Part 3

A comparatively inert primitive society reacts to injury or benefit as does a plant, but shows little evidence of pain or pleasure. Modern society, however, in proportion to its rapidly differentiating organism and its increase in swift, accurate, complex activity, manifests a corresponding increase in consciousness. We are now socially conscious to an acute degree; and this proves our equal ability to act, to avert injury, and seek benefit, not as individuals, but as a society.

Naturally pain is the most impressive fact, for pleasure is a normal condition and only felt in contrast to pain. Pain is some interference with natural law, and as such makes itself sharply felt. Man was led to the study of physiology through pathology; the ache introduced us to the stomach. So society feels first and most what hurts it, and our study of sociology is prefaced by social pathology. And as men, in their first gropings after relief from pain, practised all manner of tricks with fetich-worship, with wild, noisy dances, with filthy medicines, with murderous leeches and lances and poisonous pills; and as still, among the ignorant, any wide-blazoned patent medicine is sure of acceptance if it promises to cure the pain, felt but not understood; so society’s first efforts at relief are superstitious, empirical, and often deadly bad for its system.

We need the patient, scientific study of the social body, its structure and functions, anatomy, physiology, and pathology, as we have had it for the physical body; we need careful, recorded observation of the results of previous remedies, and of new ones as well, and all this is a new field of science. We have plenty of facts at hand; all history lies behind us with its glaring records; all life is before us to-day in every stage of development; but we have only begun to arrange and study those facts from the point of view of the sociologist. If a watch goes wrong, we examine its “works” for fracture, loss, misplacement, or some “foreign body”; but to do this successfully involves knowledge of what a watch is, what it is for, how it is made, and how it works. We must know the mechanics of the thing if we are to mend it. So if Society goes wrong we must examine its works, and we cannot tell if they are wrong, nor set them right, unless we have some knowledge of what Society is, what it is for, how it was made, and, above all, how it works.

This does not require all knowledge; no such complete information as Tennyson spoke of in the “Flower in the crannied wall.” Flowers are sufficiently understood for us to raise them in beauty and health and profusion; and we can learn enough about this last great form of life, Society, to mend its ways, without waiting for absolute wisdom.

This book is a study of the economic processes of society, explaining the immediate causes of a large part of our human suffering, and suggesting certain simple, swift, and easy changes of mind by which we may so alter our processes as to avoid that suffering and promote our growth and happiness.

II: MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION Summary

Social development affected by physical conditions. By our personal choice. We have overestimated the latter. “Natural” in contradistinction to “personal,” or genetic and teleological. Conscious acts most conspicuous to man. Recognition of some other forces at work. Man’s contribution to his own conduct. How individuals have promoted it, and the mass always retarded. How we retard evolution. Pterodactyls as conscious agents. Salutary effect of unconscious social processes. Our conscious behaviour always behind the times. Historic instances. Nature of the brain. Effect of education. Relative depth and size of early impressions as compared with later. Our ability to preserve and transmit ancient ideals. Folk-myth of a superior past. Reversionary tendencies, upward tendency of new brains checked by education; effect on religious progress. Should we have done better without conscious conduct? No. Enormous benefit if rightly used. Race memory, use of past. Real value of youth. Our attitude toward it. What it should be. Great advance in education in social consciousness. How to adjust conscious conduct to action of law.

II MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION

The contribution of the human race to its own development is the distinguishing feature in social evolution. That prompt and simple reaction to the environment by which the evolution of sub-human species has been accomplished, is complicated, with us, by a delayed and uncertain reaction, due to stored energy and to the internal environment of man’s conscious mind. We are of course modified by conditions, and transmit the modification through heredity. The results in social formation and conduct are clear and startling, but if man could in no way alter these results or select among the causes, to study them would be painful and useless.

Man has, however, a limited private supply of energy, his storage battery of nerve force; not initial with him, but temporarily his to use; and he has also, in the imaged world of his mind, an environment which leads him to use that personal energy according to his separate views of life; thus he can, and does, modify his conduct to a considerable degree. His contribution varies widely in extent; some individuals living very largely from personal initiative, and some almost without; it varies as widely in value; being sometimes of a most advanced grade, and at others distinctly primitive and reversionary.

