This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we
are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the
danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions.
This again seems attainable in at least two ways.
The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal
attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral
reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian
ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand
years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any
rate cease to cut his own throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it
is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the
paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek
have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters
have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the
greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest
opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological
fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would
appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild
beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth
trying.
I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But
the palæolithic Yahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two
thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved
him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains
enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the
gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at
the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government
might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our
air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘_God help
us!_’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice
would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]
It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower
way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social
organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to
be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane
despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular
advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he
might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to
come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford
to wait.
Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical
scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings,
and perverted into an instrument to consolidate their power. He thinks
that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as
proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C] and that the result
would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity
and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business
man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.
This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics
to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in
small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing
Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.
But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything
like the social momentum necessary to carry through any radical
reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful,
enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that
the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual
situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our
social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands
that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect
to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows
what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they
would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our
present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the
primitive Yahoo. In either case, the process will be gradual, and its
success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at
the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here,
overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing
over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in
general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better
things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the
great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we
know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall
always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray,
trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to
retrace our steps when we have made a false one.
The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and
reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize,
and will regard the _toleration_ of differences of opinion as among
the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For
as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that
_perfection_ may be postulated, provision has always to be made for
the _improvement_ of the social order. It can never be accepted as
absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle,
of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only
good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves
superior: under changed conditions they may become inferior, and may
fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into
something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order
must be _plastic_, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must
always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of
turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely
adoption of such novelties.
But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait
till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise
spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas
have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved.
Society cannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so
organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally
necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations,
whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be
valuable.
Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure is
_essentially experimental_, and all that this implies. We do not know,
at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or
of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to
expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion
that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are
undesirable, and that no good can come of coddling and cultivating
them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the
intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the
former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types.
How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we
can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail
experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’
and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because
if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall
realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course
that yields unsatisfactory results.
It is really one of the great advantages of eugenics that it cannot
proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by
the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which
will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public.
For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail,
and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus
the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about
unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of
tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of
social forces.