WHAT is environment?
When we speak of a man's environment we mean his surroundings, his
experiences; all that he sees, hears, feels, and learns from the instant
that the lamp of life is kindled to the instant when the light goes out.
By environment we mean everything that develops or modifies the child or
the man for good or for ill.
We mean his mother's milk; the home, and the state of life into which he
was born. We mean the nurse who suckles him, the children he plays with,
the school he learns in, the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the
food he eats. We mean the games he plays, the work he does, the sights
he sees, the sounds he hears. We mean the girls he loves, the woman he
marries, the children he rears, the wages he earns. We mean the sickness
that tries him, the griefs that sear him, the friends who aid and the
enemies who wound him. We mean all his hopes and fears, his victories
and defeats; his faiths and his disillusionments. We mean all the harm
he does, and all the help he gives; all the ideals that beckon him,
all the temptations that lure him; all his weepings and laughter, his
kissings and cursings, his lucky hits and unlucky blunders: everything
he does and suffers under the sun.
I go into all this detail because we must remember that everything
that happens to a man, everything that influences him, is a part of his
environment.
It is a common mistake to think of environment in a narrow sense, as
though environment implied no more than poverty or riches. Everything
outside our skin belongs to our environment.
Let us think of it again. Education is environment; religion is
environment; business and politics are environment; all the ideals,
conventions, and prejudices of race and class are environment;
literature, science, and the Press are environment; music, history, and
sport are environment; beauty and ugliness are environment; example and
precept are environment; war and travel and commerce are environment;
sunshine and ozone, honour and dishonour, failure and success, are
environment; love is environment.
I stress and multiply examples because the power of environment is so
tremendous that we can hardly over-rate its importance.
A child is not born with a conscience; but with the rudiments of a
conscience: the materials from which a conscience may or may not be
developed--by environment.
A child is not born with capacities, but only with potentialities, or
possibilities, for good or evil, which may or may not be developed--by
environment.
A child is born absolutely without knowledge. Every atom of knowledge he
gets must be got from his environment.
Every faculty of body or of mind grows stronger with use and weaker with
disuse. This is as true of the reason and the will as of the muscles.
The sailor has better sight than the townsman, because his eyes get
better exercise. The blind have sharper ears than ours, because they
depend more on their hearing.
Exercise of the mind "alters the arrangement of the grey matter of the
brain," and so alters the morals, the memory, and the reasoning powers.
Just as dumb-bells, rowing, or delving develop the muscles, thought,
study, and conversation develop the brain.
And everything that changes, or develops, muscle or brain is a part of
our environment.
There must be bounds to the powers of environment, but no man has yet
discovered the limits, and few have dared to place them wide enough.
But the scope of environment is undoubtedly so great, as I shall try to
prove, that, be the heredity what it may, environment has power to save
or damn.
Let us think what it means to be born quite without knowledge. Let us
think what it means to owe all that we learn to environment.
So it is. Were it not for the action of environment, for the help
of other men and women, we should live and die as animals; without
morality, without decency, without the use of tools, or arms, or arts,
or letters. We should be savages, or superior kinds of apes. That we are
civilised and cultured men and women we owe to the fellow-creatures
who gave into our infant hands the key to the stored-up knowledge and
experience of the race.
The main difference between the Europe of to-day and the Europe of the
old Stone Age is one of knowledge: that is, of environment
Suppose that a child of Twentieth-Century parents could be born into the
environment of an earlier century. Would he grow up with the ideas of
to-day, or with the ideas of those who taught and trained him? Most
certainly he would fall into step with his environment: he would think
with those with whom he lived, and from whom he learnt.
Born into ancient Athens, he would look upon slavery as a quite natural
and proper thing born into ancient Scandinavia, he would grow up a
Viking, would worship Thor and Odin, and would adopt piracy as the only
profession for a man of honour born into the environment of the Spanish
prime, he would think it a righteous act to roast heretics or to
break Lutherans on the wheel. Born into the fanatical environment of
Sixteenth-Century France, he would have no scruples against assisting in
the holy massacre of St. Bartholomew's.
Born a Turk, he would believe the Koran, and accept polygamy and
slavery. Born a Red Indian, he would scalp his slain or wounded enemies,
and torture his prisoners. Born amongst cannibals, he would devour his
aged relatives, and his faded wives, and most of the foes made captive
to his bow and spear.
Suppose a child of modern English family could be born into the
environment of Fourteenth-Century England!
He would surely believe in the Roman Catholic religion, in a personal
devil, and in a hell of everlasting fire.
He would believe that the sun goes round the world, and that any person
who thought otherwise was a child of the devil, and ought to be broiled
piously and slowly at a fire of green faggots.
He would accept slave-dealing, witch-burning, the Star Chamber, the
whipping-post, the pillory, and the forcing of evidence by torture, as
comfortably as we now accept the cat-o'-nine-tails, the silent system,
and the gallows.
