Human provincialism, all of it, is the consequence of a common
cause—_the provincialism of the savage_. Back of the provincialism
of the savage is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial
egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of all men, and as such
has imparted to all men their general characters of mind and heart.
Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a human being, a grass
blade, or a race, grows from something. This something, this germ or
embryo from which each thing springs, imparts to the thing its
fundamental characters. However far anything may evolve, and however
much it may come to differ superficially from its original, it will
always remain at heart more or less faithful to the facts of its
genesis. This hereditary tendency of everything, this tendency
toward invariability, is the conservative, or inertial tendency of
the universe. All races, colours, and conditions of men—civilised,
slightly civilised, and barbarous—extend back to, and take root
in, savages, just as all savages have probably sprung in some still
more remote period of the past from a single stirp of anthropoids.
The savage is, therefore, the author of human nature and philosophy.
Just as the fish, which is the common ancestor of all amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and mammals, has predetermined the general
structural style of all subsequently evolved vertebrates, so the
savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the
general mental and dispositional make-up of all higher men. That
civilised and semi-civilised men are naturally narrow and
revengeful, selfish and superstitious, and find it next to
impossible to feel and act toward others as they would like to have
others feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more mysterious
than that vertebrates have red blood, two eyes, two pairs of limbs,
and a backbone with a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it.
Just as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child persist,
often but slightly modified, in the full-grown man or woman, so the
habits, beliefs, and conceptions, formed by the race in its
childhood, continue, under the influence of the same laws of
inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial development. Human
nature changes with great reluctance, and only in its superficial
aspects at that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive ideas
and practices of the Stone Age, and men in the pastoral and hunting
stages of mankind, in all the highest societies of men. There is
scarcely a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or trait of
character, found among men of the past but may be seen still among
our contemporaries.
Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as egoism (self-love) is.
There is not so much of it in the world as there is of egoism. But
that is simply the misfortune of our place of existence. There is no
reason why there might not have been as much, or even more, under
different conditions. With the same antecedents, nothing can, of
course, happen differently from what does happen. But with different
antecedents, different causes, the results are bound to be
different. Civilised men are not beings of altruism, because they
are not the _effects_ of that kind of _causes_. But there is no
reason why there might not be a world—several of them, in fact, or
even a universeful—where the inhabitants have never known or heard
of such an indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves to
others—where it is as natural for them to act toward each other
according to what we call the Golden Rule as it is for us
terrestrial heathens to violate it. It is possible to conceive of
beings with even too much altruism. The ideal condition is one of
balanced egoism and altruism—one in which each thinks as much of
others as he does of himself, no more and no less. And if beings
were endowed with natures rendering them not only willing but
_determined_ to act primarily in the interests of others, and this
condition of things were universal, there would be about as much
discord and strife as if everyone acted in the interest of himself.
The Golden Rule among a lot of hypothetical otherists like this
would be the opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the
importance of others as we do, they would need to encourage regard
for self. Wouldn’t it seem original to live in a world where men
were sent to gaol for over-benevolence, and where sermons had to be
preached on such texts as, ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’;
‘It is more blessed to receive than to give’; ‘Avoid doing to
yourself that which you do not like when done to others’; ‘The
Lord loves a cheerful taker’; and the like?
The persistence with which savage ideas and instincts continue to
influence men long after those ideas and instincts have really
become anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by civilised
men and women everywhere. The sun continues to ‘rise’ and
‘set’ in all civilised lands just as it used to do to the
savage, although men have long since learned that it does not do
either. Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual subterranean
region, and heaven was an abode located a few hours’ journey above
the supposedly flat earth. To-day we continue to say ‘_up_ to
heaven,’ and ‘_down_ to hell’ (never ‘down to heaven’ and
‘up to hell’), and always think of these places as being thus
relatively located, although it is extremely doubtful whether any
really sane mind continues to believe that hell is on the inside of
the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and although _up_
means simply away from the centre of the earth, and away from the
centre of a ball means literally every possible direction. The
theological theories of the origin, nature, and destiny of man and
of the universe in general, all of which originated in savage or
semi-savage minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable traces of
their origin, continue to cling to the minds of the masses of
civilised men, notwithstanding the inherent absurdity of these
theories, and notwithstanding the fact that their unsoundness is
vouched for by the most positive and unanimous assurances from the
scientific world. Why should civilised men and women, any of them,
be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or find delight in such
loathsome avocations as the fishing and hunting of their
fellow-creatures? Because their ancestors were savages, and they are
not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the instincts of
their savage sires. There is no other explanation. No human being
could enjoy seeing a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a
poor harmless hare—unless he were a savage. No human being could
go out to the abodes of the squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous
balls into their beautiful bodies for food or fun—unless he were a
savage. No human being would lounge all day about the margins of a
brook, blind to the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest
and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the lips of those whom
he deceives, and drag them from their waters to suffocate in the
sun—unless he were a savage. No human being would have palaces and
parks and yachts and equipages, townships of lands, packs of hounds,
and studs of horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when all
around him are the men and women who made this wealth, half clad and
half starved, suffocating in shanties and working like wretches from
morning till night—unless he were a savage. All of these deeds are
savage deeds, deeds of exceeding thoughtlessness and brutality, and,
instead of being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind positively
painful.
Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief occupations of savage
life. Back of the activities displayed in these occupations are
powerful instincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised peoples
are devoted primarily to the arts of industry and peace. But there
are enough savages in every civilised society, and enough of the
savage spirit in those who pretend to approximate the civilised
state, to give to civilised life a decidedly barbaric aspect. War is
a more or less regular exercise, and killing and competing and
torturing enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples. Next to
eating, fighting, in one form or another, is the favourite pursuit
of men nearly everywhere on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever
human beings have any energy or time left over from what they are
required to spend in maintaining their existence, they use it in
fighting somebody or in watching somebody else fight. And generally
the more brutal and sanguinary the conflict, the more popular and
satisfying it is. Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain
and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and the baseball and
slugball battles of the Americans, where eager thousands gather and
roar for hours like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or
set of animals punish or discredit another. If there are no pigeons
to shoot, or if the community is ruled by men and women who are too
emancipated to allow such things, we make glass birds and heroically
bang away at them, supplying by our imaginations the blood and agony
of real carnage. And if we can’t do anything else, we take some
poor pig, that never did anyone any harm in the world, and grease it
and turn it loose, and then take after it with knives, as Chicago
butchers do on vacation days, and see who can cut its throat the
quickest. This amusement, in pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty
near the top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. Maybe it
is outclassed by that other contest sometimes advertised as a
feature of butchers’ barbecues, in which a band of professional
cutthroats compete to see who can kill, skin, and eviscerate the
largest number of their fellow-beings in a given time.
Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by
contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up
primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us.
The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so
incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical
parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The
bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for
the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the
prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each
other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs,
are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the
Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature
or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The
ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over
the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the
pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction
of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made
amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability
to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind
from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any
other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form
of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the
death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go
into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.
Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples are more horrible to
an emancipated mind than that of bull-fighting. It is the national
amusement of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who have
acquired their natures and institutions from the Spanish. ‘Every
Sunday afternoon, whenever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men
and women, representing every class of society, mothers and
grandmothers, priests and monks, assemble at the Plaza de Toros in
Madrid to witness the most brutal spectacle the human taste
approves. Six bulls are tortured and worried until they are
exhausted. Then they are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a
matador, who is the most popular person in the community and makes
more money than any other man. Often as many as twelve horses are
ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls, and are allowed to
die in the presence of the audience, with blood gushing from their
wounds and their entrails dragging upon the ground. This sort of
thing is carried on not only in Madrid, but is a regular weekly
festival in all the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded, so
they cannot even see what attacks them. The men who torture the
bulls have wooden screens behind which they can dodge when pursued,
and if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely upon any of
its tormentors, the other matadors throw a blanket over its head. It
is not sport, for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to escape
or to fight back. It is simply slow butchery, an exhibition of
unmitigated cowardice and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish
people are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per cent, of the
population approve this atrocious barbarism—not only approve it,
but demand that the King shall appear in the royal box at every
bull-fight, or have his throne upset.’
The notorious ‘Juke’ family of criminals, who sprang from a
single ruffian who lived in 1720, has cost the State of New York
millions of dollars in money and incalculable misery and crime. But
the initial savage progenitors of the human species have stocked the
earth with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers—knaves,
felons, kings, warriors, barbarians, butchers, brutalitarians,
kleptomaniacs, and thugs—that has ever (let us hope) brought
damnation to a world.