equality (the abolition of slavery); it triumphed, but it did not halt,
because to live is to struggle; the society of the middle ages struggled
for _religious_ equality; it won the battle, but it did not halt; and at
the end of the last century, it struggled for _political_ equality. Must
it now halt and remain stationary in the present state of progress?
To-day society struggles for _economic_ equality, not for an absolute
material equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of which
I have already spoken. And all the evidence enables us to foresee with
mathematical certainty that this victory will be won to give place to
new struggles and to new ideals among our descendants.
The successive changes in the subject-matter (or the ideals) of the
struggles for existence are accompanied by a progressive mitigation of
the methods of combat. Violent and muscular at first, the struggle is
becoming, more and more, pacific and intellectual, notwithstanding some
atavic recurrences of earlier methods or some psycho-pathological
manifestations of individual violence against society and of social
violence against individuals.
The remarkable work of Mr. Novicow[14] has recently given a signal
confirmation to my opinion, although Novicow has not taken the sexual
struggle into account. I will develop my demonstration more fully in
the chapter devoted to _l'avenir moral de l'humanité_ (the intellectual
future of humanity), in the second edition of _Socialismo e
Criminalità_.
For the moment I have sufficiently replied to the anti-socialist
objection, since I have shown not merely that the disproportion between
the number of births and the number of those who survive tends to
constantly diminish, but also that the "struggle for existence" itself
changes in its essence and grows milder in its processes at each
successive phase of the biological and social evolution.
Socialism may then insist that human conditions of existence ought to be
guaranteed to all men--in exchange for labor furnished to collective
society--without thereby contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival
of the victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian law
ought to be understood and applied in each of its varying
manifestations, in harmony with the law of human progress.
Socialism, scientifically understood, does not deny, and cannot deny,
that among mankind there are always some "losers" in the struggle for
existence.
This question is more directly connected with the relations which exist
between _socialism_ and _criminality_, since those who contend that the
struggle for existence is a law which does not apply to human society,
declare, accordingly, that _crime_ (an abnormal and anti-social form of
the struggle for life, just as _labor_ is its normal and social form) is
destined to disappear. Likewise they think they discover a certain
contradiction between socialism and the teachings of criminal
anthropology concerning the congenital criminal, though these teachings
are also deducted from Darwinism.[15]
I reserve this question for fuller treatment elsewhere. Here is in brief
my thought as a socialist and as a criminal anthropologist.
In the first place the school of scientific criminologists deal with
life as it now is--and undeniably it has the merit of having applied the
methods of experimental science to the study of criminal phenomena, of
having shown the hypocritical absurdity of modern penal systems based on
the notion of free-will and moral delinquency and resulting in the
system of cellular confinement, one of the mental aberrations of the
nineteenth century, as I have elsewhere qualified it. In its stead the
criminologists wish to substitute the simple segregation of individuals
who are not fitted for social life on account of pathological
conditions, congenital or acquired, permanent or transitory.
In the second place, to contend that socialism will cause the
disappearance of all forms of crime is to act upon the impulse of a
generous sentiment, but the contention is not supported by a rigorously
scientific observation of the facts.
The scientific school of criminology demonstrates that crime is a
natural and social phenomenon--like insanity and suicide--determined by
the abnormal, organic and psychological constitution of the delinquent
and by the influences of the physical and social environment. The
anthropological, physical and social factors, all, always, act
concurrently in the determination of all offences, the lightest as well
as the gravest--as, moreover, they do in the case of all other human
actions. What varies in the case of each delinquent and each offense, is
the decisive intensity of each order of factors.[16]
For instance, if the case in point is an assassination committed through
jealousy or hallucination, it is the anthropological factor which is the
most important, although nevertheless consideration must also be paid
to the physical environment and the social environment. If it is a
question, on the contrary, of crimes against property or even against
persons, committed by a riotous mob or induced by alcoholism, etc., it
is the social environment which becomes the preponderating factor,
though it is, notwithstanding, impossible to deny the influence of the
physical environment and of the anthropological factor.
We may repeat the same reasoning--in order to make a complete
examination of the objection brought against socialism in the name of
Darwinism--on the subject of the ordinary diseases; crime, moreover, is
a department of human pathology.
All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or not infectious, severe or
mild, are the product of the anthropological constitution of the
individual and of the influence of the physical and social environment.
