English and American schools. It is the other version, a very tenable
one, that is not allowed to be taught anywhere. No American historian,
however American, could be more positive that George III was wrong and
George Washington right than all the English historians are. What would
show real independence of mind would be to state the case for George
III. And there was a very real case for George III. I will not go into
it here, but every honest historical student will agree with me. Perhaps
the fairest way of putting it is this: that it was not really a case of
a government resolved on tyranny, but of a nation resolved on
independence. But if we sympathize with national independence, surely
there is something to be said for intellectual independence. And the
professor is far from being really sympathetic with intellectual
independence. He is so far from it that he wants both sides forced to
tell the same story, apparently whether they like it or not. As a fact,
they do agree; but apparently in any case the professor would coerce
them into agreement. And his extraordinary reason for this course is
that history should aim at truth.
But suppose I do aim at truth, and sincerely come to the conclusion that
North was a patriot and Burke a sophist? How would the professor prevent
it being “possible” for me to teach what I think is true? The truth is
that it has never occurred to these progressive professors that there
could be any view of any question except their own, or what they call
their own. For it is only a tradition they have been taught; a
tradition as narrow as North’s and now nearly as old.
But the professor goes on to say something much more interesting and
curious. After saying very truly that the past, the Plantagenet period
for instance, should not be made a mere matter of kings and battles, he
goes on to say, “What we want to see is the textbook of history and the
teaching of it brought more closely into touch with the realities of the
modern world--the world of the division of labour between different
countries, of the application of science to industry, of the shortening
of the spaces of the earth by improvements in transport--and with all
that these realities imply.”
Now it seems to me obvious that what we want is exactly the opposite. A
child can see these realities of the modern world, whether he is taught
any history or not. He will see them whether you want him to or not. As
he grows up he will learn by experience all about the improvements in
transport, its acceleration by Zeppelins and its interruption by
submarines. He will realize for himself that the modern world is the
world of the division of labour between nations. For he will know that
England has been turned into an isolated workshop with hardly food
enough for a fortnight, with the potential alternative of surrender or
starvation or eating nails. He will by the light of nature know all
about the application of science to industry--in war by chemical
analyses of poison gas, in peace by bright little pamphlets about phossy
jaw. He will know “all that these realities imply,” about which also
there is very much that might be said. But even if we consider only the
somewhat cheerier products of the division of labour and the
application of science to industry, there is quite as little need
laboriously to instruct the infant in what he can see for himself. A
child has a very pure and poetical love of machinery, a love in which
there is nothing in the least evil or materialistic. But it is hardly
necessary to devote years to proving to him that motor-cars have been
invented, as he can see them going by in the street. It is not necessary
to read up in the British Museum the details with which to demonstrate
that there are really such things as tube stations or motor-bicycles.
The child can see these things everywhere, and the real danger obviously
is that he should think they had existed always. The danger is that he
should know nothing of humanity, except as it is under these special and
sometimes cramping conditions of scientific industry and the division of
labour. It is that he should be unable to imagine any civilization
without tube stations, whatever its substitutes in the way of temples or
trophies of war. It is that he should see man as a sort of
cyclist-centaur, inseparable from his motor-bike. In short, the whole
danger of historical ignorance is that he may be as limited to his local
circumstances as a savage on an island, or a provincial in a decayed
town, or a historical professor in the League of Nations Union.
The whole object of history is to enlarge experience by imagination. And
this sort of history would enlarge neither imagination nor experience.
The whole object of history is to make us realize that humanity could be
great and glorious, under conditions quite different and even contrary
to our own. It is to teach us that men could achieve most profitable
labour without our own division of labour. It is to teach us that men
could be industrious without being industrial. It is to make us
understand that there might be a world in which there was far less
improvement in the transport for visiting various places, and there
might still be a very great improvement in the places visited.
The professor is perfectly right in saying that a history of the
Plantagenet period ought not merely to record the presence of kings and
armies. But what ought it to record? Is it to record only the absence of
motors and electric lights? Should we say nothing of the Plantagenet
period except that it did _not_ have motor-bikes? I venture to suggest
that we might record the presence of some things which the whole people
had then and have not got now, such as the guilds, the great popular
universities, the use of the common lands, the fraternity of the common
creed.
