of altruism, a point is reached when the individual becomes capable
of some kind of sympathy, however attenuated, with beings outside the
limits of the biological unit within which the primitive function of
altruism lies. This extension is perhaps possible only in man. In
a creature like the bee the rigidly limited mental capacity of the
individual and the closely organized society of the hive combine to
make the boundary of the hive correspond closely with the uttermost
limit of the field over which altruism is active. The bee, capable of
great sympathy and understanding in regard to her fellow-members of
the hive, is utterly callous and without understanding in regard to
any creature of external origin and existence. Man, however, with his
infinitely greater capacity for assimilating {125} experience, has not
been able to maintain the rigid limitation of sympathy to the unit, the
boundaries of which tend to acquire a certain indefiniteness not seen
in any of the lower gregarious types.
Hence tends to appear a sense of international justice, a vague feeling
of being responsibly concerned in all human affairs and by a natural
consequence the ideas and impulses denoted under the term “pacifism.”
One of the most natural and obvious consequences of war is a hardening
of the boundaries of the social unit and a retraction of the vague
feelings towards international sympathy which are a characteristic
product of peace and intercommunication. Thus it comes about that
pacifism and internationalism are in great disgrace at the present
time; they are regarded as the vapourings of cranky windbags who have
inevitably been punctured at the first touch of the sword; they are,
our political philosophers tell us, but products of the miasm of
sentimental fallacy which tends to be bred in the relaxing atmosphere
of peace. Perhaps no general expressions have been more common since
the beginning of the war, in the mouths of those who have undertaken
our instruction in the meaning of events, than the propositions
that pacifism is now finally exploded and shown always to have been
nonsense, that war is and always will be an inevitable necessity in
human affairs as man is what is called a fighting animal, and that not
only is the abolition of war an impossibility, but should the abolition
of it unhappily prove to be possible after all and be accomplished, the
result could only be degeneration and disaster.
Biological considerations would seem to suggest that these
generalizations contain a large element of inexactitude. The doctrine
of pacifism is {126} a perfectly natural development, and ultimately
inevitable in an animal having an unlimited appetite for experience
and an indestructible inheritance of social instinct. Like all moral
discoveries made in the haphazard, one-sided way which the lack of
co-ordination in human society forces upon its moral pioneers, it
has necessarily an appearance of crankiness, of sentimentality, of
an inaptitude for the grasp of reality. This is normal and does not
in the least affect the value of the truth it contains. Legal and
religious torture were doubtless first attacked by cranks; slavery
was abolished by them. Advocacy by such types does not therefore
constitute an argument of any weight against their doctrines, which
can adequately be judged only by some purely objective standard.
Judged by such a standard, pacifism, as we have seen, appears to be a
natural development, and is directed towards a goal which unless man’s
nature undergoes a radical change will probably be attained. That its
attainment has so far been foreseen only by a class of men possessing
more than the usual impracticability of the minor prophet is hardly to
be considered a relevant fact.
* * * * *
It is impossible to leave this subject without some comment on the
famous doctrine that war is a biological necessity. Even if one knew
nothing of those who have enunciated this proposition, its character
would enable one to suspect it of being the utterance of a soldier
rather than a biologist. There is about it a confidence that the vital
effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt
for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind
one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is
the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, {127} where
facts are the masters of all. It may be supposed that even in the
country of its birth the doctrine seemed more transcendently true in
times of peace amid a proud and brilliant regime than it does now after
more than twelve months of war. The whole conception is of a type to
arouse interest in its psychological origin rather than in a serious
discussion of its merits. It arose in a military State abounding in
prosperity and progress of very recent growth, and based upon three
short wars which had come closely one after another and formed an
ascending series of brilliant success. In such circumstances even
grosser assumptions might very well flourish and some such doctrine was
a perfectly natural product. The situation of the warrior-biologist
was in some way that of the orthodox expounder of ethics or political
economy—his conclusions were ready-made for him; all he had to do was
to find the “reasons” for them. War and war only had produced the best
and greatest and strongest State—indeed, the only State worthy of the
name; therefore war is the great creative and sustaining force of
States, or the universe is a mere meaningless jumble of accidents. If
only wars would always conform to the original Prussian pattern, as
they did in the golden age from 1864 to 1870—the unready adversary,
the few pleasantly strenuous weeks or months, the thumping indemnity!
