the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and
Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago
pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the
idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then
evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will
encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal
reason" is the impossibility of getting different classes of men to
agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any
longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every class has an
ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable
to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells
so far as they are representatives of the citizens of the classless
society of the future, a society based on social solidarity, on
world-wide brotherhood. But to the socialist materialist, war, in a
world based on private ownership of the means of production used to
produce commodities, with its concomitants, the wage-system,
competition--domestic and international,--and ever-recurring
"over-production," is so very far from unreasonable that it is
absolutely inevitable.[37]
Mr. Wells evidently brought something with him when he left the Doll's
House.
We now begin to realize what a very difficult matter it is to rid the
mind completely of the effects of what Professor Veblen calls "the
institutional furniture handed down from the past." The man, who yields
to the lure of Socialism, must sooner or later effect a revolution
within his own mind; if he does not, he will sooner or later return to
his Doll's House, or make an excursion into some field of "pragmatic
romance" where he will build himself a new doll's house.
Granted the truth of historical materialism, how will future
generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a
generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic
modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of
Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without
being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth
of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets')
seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some
old God."
But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled
beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his
curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle
classes of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth
century welcomed as the ultimate massage of philosophy, will not be
ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think
of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet,
Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of
Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in
this opening decade of the twentieth.
The men and women of the future will, I am sure, feel themselves akin
to Shelley. They will probably enjoy Byron too, so far as they
understand him; but men and women, who have never known any relationship
between the sexes but that of independence and equality, will be bored
and baffled by that great bulk of Byron's verse which shocked his
contemporaries.
When we turn to the drama, it appears probable that the revolution in
the relations of the sexes will convert into mere materials for the
historian even our greatest plays, such as Ibsen's "The Doll's House,"
Sudermann's "The Joy of Living," Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," and Shaw's
"Mrs. Warren's Profession."
Are the "educated and professional" socialists prepared to accept gladly
such tremendous changes? They are confronted by a momentous question. It
was of their class William Morris was thinking when he wrote:
"I have looked at this claim by the light of history and my own
conscience, and it seems to me so looked at to be a most just
claim, and that resistance to it means nothing short of a denial of
the hope of civilization.
This, then, is the claim:--
_It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do
which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do: and
which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither
over-wearisome nor over-anxious._
Turn that claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I
cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet again I say if
Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would be
changed; discontent and strife and dishonesty would be ended. To
feel that we were doing work useful to others and pleasant to
ourselves, and that such work and its due reward _could_ not fail
us! What serious harm could happen to us then? And the price to be
paid for so making the world happy is Revolution."[38]
Are they willing to pay the price? Nora paid the price for her freedom
and paid it in full.
_She took nothing from strangers._
If they are unwilling to pay the price, what is there left for them save
the joyless sensuality and black despair of pessimism?
FOOTNOTES:
[7] "The Theory of Business Enterprise," Veblen, New York, 1904. Pages
351, 352. See also my article on Veblen the Revolutionist, International
Socialist Review, June, 1905, vol. V, page 726.
[8] Throughout this article "nihilism" is not used in its strict
technical or philosophical sense, but is used simply as a convenient
term by which to designate the aggregate of those aspects of Socialism
which, viewed from the standpoint of the existing regime, appear as
negative and destructive.
[9] "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Karl Marx,
New York, 1904. Pages 11, 12.
[10] "See Philosophical Essays," Joseph Dietzgen, Chicago, 1906. Pages
174 and 52.
[11] "Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History." Antonio
Labriola, Chicago, 1904. Pages 85, 86.
[12] l. c. pages 155-6, 158.
[13] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 86.
[14] "Socialism and Modern Science." Enrico Ferri, New York, 1904. Pages
60, 61.
[15] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 116.
[16] The reader will observe that Ferri reads into the Erfurt
pronouncement on religion (quoted in full above) a broader spirit of
tolerance than its words necessarily imply.
[17] See "The Theory of the Leisure Class." Thorstein Veblen, New York,
1905. Pages 287, 288.
[18] Marx in "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts Philosophie."
[19] "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." F.
Engels, Chicago, 1905. Page 99, and "Woman under Socialism," August
Bebel, New York, 1904. Page 127.
[20] Engels, "Origin of the Family, &c." Page 100.
[21] (Mrs. Parsons'.) The enlightened public opinion of to-day finds the
chief if not the only warrant for universal male suffrage in its being
an educational means. In this view women need the suffrage at present
even more than men.
[22] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery gave striking
expression to one phase of this subject at a recent discussion of the
London Sociological Society. She urged that _without economic
independence_ the individuality of woman could not exercise that natural
selective power in the choice of a mate which was probably a main factor
in the spiritual evolution of the race. _The American Journal of
Sociology_, Sept., 1905. Page 279.
