Part 7
“The great law of variation teaches--both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent--that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies, which also vary more or less widely. In view of all this, how can the work and the reward be equal for all?
“The more highly the social life is developed, the more important becomes the great principle of the division of labor, the more requisite it becomes for the stable existence of the state as a whole that its members should distribute among themselves the multifarious tasks of life, each performing a single function; and as the labor which must be performed by the individuals, as well as the expenditure of strength, talent, money, etc., which it necessitates, differs more and more, it is natural that the remuneration of this labor must also vary widely. These are facts so simple and so obvious that it seems to me every intelligent and enlightened statesman ought to be an advocate of the theory of descent and the general doctrine of evolution as the best antidote for the absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the Socialists.
“And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that Virchow, in his denunciation, had in mind, rather than the mere metamorphic development, the theory of descent, with which it is always confused! Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic.
“If one wishes to attribute a political tendency to this English theory--which is quite permissible--this tendency can be nothing but aristocratic; by no means can it be democratic, still less socialistic.
“The theory of selection teaches that in the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, it is always and everywhere a small and privileged minority alone which succeeds in living and developing itself; the immense majority, on the contrary suffer and succumb more or less prematurely. Countless are the seeds and eggs of every species of plants and animals, and the young individuals who issue from them. But the number of those who have the good fortune to reach fully developed maturity and to attain the goal of their existence is relatively insignificant.
“The cruel and pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere through animated nature, and which in the nature of things must rage, this eternal and inexorable competition between all living beings is an undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the strongest or fittest is able to come forth victoriously from this battle of competition. The great majority of their unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined to perish. It is well enough to deplore this tragic fatality, but one cannot deny or change it. ‘Many are called, but few are chosen!’
“The selection, the ‘election’ of these ‘elect’ is by absolute necessity bound up with the rejection or destruction of the vast multitude of beings whom they survived. And so another learned Englishman has called the fundamental principle of Darwinism ‘the survival of the fittest, the victory of the best.’
“At all events the principle of selection is not in the slightest degree democratic; it is, on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If then, Darwinism, carried out to its ultimate logical consequences, has, according to Virchow, for the statesman ‘an extraordinarily dangerous side’ the danger is doubtless that it favors aristocratic aspirations.”
And now let us turn to the closing pages of the second volume of Haeckel’s valuable work, “The History of Creation.” We shall find it interesting and instructive to observe the nature of the argument which he there uses with great effect against Virchow. Virchow had delivered his celebrated address at Berlin, which closed as follows: “It is absolutely certain that Man is not descended from apes.”
Haeckel takes this up, gives a resumé of the facts known to zoology on this point, and then winds up with the following: “In view of this state of affairs, we zoologists, recognized as authorities on the subject, may surely ask, How can many so-called anthropologists still maintain that there exists no sort of actual proofs of the ‘Derivation of Man from Apes’? How can Virchow, Ranke, and others, who are not zoologists, in the speeches they annually deliver at anthropological and other congresses, continue to declare that this ‘Pithecoid thesis’ is an empty hypothesis, an unproved assertion, and a mere dream of the philosophers of nature? How can these anthropologists still continue to ask for ‘certain proofs’ of this thesis when proofs with all the clearness that could be desired lie before them, and are unanimously recognized by all zoologists? As regards Virchow’s often quoted declarations against the Pithecoid thesis, they have obtained great favor in wide circles, only because of the high authority this famous naturalist enjoys in an entirely different domain of science. His ‘cellular pathology,’ his ingenious application of the cell-theory to the whole province of medicine, introduced a grand advance in that branch of science thirty years ago. This great and lasting service rendered by him has, however, no connection whatever with the unyielding and negative position which, unfortunately, Virchow persists in assuming towards the doctrine of evolution.”
It probably never occurred to Haeckel that the argument which he here uses to meet Virchow’s opposition to evolution, would serve quite as effectively as a reply to his own opposition to Socialism.
As regards Haeckel’s “often quoted declarations against” Socialism, “they have obtained great favor in wide circles, only because of the high authority which this famous naturalist enjoys in an entirely different domain of science. His biogenetic principle, discovered in embryology, “introduced a grand advance in that science thirty years ago. This great and lasting service rendered by him has, however no connection whatever with the unyielding and negative position which, unfortunately,” Haeckel “persists in assuming towards the doctrine of” Socialism.
