Everything has been evolved—_everything_—from daffodils to
states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result
of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous
from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of
its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe.
That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and
altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human
and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts
exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have
been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as
definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in
this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio
in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand
has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the
mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.
Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the
universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of
regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated
enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of
mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness,
savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the
primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more
universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which
long ago came the original miscreants of this world.
‘I saw the fishes playing there;
I saw all that was in the whole world round;
In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,
All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.
All these I saw, and say to you,
That nothing lives among them without hate.’
Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been
brought about largely through war—war between individuals and
between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle
between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness.
Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses,
because beings hated and exterminated each other before they
tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed
cooperation as a factor in life evolution.
There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic
factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition.
Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal
life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the
humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic
existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in
colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled
animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in
animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most
obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism
antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the
many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a
long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not
mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among
the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the
mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than
transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of
pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they
may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard
to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any
more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few
societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more
than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a
co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and
influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it
involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is
also prominent in all social activities.
The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the
most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life.
It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the
gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is
anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the
expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is
everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces
an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has
all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in
which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an
individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power
made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this
individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its
phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help
thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he
comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world,
what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and
his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being
with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the
welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in
terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.
Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows
itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity,
public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of
kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and
the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and
brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer:
there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the
world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out
of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against
their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial
stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have
learned to stand by each other and help each other against their
common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to
stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of
fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal
have gone down.
The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is
not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by
other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together
of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of
companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal
gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however
much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each
other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by
causes or considerations different from those which actuate a
society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things.
The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be
looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.
The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of
individuals _with each other_ and _against others_ is a significant
fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of
the earth. _To this fact is due the restricted and illogical
character of all altruism_. The ethical systems of all peoples are,
and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and
contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended
universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among
those associating more or less closely as a group, and having
interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of
primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a
few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very
half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen
and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and
imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the
community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad
influences operating as race experience and race selection enable
men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures,
interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the
conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger
number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and
kinship.
III. The Ethics of the Savage.
∂
The ethics of the savage is, almost without exception, purely tribal
in its extent. A marked distinction is everywhere made by primitive
peoples between injuries to persons _inside_ the tribe and injuries
to those _outside_ the tribe. Crimes which are looked upon as
felonious when committed by a savage against the members of his own
tribe may be regarded as harmless, or even highly commendable, when
perpetrated on those outside the tribe. Acts are not judged
according to their intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to
whether they are performed on outsiders or on insiders. The Balantis
(Africa) punish with death a theft committed against a
fellow-tribesman, but encourage and reward thieving from other
tribes. The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her son may be a
successful robber—not a robber of her own people, but of other
peoples—and in order that he may become proficient in crime
teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in the wall. By
certain Bedouin tribes the ‘strenuous life’ is held in such high
honour that ‘it is considered a disgrace to die in bed’; and
among the man-eating Fijians ‘men who have not slain an enemy
suffer the most degrading of all punishments’.[1] In the paradise
of the Kukis (India) the cut-throats who have in life killed the
largest number of aliens not only inherit the highest places, but
these adepts of the knife are supposed to be attended in their
celestial comings and goings by their victims as slaves.[1] In his
dealings with the other members of his tribe, the savage observes a
certain rude code of morals, this code being usually, as in the case
of the civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and
brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and hypocrisy. But the
savage recognises no moral obligations to any being outside of his
tribe, clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing more positively
than this. Consanguinity and self-interest are the only bases of
savage friendship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be attacked,
robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or enslaved, with perfect
propriety. It was this general hostility of foreigners that Cain
feared when he was turned out from his countrymen after his crime
upon Abel. He knew that he was liable to be set upon by the first
stranger that came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set a mark
upon him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him.’
‘There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers,’
says Sir Henry Maine, in speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and
Semitic races, ‘except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If
a man was not of kin to another, there was nothing between them. He
was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as much as the wild
beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging, indeed, to the
craftiest and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely be too
strong to assert that the dogs which followed the camp had more in
common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated
tribe’.[2] Among some tribes of savage men the ethical code is
reversed in dealing with outsiders, and enmity toward aliens is
considered a duty.
