THE upholders of the doctrine of free will commonly fall into the error
of considering heredity and environment apart from each other.
Father Adderley, in a lecture given at Saltley, told his hearers that
"all our great scientists agree that people have the power to overcome
their hereditary tendencies." Perhaps: but they can only get that power
from environment; and if the environment is bad they will not get that
power.
But the most surprising example of this mental squinting is afforded by
the Rev. C. A. Hall, who may be said to squint with both eyes. For, in
a lecture given at Paisley, this gentleman first shows that we
can overcome our heredity, and then shows that we can overcome our
environment And yet it never occurred to him that to prove the freedom
of the will we must be able to overcome our heredity and environment
together.
Mr. Hall's argument may be stated thus: By the aid of environment we can
overcome our heredity; by the aid of heredity, or of good environment we
can overcome bad environment; therefore we are superior to heredity and
environment.
It is like saying: by means of natural intelligence and a good teacher
I can become a good scholar; by means of natural intelligence and a good
teacher I can correct the errors of a bad teacher. Therefore I do not
depend upon intelligence nor teaching for my knowledge.
But I have answered Messrs. Adderley and Hall in my chapter on
self-control.
An example of a similar error is afforded by a clergyman who wrote to me
from Warrington. He said:
You can never hope to improve the social environment until you
_persuade_ men that they can rise superior to their circumstances.
The men are to be "persuaded" to rise. And what is that persuasion,
but a part of their environment? And if men are "persuaded" to try, and
succeed, to whom is the victory due? Is it not due to the "persuasion"?
Of course it is. And the persuasion came from outside themselves, and is
part of their environment.
The same clergyman said, "If heredity and environment have made the
individuals of whom society is made up, heredity and environment have
made society itself," and asked me how I could logically accuse society
of injuring any one.
A strange question based upon a misunderstanding. The criminal injures
society, society injures the criminal.
I accuse both of injurious action. I _blame_ neither. I say both are
that which heredity and environment made them. I say neither can help
it. But I say that both can be _taught_ to help it, and that _both_
should be taught to help it. Is there anything illogical in that?
This brings me to the Rev. Charles Marson, a very clever and witty man,
who is hopelessly muddled over the simple matter. In "The Religious
Doubts of Democracy," Mr. Marson says:
Now, as reform starts by a feeling and conviction of blame, and cannot
start at all unless it can say: "This is wrong. It might be right. This
ought not to be and is, and need not be" so, if the answer is: "But this
was as mathematically fixed at its birth as the path of a planet in
its orbit," the poor reformed can only say, "Sorry I spoke"; and if
he speaks again it will be to laugh at the Clarion for wasting ink in
blaming orbits which are mathematically fixed.
Indeed, if I were a burglar, I would invest part of my swag in endowing
Determinists to pour arguments and ridicule upon Christian magistrates
and criminal codes, with their active and irritating blame. Certainly,
if I were Lord Rackrent, I should invite my anti-reform friends, the
Determinists, to dinner, take them to the opera, and send them round to
address the Socialists, at my expense.
Mr. Blatchford, being anxious to fight against the doctrine of sin,
builds a fatalist rampart, looks over the top, and says: "Can man sin
against God? His actions are fixed." We walk round behind him and say:
"Can man sin against man? Can social systems sin against man?" And the
very rampart of fatalism he has erected hinders him from escaping from a
withering fire, except by backing into obscurantism and ultra-Toryism.
This is the same error, differently stated. If man cannot be blamed,
society cannot be blamed: therefore everything must remain as it is. I
often wonder where the clergy learn their logic.
Men cannot be blamed: society cannot be blamed. But both can be
_altered_: by environment. That is to say, if heredity and environment
have endowed some man with reason and knowledge and inclination for the
task, that man may be able to improve society, or the individual, by
_teaching_ one or both. And the teaching will be environment.
We cannot, as Mr. Marson pointed out in his article, "blame"
environment; but we can attribute evils to the action of environment,
and we can change the environment, always provided that heredity and
environment have endowed us with the needful knowledge and brains for
the purpose.
Let us look at the facts. There is a very terrible disease called
diphtheria. It is caused by a small fungoid bacillus, and it has killed
myriads of children, and caused much suffering and grief.
Do we blame "the vegetable bacillus"? No. We cannot blame a bacillus.
So I say we cannot blame diphtheria for killing children. No sane person
ever suggested blame in such a case. But do we take any the less trouble
to fight against diphtheria?
We do not "blame" a rat for eating our chickens, nor a boat for
capsizing in a breeze, nor a lunatic for setting fire to a house, nor a
shark for eating a sailor. But has any sane person ever suggested that
we should not try to keep rats out of the henhouse, nor to ballast a
faulty boat, nor restrain a madman from playing with fire, nor to rescue
a sailor from a shark?
Mr. Marson asks ironically whether a social system "can be naughty,"
whether a social system may be praised logically, blamed logically, and
held responsible logically.
I reply that a social system cannot be logically "blamed," any more than
a shark, a disease, a fool can be logically blamed. But a social system
may be approved or disapproved, and may be altered and abolished.