He would look upon education, sanitation, and science as black magic and
defiance of God.
He would never have learnt from Copernicus, Newton, Harvey, Bacon,
Spencer, Darwin, Edison, or Pasteur.
He would be ignorant of Shakespeare, Cromwell, the French Revolution,
the Emancipation of Slaves, the Factory Acts, and the Household
Franchise.
He would never have heard of electricity, steam, cheap books, the free
Press, the School Board, the Fabian Society.
He would never have heard of the Australian Colonies, of the Indian
Empire, of the United States of America, nor of Buonaparte, George
Washington, Nelson, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln, nor Florence
Nightingale.
Not one of these great men, not one of these great things would form a
part of his environment.
Nor may we lightly claim that he, himself, would be of a more highly
developed type, that his propensities would be more humane, his nature
more refined.
For we must not overlook such examples as Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc,
Chaucer, Mallory, and Sir Thomas More.
We must not forget that the refined John Wesley believed in
witch-burning, that the refined Jeremy Taylor thought all the millions
born in heathen darkness would be doomed to eternal torment.
Nor must we forget that many educated, cultured, and well-meaning
Europeans and Americans to-day believe that unbaptised babies, and
free-thinkers, and unrepentant Christians will lie shrieking forever in
a lake of fire and brimstone.
We must not forget that it is now, in the Twentieth Century, that I,
an Englishman, am writing this book to plead that men and women,
our brothers and sisters, should not be hated, degraded, whipped,
imprisoned, hanged, and everlastingly damned for being more ignorant and
less fortunate than others, their fellows.
Taken straight from the cradle and brought up by brutes, a child would
be scarcely human. Taken straight from the cradle and brought up amongst
savages, the child must be a savage.
Taken straight from the cradle and brought up amongst thieves, the child
must be a thief.
Every child is born destitute of knowledge, and every child is born with
propensities that may make for evil or for good.
And the men and women amongst whom the child is born and reared are the
sole source from which he can get knowledge.
And the men and women amongst whom the child is born and reared are the
sole means by which his propensities may be restrained from evil and
developed for good.
The child's character, then, his development for good or evil, depends
upon his treatment by his fellow-creatures.
His propensities depend upon his ancestors.
That is to say, a child must inevitably grow up and become that which
his ancestors and his fellow-creatures make him.
That is to say, that a man "is a creature of heredity and environment."
He is what he is made by a certain kind of environment acting upon a
certain kind of heredity.
He does not choose his ancestors: he does not choose his environment.
How, then, can he be blamed if his ancestors give to him a bad heredity,
or if his fellow-creatures give to him a bad environment?
Should we blame a bramble for yielding no strawberries, or a privet bush
for bearing no chrysanthemums?
Should we blame a rose tree for running wild in a jungle, or for
languishing in the shadow of great elms?
There are no figs on thistles, because the heredity of the thistle does
not breed figs.
And the lily pines, and bears leaves only, in darkness and a hostile
soil, because the conditions are against it.
The breed of the rose or the fig is its heredity: the soil and the
sunshine, or the darkness and the cold, and the gardener's care or
neglect, are its environment.
Let any one who under-rates the power of environment exercise his
imagination for a minute.
Suppose he had never learnt to read! Suppose he had never learnt to
talk! Suppose he had never learnt to speak the truth, to control his
temper, to keep his word, to be courteous to women, to value life!
Now, he had nothing of this when he was born. He brought no knowledge
of any kind into the world with him. He had to be _taught_ to read, to
speak, to be honest, to be courteous; and the teaching was part of his
environment.
And suppose none had cared to teach him good. Suppose, instead, he had
been taught to lie and to steal, to hate and to fight, to gamble and to
swear! What manner of man would he have been?
He would have been that which his environment had made him.
And would he have been to blame? Would it have been his fault that he
was born amongst thieves? Would it have been his fault that he had never
heard good counsel, but had been drilled and trained to evil?
But the objector may say that as he got older and knew better he could
mend his ways.
And it is really necessary, strange as it may seem, to point out that he
never _could_ "know better," unless some person _taught_ him better. And
the teaching him to "know better" would be a change in his environment:
it would be a part of his environment, for which he himself would
deserve no credit.
The point is that, since he is born destitute of knowledge, he never
could know good unless _taught_ good by some other person. And that this
other person would be outside himself, and part of his environment.
Now, how could the ignorant child be blamed if some power outside
himself teaches him evil, or how can he be praised if some power outside
himself teaches him good?
But he would have a conscience? He would be born with the rudiments of a
conscience. But what his conscience should become, what things it would
hold as wrong, would depend wholly upon the teaching he got from those
who formed part of his environment.
In a cannibal environment he would have a cannibal conscience; in a
Catholic environment a Catholic conscience; in a piratical environment
a pirate's conscience. But of that more in its due place. Let us now
examine some of the effects of environment.