That is the sort of biological necessity one can understand. But twelve
months of agonizing, indecisive effort in Poland and Russia and France,
might have made the syllogism a little less perfect, the new law of
Nature not quite so absolute.
These matters, however, are quite apart from the practical question
whether war is a necessity to maintain the efficiency and energy
of nations and to prevent them sinking into sloth and degeneracy.
The {128} problem may be stated in another form. When we take a
comprehensive survey of the natural history of man—using that term to
include the whole of his capacities, activities, and needs, physical,
intellectual, moral—do we find that war is the indispensable instrument
whereby his survival and progress as a species are maintained? We are
assuming in this statement that progress or increased elaboration is to
continue to be a necessary tendency in his course by which his fate,
through the action of inherited needs, powers, and weaknesses, and of
external pressure is irrevocably conditioned. The assumption, though
commonly made, is by no means obviously true. Some of the evidence
justifying it will be dealt with later; it will not be necessary here
to do more than note that we are for the moment treating the doctrine
of human progress as a postulate.
Man is unique among gregarious animals in the size of the major unit
upon which natural selection and its supposedly chief instrument,
war, is open to act unchecked. There is no other animal in which the
size of the unit, however laxly held together, has reached anything
even remotely approaching the inclusion of one-fifth or one-quarter
of the whole species. It is plain that a mortal contest between two
units of such a monstrous size introduces an altogether new mechanism
into the hypothetical “struggle for existence” on which the conception
of the biological necessity of war is founded. It is clear that
that doctrine, if it is to claim validity, must contemplate at any
rate the possibility of a war of extremity, even of something like
extermination, which shall implicate perhaps a third of the whole human
race. There is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished
as the result of a racial impoverishment so extreme, even if it were
accompanied by a closely specific {129} selection instead of a mere
indiscriminate destruction. Progress is undoubtedly dependent mainly on
the material that is available for selection being rich and varied. Any
great reduction in the amount and variety of what is to be regarded as
the raw material of elaboration necessarily must have as an infallible
effect, the arrest of progress. It may be objected, however, that
anything approaching extermination could obviously not be possible in
a war between such immense units as those of modern man. Nevertheless,
the object of each of the two adversaries would be to impose its
will on the other, and to destroy in it all that was especially
individual, all the types of activity and capacity which were the
most characteristic in its civilization and therefore the cause of
hostility. The effect of success in such an endeavour would be an
enormous impoverishment of the variety of the race and a corresponding
effect on progress.
To this line of speculation it may perhaps further be objected that the
question is not of the necessity of war to the race as a whole, but to
the individual nation or major unit. The argument has been used that
when a nation is obviously the repository of all the highest gifts and
tendencies of civilization, the race must in the end benefit, if this
nation, by force if necessary, imposes its will and its principles on
as much of the world as it can. To the biologist the weakness of this
proposition—apart from the plain impossibility of a nation attaining
an objective estimate of the value of its own civilization—is that it
embodies a course of action which tends to the spread of uniformity
and to limit that variety of material which is the fundamental quality
essential for progress. In certain cases of very gross discrepancy
between the value of two civilizations, it is quite possible that the
destruction of the simpler by the more elaborate does not result in
any great {130} loss to the race through the suppression of valuable
varieties. Even this admission is, however, open to debate, and it
may well be doubted whether in some ways the wholesale extermination
of “inferior” races has not denied to the species the perpetuation of
lines of variation which might have been of great value.
It seems remarkable that among gregarious animals other than man direct
conflict between major units such as can lead to the suppression of
the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon. They are, it may be
supposed, too busily engaged in maintaining themselves against external
enemies to have any opportunities for fighting within the species.
Man’s complete conquest of the grosser enemies of his race has allowed
him leisure for turning his restless pugnacity—a quality no longer
fully occupied upon his non-human environment—against his own species.
