relation between concept and conduct. In adaptation to our physical
environment, whether the original face of nature, or the latest
inventions in mechanics, we have material relations to deal with, and
have learned how.
Social relations are psychic. That a steel spade is better than a wooden
one is easily proven to the hand and eye. That a democracy is better
than a despotism is not so simple a proposition. The laws of the
hydraulic press are established by visible experiment; but the laws of
the distribution of wealth work in another medium, and are more
difficult to establish.
Society is a psychic condition; all social relations exist and grow in
the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests
absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them
change their minds, and he does not. As a human animal the despot is of
such size, weight, colour—he is a physical fact. As a Despot—he is but a
psychical fact—he exists as a Despot only in the minds of men. (This is
not Christian Science, but sociological science.) He is a concept, a
common concept, acting under which all men do thus and thus; outgrowing
which, they discard their Despot and adopt some other political belief.
In pre-social planes of evolution we do not find this factor in
determining conduct. Earlier forms of life reacted directly to
conditions and were modified by them. Man reacts to external conditions
as do other animals, but also he acts according to these special inner
conditions—his ideas. The power to form and retain concepts, and act
under their influence precisely as if they were facts, is what gives the
element of special progress and also of perversity to human conduct.
This internal environment, the general furnishing of a man’s brain, and
more particularly its basic concepts, do more to determine his action
than does external environment. His reaction to external conditions is
modified by these internal conditions; unless you know them you cannot
predict the result; unless you change them you cannot change the result.
Present the same conditions of shipwreck to sailors of different
nationalities, and see how widely they differ in conduct. A crew of
Chinamen, wild with terror or in a stupor of fatalism, show no
discipline or courage, they can scarce save themselves. A crew of the
Latin race, as was so lamentably shown in the wreck of the _Bourgogne_,
seek frantically to save themselves, at the expense of passengers,
women, and children. A crew of English or Americans show self-control,
resource, courage. They save first the women and children and the
passengers, last themselves. If there is no escape they preserve their
discipline to the last, as in the crew of the _Victoria_ going down to
death in perfect order, to the sound of music.
Even under that imminent pressure, the most direct modifying force in
nature, the fear of death—the action of the human being depends more
upon his character, that is, upon the sum of his concepts and consequent
habits, than on the present environment. Maternal instinct is one of the
strongest and most deep-seated in nature, but under the action of
certain religious concepts, mothers have given their babies to Moloch or
to the Ganges. The sex instinct is of incalculable force, but under the
action of certain concepts men and women have been known to stultify it
absolutely in voluntary celibacy.
An excellent proof of the power of concepts compared with conditions is
given in the heroism of William Phelps, the Indianapolis negro. Two
coloured men were at work in a great boiler, riveting. Some person by
accident turned on the steam. Hot steam as a material condition is quite
forcible, and the two men started for the ladder. But Phelps, who was
foremost, was arrested by a concept. He stepped back, saying to the
other, “You go first—you’re married!” Even in that comparatively
undeveloped brain, a group of concepts as to Duty and Honour were
stronger modifiers of conduct than boiling steam.
This power of directing action by concepts is at once our great
advantage and disadvantage. If the concepts are true, if they are
founded on fact and in accordance with law, they promote advantageous
conduct; if they are false, they promote disadvantageous conduct. Even
if once true, that is, as true as the brains of a given period, acting
on the knowledge of that period, could comprehend, they become
mischievous if not changed to suit the larger brains and larger
knowledge of a later time. As shown in the previous chapter, this is
precisely our difficulty. We are always being hindered by our
back-acting brain. Society progresses far more rigidly than our
recognition of it. The acts and facts of to-day continually diverge from
the concepts of yesterday.
History exhibits an endless series of man’s efforts to check his own
growth. Patient, persistent, ingenious, devout, he has laboured
incessantly to stay where he was—where he used to be; and is continually
astonished to find himself still in motion and going upward. In dealing
with the average human brain, these deterrent forces are constantly met;
the mere physical resistance to a new process of thought; and a
conscious, yes, and conscientious, resistance to a concept not in
accordance with the previous supply.
That common resistance to progress called prejudice is a physical brain
condition. Certain ideas are early formed, usually under strong
pressure, and no further action is taken on that subject, no admission
of new ideas, no examination of what is already there. This inactive
area dwindles in disuse, is ill-nourished because unused, becomes stiff
and feeble; and it is exceedingly difficult to make any fresh impression
on the neglected part. When another person does try to arouse thought in
that locality, to explain, convince, persuade, enlighten, he is
confronted with this thick, inert mass we call a prejudice.