We have heretofore gravely overestimated the relative extent of this personally modified conduct or telic action, as compared with the conduct which is the result of unconsciously transmitted forces, or genetic action. In the dawn of human consciousness the field of personal conduct was most prominent to man, and he took small note of what things he did under the unobstructed action of natural tendencies.

The word “natural” is here used in contradistinction to “personal”; not as holding man’s personal conduct to be un-, anti-, or super-natural, but as distinguishing between the actions resultant from general laws, and those resultant from the man’s choice and will; between the genetic and the telic. Marriage, for instance, is a result of the natural laws of sex-attraction, with their deeper bases in race-preservation; celibacy is a result of personal choice and will, based on certain ideas cherished by the individual; marriage is genetic—celibacy, telic. The cerebral activity required to decide upon and enforce a given act, apart from and perhaps in spite of the natural tendencies, makes such acts more perceptible and more memorable; and man inevitably grew to overestimate that part of his behaviour which had passed muster in the front halls of the brain. In these cases he felt himself act, and assumed that the acts which he felt were the sum of his conduct. Plainly perceiving, however, that these acts of his were very irregular and unreliable, often indeed differing widely from his intention, he soon postulated other forces as working upon him, supposedly personal, for he knew no others; and gods and devils were installed in his universe as cogent factors in this perplexing mass of conduct. Some, feeling dimly the larger currents of tendency pressing upon them, conceived of Fate, Destiny, Karma, Fore-ordination—something high and invincible, governing conduct from afar. In all the history of man’s conscious life he has been struggling with his conduct, and seeking to modify it to what he from time to time considered desirable ends.

That he has accomplished so much is due to the tremendous power he has to use in this way; that he has accomplished so little is due to his misapprehension of the best means of applying this power; and that he has produced such strange, peculiar kinds of personally modified conduct is due to his varying conception of the desired ends.

Overestimating his personal power, he constantly overdraws upon its resources, exhorting the individual to behave thus and thus; as if all conduct were telic. He has known little or nothing of the genetic laws of human progress which would have guided his course and lightened his task so wonderfully, could he but have understood them. Better housing for the poor does more to develop chastity than preaching it to two families who live in one small room.

As we now begin to grasp something of the position of man in nature, and of the processes of social evolution, we see how irresistibly he was urged upward by the progressive tendencies which lift mankind from savagery as they lifted the savage from the brute; and also how he has been held back by cumulative habits and earlier instincts. In this vast field of evolutionary processes, man, as a conscious, self-directing agent, flounders slowly along, now pushing violently toward a stage of development quite beyond his immediate grasp; and now as violently maintaining standards and ideals long since outgrown and become retroactive and injurious.

The extremes of his influence are most marked. Again and again has the race put forth a man with a specialised brain fitted to grasp a scheme of conduct far superior to that obtaining in his time; and, under the functional necessity of a member of society, urging this higher scheme of conduct upon his fellows with sublime faith, courage, and endurance. Social evolution has been markedly promoted by minds like these. Always someone seeing ahead and proclaiming the advance, and the mass, as they become able to grasp the new concepts, struggling mightily to modify their conduct thereto. Looking only at this side of it, we should say that man, as a factor in social evolution, worked most powerfully to promote it.

There is quite another side to it, however. The human brain, while it has the capacity to foresee future conditions, and to dictate conduct modified to such improved ends, has also memory, the power to retain past conditions, and to modify conduct upon them. If we can imagine active self-consciousness in some stage of physical evolution, it is easy to see how diversely it might have worked.

Take a high-minded pterodactyl, for instance—some poetic, philosophic, progressive pterodactyl. He might have had dim concepts of larger wings and lighter bones, of dryness and sunshine and wide spaces of sweet air; he might even have had faint visions of soft feathers, of nestled eggs, and the joyous music of love. If he were capable of transmitting these ideals among his brethren, they might have been induced to soar more assiduously and perch the higher—so sooner introducing the archeopteryx.

But if on the other hand we postulate our self-conscious pterodactyls as possessing long memories and venerable traditions, ancestor worship and a retroactive education, we should then find them forever yearning for their reptilian past; forcibly re-immersing each aspiring young generation in adhesive depths of mud, and piously destroying the would-be birds as enemies to society. It is on this side of our consciousness that man, as a factor in social evolution, is of such doubtful value.