When the major units of humanity were small the results of such
conflict were not perhaps very serious to the race as a whole, except
in prolonging the twilight stages of civilization. It can scarcely be
questioned that the organization of a people for war tends to encourage
unduly a type of individual who is abnormally insensitive to doubt,
to curiosity, and to the development of original thought. With the
enlargement of the unit and the accompanying increase in knowledge
and resources, war becomes much more seriously expensive to the race.
In the present war the immense size of the units engaged and their
comparative equality in power have furnished a complete _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the proposition that war in itself is a good thing even
for the individual nation. It would seem, then, that in the original
proposition the word “war” must be qualified to mean a war against a
smaller and notably weaker adversary. The German Empire was founded on
such wars. {131} The conception of the biological necessity of war
may fairly be expected to demonstrate its validity in the fate of that
Empire if such a demonstration is ever to be possible. Every condition
for a crucial experiment was present: a brilliant inauguration in the
very atmosphere of military triumph, a conscious realization of the
value of the martial spirit, a determination to keep the warrior ideal
conspicuously foremost with a people singularly able and willing to
accept it. If this is the way in which an ultimate world-power is to
be founded and maintained, no single necessary factor is lacking. And
yet after a few years, in what should be the very first youth of an
Empire, we find it engaged against a combination of Powers of fabulous
strength, which, by a miracle of diplomacy no one else could have
accomplished, it has united against itself. It is an irrelevance to
assert that this combination is the result of malice, envy, treachery,
barbarism; such terms are by hypothesis not admissible. If the
system of Empire-building is not proof against those very elementary
enemies, any further examination of it is of course purely academic.
To withstand those is just what the Empire is there for; if it falls
a victim to them, it fails in its first and simplest function and
displays a radical defect in its structure. To the objectivist practice
is the only test in human affairs, and he will not allow his attention
to be distracted from what did happen by the most perfectly logical
demonstration of what ought to have happened. It is the business of an
Empire not to encounter overwhelming enemies. Declaring itself to be
the most perfect example of its kind and the foreordained heir of the
world will remain no more than a pleasant—and dangerous—indulgence, and
will not prevent it showing by its fate that the fruits of perfection
and the promise of permanence are not demonstrated in the wholesale
{132} manufacture of enemies and in the combination of them into an
alliance of unparalleled strength.
* * * * *
The doctrine of the biological necessity of war may, then, be regarded
as open to strong suspicion on theoretical grounds of being contrary
to the evolutionary tendency already plainly marked out for the human
species. The fact that the nation in which its truth was most generally
accepted has been led—and undoubtedly to some extent by it—into a
war which can scarcely fail to prove disastrous suggests that in the
practical field it is equally fallacious. It may well, therefore, be
removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other
pseudo-scientific dogmas of political “biologists”—the facile doctrines
of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on
Teutons and Celts, on Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races,
and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have
gulled the innocent so long.
IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.
The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the
thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to
yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management
of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be
found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as
manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gregariousness
is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance,
but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an
interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activities. We
have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as
imperative and just as {133} characteristically social as those of
any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as
actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the
fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more
marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to
his gregariousness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of
crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many
of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there
is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely
indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the
socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that
they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man.
The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from
disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee—as
has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity.
In mental affairs, as I have tried to show, man owes to the social
habit his inveterate resistiveness to new ideas, his submission to
tradition and precedent, and the very serious fact that governing power
in his communities tends to pass into the hands of what I have called
the stable-minded—a class the members of which are characteristically
insensitive to experience, closed to the entry of new ideas, and
obsessed with the satisfactoriness of things as they are. At the time
when this corollary of gregariousness was first pointed out—some
ten years ago—it was noted as a serious flaw in the stability of
civilization. The suggestion was made that as long as the great
expert tasks of government necessarily gravitated into the hands of
a class which characteristically lacked the greater developments of
mental capacity and efficiency, the course of {134} civilization must
continue to be at the mercy of accident and disaster. The present
European war—doubtless in the actual state of affairs a remedy no less
necessary because of its dreadfulness—is an example on the greatest
possible scale of the kind of price the race has to pay for the way in
which minds and temperaments are selected by its society.