I fear the professor will not follow me into matters so disturbing to
his perfect picture of progress. But, in conclusion, there is one little
question I should like to ask him, and it is this. If you cannot see
Man, divine and democratic, under the disguises of all the centuries,
why on earth should you suppose you will be able to see him under the
disguises of all the nations and tribes? If the Dark Ages must be as
dark as they look, why are the black men not so black as they are
painted? If I may feel supercilious towards a Chaldean, why not towards
a Chinaman? If I may despise a Roman for not having a steam-plough, why
not a Russian for not wanting a steam-plough? If scientific industry is
the supreme historical test, it divides us as much from backward
peoples as from bygone peoples. It divides even European peoples from
each other. And if that be the test, why bother to join the League of
Nations Union?
The Evolution of Slaves
A very curious and interesting thing has recently happened in America.
There has suddenly appeared an organized political attack on Darwinian
Evolution, led by an old demagogue appealing entirely to the ideals of
democracy. I mean no discredit to Mr. Bryan in calling him a demagogue;
for I should have been far more heartily on his side in the days when he
was a demagogue than in the days when he was a diplomatist. He was a
much wiser man when he refused to allow the financiers to crucify
humanity on a golden cross, than when he consented to allow the Kaiser
to crucify it on an iron cross. The movement is religious and therefore
popular; but it is Protestant and therefore provincial. Its opponents,
the old guard of materialism, will of course do their best to represent
it as something like the village that voted the earth was flat. But
there is one sharp difference, which is the point of the whole position.
If an ignorant man went about saying that the earth was flat, the
scientific man would promptly and confidently answer, “Oh, nonsense; of
course it’s round.” He might even condescend to give the real reasons,
which I believe are quite different from the current ones. But when the
private citizen rushes wild-eyed down the streets of Heliopolis, Neb.,
calling out “Have you heard the news? Darwin’s wrong!” the scientific
man does not say, “Oh, nonsense, of course he’s right.” He says
tremulously, “Not entirely wrong; surely not entirely wrong”; and we can
draw our conclusions. But I believe myself there is a deeper and more
democratic force behind this reaction; and I think it worthy of further
study.
I recently heard a debate on that American system of class privilege
which we call for convenience Prohibition; and I was very much amused by
one argument that was advanced in its favour. A very intelligent young
American, a Rhodes scholar from Oxford, advanced the thesis that
Prohibition was not a violation of liberty because, if it were fully
established, its victims would never know what they had lost. If a
generation of total abstainers could once grow up “without the desire”
for drink, they would not be conscious of any restraint on their
freedom. The argument is ingenious and promising and opens up a wide
field of application. Thus, if I happen to find it convenient to keep
miners or other proletarians permanently underground, I have only to
make sure that all their babies are born in pitch darkness and they will
certainly never imagine the light of day. My action therefore will not
only be just and benevolent in itself, but will obviously involve not
even the faintest infringement of the ideal of freedom. Or if I merely
kidnap all the babies from all the mothers in the country, it is obvious
that the infants will not remember their mothers, and in that sense will
not miss them. There is therefore no reason why I should not adopt this
course; and even if I hide the babies from their mothers by locking them
up in boxes, I shall not be violating the principle of liberty; because
the babies will not understand what I have done. Or, to take a
comparison even closer in many ways, there is an ordinary social problem
like dress. I come to the conclusion that ladies spend too much money on
dress, that it is a social evil because families suffer from the
extravagance, and rivalries and seductions distract the state. I
therefore decree, on the lines of Prohibitionist logic, that the law
shall forbid anybody to wear any clothes at all. Nobody who grows up
naked, according to this theory, will ever have any regrets for beauty
or dignity or decency; and therefore will have suffered no loss. I
cannot sufficiently express my admiration for the extraordinary
simplicity which can smooth the path of Prussianism with this large,
elementary and satisfactory principle. So long as we tyrannize enough we
are not tyrannizing at all; and so long as we steal enough our victims
will never know what has been stolen. Seriously, everybody knows that
the rich planning the oppression of the poor will never lack a sycophant
to act as a sophist. But I never dreamed that I should live to enjoy so
crude and stark and startling a sophistry as this.