A consciousness that works backwards, a personal modification of conduct based on the forced retention of more primitive conditions and ideals, this has been, and still is, one of the heaviest drawbacks to human progress. Fortunately for us the general mass of our conduct is resultant from natural causes, rather than personal. We are forced upward from century to century by changing conditions, whether we will or not. The tempting island and sheltered waterway evolved from us the boat, and the boat grew and spread mightily and changed the fate of nations. Under its influence man widened and thickened in social intercourse, and became wise and friendly in practice, long before his conscious ideals of conduct were anything but ignorant and savage.

Steam communication has united modern peoples faster than all religions, joining land to land in bands of iron, and the biting edges of the nations must wear smooth under the wheels. A Russian railroad track comes to the edge of Germany, with a different gauge from the German road which continues it, but the railroad is stronger than Czar or Emperor, and makes ultimately for peace.

Our constantly increasing facilities for communication are social functions, evolved in the human race on natural lines, and they bring different character and conduct long before the popular mind has understood their meaning and consciously adopted their results. As an effect of changed conditions our conduct to-day is at the grade required by steam and electric communication; but as far as that conduct springs from personal judgment and will we are still in the sailing-vessel period, some even in that of the slave-rowed galley.

Every line of social evolution makes for peace to-day, for smooth and rapid growth of international agreement; but our personally modified conduct, resting as it does on very ancient ideals and traditions, still drives us into war. Man’s personal conduct has never, as a whole, been up to the level of his socially evolved conduct. Note how the development of industry and commerce lifted and lightened Europe, leading on to peace, to education, to freedom; and how all the while the dominant ideals and conscious efforts of the same people were all for war, its highly prized glories and its supposed gains. See, when learning began to lift its head as a great social factor in those dark ages, how the proud knight still boasted that he could not read or write—mere priestcraft, much beneath him. Quite late in English history it was held derogatory for the nobility to spell well, these baser arts were for their inferiors. In more recent times we can see as plainly how the advance of women, their fuller education and general development, a most important step in social evolution, has been as earnestly opposed by the great majority of persons, acting under the dominance of long-held lines of hereditary ideas and superstitions.

It would seem here as if man were a most undesirable factor in social evolution; as if he acted solely as a brake on the wheels of progress, always seeking to maintain previous conditions, and to modify conduct retroactively. We can easily see how this deterrent position is taken by us. Our range of perception depends on our brain. The brain is an organ, transmitted with hereditary modification like any other organ, and that hereditary modification is of course resultant from earlier conditions. The older the modifying conditions the deeper the modification; racial habits of unbroken centuries are not to be offset by one lifetime’s change. So we look out upon the world through an ancestral brain which is far more responsive to simple primitive stimuli than to the more subtle combinations of the present; witness the absurd delight of modern man in hunting.

By this inheritance we find it easier to enjoy, approve of, understand, and uphold that which has been than that which is; to say nothing of that which is to be. Nevertheless the brain is of most easily modifiable structure, and, of itself, shares in the uplifting pressure toward higher development. Each child should bring to the race a little more brain capacity, a little more inclination to progress, and no doubt he does. But this tendency to new power of thought and breadth of vision, which is ours in every child by virtue of social evolution, is heavily offset by the parental action, by our conscious contribution to our own conduct.

Nothing is firmer in our minds than the concept of parental duty; an instinct of primitive force and cumulative development. Parental duty involves education, and education, as previously grasped by man’s consciousness, has been one of the most retroactive of social forces as well as one of the most beneficial.

It is a simple physiological law that the impressions first received are keener and deeper than those of later years. Thus each old person carries a memory of better things in his youth; not that they were better in any way, but that his machinery was fresher and took stronger impression. Owing to this the teaching of the aged has always harked back to the superiority of the past—their youth, and deprecated the decadence of the present—their age. It is the measure of personal life erroneously applied to racial life. Under its pressure has sprung one of the most universal of our folk-myths, the legend of a Heroic Past.

The diminutive size and narrow experiences of a child make the events of youth seem larger than those of maturity. The aging brain, as it weakens in recent memories of what a large experience makes small events, recurs vividly to those important records of its youth, and thus naturally cherishes this conviction of the real superiority of those early days. The long life and wide range of impression of the human being give a broad field for this natural assumption, and the power of speech makes the assumption transmissible.