When we see the great and serious drawbacks which gregariousness
has entailed on man, it cannot but be supposed that that course
of evolution has been imposed upon him by a real and deep-seated
peculiarity of his nature—a fatal inheritance which it is impossible
for him to repudiate.
* * * * *
When we inquire why it is that the manifestations of gregariousness in
man are so ambiguous that their biological significance has been to
a great extent overlooked, the answer seems to be furnished by that
capacity for various reaction which is the result of his general mental
development, and which has tended almost equally to obscure his other
instinctive activities. It may be repeated once more that in a creature
such as the bee the narrow mental capacity of the individual limits
reaction to a few and relatively simple courses, so that the dominance
of instinct in the species can to the attentive observer never be long
in doubt. In man the equal dominance of instinct is obscured by the
kaleidoscopic variety of the reactions by which it is more or less
effectually satisfied.
While to a superficial examination of society the evidences of man’s
gregarious inheritance are ambiguous and trivial, to the closer
scrutiny of the biologist it soon becomes obvious that in society as
constituted to-day the advantageous mechanisms rendered available by
that inheritance are not being made use of to anything approaching
their full possibilities. To such an extent is this the case {135}
that the situation of man as a species even is probably a good deal
more precarious than has usually been supposed by those who have
come to be in charge of its destinies. The species is irrevocably
committed to a certain evolutionary path by the inheritance of instinct
it possesses. This course brings with it inevitable and serious
disadvantages as well as enormously greater potential advantages. As
long as the spirit of the race is content to be submissive to the
former and indifferent to the discovery and development of the latter,
it can scarcely have a bare certainty of survival and much less of
progressive enlargement of its powers.
* * * * *
In the society of the bee two leading characteristics are evident—an
elaborate and exact specialization of the individual, and a perfect
absorption of the interests of the individual in those of the hive;
these qualities seem to be the source of the unique energy and power
of the whole unit and of the remarkable superiority of intelligence
it possesses over the individual member. It is a commonplace of human
affairs that combined action is almost invariably less intelligent than
individual action, a fact which shows how very little the members of
the species are yet capable of combination and co-ordination and how
far inferior—on account, no doubt, of his greater mental capacity—man
is in this respect to the bee.
This combination of specialization and moral homogeneity should be
evident in human society if it is taking advantage of its biological
resources. Both are, in fact, rather conspicuously absent.
There is abundant specialization of a sort; but it is inexact, lax,
wasteful of energy, and often quite useless through being on the one
hand superfluous or on the other incomplete. We have large numbers of
experts in the various branches of science {136} and the arts, but
we insist upon their adding to the practice of their specialisms the
difficult task of earning their living in an open competitive market.
The result is that we tend to get at the summit of our professions only
those rare geniuses who combine real specialist capacity with the arts
of the bagman. An enormous proportion of our experts have to earn their
living by teaching—an exhausting and exacting art for which they are
not at all necessarily qualified, and one which demands a great amount
of time for the earning of a very exiguous pittance.
The teaching of our best schools, a task so important that it should be
entrusted to none but those highly qualified by nature and instruction
in the art, is almost entirely in the hands of athletes and grammarians
of dead languages. We choose as our governors amateurs of whom we
demand fluency, invincible prejudice, and a resolute blindness to
dissentient opinion. In commerce we allow ourselves to be overrun by a
multitude of small and mostly inefficient traders struggling to make
a living by the supply of goods from the narrow and ageing stocks
which are all they can afford to keep. We allow the supply of our
foodstuffs to be largely in the hands of those who cannot afford to
be clean, and submit out of mere indifference to being fed on meat,
bread, vegetables which have been for an indefinite period at the
mercy of dirty middlemen, the dust and mud and flies of the street,
and the light-hearted thumbing errand-boy. We allow a large proportion
of our skilled workers to waste skill and energy on the manufacture of
things which are neither useful nor beautiful, on elaborate specialist
valeting, cooking, gardening for those who are their inferiors in
social activity and value.