This world of incessant toil is a more than Vestal world. It is true
that males can sometimes be perceived in it; but they appear only at
particular seasons, and they have nothing whatever to do with the
workers or with the work. None of them would presume to address a
worker,—except, perhaps, under extraordinary circumstances of common
peril. And no worker would think of talking to a male;—for males, in
this queer world, are inferior beings, equally incapable of fighting or
working, and tolerated only as necessary evils. One special class of
females,—the Mothers-Elect of the race,—do condescend to consort with
males, during a very brief period, at particular seasons. But the
Mothers-Elect do not work; and they _must_ accept husbands. A worker
could not even dream of keeping company with a male,—not merely because
such association would signify the most frivolous waste of time, nor
yet because the worker necessarily regards all males with unspeakable
contempt; but because the worker is incapable of wedlock. Some workers,
indeed, are capable of parthenogenesis, and give birth to children who
never had fathers. As a general rule, however, the worker is truly
feminine by her moral instincts only: she has all the tenderness, the
patience, and the foresight that we call “maternal;” but her sex has
disappeared, like the sex of the Dragon-Maiden in the Buddhist legend.
For defense against creatures of prey, or enemies of the state, the
workers are provided with weapons; and they are furthermore protected
by a large military force. The warriors are so much bigger than the
workers (in some communities, at least) that it is difficult, at first
sight, to believe them of the same race. Soldiers one hundred times
larger than the workers whom they guard are not uncommon. But all these
soldiers are Amazons,—or, more correctly speaking, semi-females. They
can work sturdily; but being built for fighting and for heavy pulling
chiefly, their usefulness is restricted to those directions in which
force, rather than skill, is required.
[Why females, rather than males, should have been evolutionally
specialized into soldiery and laborers may not be nearly so simple a
question as it appears. I am very sure of not being able to answer it.
But natural economy may have decided the matter. In many forms of life,
the female greatly exceeds the male in bulk and in energy;—perhaps, in
this case, the larger reserve of life-force possessed originally by the
complete female could be more rapidly and effectively utilized for the
development of a special fighting-caste. All energies which, in the
fertile female, would be expended in the giving of life seem here to
have been diverted to the evolution of aggressive power, or
working-capacity.]
Of the true females,—the Mothers-Elect,—there are very few indeed; and
these are treated like queens. So constantly and so reverentially are
they waited upon that they can seldom have any wishes to express. They
are relieved from every care of existence,—except the duty of bearing
offspring. Night and day they are cared for in every possible manner.
They alone are superabundantly and richly fed:—for the sake of the
offspring they must eat and drink and repose right royally; and their
physiological specialization allows of such indulgence _ad libitum_.
They seldom go out, and never unless attended by a powerful escort; as
they cannot be permitted to incur unnecessary fatigue or danger.
Probably they have no great desire to go out. Around them revolves the
whole activity of the race: all its intelligence and toil and thrift
are directed solely toward the well-being of these Mothers and of their
children.
But last and least of the race rank the husbands of these Mothers,—the
necessary Evils,—the males. They appear only at a particular season, as
I have already observed; and their lives are very short. Some cannot
even boast of noble descent, though destined to royal wedlock; for they
are not royal offspring, but virgin-born,—parthenogenetic
children,—and, for that reason especially, inferior beings, the chance
results of some mysterious atavism. But of any sort of males the
commonwealth tolerates but few,—barely enough to serve as husbands for
the Mothers-Elect, and these few perish almost as soon as their duty
has been done. The meaning of Nature’s law, in this extraordinary
world, is identical with Ruskin’s teaching that life without effort is
crime; and since the males are useless as workers or fighters, their
existence is of only momentary importance. They are not, indeed,
sacrificed,—like the Aztec victim chosen for the festival of
Tezcatlipoca, and allowed a honeymoon of twenty days before his heart
was torn out. But they are scarcely less unfortunate in their high
fortune. Imagine youths brought up in the knowledge that they are
destined to become royal bridegrooms for a single night,—that after
their bridal they will have no moral right to live,—that marriage, for
each and all of them, will signify certain death,—and that they cannot
even hope to be lamented by their young widows, who will survive them
for a time of many generations...!
V
But all the foregoing is no more than a proem to the real “Romance of
the Insect-World.”