This same senseless hostility toward every one from abroad, so
spitefully exhibited by primitive men, is also manifested by ants,
who immediately recognise and pounce upon an individual introduced
from a foreign colony, but welcome with every demonstration of joy,
even after a lapse of weeks or months, a returning member of their
own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness is found also in
elephants. If by accident an elephant becomes separated from his
herd, he becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being permitted in
any circumstances to attach himself to another herd.[3]
That the savage should entertain feelings of friendship for those
belonging to the same social unit as himself is, considering the
circumstances in which it takes place, a perfectly natural
phenomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the savage, the beings
among whom he has come into existence, and in the midst of whom he
has grown up. He knows and understands them, and is known and
understood by them. They speak the same language as himself, and
cherish the same customs and traditions. They have the same sacred
trees, the same gods, the same experiences day after day, and the
same memories, as he himself. They are his associates in the chase,
his allies in war, and his comrades in sorrow and success. They are
the only beings into whose lives he has ever entered. They
constitute his world, and are to him the only real beings in the
universe.
The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the savage, for the most
part, his kinspeople. If they are not actually related to him by
blood, they are usually conceived by him to be so related. The
co-villagers of an Indian community call each other brothers. It is
a characteristic of all the Aryan and Semitic races when in the
tribal state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and all
subdivisions of them, are descended each from a single male
ancestor. The savage sees the living family of which he forms a part
descended from a single living man and his wife or wives. This
family group with which he is familiar and other similar groups make
up the tribe. And the process by which each family has been brought
about is in his mind identical with the process by which the
community as a whole has been formed.[2] It is a conception of this
kind, handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal times, which
causes the Jews even to-day to regard themselves as the ‘seed’
of that venerable sheik who, so many centuries ago, led them as a
band of nomads in their memorable migration westward from the plains
of Mesopotamia. It is not strange, therefore, considering all of the
circumstances in the midst of which the savage lives and moves, that
he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as beings to be
distinguished by him from all other beings in the universe.
Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental sterility of the
savage, his lack of travel and imagination, the meagerness of his
experiences, and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the
community in which he lives, that he should look upon and treat all
outsiders as nobodies—as beings without any claims whatever upon
his humanity or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power of the
mind, the power by which beings are able to get out of themselves
and into the places of others, the power which enables us to view
the world comparatively—that is, from different points of view.
This power of mind, which imparts to the higher types of
intelligence their mobility and sympathy, is rudimentary in the
savage. This has been proved by Tylor in his study of the
comparative mythology of savages. It is this lack of imagination in
the savage, combined with his ignorance and his simplicity of life,
which gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him inaccessible
to those higher sentiments of justice and righteousness which
are—well, which are, at least, dreamed about and theorised about
by the more evolved savages of the ‘civilised world.’ The world,
to the simple mind of the savage, is, as it is to the mind of the
child, the world in which he lives and moves—the world which he
feels, hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boundary of the
universe. Beings beyond his tribe are outside of the world. If they
exist at all, it is as a very different order of beings from him and
his people. They are not of kin to him, speak a strange tongue, and
have monstrous customs and superstitions. How could they be in any
way related to him? They are his enemies—vague villainous
apparitions who appear to him only in the horrible ordeals of
battle. His chief occupation is the waging of war against them, and
his keenest gratification is felt in laying them low. The accounts
of all travellers testify that the intertribal relations of savages
are, with few exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility. The
irreconcilable antagonism between the savage and those around him
begets in the savage nature its dominating impulse—hate, hatred
and hostility toward other men, as well as toward all other beings.
In fact, the savage makes no moral distinction between man and the
other animals, but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes,
whom he must either use or remove from the face of the earth. The
savage hunts men about as he hunts other animals, and for a like
purpose. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse
chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt antelopes
to-day.
1. Spencer: _Principles of Ethics_, vol. i.; New York, 1893..
2. Maine: _Early History of Institutions_; New York, 1869.
3. Tennent: _Natural History of Ceylon_; London, 1861.