HUMANITY.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The wanton disposition of young children, like the mischievousness of
our next relatives, the tree climbing half-men of the tropical forests,
has often been mistaken for natural malevolence, but is rather due to
an excess of misdirected vital energy. In seeking a vent for the
exuberance of that energy, a frolicsome child, like a playful monkey,
is apt to become destructive, merely because destruction is easier than
construction. Mischievousness, in the sense of cruelty and gratuitous
malice, is, however, by no means a prominent character-trait of monkeys
or normal boys. The most wayward of all known species of fourhanders
are undoubtedly the African baboons; yet a long study of their natural
disposition, both in freedom and captivity, has convinced me that even
their fits of passionate wrath stop short of actual cruelty, and are,
in fact, almost invariably intended as a protest against acts of
injustice or violence. At Sidi Ramath, Algiers, I saw a number of
babuinos hasten to the aid of a shrieking child, who had hurt his hand
in the gear of an ox-cart, and whose cries they evidently attributed to
the brutality of his companions. The sight of a wounded
fellow-creature, a crippled rat, a mangled bird, a dying rabbit, never
fails to throw my pet Chacma-baboon into a paroxysm of shrieking
excitement, and within reach of her chain she will act upon the impulse
of compassion by trying to redress the injuries of her playmates or
rescuing the victim of a dog-fight. The fierce mandril, with resources
of self-defense that would defy the attack of a panther, is
nevertheless so averse to an aggressive exertion of that strength that
menagerie-keepers can trust him to spare, if not protect, the smallest
species of his distant relatives, as well as such petulant
fellow-captives as young dogs and raccoons. The hunters of the Orinoco
Valley can attract fourhanders of all species by imitating the peculiar
long-drawn wail of a young capuchin-monkey. At the sound of that cry
spider-monkeys, stentors, and tamarins will hasten up from all parts of
the forest, attracted less by curiosity than the evident desire to
succor a distressed fellow-creature.
That instinct of compassion still manifests itself in the disposition
of children and primitive nations. I have seen youngsters of five or
six years gasp in anguish at sight of a dying dog, or turn with horror
from the bloody scenes of a butcher-shop. Sir Henry Stamford describes
the frantic excitement of a Hindoo village at the discovery of a number
of buckshot-riddled hanuman apes; and that sympathy is not limited to
the nearest relatives of the human species, for in the suburbs of
Benares the gardener of a British resident was pursued with howls and
execrations for having killed a young Roussette—some sort of
frugivorous bat. The mob repeatedly cornered the malefactor, and with
shrieks of indignation shook the mangled creature before his face. The
traveler Busbequius mentions a riot in a Turkish hamlet where a
Christian boy came near being mobbed for “gagging a long-billed fowl.”
“Man’s inhumanity to man,” as practiced by their foreign visitors,
inspired the South Sea Islanders with a nameless horror. A sailor of
the British ship Endeavor having been sentenced to be punished for some
act of rudeness toward the natives of the Society Islands, the natives
themselves interceded with loud cries for mercy, and seemed, indeed, to
settle their own quarrels by arbitration, or, at worst, boy-fashion, by
wrestling and pummeling each other, and then shaking hands again. A
similar scene was witnessed in Prince Baryatinski’s camp in the eastern
Caucasus, where a poor mountaineer offered to renounce his claim to a
number of stolen sheep, rather than see the thief subjected to the
barbarous penalties of a Russian court-martial. In Mandingo Land Mungo
Park was mistaken for a Portuguese slave-trader, nevertheless the pity
of his destitute condition gradually overcame the hostility of the
natives; so much, indeed, that they volunteered to relieve his wants by
joint contributions from their own rather scanty store of comestibles.
Even among the bigoted peasants of northern Italy the butcheries of the
Holy Inquisition at first provoked a fierce insurrection in favor of
the condemned heretics. In India and Siam some two hundred million of
our fellow-men are so unable to overcome their horror of blood-shed
that in time of famine they have frequently preferred to starve to
death rather than satisfy their hunger by the slaughter of a
fellow-creature.
A diet of flesh food has, indeed, a decided influence in developing
those truculent propensities which our moralists have often been misled
to ascribe to the promptings of a normal instinct. In our North
American Indians, for instance, a nearly exclusively carnivorous diet
has engendered all the propensities of a carnivorous beast; but the
next relatives of those sanguinary nomads, the agricultural Indios of
Mexico and Central America, are about as mild-natured as their
Hindostan fellow-vegetarians, while Science and tradition agree in
contrasting the customs of flesh-eating hunters and herders with the
frugal habits of our earliest ancestors. The primitive instincts of the
human soul are clearly averse to cruelty.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The apologists of Supernaturalism have frequently insisted on the
distinction between naturally advantageous and naturally thankless
virtues. Under the former head they would, for instance, include
Temperance and Perseverance; under the latter, charity and the love of
enemies—thus arguing for the necessity of assuming an other-worldly
chance of recompense for the unselfish merits of a true saint.