But the last example I gave, that of the normality of clothes or of
nakedness, has a further relevance in this connexion. What is really at
the back of the minds of the people who say these strange things is one
very simple error. They imagine that the drinking of fermented liquor
has been an artifice and a luxury; something odd like the strange
self-indulgences praised by the decadent poets. This is simply an
accident of the ignorance of history and humanity. Drinking fermented
liquor is not a fashion like wearing a green carnation. It is a habit
like wearing clothes. It is one of the habits that are indeed man’s
second nature; if indeed they are not his first nature. Wine is purest
and healthiest in the highest civilization, just as clothing is most
complete in the highest civilization. But there is nothing to show that
the savage has not shed the clothes of a higher civilization, retaining
only the ornaments; as a good many fashionable people in our own
civilization seem to be doing now. And there is nothing to show that
ruder races who brew their “native beers” in Africa or Polynesia have
not lost the art of brewing something better; just as Prohibitionist
America, before our very eyes, has left off brewing Christian beer and
taken to drinking fermented wood-pulp and methylated spirit. The very
example of modern America falling from better to baser drinks, under a
dismal taboo, is a perfect model of the way in which civilizations have
relapsed into savagery, and produced the savages we know. But the point
is that drink, like dress, is the rule; and the exceptions only prove
the rule. There are individuals who for personal and particular reasons
are right to drink no liquor but water; just as there are individuals
who have to stay in bed, and wear no clothes but bedclothes. There have
been sects of Moslems and there have been sects of Adamites. There have
been, as I have said, barbarized peoples fallen so far from civilization
as to wear grotesque garments or none, or to drink bad beer or none. But
nobody has ever seen Primitive Man, naked and drinking water; he is a
myth of the modern mythologists. Man, as Aristotle saw long ago, is an
abnormal animal whose nature it is to be civilized. In so far as he ever
becomes uncivilized he becomes unnatural, and even artificial.
Now at the back of all this, of course, the real difference is
religious. I only take this one case of what is called temperance for
the sake of the wider philosophy that underlies it. When my young
American friend talked of the next generation growing up without the
desire for “alcohol,” he had at the back of his mind a certain idea. It
is the idea which I have just seen expressed by another American in a
high-brow article, in the words: “Evolution does not stand still. We are
not finished. The world is not finished.” What it means is that the
nature of man can be modified to suit the convenience of particular men;
and this would certainly be very convenient. If the rich man wants the
miners to live underground, he may really breed for it a new race as
blind as bats and owls. If he finds it cheaper to run the schools and
school inspections on Adamite principles, he can hope to produce
Adamites not merely as a sect but as a species. And the same will be
true of teetotalism or vegetarianism; nature, having evolved man who is
an ale-drinking animal, may now evolve a super-man, or a sub-man, who
shall be a water-drinking animal. Having risen from a monkey who eats
nuts to a man who eats mutton, he may rise yet higher by eating nuts
again.
Thinking people, of course, know that all that is nonsense. They know
there is no such constant flux of adaption. So far from saying that the
evolution of man has not finished, they will point out that (as far as
we know) it has not begun. In all the five thousand years of recorded
history, and in all the prehistoric indications before it, there is not
a shadow or suspicion of movement or change in the human biological
type. Even evolution, let alone natural selection, is only a conjecture
about things unknown, compared with the broad daylight of things known
in all those thousands of years. The only difference is that evolution
seems a probable conjecture, and natural selection is on the face of it
an extravagantly improbable one. All this, which is obvious to thinking
people, has at last become obvious even to the most unthinking; and
_that_ is the meaning of the attack on Darwinism in America and the
battle of Mr. Bryan against the Missing Link. The secret is out. The
obscurantism of the professors is over. Those of us who have humbly
hammered on this point from time to time suddenly find ourselves
hammering on an open door. For these changes almost always come
suddenly; which is alone enough to show that human history at least has
never been merely an evolution. As Darwinism came with a rush, so
Anti-Darwinism has come with a rush; and just as people who accepted
evolution could not be held back from embracing natural selection, so it
is likely enough that many, who now see reason to reject natural
selection, will not be stopped in their course till they have also
rejected evolution. They will merely have a vague but angry conviction
that the professors have been kidding them, as they had before that the
parsons had been kidding them. But behind all this there will be a very
real moral and religious reaction; the meaning of which is what I have
described in this article. It is the profound popular impression that
scientific materialism, at the end of its hundred years, is found to
have been used chiefly for the oppression of the people. Of this the
most evident example is that evolution itself can be offered as
something able to evolve a people who can be oppressed. As in the
argument about Prohibition, it will offer to breed slaves; to produce a
new race indifferent to its rights. Morally the argument is quite
indistinguishable from justifying assassination by promising to bring up
children as suicides, who will prefer to be poisoned.