Prejudices are stronger and more extensive among the ignorant, because
the brain is so little used in any part that the clogged areas spread
and thicken undisturbed for generations. The lumpy brain is transmitted
in turn to the young, and the false ideas promptly reinserted during
each child’s defenceless infancy, so that in time a formidable obstacle
to progress is developed, called race-prejudice. The more learned are
not absolutely free from prejudice, only relatively so in comparison
with the more ignorant. In whatever portion of the brain we do not
actively think, we find an accumulating tendency to prejudice.
A healthy and active brain, used to free movement and clear connection,
is affronted by any inert mass among its vital processes, as a
housekeeper is affronted by some mouldy heap in a disused closet and
cleans it out energetically. Old and familiar subjects are more heavily
clogged in this way than those more recent and less known, yet
prejudices will form, if allowed, even on the most recent of sciences. A
brain, like any other organ, must be frequently and fully used to keep
it healthy.
These natural tendencies of the brain, the inertia of habit and the
local stiffening of prejudice, would not be so injurious if left to the
healthy counteracting influence of equally natural tendencies to growth.
But the passive resistance has been rendered active and infinitely
multiplied in power by the conscious brain action which has so
mistakenly exalted its worst faculties, and choked the growth of its
best ones.
We very early made it the highest test of virtue to believe what we
could not understand; _i. e._, to hold by main force an unassimilated
idea, like a stone in the stomach; and an equal test of sin to presume
to examine this irritating mass.
The organic method is to relate each perception to those previously
received. The brain is of its own nature logical. Impressions made upon
it are sorted and stored in definite connection. This may be noted in
ordinary conversation, as when the hearer discovers that the stream of
talk he understood to concern Jane was really about Mary. “Oh!” says he,
with a sense of physical un-ease as of one who has stepped down where
there was no step, “I thought you were talking about Jane!” and there is
a pause while he hastily pulls out all those statements from group
“Jane” in his mind, and rearranges them in group “Mary.”
By this natural power of relating impressions, called consistency, we
are able to form a connected scheme of things and work rationally
thereunder. If any of these impressions are incorrect, it leads to
further error; and if the false impressions be those of main importance,
the whole fabric of mental association will be wrong.
Thus a belief in luck necessarily tends to underrate mere
knowledge—study, accuracy. The woman who says she “has no luck with her
bread” is not likely to go to a cooking school. Take the full extension
of this same concept about luck—chance—fate—and you get fatalism, the
logical consequence of which is seen in those backward and inert nations
where it rules. They may make good fighters, but never good
inventors—discoverers—creators; they endure life, but do not promote its
development. Religious history gives us plenty of “awful examples” of
the power of one radically wrong concept to fill the mind with error,
and the world with blood and tears.
Our disinclination to accept a statement which does not agree with those
previously held is the brain’s physical rejection of an impression
claiming to belong to a certain group, but finding no connection there.
If forced to accept it as incontrovertibly true, we must then throw out
all the others and wholly rearrange that group of concepts. This is
where we say “Ah! that alters the case,” when some patent fact forces us
to “change our minds.”
If forced to accept facts indisputably true, but as far as we can see
irreconcilable, there can be no mental action whatever on that subject.
They are held by force in the brain, but do not grow there and do not
lead to any further grouping of concepts. This state of mind is familiar
to the guessers of charades. “My first is this,” “my second is that”—“my
whole is so and so”—and the brain seizes these detached assertions and
seeks for some possible arrangement in which they will “make sense” as
we call it—or else “gives it up.” If the riddle has been misstated, it
is impossible to guess it. And this is the first great difficulty in
what has been so long called the riddle of human life—it has been
misstated. No wonder we have had to give it up.
The value of that proper relation of ideas we call consistency is this:
A brain with all its concepts in natural sequence and order transmits
energy in a smooth, continuous stream. The brain with inconsistent
concepts, lodged in thought-tight compartments, loses energy in
cross-currents, contradictions, _culs-de-sac_; and the resultant conduct
is weak and uncertain. Each root idea tends to modify conduct its way;
and if the root ideas do not agree neither does the conduct. Often it
results in mere inhibition—we see this act to contradict that—cannot
reconcile them—and so do nothing. The basic concepts of early man were
wrong. His observation was necessarily narrow, his deductions most
partial, his whole position one of repeated errors, as is so generally
true of all extreme youth. These errors of the undeveloped brain would
have given way in course of normal development to better thinking, as
the child’s missteps lead on to better walking, but for the ill-founded
Grandpa theory.
