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And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread, and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and makes it over to suit himself.

You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is pleasant. When I was in college the professor would propound the old question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?" My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will prove that it is!"

THE USE OF REASON

The great majority of people are brought up to believe that some particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that there are penalties more or less severe for the application of reason to these dogmas. What particular set it happens to be is a matter of geography; in a crowded modern city like New York, it is a matter of the particular block on which the child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be taught that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be taught that it is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. A child born on Madison Avenue will be taught that it is a question of the precise metaphysical process by which bread is changed into human body and wine into human blood. Each of these children will be assured that his human reason is fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this "sacred" subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept the authority of some ancient tradition, or some institution, or some official, or some book for which a special sanction is claimed.

Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside of or above human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? In order to test this possibility, select for yourself the most convincing way by which a special revelation could be handed down to mankind. Take any of the ancient orthodox ways, the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top, or a voice speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before a great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. Suppose that were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale-Harvard football game; suppose the news were to be flashed to the ends of the earth that God had thus presented to mankind an entirely new religion. What would be the process by which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon that revelation? First, they would have to consider the question whether it was an American newspaper fake--by no means an easy question. Second, they would have to consider the chances of its being an optical delusion. Then, assuming they accepted the sworn testimony of ten thousand mature and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the possibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really a supernatural being, they would next have to decide the chances of its being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth dimension of space, or from the devil. In considering all this, they would necessarily have to examine the alleged revelation. What was the literary quality of it? What was the moral quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind if the alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied?

Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, the human judgment; there is no other method of determining them, there would be nothing for any individual person, or for men as a whole to do, except to apply their best powers, and, as the phrase is, "make up their minds" about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge, would decide.

It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it. And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to destroy its own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before--except that I am no longer in position to be certain of anything."

You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on, using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy, metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.

Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably rational form of conduct--and find myself in conflict with the "faith" of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its day of holiness!

If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the right of men to use their minds--and the victory is not yet. The term "free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it was established--that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful, almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings, in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious institutions.

Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid their use. It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an eternity of sulphur and brimstone.

Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.

THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy the history of this long process--these facts are now the basis of all modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.

You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled "Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it knows--that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.

How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.

But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.

Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain, and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is engaged in contriving. In other words, man has come to a time when his mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up, but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.

NATURE AND MAN

If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it, just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment, and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which appears to be the soul of all being.

Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms they cannot be distinguished.

What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success, she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing but the bones to tell us about them.

No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by artificial light in the bowels of the earth.

So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now--whether we say with the theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms--at any rate it has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call "intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the creator, and decides that it is good--yet not so good as it might be! Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear--nature has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet, nor anything resembling it.

Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall impious man presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys, his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale imitations of celestial harmonies!

Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops, and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it. It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.

But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."

In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of man revised and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does, nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.

But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all colleges, except a few which have been tainted by Socialist thought, the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.

Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime of "race suicide"--that is to say, their presuming to use their reason to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law, over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist, Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!

Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land. All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the "law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.

So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"--that old nature of the "tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the natural resources of the earth!

MAN THE REBEL

In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto.

Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal structure which we call civilization--in part still healthy and progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.

What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing establishments."

Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide. Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.

If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "according to nature."

Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth. To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.

And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism." He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms of exploitation of man by his fellows.

Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage than it is able to endure.

MAKING OUR MORALS

Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will, guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.

It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship on the rocks--because the helmsman persisted in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!

If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws and customs and moral codes.

This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules. It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.

Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.

And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your dungeons.

Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?

Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course, that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.

Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such circumstances.

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