The decisiveness of the personal conditions or of the environment varies
in the various diseases; phthisis or heart disease, for instance, depend
principally on the organic constitution of the individual, though it is
necessary to take the influence of the environment into account;
pellagra,[17] cholera, typhus, etc., on the contrary, depend principally
on the physical and social conditions of the environment. And so
phthisis makes its ravages even among well-to-do people, that is to say,
among persons well nourished and well housed, while it is the badly
nourished, that is to say, the poor, who furnish the greatest number of
victims to pellagra and cholera.
It is, consequently, evident that a socialist regime of collective
property which shall assure to every one human conditions of existence,
will largely diminish or possibly annihilate--aided by the scientific
discoveries and improvement in hygienic measures--the diseases which are
principally caused by the conditions of the environment, that is to say
by insufficient nourishment or by the want of protection from inclemency
of the weather; but we shall not witness the disappearance of the
diseases due to traumatic injuries, imprudence, pulmonary affections,
etc.
The same conclusions are valid regarding crime. If we suppress poverty
and the shocking inequality of economic conditions, hunger, acute and
chronic, will no longer serve as a stimulus to crime. Better nourishment
will bring about a physical and moral improvement. The abuses of power
and of wealth will disappear, and there will be a considerable
diminution in the number of crimes due to circumstances (_crimes
d'occasion_), crimes caused principally by the social environment. But
there are some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting crimes
against decency due to a pathological perversion of the sexual instinct,
homicides induced by epilepsy, thefts which result from a
psycho-pathological degeneration, etc.
For the same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused,
talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves
freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and
imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it
will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and
mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration
(ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders). Among
these preventive influences may be: a better economic and social
organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing in efficacy
given by experimental biology, and less and less frequent procreation,
by means of voluntary abstention, in cases of hereditary disease.
To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist regime--although
they will be infinitely fewer--there will always be some who will be
vanquished in the struggle for existence--these will be the victims of
weakness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of suicide.
We may then affirm that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the
struggle for existence. Socialism will, however, have this indisputable
advantage--the epidemic or endemic forms of human degeneracy will be
entirely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause--the
physical poverty and (its necessary consequence) the mental suffering of
the majority.
Then the struggle for existence, while remaining always the driving
power of the life of society, will assume forms less and less brutal and
more and more humane. It will become an intellectual struggle. Its ideal
of physiological and intellectual progress will constantly grow in
grandeur and sublimity when this progressive idealization of the ideal
shall be made possible by the guarantee to every one of daily bread for
the body and the mind.
The law of the "struggle for life" must not cause us to forget another
law of natural and social Darwinian evolution. It is true many
socialists have given to this latter law an excessive and exclusive
importance, just as some individuals have entirely neglected it. I refer
to the law of solidarity which knits together all the living beings of
one and the same species--for instance animals who live gregariously in
consequence of the abundance of the supply of their common food
(herbivorous animals)--or even of different species. When species thus
mutually aid each other to live they are called by naturalists
_symbiotic_ species, and instead of the struggle for life we have
co-operation for life.
It is incorrect to state that the struggle for life is the sole
sovereign law in Nature and society, just as it is false to contend that
this law is wholly inapplicable to human society. The real truth is that
even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which
grows progressively milder in its methods and more elevated in its
ideals. But operating concurrently with this we find a law, the
influence of which upon the social evolution constantly increases, the
law of solidarity or co-operation between living beings.
Even in animal societies mutual aid against the forces of Nature, or
against other animals is of constant occurrence, and this is carried
much further among human beings, even among savage tribes. One notes
this phenomenon especially in tribes which on account of the favorable
character of their environment, or because their subsistence is assured
and abundant, become of the industrial or peaceful type. The military or
warlike type which is unhappily predominant (on account of the
uncertainty and insufficiency of subsistence) among primitive mankind
and in reactionary phases of civilization, presents us with less
frequent examples of it. The industrial type constantly tends, moreover,
as Spencer has shown, to take the place of the warlike type.[18]
Confining ourselves to human society alone, we will say that, while in
the first stages of the social evolution the law of the struggle for
life takes precedence over the law of solidarity, with the growth within
the social organism of the division of labor which binds the various
parts of the social whole more closely together in inter-dependence, the
struggle for life grows milder and is metamorphosed, and the law of
co-operation or solidarity gains more and more both in efficiency and in
the range of its influence, and this is due to that fundamental reason
that Marx pointed out, and which constitutes his great scientific
discovery, the reason that in the one case the conditions of
existence--food especially--are not assured, and in the other case they
are.