The traditional superiority of the past, on the authority of statements
open to no examination and no criticism, rapidly developed into ancestor
worship and that whole great retroactive tendency of thought which is
still so heavily dominant among us. In it we have deified inertia, as
best instanced in China. Assuming that the crude theories of humanity’s
youth were true, the brain tried to correlate them; to form some
connected scheme of life based on such premisses. This was functionally
impossible. No healthy brain could “make sense” of such postulates as
these. As a consequence, normal brain action on such lines ceased.
Abnormal brain action developed freely, its extreme being what we call
fanaticism. Those who attended to the maintenance of ancient concepts
soon found that any increase of mental activity led to the unsettling of
their supposed truth; and so, with the best of intentions, used every
possible means to discourage such activity.
And as the average mind found itself forbidden to think on certain of
the most important lines in life, and unable to think logically on such
bases as were allowed, it simply accepted them as “unthinkable” and so
admitted in the common stock of ideas these disconnected heaps of
arbitrary statement. Our natural tendency to relate and connect our
percepts and concepts in logical sequence, so as to form a rational
collection agreeing with itself and with our behaviour, has been not
only neglected but prevented; and this arbitrary disconnection of mental
processes has been so thorough and universal that we have grown to
expect what we call “inconsistency” in human action.
Yet consistency is one of the brain’s most essential laws. We expect
things to be consistent, we demand it. Talk disconnectedly to the most
ordinary person and he soon cries, “What on earth are you talking about?
I don’t see what that has to do with it!” And we all know how busy our
brains are, trying to make out to ourselves that our own conduct is
consistent. We are naturally consistent, but the unbroken centuries of
violent insertion and compulsory retention of irreconcilable statements
in the young brain have perverted natural action and trained us in an
artificial inconsistency.
This enforced maintenance of older concepts has for its result this: At
any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to
antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached
with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth. And as our conscious
acts are modified by those ancient concepts, our acts are necessarily
behind the times. Changing conditions constantly demand revision of the
conduct of society, but if that conduct—so far as it is consciously
ours—is based on unchanging ideas, there must be conflict. There has
been, always. Take some well-known historic instance, as the French
Revolution.
Here was a long-established social relation, that of feudalism, lineal
descendant of still remoter patriarchal grouping, producing in the
conscious mind a highly developed concept or group of concepts,
described in the phrase, “_l’ancien régime_.” Meanwhile the conditions
which made feudalism an advantageous form of social relation changed
intrinsically. The natural basis in fact was gone, but the idea remained
firmly intrenched in the mind. Acting under the idea, feudalism was
maintained, but the change in conditions proceeded irresistibly.
Some few there were whose minds consciously perceived the change in
conditions, formed new concepts, and sought to transmit those concepts.
But this effort was on the one hand too limited in range, and on the
other too vague and varied in form, to really bring about the change, or
wisely guide it. The action of the cruel facts on a no longer normal
social relation, resulted in a vast reaction, quite uncontrollable by
the newer ideals.
The endeavour to reconstruct society on the theory of the “social
contract,” or any other then advanced, naturally failed, as the
endeavour to maintain an outworn system failed, and the carnage and
confusion, the partial reaction to the old basis, the slow, irregular,
fumbling progress toward a better state were the results, as we have
seen. That conduct which led to the improvement of the social system in
France was resultant from conditions and not from concepts.
In our own recent experience with the system of human slavery we have
another marked instance, both in the irresistible trend of progressive
conditions which brought the change and in the splendid effort to alter
those governing concepts on which the system rested in the minds of men.
In the abolition movement we have the conscious human effort to alter
conscious conduct. The physical extension of our national boundaries and
the mechanical extension of economic processes was the unconscious
pressure of conditions which also modified conduct. And against both
stood the vast weight of brain inertia, and the unending array of false
concepts, dating back to the historic period when slavery was a useful
relation, and buttressing itself with the crudest quotations from
ancient religions.
The power of the freely developing brain to keep pace with new social
relations and proclaim newly perceived truth is offset by the tremendous
undertow of the undeveloped brain and its power to compel acceptance of
ancient errors.
In a long-range view of social progress it would seem that in early
times the conscious mind had a very small share in our development, and
that conditions did almost all, even while man fondly thought that he
did; but as society grows and the brain grows in spite of itself, the
balance of power swings steadily toward conscious conduct. A broader
religion and a fuller education make the formation and transmission of
ideas continually easier; and personal freedom so accustoms us to handle
our own conduct that the power of humanity to consciously improve its
world is now a large and growing factor in social evolution.