—By far the most startling discovery in relation to this astonishing
civilization is that of the suppression of sex. In certain advanced
forms of ant-life sex totally disappears in the majority of
individuals;—in nearly all the higher ant-societies sex-life appears to
exist only to the extent absolutely needed for the continuance of the
species. But the biological fact in itself is much less startling than
the ethical suggestion which it offers;—_for this practical
suppression, or regulation, of sex-faculty appears to be voluntary!_
Voluntary, at least, so far as the species is concerned. It is now
believed that these wonderful creatures have learned how to develop, or
to arrest the development, of sex in their young,—by some particular
mode of nutrition. They have succeeded in placing under perfect control
what is commonly supposed to be the most powerful and unmanageable of
instincts. And this rigid restraint of sex-life to within the limits
necessary to provide against extinction is but one (though the most
amazing) of many vital economies effected by the race. Every capacity
for egoistic pleasure—in the common meaning of the word “egoistic”—has
been equally repressed through physiological modification. No
indulgence of any natural appetite is possible except to that degree in
which such indulgence can directly or indirectly benefit the
species;—even the indispensable requirements of food and sleep being
satisfied only to the exact extent necessary for the maintenance of
healthy activity. The individual can exist, act, think, only for the
communal good; and the commune triumphantly refuses, in so far as
cosmic law permits, to let itself be ruled either by Love or Hunger.
Most of us have been brought up in the belief that without some kind of
religious creed—some hope of future reward or fear of future
punishment—no civilization could exist. We have been taught to think
that in the absence of laws based upon moral ideas, and in the absence
of an effective police to enforce such laws, nearly everybody would
seek only his or her personal advantage, to the disadvantage of
everybody else. The strong would then destroy the weak; pity and
sympathy would disappear; and the whole social fabric would fall to
pieces... These teachings confess the existing imperfection of human
nature; and they contain obvious truth. But those who first proclaimed
that truth, thousands and thousands of years ago, never imagined a form
of social existence in which selfishness would be _naturally_
impossible. It remained for irreligious Nature to furnish us with proof
positive that there can exist a society in which the pleasure of active
beneficence makes needless the idea of duty,—a society in which
instinctive morality can dispense with ethical codes of every sort,—a
society of which every member is born so absolutely unselfish, and so
energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its
youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.
To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of
our moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than
virtue, better than kindness, better than self-denial,—in the present
human meaning of those terms,—might, under certain conditions,
eventually replace them. He finds himself obliged to face the question
whether a world without moral notions might not be morally better than
a world in which conduct is regulated by such notions. He must even ask
himself whether the existence of religious commandments, moral laws,
and ethical standards among ourselves does not prove us still in a very
primitive stage of social evolution. And these questions naturally lead
up to another: Will humanity ever be able, on this planet, to reach an
ethical condition beyond all its ideals,—a condition in which
everything that we now call evil will have been atrophied out of
existence, and everything that we call virtue have been transmuted into
instinct;—a state of altruism in which ethical concepts and codes will
have become as useless as they would be, even now, in the societies of
the higher ants.
The giants of modern thought have given some attention to this
question; and the greatest among them has answered it—partly in the
affirmative. Herbert Spencer has expressed his belief that humanity
will arrive at some state of civilization ethically comparable with
that of the ant:—
“If we have, in lower orders of creatures, cases in which the nature is
constitutionally so modified that altruistic activities have become one
with egoistic activities, there is an irresistible implication that a
parallel identification will, under parallel conditions, take place
among human beings. Social insects furnish us with instances completely
to the point,—and instances showing us, indeed, to what a marvelous
degree the life of the individual may be absorbed in subserving the
lives of other individuals... Neither the ant nor the bee can be
supposed to have a sense of duty, in the acceptation we give to that
word; nor can it be supposed that it is continually undergoing
self-sacrifice, in the ordinary acceptation of that word... [The facts]
show us that it is within the possibilities of organization to produce
a nature which shall be just as energetic in the pursuit of altruistic
ends, as is in other cases shown in the pursuit of egoistic ends;—and
they show that, in such cases, these altruistic ends are pursued in
pursuing ends which, on their other face, are egoistic. For the
satisfaction of the needs of the organization, these actions, conducive
to the welfare of others, _must_ be carried on...
“So far from its being true that there must go on, throughout all the
future, a condition in which self-regard is to be continually subjected
by the regard for others, it will, contrari-wise, be the case that a
regard for others will eventually become so large a source of pleasure
as to overgrow the pleasure which is derivable from direct egoistic
gratification... Eventually, then, there will come also a state in
which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges in the
other.”