[23] (LaMonte's.) No wonder such a startling hypothesis aroused the ire
of our clerical friends.
[24] (LaMonte's.) It is worthy of note that this suggestion of a serious
modification of marriage _under existing economic conditions_ comes
characteristically, not from a Socialist, but from the wife of a
Republican member of Congress and the daughter of a distinguished
financier.
[25] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Through the discovery of certain and innocuous
methods of preventing conception. The application of this knowledge
would have to be encouraged by public opinion in cases where conception
would result in a degenerate offspring. Public opinion would also have
to endorse the segregation of persons tainted with communicable sexual
disease.
[26] Berlin cablegram in the New York Sun of Dec. 7, 1906.
[27] "Origin of the Family, &c.," Pages 91, 92. See also Bebel, "Woman
under Socialism," Page 122, and elsewhere.
[28] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 208, 209.
[29] On the existence of organized societies without a co-ercive State,
see also, "Ancient Society." Lewis H. Morgan, Chicago, 1907.
[30] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 211, 212.
[31] "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific." F. Engels, Chicago, 1905.
Pages 76, 77.
[32] "The Economic Interpretation of History." Edwin R. A. Seligman, New
York, 1903. Pages 105 and 109.
[33] "The People's Marx." Gabriel Deville, New York, 1900. Pages 18, 19.
[34] Cartoonists are warned that this idea is protected by copyright.
[35] The other day I chanced upon a pamphlet by one Oscar Lovell Triggs
of Chicago. It bore the title, "William Morris, Craftsman, Writer and
Social Reformer." In turning over its pages I was somewhat startled to
read: "'Scientific' socialism he never understood or advocated." And
again further on my eye fell on this gem: "It is apparent that Morris's
'Socialism' is poetic and not scientific socialism." This pamphlet
should have a place of honor in every doll's library.
[36] In "Sartor Resartus."
[37] In fact, Professor Veblen has shown that for the last quarter of a
century the commonest cause of seasons of "ordinary prosperity" has been
war. See "The Theory of Business Enterprise." Pages 250-1.
[38] From "Art and Socialism," a pamphlet that is now rare.
THE BIOGENETIC LAW
It is very easy to go too far in drawing analogies between biology and
sociology. Society--as yet, at least--is not an organism in the sense
that a tree or a mammal is. It is quite true that with the perfect
organization and solidarity to which Socialists look forward the analogy
will be more complete than it is to-day, but for the present we must
always remember that, as the lawyers would say, "the cases are not on
all fours." If we bear these reservations in mind laws drawn from
natural science are often of the greatest aid in enabling us to
understand the phenomena of psychology and sociology.
One of the most helpful of these laws of science is the biogenetic law
which is always associated with the great name of Ernest Haeckel, its
most distinguished exponent. Doctor William Boelsche, in his book[39] on
Haeckel, uses, to illustrate this law, the familiar example of the
frog. The mother frog lays her eggs in the water. In due course a new
little frog develops from each of these eggs. But the object that
develops from them is altogether different from the adult frog. This
object is the familiar fish-like tadpole. It finally loses its tail,
develops legs, and becomes a frog. Doctor Boelsche discusses the matter
as follows:--
"There are reasons on every hand for believing that the frogs and
salamanders, which now stand higher in classification than the fishes,
were developed from the fishes in earlier ages in the course of
progressive evolution. Once upon a time they were fishes. If that is so,
the curious phenomenon we have been considering really means that each
young frog resembles its fish ancestors. In each case to-day the frog's
egg first produces the earlier or ancestral stage, the fish, it then
develops rapidly into a frog. In other words, the individual development
recapitulates an important chapter of the earlier history of the whole
race of frogs. Putting this in the form of a law, it runs: each new
individual must, in its development, pass rapidly through the form of
its parents' ancestors before it assumes the parent form itself. If a
new individual frog is to be developed and if the ancestors of the
whole frog stem were fishes, the first thing to develop from the frog's
egg will be a fish and it will only later assume the form of a frog.
"That is a simple and pictorial outline of what we mean when we speak of
the biogenetic law. We need, of course, much more than the one frog-fish
before we can erect it into a law. But we have only to look around us
and we find similar phenomena as common as pebbles.
"Let us bear in mind that evolution proceeded from certain amphibia to
the lizards and from these to the birds and mammals. That is a long
journey, but we have no alternative. If the amphibia (such as the frog
and the salamander) descend from the fishes, all the higher classes up
to man himself must also have done so. Hence the law must have
transmitted even to ourselves this ancestral form of the gill-breathing
fish.