Haeckel’s complaint that Virchow could not judge the merits of evolution because he was not a zoologist, is well taken. But the Socialist has as good or better right to assert that Haeckel was incapable of estimating the relationship of Socialism to Darwinism, for he certainly knew a good deal less about Socialism than Virchow knew of zoology.
This is precisely the trouble with Haeckel’s criticism of what he calls Socialism. Of the theories of Karl Marx and the modern scientific Socialists, he knew absolutely nothing. The Socialism he condemned had been abandoned by the Socialists themselves, nearly thirty years before his criticism was made.
“Absurd equalitarian notions,” granted; but they were not even the sole property of the utopian Socialists. They borrowed them from the bourgeois revolutionists of 1789. It was they who boasted of the equality they would set up. That equality, which, as Engels says, only “materialized in bourgeois equality before the law.”--“The equality before the law of all commodity-owners.” It was this struggling bourgeoisie that adopted as its catch-words, “liberty, fraternity, equality,” and applied them to a typical bourgeois use when they inscribed them above the entrances to French prisons.
A significant clause in the second sentence of Haeckel’s criticism is, “in human societies as in animal societies,” the duties, etc., of the members cannot be “equal.” The only possible point this could have as a criticism of Socialism, would be its use to deny the possibility of abolishing social class divisions. There is nothing to show whether Haeckel intended it to have such a specific application, but as any other application it might have could be in no way opposed to the Socialist position, I need only show its failure in that regard.
“Bee” society may be said to have class divisions, and it must be conceded that these classes cannot be abolished by anything that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be called “bee socialism.” But the reason for this is not far to seek and, when found, it makes any argument by analogy, against Socialism, impossible. Bee workers are “physiologically” incapable of discharging any other function in bee society. They are females, incapable of maternity. As a result of this the queen bee is obliged to shoulder the whole burden of the reproduction of the species, and she is specialized in this direction to such an extent, that she could not possibly be a worker. The drone, as the male breeder, is in the same fix, and the popular notion that they are useless loafers, has its origin in the bee custom of applying the boot, or something worse, to all superfluous members of the drone class.
“A hive of bees,” says Prof. Huxley, “is an organic polity, a society in which the part played by each member is determined by organic necessities. Queens, workers, and drones are, so to speak, castes divided from one another by marked physical barriers.”
Says Ernest Untermann in his fine chapter on this question, in “Marxian Economics”: “Every textbook on natural history describes the different orders. For instance, the societies of bees are ‘monarchies’, those of ants ‘republics’. But in either case, biological variation determines the form of these societies. Queen bees, drones, and workers are of organically different structure and equipped with different specialized organs. The queen bee is equipped only for the duties of conception and the laying of eggs. The drone cannot perform any other function but that of fertilizing the queen. The worker alone has organs for gathering flower dust, honey, and manufacturing wax.” Class divisions in bee society are therefore “biological” and not economic. But Haeckel’s comparison ignores this vital distinction. Before this argument can be used against the Socialist advocacy of class abolition, it must be shown that a queen cannot wash clothes with starvation as an alternative, and that a pleb woman could not wear a coronet, should her father invest in a busted duke.
True there are other animal societies which have no such biological division. But these have no private property in the means of life, and therefore no classes. Pelicans and crows recognize only three grounds as justification for idleness--infancy, old age and sickness or accident.
A recent Socialist writer said: “Take two babies together--the worker’s baby and the parasite’s baby. There they are, both of them, out of the great mystery. Examine their soft little bodies. Do you see spurs on the one and a saddle on the other? And yet, one is to grow up a profligate loafer, and the other a starved and beaten worker. One to rot at the top; the other to be stunted and oppressed at the bottom.”
Of course these two babies would not be equal, either actually or potentially, but is that any reason why they should be given an unequal start? How are we to find out which is the best in any sense, if a multitude of opportunities open to the one are to be closed to the other?
And here Haeckel’s implied parallel breaks down once more. In nature the strong and capable survive in the struggle for existence; nature gives something like a fair field and no favor. But in capitalist society, a puling son of a rich father is coddled to maturity, and reproduces others of his kind; while the lusty child of a worker is murdered by poisonous milk, or debarred from marriage by low wages.
In nature, “fittest” does not mean best in any moral sense, except indirectly, as that the practice of certain moral principles in animal societies may constitute, or add to, fitness. But in present society in a vast number of instances, fitness does not mean “best” even to the extent that such a word may be used in the natural world.