We cannot "blame" a man's environment, in the strict meaning of the
word. But we may attribute a man's crime, or shame, or ruin to his
environment.
We do not blame prussic acid for being lethal; but we do not allow
chemists to sell it in large quantities to every casual stranger. _Why?_
Because it is _poison_.
Well, the influenza bacillus is poison, falsehood is poison, vice is
poison, greed and vanity and cruelty are poison; and it behooves us to
destroy those poisons, and so to improve our social system and the
environment of our fellow-men.
We come now to the idea that to teach men that all blame is unjust is to
encourage them to do wrong. This idea is expressed, with characteristic
clumsiness and obscurity, by Bishop Butler, in that monument of loose
thinking and foggy writing, "The Analogy of Religion."
What Butler wanted to say, and tried to say, in more than 800 words of
his irritating style, is simply that a child brought up to believe that
praise and blame were unjust, would be a plague to all about him, and
would probably come to the gallows. The reader will find it in Chapter
VI. of "The Analogy."
Now, I quite believe that if the matter had to be explained to a child
by Bishop Butler the effect would be fatal, because the poor bishop did
not understand it himself, and was not good at explaining things he did
understand. But the child would be in no danger if he were instructed
by a man who knew what he was talking about, and was able to say what
he knew in plain words and clear sentences. And I can say from my
experience of children that I find them readier of apprehension, and
clearer thinkers than I have found most clergymen.
As I have dealt with this argument in my chapter on self-control I need
not go over the ground again. But I may say that we should teach a child
that some things are right and some are wrong, and why they are right
and why they are wrong; and that he was not to blame others because they
either do not know any better, or are unable to do any better, and we
should teach him that one learns to be good as one learns to write or
to swim, and that the harder one tries the better one succeeds. And
we should feel quite sure that the child would be just as good as
his heredity and our training made him; and as for his coming to the
gallows, if _all_ children were taught on our system _there would be no
gallows to come to_, and very few looking for that sacred instrument,
the sight of which convinced Gulliver that he was "once more in a
Christian country."
Is it necessary for me to answer the charge of presumption brought
against me by Dr. Aked? Dr. Aked says I am presumptuous because I
deny the belief of great and holy men of past ages. He says that the
agreement of Cheyne and Perowne in praise of the fifty-first Psalm is
typical of the world's consensus of opinion. And this Psalm is the cry
of a broken heart for deliverance from sin. Dr. Aked goes on as follows:
To-day we are asked to believe that all this is a delusion.
We are told that man could not and cannot sin against God. We are
invited to believe that the men of every age and nation whose hearts
have bled in sorrow over accomplished sin, who have cried in anguish
of soul for deliverance from the body of this death, whose joy in the
realisation of divine forgiveness has flowed in strains of immortal joy
over countless generations, were ignorant and foolish persons, inventing
their sufferings and imagining their solace, and needing some journalist
of the twentieth century to teach them that no man could really sin
against God! We are, apparently, expected to believe that the author
of this Psalm and the author of the "second Isaiah," that Paul and
Augustine, the author of "Thomas A'Kempis," and John Bunyan, knew
nothing of psychology and nothing of divinity, that they never
understood their own experience, and, though they have interpreted
humanity to uncounted millions of the children of men, yet lived
and died in crass ignorance of the workings of the human heart The
proposition is not modest. That any man should be found, however
flippantly, to advance it is marvellous. That any human being should be
found to accept it seriously is incredible.
Dr. Aked's argument amounts to a claim that we should believe in Free
Will because most men believe in it, because many good and great men
have believed in it.
But many millions of men have believed in a material hell. In which
Dr. Aked does not believe. Many good and great men have believed in a
material hell, and millions of men (some of them good and clever) still
believe in a material hell. And Dr. Aked does not believe in it.
And when the doctrine of hell-fire was first assailed, what did the Dr.
Akeds of the time declare? That without the fear of hell men would be
wicked, and would do wrong in defiance of God; and that the theory that
there was no hell of fire was "incredible." And what is this charge of
audacity which Dr. Aked brings against me for denying sin? It is just
the charge that was brought against Charles Darwin when he had the
immodesty to declare that the human species was evolved from lower
forms.
How was that theory met by the Dr. Akeds of the time? Darwin was
ridiculed and denounced, and nearly all the religious world was aghast
at his folly and his irreverence, and his presumption in advancing a
theory which was contrary to the teachings of Holy Writ. But Darwin's
theory was _true_.
Darwin's theory was true, and I claim that this theory is true. Is it
any answer to tell me that I am presumptuous in opposing the beliefs
of great men past and present? Darwin opposed the general belief,
and Darwin was right and the general belief was wrong. Is it any more
reasonable to condemn this theory for traversing the fifty-first Psalm
than it was to condemn Evolution for traversing the Book of Genesis?
Are we never to deviate from the beliefs of our forefathers, be the
evidence against those beliefs never so strong? How, then, shall
knowledge increase or progress be possible?