This carries its visible proof in the increasing activity of our
interest in social phenomena, and of our efforts to alleviate the
distress of humanity and better those conditions within our reach. We
have the power and the desire to help, and the main obstacle to a swift
and orderly improvement is in the brain; both in its passive ignorance
and prejudice and its active maintenance of mistaken or long-outgrown
ideas.
The position here taken, that the human brain has not kept pace with the
development of society, and has acted as a deterrent rather than an
assistant to our growth, may be questioned from the point of view of the
evolutionist. Natural selection, he will assert, develops in each animal
a brain capacity suited to his needs, and speedily removes him from the
field of contest if he does not manifest it; man in the struggle for
existence must similarly develop the kind and amount of brain that is
necessary to him, and if he does not he will perish. Therefore the human
brain to-day is all that can be expected, and it is useless to talk of
any wholesale and sudden improvement in social conditions from that
source.
This would be true if man were a creature whose existence was
conditioned upon his own individual activities. While the human animal
remained at that stage of development where he was directly reached by
the consequences of his own personal conduct, his brain power was
cultivated in this simple way; if he was not smart enough to live, he
died, and was well out of the procession.
But so soon as any social relation was established, when our gains and
losses were fused in collective action, this method of brain culture was
no longer reliable. Once firmly established as a living species through
the process of agriculture, the degree of intelligence necessary to the
maintenance of this process was sufficient to sustain life, while the
further development of intelligence rested on other activities less
instantly important to the life process, and not so sharply brought home
in personal consequences.
The individual hunter, if he failed to show the grade of ability
necessary to supply his wants, promptly died of his own inferiority, but
man, in social relation, is maintained by the collective effort,
prospering or suffering with his society, and his pooling of abilities
is so far-reaching and hopelessly intermixed that it is impossible to
pick out the consequences of one man’s action and pile them neatly on
his own head. Naturally, selection acts on the society rather than the
man, and must needs act slowly and with an appearance of injustice.
Incipient errors are not met by the sharp reproof of individual
consequence, and wide ranges of eccentricity are possible, so that they
do not touch those basic economic processes of society on which all our
lives rest.
Gross mistakes in agriculture would be soon punished by the extinction
of the mistaken society, or errors in mechanics, in navigation, in any
part of our work which deals with the primal necessities of life, but
errors in astronomy, in religion, or education do not result in such
immediate destruction.
Thus the human intellect on the lower stages shows a certain solid
average ability, built up by natural selection acting on societies as it
acts on individuals, but the human intellect in its higher grades is
painfully irregular and defective, making our higher social
manifestations as questionable, uncertain, and often mischievous as our
lower ones are clearly good.
Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to plough and sow, to kill
wolves and steer a ship, but in later social development he has been as
open to destruction as any poor beast below him. In the long lesson of
history we may see him again and again killed down to the level of his
intelligence. Nations have been conquered, civilisations destroyed,
kings decapitated, but the peasant survived.
The problems we have really solved do not have to be done over again;
the downfall of past societies is but the wiping off the slate of a mass
of elaborate failures. “Rule it all out down to that first line and
begin again!” says the teacher.
We are quite clever at simple examples in units, but very weak on
fractions. We could see how one man affected another in the short radius
of a limited early group, but the long-range effects of our widening
interhuman activities have been beyond us, and we are slowly working out
in heavy centuries those problems of liberty and justice, of honesty and
love, the mastery of which is as essential to our further progress as
was the early mastery of metallurgy and mechanics.
A mistake in short and simple addition is easily seen, but as the
examples grow more complex the errors are more difficult to trace.
They spread wider and last longer, and by the time a society begins to
meet the punishment due to the behaviour of its misguided constituents,
those worthies have long since died in the odour of sanctity and a new
generation is piously producing the incipient errors which will destroy
its grandchildren. The vigour of our basic life processes sustains us
through wide reaches of experiments and mistakes.
A flourishing society can maintain more fools than any savage period
could afford.
We have to do in this book with several of the basic errors in our
common concepts as to economics. We shall see how different are the
facts of our economic life to-day from that inner world of concepts we
carry in the brain and always take for facts while they remain there.
The world is, to us, the sum of our concepts concerning it; and while
the real facts relentlessly affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly
importance because they modify our conduct.
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most
primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the
most absurd ideas a brain can hold. They do not fit the facts; they are
not provable as true, but very promptly provable as false; they do not
agree with such true ideas as we have, nor even with each other; but all
this gives no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ
has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to
hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and
large active lies.