Is Darwin Dead?
Mr. Ernest Newman, that lively and acute critic, once rebuked the
arrogance of those of us who confessed that we knew nothing about music.
Why he should suppose we are arrogant about it, if he does think so, I
cannot quite understand. I, for one, am fully conscious of my
inferiority to him and others through this deficiency; nor is it, alas,
the only deficiency. I have sometimes thought it would be wholesome for
anybody who has succeeded pretty well by some trick of some trade, to
have a huge notice board or diagram hung in front of him all day;
showing exactly where he stood in all the other crafts and competitions
of mankind. Thus the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, as it rose
from the paper on which an entirely new type of villanelle had just
sprung into being, would encounter the disconcerting facts and figures
about his suitability to be a professional acrobat or a pearl-diver. On
the other hand, the radiant victor in the great International Egg and
Spoon Race can see at a glance how very far down he stands, so to speak,
in the queue of those waiting for the post of Astronomer Royal. Most of
us have at least one or two gaps in our general culture and information;
and sometimes whole departments of knowledge are practically hidden from
whole generations and classes of mankind. There is something very
defective and disproportionate about even the ideal culture of a modern
man. It may be that Mr. Newman is deeply read in that mediæval theology
which is still the subconscious basis of most morality; but it is also
possible that he is not. He may have at his fingers’ ends that military
art which has often turned the fortunes of history; but he may not. He
would be none the less a highly cultivated gentleman, if he did not. Yet
the mystical and the military mind have been at least as pivotal and
practical in history as the musical mind. I can admire them all, but I
have no claim to possess any of them.
But my ignorance of music happens to assist me with a convenient
metaphor in the more controversial matter of my ignorance of science. I
once made some remarks about the decline of Darwinism, in a review of
the Wells “Outline of History.” This aroused rather excited criticism;
but one comparatively calm critic challenged what really interests me in
the matter: he said that my conundrums about the wing of the bat and
similar things “could easily be solved on purely Darwinian lines by any
competent zoologist, or even by one so incompetent as myself.” The
conundrum in question, of course, concerns the survival value of
features in their unfinished state. If a thing can fly it may survive,
and if it has a wing it may fly; but if it cannot fly with half a wing,
why should it survive with half a wing? Yet Darwinism pre-supposes that
numberless generations could survive before one generation could fly.
Now it is quite true that I am not even an incompetent zoologist; and
that my critic is more competent than I, if only in the mere fact of
being a zoologist at all. Nevertheless, I adhere to my opinion, and do
so for a reason that seems to me worthy of some little consideration. I
do it because this does happen to be exactly one of those questions on
which, as it seems to me, the independent critic has really a right to
check the specialist. For it is a larger question of logic, and not a
smaller question of fact. It is like the difficulty of believing that a
halfpenny can fall head or tail a hundred times running; which has
nothing to do with the numismatic value of the coin. It is like the
difficulty of believing that a mere tax could make a loaf cheaper, which
has nothing to do with the agrarian craft of growing corn. There is a
general tide of reason flowing against such improbabilities, even if
they are possibilities; they would still be exceptions, and reason would
be on the side of the rule. And whatever the details of natural history,
this thing is against the very nature of things.