Presumptuous to deny what great men in the past believed? Then the world
is flat, and the sun goes round the world, and polygamy is right, and
Saturday is the Sabbath day, and all Jews, Mohammedans, Buddhists,
Confucians, and pagans will be damned, and the abolition of
witch-burning was a mistake, and Luther was presumptuous for resisting
the authority of the Church of Rome, and Dr. Aked is presumptuous for
differing from the Church of England. In such absurdities does the
clerical mind entangle itself when it tries to think.
Mr. Marson says that if he were a burglar he would spend some of the
money he stole in paying lecturers to teach the doctrine that men ought
not to be blamed for their actions. But if all men were trained upon our
principles there _would not be any burglars_.
However, let us see what Mr. Marson means. He means that if punishment
and blame were abolished burglars and other wrongdoers might go scot
free, and might rob, or kill, or cheat; and no one should say them nay.
But Mr. Marson is a clergyman, and does not understand.
It is a strange notion this, that if you do not blame a man you cannot
interfere with him. We do not blame a lunatic: even a Christian does not
blame a lunatic. But we do not allow a madman to go round with an axe
and murder people. We do not hang a madman, nor punish him in any way.
If a murderer is proved to be mad he is pardoned and--restrained.
So, although we might not blame a thief, or a sweater, or a poisoner, it
does not follow that we should allow him to go on stealing, or sweating,
or murdering.
We propose to defend society from the individual; but we propose to do
more than that: we propose to do what the Christian does not attempt to
do--we propose to defend the individual from society.
The Christian method of dealing with the burglar is to neglect him in
his childhood and his youth, to allow him to become a burglar, from
sheer lack of opportunity to become anything else, and then to lecture
him and send him to prison.
But, my Christian friends, how do you find your system work? If you tell
Bill Sykes he is a bad man, that the angels will not love him, that the
fat successful sweater or idler will loathe and despise him, and if you
send Bill to prison and hard labour for a term of years, will it always
happen that William will repent and reform, and become a building
society or a joint-stock bank himself?
Or do you find that poor Bill hardens his heart, and hates you; and that
he comes out of your shameful prison, and from your cowardly and savage
whips and chains, and burgles and drinks again, and learns to carry a
revolver?
If we want to get rid of evil we must remove the _cause_ of evil. It is
useless to punish the victim.
It is with moral evils as with physical evils. When an epidemic of fever
or smallpox comes upon us we do not punish the sick, nor blame them.
But we isolate the sick, and we attack the _cause_ of the sickness, by
attending to matters of hygiene and sanitation. That is how we ought to
deal with moral sickness.
Men do not live badly because they are "wicked," but because they are
ignorant. The remedy lies in the study and adoption of the laws of the
science of human life.
If we are to have a moral people we must first of all have a healthy
people. If the working classes are to be made sober and pure and wise,
the other classes must be made honest, and to be made honest they must
be taught what honesty is.
But the Christian cannot teach what honesty is because he does not
know. He cannot attack the causes of vice and crime, because he does not
understand that vice and crime are caused. He has been taught that men
do wrong because they will not do right, and that they can do right if
they will.
The Christian blames the criminal, and punishes him, because the
Christian believes that the criminal has a "free will."
But we should not blame nor punish the criminal, because we know that
he is a victim of heredity and environment. So we should restrain the
criminal, and try to reform him; and we should attack the environment
which made him a criminal, and is still making more criminals, and we
should try to alter that environment, and so prevent the making of more
criminals.
For the hardened criminal, restraint may be necessary. It may be
impossible to reform him. It may be too late.
But it is not too late to save millions of innocent children from a like
disaster and disgrace. It is not too late to prevent evil in the future,
though we cannot atone for the evil wrought in the past.
We know, and the Christian knows, that where a murderer destroys one
life society destroys thousands. We know that all through our pursy
civilisation, in all the fine cities of our wealth, our culture, and our
boastful piety, the ruin of children, the production of monsters, the
desecration of human souls, is going steadily and ruthlessly on. We know
this, and the Christian knows this; but we propose to prevent it, to
stop it, by striking at the root _cause_: the Christian hopes to check
it by lopping off here and there one of the fruits.
That is one reason why I claim that Humanism is a better religion than
Christianity; that is one reason why I claim that Christianity is a
failure.
What is the cause of crime? The Christian does not know. What is the
cause of ignorance? The Christian does not know. What is the cause of
poverty? The Christian does not know.
For ages the Christians trusted to religion to rid them of pestilence.
Science taught them to _prevent_ pestilence. Now they trust to religion
to rid the world of vice and crime. It is the same old error. Science
has shown us the causes of vice and crime: science teaches us that we
must attack the causes.
But the world is very ignorant in affairs of moral sanitation; and has
an almost religious veneration for the sacredness of Grand Ducal ducks.
As for the children--why do not their parents take care of them? Perhaps
because the parents were neglected by _their_ parents.
And which is the better, to go back for a dozen generations blaming
parents, or to begin now and teach and save the children?