energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms
of exploitation of man by his fellows.
Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A
Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved
war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts,
has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks,
May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his
love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to
invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction
of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in
the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men,
I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been
made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all
thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such
that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage
than it is able to endure.