In the lives of individuals as in the life of societies, when the means
of subsistence, that is to say, the physical basis of existence, are
assured, the law of solidarity takes precedence over the law of the
struggle for existence, and when they are not assured, the contrary is
true. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only permitted
but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion if the tribe inhabits an
island where food is scarce (for instance, in Polynesia), and they are
immoral and criminal acts on continents where the food supply is more
abundant and certain.[19]
Just so, in our present society, as the majority of individuals are not
sure of getting their daily bread, the struggle for life, or "free
competition," as the individualists call it, assumes more cruel and more
brutal forms.
Just as soon as through collective ownership every individual shall be
assured of fitting conditions of existence, the law of solidarity will
become preponderant.
When in a family financial affairs run smoothly and prosperously,
harmony and mutual good-will prevail; as soon as poverty makes its
appearance, discord and struggle ensue. Society as a whole shows us the
picture on a large scale. A better social organization will insure
universal harmony and mutual good-will.
This will be the achievement of socialism, and, to repeat, for this, the
fullest and most fruitful interpretation of the inexorable natural laws
discovered by Darwinism, we are indebted to socialism.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Such socialists are LABUSQUIERE, LANESSAU, LORIA And COLAJANNI.
[14] NOVICOW, _Les luttes entre sociétés, leurs phases successives_,
Paris, 1893. LERDA, _La lotta per la vita_, in _Pensiero italiano_,
Milan, Feb. and March, 1894.
[15] I regret that M. Loria, ordinarily so profound and acute, has here
been deceived by appearances. He has pointed out this pretended
contradiction in his "Economic Foundations of Society" (available in
English, Tr.). He has been completely answered, in the name of the
school of scientific criminal anthropology, by M. RIVIERI DE ROCCHI, _Il
diritto penale e un'opera recente di Loria in Scuola positiva nella
giurisprudenza penale_ of Feb. 15, 1894, and by M. LOMBROSO, in
_Archivio di psichiatria e scienza penali_, 1894, XIV, fasc. C.
[16] ENRICO FERRI, Sociologie criminelle (French translation), 1893,
Chaps. I. and II.
A recent work has just given scientific confirmation to our inductions:
FORSINARI DI VERCE, _Sulla criminalità e le vicende economiche d'Italia
dal 1873 al 1890_. Turin, 1894. The preface written by Lombroso
concludes in the following words: "We do not wish, therefore, to slight
or neglect the truth of the socialist movement, which is destined to
changed the current of modern European thought and action, and which
contends _ad majorem gloriam_ of its conclusions that _all_ criminality
depends on the influence of the economic environment. We also believe in
this doctrine, though we are unwilling and unable to accept the
erroneous conclusions drawn from it. However enthusiastic we may be, we
will never, in its honor, renounce the truth. We leave this useless
servility to the upholders of classical orthodoxy."
[17] A skin-disease endemic in Northern Italy. Tr.
[18] See in this connection the famous monographs of Kropotkin, _Mutual
aid among the savages_, in the "Nineteenth Century," April 9, 1891, and
_Among the barbarians_, "Nineteenth Century," January, 1892, and also
two recent articles signed: "Un Professeur," which appeared in the
_Revue Socialiste_, of Paris, May and June, 1894, under the title:
_Lutte ou accord pour la vie_.
[19] ENRICO FERRI, _Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_,
_Introduction_, _Turin_, 1894.
IV.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
The third and last part of the argument of Haeckel is correct if applied
solely to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but its starting
point is false if it is intended to apply it to the social domain and to
turn it into an objection against socialism.
It is said the struggle for existence assures the survival of the
fittest; it therefore causes an aristocratic, hierarchic gradation of
selected individuals--a continuous progress--and not the democratic
leveling of socialism.
Here again, let us begin by accurately ascertaining the nature of this
famous natural selection which results from the struggle for existence.
The expression which Haeckel uses and which, moreover, is in current
use, "survival of the best or of the best fitted," ought to be
corrected. We must suppress the adjective _best_. This is simply a
persisting relic of that teleology which used to see in Nature and
history a premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process of
continuous amelioration or progress.
Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal
evolution, has completely banished the notion of final causes from
modern scientific thought and from the interpretation of natural
phenomena. Evolution consists both of involution and dissolution. It
may be true, and indeed it is true, that by comparing the two extremes
of the path traversed by humanity we find that there has really been a
true progress, an improvement taking it all in all; but, in any case,
progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe has
said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retrogression, of
evolution and of dissolution.