But a humane disposition is, on the whole, quite natural enough to
dispense with the promise of preternatural rewards. Good-will begets
good-will; benevolence is the basis of friendship, while malice begets
ill-will, and is apt to betray its claws in spite of the soft-gloved
disguise of polite formalities.
A humane master is better served than a merciless despot; his
dependants identify his interests with their own; his family, his
tenants, his very cattle, thrive as in an atmosphere of sunshine, while
habitual unkindness blights every blessing and cancels all merits.
Mental ability seems rather to aggravate the odium of a cruel
disposition, while, on the other hand, we are almost ashamed to notice
the mental or physical shortcomings of a kind-hearted man. Intellectual
attainments have never reconciled the world to the demerits of a
spiteful despot. Tiberius, the most abhorred of all the imperial
monsters of tyrant-ridden Rome, was, next to Julian, mentally perhaps
the most gifted of Cæsar’s successors. Philip the Second was the most
astute, as well as the most powerful, sovereign of his century, but his
cold-blooded inhumanity prevented him from ever becoming a popular
hero. Henry the Eighth’s services to the cause of Protestantism did not
save him from the execrations of his Protestant subjects. Pedro el
Cruel was probably the most enlightened man of his nation, a friend of
science in an age of universal ignorance, a protector of Jews and
Moriscos in an age of universal bigotry. But his delight in refinements
of cruelty made him so hateful that at the first opportunity his
Trinitarian and Unitarian subjects joined in a revolt which the tyrant
tried in vain to appease by promises of the most liberal reforms.
Tolerance, properly speaking, is nothing but common humanity, applied
to the settlement of religious controversies; the essential principle
of civilization is humanity applied to the daily commerce of neighbors
and neighboring nations. Superior humanity alone has founded the
prestige of more than one potentially inferior nation.
A benevolent disposition, moreover, finds its own reward in the fact
that the order of the visible universe is, in the main, founded on a
benevolent plan. The system of Nature, with all the apparent ferity of
her destructive moods, tends on the whole to insure the greatest
possible happiness of the greatest possible number, and the natural
inclination of the benevolent man is therefore in sympathy, as it were,
with the current of cosmic tendencies; his mind is in tune with the
harmony of Nature.
C.—PERVERSION.
The unparalleled inhumanities of the medieval bigots seem to form a
strange contrast with the alleged humanitarian precepts of the Galilean
prophet, but were nevertheless the inevitable consequence of a doctrine
aimed at the suppression of the natural instincts of the human soul.
“Whatever is pleasant is wrong,” was the shibboleth of a creed that has
been justly defined as a “worship of sorrow,” and the practice of the
self-denying virtues was valued chiefly in proportion to their
afflictiveness. Herbert Spencer, in his “Data of Ethics,” has
demonstrated with absolutely conclusive logic that the universal
practice of altruism (i.e., the subordination of personal to alien
interests) would lead to social bankruptcy, but the clear recognition
of that result would have been only an additional motive in
recommending its promotion to the world-renouncing fanaticism of the
Galilean Buddhist. Secular advantages were more than foreign to the
purposes of his reform. “Divest yourself of your earthly possessions,”
was the sum of his advice to salvation-seeking inquirers. “Renounce!
renounce!”—not in order to benefit your worldly-minded neighbor, but to
mortify your own worldliness. Abandon the path of earthly happiness—not
in order to make room for the crowding multitude, but in order to guide
your own steps into the path of other-worldliness. Disinterestedness,
in the Christian sense, meant the renunciation of all earthly interests
whatever; and the same moralist who commands his disciple to love his
enemies also bids him hate his father, mother, sister, brother, and
friends.
“Seek everything that can alienate you from the love of earth; avoid
everything that can rekindle that love,” would be at once the rationale
and the summary of the Galilean doctrine. Shun pleasure, welcome
sorrow; hate your friends, love your enemies. It might seem as if
precepts of that sort were in no danger of being followed too
literally. We can love only lovely things. We cannot help finding
hatefulness hateful. We cannot relish bitterness. We might as well be
told to still our hunger with icicles or cool our thirst with fire. But
even in its ultimate tendencies the religion of Antinaturalism was
anything but a religion of love. The suppression of physical
enjoyments, the war against freedom, against health and reason, was not
apt to increase the sum of earthly happiness; and the sense of
tolerance—nay, the instinct of common humanity and justice—was
systematically blunted by the worship of a god to whom our ancestors
for thirty generations were taught to ascribe what Feuerbach justly
calls “a monstrous system of favoritism: arbitrary grace for a few
children of luck, and millions foredoomed to eternal damnation.” “The
exponents of that dogma,” says Lecky, “attributed to the creator acts
of injustice and barbarity which it would be absolutely impossible for
the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most monstrous
excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, acts which are,
in fact, considerably worse than any that theologians have attributed
to the devil.”