"What a mad idea, many will say, that man should at one time be a
tadpole like the frog! And yet--there's no help in prayer, as Falstaff
said--even the human germ or embryo passes through a stage at which it
shows the outlines of gills on the throat just like a fish. It is the
same with the dog, the horse, the kangaroo, the duck mole, the bird,
the crocodile, the turtle, the lizard. They all have the same structure.
"Nor is this an isolated fact. From the fish was evolved the amphibian.
From this came the lizard. From the lizard came the bird. The lizard has
solid teeth in its mouth. The bird has no teeth in its beak. That is to
say, it has none to-day. But it had when it was a lizard. Here, then we
have an intermediate stage between the fish and the bird. We must expect
that the bird embryo in the egg will show some trace of it. As a matter
of fact, it does so. When we examine young parrots in the egg we find
that they have teeth in their mouth before the bill is formed. When the
fact was first discovered, the real intermediate form between the lizard
and the bird was not known. It was afterwards discovered at Solenhofen
in a fossil impression from the Jurassic period. This was the
archeopteryx, which had feathers like a real bird and yet had teeth in
its mouth like the lizard when it lived on earth. The instance is
instructive in two ways. In the first place it shows that we were quite
justified in drawing our conclusions as to the past from the bird's
embryonic form, even if the true transitional form between the lizard
and the bird were never discovered at all. In the second place, we see
in the young bird in the egg the reproduction of two consecutive
ancestral stages: one in the fish gills, the other in the lizard-like
teeth. Once the law is admitted, there can be nothing strange in this.
If one ancestral stage, that of the fish, is reproduced in the young
animal belonging to a higher group, why not several?--why not all of
them? No doubt, the ancestral series of the higher forms is of enormous
length. What an immense number of stages there must have been before the
fish! And then we have still the amphibian, the lizard, and the bird or
mammal, up to man.
"Why should not the law run: the whole ancestral series must be
reproduced in the development of each individual organism? We are now in
a position to see the whole bearing of Haeckel's idea."
In analogy with this, is it not true that every thinking man and woman
in the course of his or her development, epitomizes the history of human
thought? To be more specific, I take it that you, reader, are an
educated man of middle-class origin, and that you have been a socialist
for at least six months, and have, of course, read Engels' "Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific." Now, is it not a fact that your socialism has
developed from Utopia toward Science exactly along the lines Engels has
traced for the movement at large? So true was this in my case that for a
long time I was inclined to push the biogenetic law too far and to
conclude that every socialist had traveled the same road. I still think
the law holds here, but not in the narrow way I first applied it.
In the course of my work as an agitator (and socialist agitation is the
best School of Socialism) I met many sterling socialists who had never
been Utopians as I had. They were born fighters, so to speak, and had
been full of the class spirit, and fighting the capitalists in the
trade-union and elsewhere in every way they could think of, long before
they had ever heard of the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth. And
these men are among our best and most uncompromising socialists. Here
was a hard problem for me. I believed in my law, but it did not seen to
cover the cases of these militant socialists. I was long in solving the
problem, but I solved it at last.
Socialism has two aspects. As the most vital fact of modern life it is a
kinetic force. "Modern Socialism" in Engels' words "is, in its essence,
the direct product of the recognition on the one hand, of the class
antagonisms, existing in the society of to-day, between proprietors and
non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other
hand, of the anarchy existing in production." This is Socialism, the
most pregnant actuality in the palpitating life all about us. But, as
Engels pointed out, Socialism also has its ideological side. In this
sense it may correctly be called a theory, if we bear in mind that it is
the virile force of class-feeling, and not the theory, that is going to
effect the Social Revolution. Now, every individual socialist does in
his development conform to the biogenetic law; but the bourgeois
socialist is more apt to epitomize the history of Socialist theory,
while the proletarian socialist recapitulates the development of class
feeling as a kinetic force from blind and often unavailing hatred of the
rich to the fruitful class-consciousness of the Marxian Socialist. The
individual may combine these two processes in varying proportions; but
in broad outline the bourgeois may be expected to reproduce fairly
closely the history of Socialism, as a theory, while the proletarian
reproduces the history of Socialism, the great kinetic force.
While, from the standpoint of socialist theory, the statement of Doctor
Parkhurst and many others that "Christ was a Socialist" is a manifest
absurdity, the historian who traces back the history of Socialism, the
kinetic force, will surely be led by the chain of facts to James and
Jesus and Isaiah. For they were among those who gave most effective
expression to the class hatred which is the lineal ancestor of Marxian
Socialism viewed as a kinetic actuality. In this sense Jesus was one of
the founders of Socialism.
Here are a few extracts from these ancient sowers of the seeds of
discontent:
"The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people,
and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the
spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces
of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts."
"Wo unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field,
till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst
of the earth!" ISAIAH.
"Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter the
kingdom of heaven.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
of God."
"Wo unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour
widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye
shall receive the greater damnation." JESUS.
"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall
come upon you.
Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten.
Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a
witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye
have heaped treasure together for the last days.
Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields,
which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them
which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of
Sabaoth."
JAMES.
James would appear to have been somewhat more class-conscious than is
deemed decorous by most of our modern Christian Socialists. But Isaiah
and Jesus and James all give expression to precisely the same fierce
emotions that I have many a time seen blazing out of the eyes of poor
hopeless proletarians grouped around the soap-box; and it is the glory
of Modern Socialism that it has been able to transform this fierce class
hatred into intelligent class-consciousness which aims by loyalty to the
Proletariat to rescue the rich as well as the poor from the fatal curse
of economic inequality.
The bourgeois and the proletarian who come into the Socialist movement
both have tadpole tails to lose in the course of their development into
scientific socialists; but the tails are different. The proletarian has
to rid himself of his hatred of the rich as individuals. He has to learn
that Rockefeller, just as much as he himself, is a product of economic
conditions. After he once thoroughly learns this there will be no danger
of his being a Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous
reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of
animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in
utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to
toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can be a
fruitful idealist until he has become a materialist.
The reader of this volume will probably find himself able to agree
pretty fully with what I have said in "Science and Socialism." That is
because, when I wrote that, I had not fully gotten rid of my idealistic
tadpole tail. He will probably have more difficulty in assenting to the
theses of "The Nihilism of Socialism." That is because he has not yet
gotten rid of his tadpole tail. I do not wish to be understood as
speaking with contempt or depreciation of the tadpole tails. Without
their aid most of us bourgeois socialist frogs would never have been
able to get out of our old conservative shells. It was the utopianism of
our tails, in most cases, that first cracked the shell.
I should be sorry to have any reader interpret the materialism of "The
Nihilism of Socialism" into a disposition to deny or depreciate the
great and beneficent influence that Christianity has had in the past. I
should be greatly chagrined to be accused of irreverence in discussing
religion. Irreverence is ever a sign of a narrow intellectual horizon
and a limited vision. The scoffer is the product of the limited
knowledge characteristic of what Engels called "metaphysical
materialism." Unfortunately the mental development of many in the past
has been arrested at this Ingersoll-Voltaire stage. But with the growth
of Modern Socialism the tendency is for the metaphysical materialist to
_grow_ into socialist or dialectic materialism with its Hegelian
watchword, "Nothing is; every thing is becoming."
The socialist materialist realizes that the obsolescent ideals of
Christianity and the Family have played leading roles in the great drama
of human progress. It is impossible for him to speak lightly or
contemptuously of the ideals which have sustained and comforted, guided
and cheered countless hosts of his fellows through the long, dark ages
of Christian Faith. But he knows that those ages are past and that
present day adherence to the old ideals is atavistic and reactionary.
But none-the-less his mental attitude toward the old ideals is one of
reverent sympathy and, I had almost added, gratitude. This state of
feeling has found perfect expression in these lines by William Morris:
"They are gone--the lovely, the mighty, the hope of the ancient
Earth:
It shall labor and bear the burden as before that day of their
birth;
It shall groan in its blind abiding for the day that Sigurd hath
sped,
And the hour that Brynhild hath hastened, and the dawn that waketh
the dead;
It shall yearn, and be oft-times holpen, and forget their deeds no
more,
Till the new sun beams on Baldur, and the happy sea-less shore."
(From SIGURD the VOLSUNG.)
FOOTNOTE:
[39] Haeckel: His Life and Work. By William Boelsche. George W. Jacobs &
Company.
KISMET.
"Verily I say unto you. That there be some of them that stand here
which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of
God come with power." Mark, ix, 1.
The very close analogy between primitive Christianity and Modern
Socialism has often been pointed out both by materialists, such as
Enrico Ferri, and by Churchmen, such as the Reverend Doctor Hall.
We find in both the doctrine of the Advent. The primitive Christian
believed in all simplicity and sincerity that he should not taste death
until the Son of Man had come and established upon earth His kingdom of
justice, peace and brotherhood. The Marxian Socialist to-day is even
more sure that men and women now living will bear a part in the Social
Revolution which is to usher in the reign of Fellowship on earth. The
secret of the propaganda power of both movements is in the sincerity of
this conviction.
Just at this point we are often met with two queries, both of which
bear witness to the persistence of the utopian tadpole tails of the
questioners. The first question is: If the early Christians were sincere
and yet mistaken, may not the Socialists also be mistaken in their
doctrine of the inevitability of Socialism? The second question is: If
Socialism is inevitable--is coming anyhow--why do you Socialists vex
your souls agitating for it?