Every cycle of evolution, in the individual life as in the collective
life, bears within it the germs of the corresponding cycle of
dissolution; and, inversely, the latter, by the decay of the form
already worn out, prepares in the eternal laboratory new evolutions and
new forms of life.
It is thus that in the world of human society every phase of
civilization bears within it and is constantly developing the germs of
its own dissolution from which issues a new phase of civilization--which
will be more or less different from its predecessor in geographical
situation and range--in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The
ancient hieratic civilizations of the Orient decay, and through their
dissolution they give birth to the Graeco-Roman world, which in turn is
followed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Central Europe;
it also decays and disintegrates through its own excesses, like the
preceding civilizations, and it is replaced by the bourgeois
civilization which has reached its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon
world. But it is already experiencing the first tremors of the fever of
dissolution, while from its womb there emerges and is developing the
socialist civilization which will flourish over a vaster domain than
that of any of the civilizations which have preceded it.[20]
Hence it is not correct to assert that the natural selection caused by
the struggle for existence assures the survival of the _best_; in fact,
it assures the survival of the best _fitted_.
This is a very great difference, alike in natural Darwinism and in
social Darwinism.
The struggle for existence necessarily causes the survival of the
individuals best fitted for the environment and the particular
historical period in which they live.
In the natural, biological domain, the free play of natural
(_cosmiques_) forces and conditions causes a progressive advance or
ascent of living forms, from the microbe up to Man.
In human society, on the contrary, that is to say, in the super-organic
evolution of Herbert Spencer, the intervention of other forces and the
occurrence of other conditions sometimes causes a retrograde selection
which always assures the survival of those who are best fitted for a
given environment at a given time, but the controlling principle of this
selection is in turn affected by the vicious conditions--if they are
vicious--of the environment.
Here we are dealing with the question of "social selection," or rather
"social selections," for there is more than one kind of social
selection. By starting from this idea--not clearly comprehended--some
writers, both socialists and non-socialists, have come to deny that the
Darwinian theories have any application to human society.
It is known, indeed, that in the contemporaneous civilized world natural
selection is injuriously interfered with by _military_ selection, by
_matrimonial_ selection, and, above all, by _economic_ selection.[21]
The temporary celibacy imposed upon soldiers certainly has a deplorable
effect upon the human race. It is the young men who on account of
comparatively poor physical constitutions are excused from military
service, who marry the first, while the healthier individuals are
condemned to a transitory sterility, and in the great cities run the
risk of contagion from syphilis which unfortunately has permanent
effects.
Marriage also, corrupted as it is in the existent society by economic
considerations, is ordinarily in practice a sort of retrogressive sexual
selection. Women who are true degenerates, but who have good dowries or
"prospects," readily find husbands on the marriage market, while the
most robust women of the people or of the middle class who have no
dowries are condemned to the sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to
surrender themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution.[22]
It is indisputable that the present economic conditions exercise an
influence upon all the social relations of men. The monopoly of wealth
assures to its possessor the victory in the struggle for existence. Rich
people, even though they are less robust, have longer lives than those
who are ill-fed. The day-and-night-work, under inhuman conditions,
imposed upon grown men, and the still more baleful labor imposed upon
women and children by modern capitalism causes a constant deterioration
in the biological conditions of the toiling masses.[23]
In addition to all these we must not forget the moral selection--which
is really immoral or retrograde--made at present by capitalism in its
struggle with the proletariat, and which favors the survival of those
with servile characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all
those who are strong in character, and all who do not seem disposed to
tamely submit to the yoke of the present economic order.[24]
The first impression which springs from the recognition of these facts
is that the Darwinian law of natural selection does not hold good in
human society--in short, is inapplicable to human society.
I have maintained, and I do maintain, on the contrary, in the first
place, that these various kinds of retrograde social selection are not
in contradiction with the Darwinian law, and that, moreover, they serve
as the material for an argument in favor of socialism. Nothing but
socialism, in fact, can make this inexorable law of natural selection
work more beneficently.
As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause the "survival of
the _best_," but simply the "survival of the _fittest_."
It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced by the divers kinds
of social selection and notably by the present economic organization
merely promote, indeed, and with growing efficiency, the survival of
those best fitted for this very economic organization.
If the victors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the
weakest, this does not mean that the Darwinian law does not hold good;
it means simply that the environment is corrupt (and corrupting), and
that those who survive are precisely those who are the fittest for this
corrupt environment.