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
The Millennium of Madness, as a modern Freethinker calls the thousand
years’ reign of the Galilean superstition, might with equal justice be
called the Age of Inhumanity. “The greatest possible misery of the
greatest possible number” seems to have been the motto of the medieval
dogmatists, and, short of any plan involving the total destruction of
the human race, it seems, indeed, not easy to imagine a more effective
system for crowding the greatest conceivable amount of suffering into a
given space of time. In the pursuit of their chimeras fanatics have
never shrunk from sacrificing the happiness of their fellow-men; class
interests have made patricians callous to the sufferings of the poor,
and revolted pariahs to the fate of the rich, and in the party warfare
of antiquity cruelty was merely a means for the attainment of enlarged
opportunities of enjoyment. But to the maniacs of the Middle Ages
inhumanity seems to have become an end as well as a means. They
inflicted misery for its own sake; they waged a persistent war against
happiness itself, and their sect-founders vied in the suppression of
sympathy with every natural instinct of the human heart. “If any sect,”
says Ludwig Boerne, “should ever take it into their heads to worship
the devil in his distinctive qualities, and devote themselves to the
promotion of human misery in all its forms, the catechism of such a
religion could be found ready-made in the code of several monastic
colleges.”
Dissenters were murdered, and converts, under the full control of their
spiritual taskmasters, were doomed to a slower, but hardly less cruel,
death by wearing out their lives with penance and renunciation.
“According to that code,” says Henry Buckle, “all the natural
affections, all social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous
instincts of the human heart were sinful.... The clergy looked on all
comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they were comforts.
The great object of life was to be in a state of constant affliction.
Whatever pleased the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not what a
man liked; the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever was
natural was wrong.”
The dogma of salvation by faith seemed to make the enforced propagation
of that faith a sacred duty, and soon drenched the face of the earth
with the blood of pagans and dissenters; the worship of sorrow drove
thousands to devote themselves and their children to a life of
perpetual penance; and the insanities of the hideous superstition
culminated in that dogma of eternal hell tortures that deprived its
converts of the last solace of nature, and barred the last gate of
escape from the horrors of existence.
E.—REFORM.
The skeptic Holbach, and several of his philosophical friends, directed
the keenest shafts of their logic against the doctrine of eternal
punishment, and never wearied of repeating that the belief in a
merciless God naturally tends to fill the world with merciless bigots.
“How insignificant,” they argued, “the occasional sufferings of a
transient life on earth must appear to the converts of John Calvin, who
held that about nine-tenths of the human race are foredoomed to an
eternity of nameless and hopeless tortures. How absurd they must deem
the complaints of a life-weary wretch, who, ten to one, will soon look
back to the comparative bliss of that life as to the happiness of a
lost Eden.” The Universalists are fond of enlarging on the moral of
that theme, yet from a wider point of view their objections might be
extended to the entire doctrine of other-worldliness, since Holbach’s
argument might find its exact analogue in the dogma of post mortem
compensation. “His soul will be the gainer,” thought the Crusader who
had demonstrated the dangers of unbelief by smashing a Moorish skull,
“and if he should die his spirit will enter the gates of the New
Jerusalem.” “Oh, the ingratitude,” actually said a priest of the
Spanish-American land robbers, “the ingratitude of the wretches who
grudge us the territories of their base earthly kingdoms and forget
that our gospel offers them a passport to the glorious kingdom of
heaven!” “The ingratitude!” repeats the modern pharisee, “the base
ingratitude of those factory children who grudge me the privileges of
my position, and clamor for an increase of wages to gratify their
worldly desires. Consumption? Hunger? Frost? should not the rich
promises of the gospel compensate such temporal inconveniences, and
have I not founded a Sabbath-school to save them from the lusts of
their unregenerate souls?”
Only a few months ago a Chinese philosopher acquainted us with the
verdict of his countrymen on the “gospel of love” that sends its
missionaries on ships loaded with brandy and opium, and escorted by
armadas for the demolition of seaports that might refuse to admit the
cargo of spirituous and spiritual poisons.
Secularism, the religion of Nature, should teach our brethren that
their highest physical and their highest moral welfare can be only
conjointly attained, and that cramping misery stunts the soul, as well
as the body of its victim. It should preach the solidarity of human
interests which prevents the oppressor from enjoying the fruits of his
inhumanity, and makes the curses of his dependents, nay, even the mute
misery of his starving cattle, react on the happiness of a cruel
master. It should expose the business methods of the humanitarians who
propose to silence the clamors of their famished brethren with
consecrated wafers and drafts on the bank of the New Jerusalem.
The Christian duty of transferring our love from our friends to our
enemies may be one of those virtues that have to await their recompense
in a mysterious hereafter, but natural humanity can hope to find its
reward on this side of the grave.