A real estate “shark” is a libel on the fish. An indispensable qualification in business is to have few scruples and be a first-class liar. Honesty and suicide are synonymous terms.
The statement that natural selection “favors aristocratic aspirations,” involves the same fallacy. It assumes that aristocrats are on top because of fitness to be there. Recent revelations in Berlin indicate that the aristocrats of Haeckel’s own country are “fittest” for the garbage can.
Haeckel’s main position is that “the struggle for existence” in nature is a justification for “competition” in society. To begin with, Kropotkin has shown that Haeckel grossly misrepresents nature when he speaks of “the cruel, pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere throughout animated nature” and “between all living beings.” When this is used as a defense of present society, it is equal to saying that human society should seek its models among the lowest forms of organic life rather than the highest. Haeckel’s position was taken by Spencer and received the following clever reply from Prof. Ritchie: “The struggle among plants and the lower animals is mainly between members of the same species; and the individual competition between human beings, which is so much admired by Mr. Spencer, is of this primitive kind.”
Kropotkin says: “If we ask nature ‘who are the fittest, those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.”
As to the desirability of that “pitiless struggle,” Huxley pertinently says: “Of all the shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of the individual against the individual is most strictly limited.”
Whatever may be the truth among the protozoa, we are safe in applying to society the statement of Ruskin: “Co-operation is always and everywhere the law of life; competition is always and everywhere the law of death.”
Human society eventually reaches a point of development where nature’s haphazard ways are interfered with, and man arranges means to an end. Professor Schiaparelli thought he saw canals on Mars, and inferred intelligent inhabitants. The difference in water-ways, between blind nature and a designing intelligence, is the difference between a rambling river and a straight canal.
Now human society has arrived at a stage where its consciousness of itself and the possibility of self-arrangement, becomes a factor. This is a tremendous step forward, and its future possibilities seem to be illimitable. Before this can be largely effective, however, it will be necessary to thoroughly understand all fundamental social laws.
We had no rod to rule the lightning until we knew the laws of its movement. There will be no real airship until we master the laws of aerial flight. Socialism solves the social problem, not because it has, but because it is, an explanation of the laws of social development in general, and of existing society in particular. On these laws our faith is founded. By consciously arranging the social institutions which so profoundly affect our lives, in harmony with these laws, we shall cease to be the slaves of a blind necessity.
As Engels has well said: “Man’s social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces, that have hitherto governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself more and more consciously, make his own history--only from that time will the social causes set in motion by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”
VIII.
SPENCER’S “SOCIAL ORGANISM.”
The crowning generalization of modern thought is that which presents the Universe as a unity, inter-related in all its parts. By it, the defenders of dualism are discredited, and their theological, metaphysical philosophy is thrown aside. It is no longer God and Man, nor even Man and God, but Man only, with God an anthropomorphic shadow, related to man not as his creator, but as created by him. God and Man are not “two,” but in reality “one.”
Modern science has reversed the order of their appearance, and also the order of their dependence. That which seemed to our primitive ancestors a living reality, a separate and independent being, proves, when submitted to the tests of anthropology and psychology, to have been a creature of their own dreams.
And thus, as a result of scientific research into the origin of dualism and the nature of dreams, as Professor Clifford says: “The dim and shadowy outline of the superhuman deity fades slowly from before us; and as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with greater and greater clearness, the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure--the figure of him who made all Gods and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history, and from the inmost depths of every soul, the face of our father man looks out upon us, with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes, and says: ‘Before Jehovah was, I am.’”
The thinker who would expand his intellectual wings in this monistic atmosphere, must possess not only a “discriminating” mind, but also, as Marcus Hitch suggests, a “unifying” mind. There are two errors he must avoid; the creation of distinctions that do not exist and the ignoring of distinctions that do.
The chief sinner against this first canon of dialectical thinking is our old friend the theologian. When the evolutionary naturalists demonstrated the hopeless untruth of his “revealed” legends about the origin of men and things, he sought refuge in the ingenious theory that these fables while scientifically indefensible were, notwithstanding, spiritually true. In short, scientific truth and spiritual truth were so distinct as to have no vital relations. These “artful dodgers” have relieved controversial literature of much of its wonted heaviness and contributed generally to the gaiety of the nations.
Socialists have always been among the first to enjoy these entertaining performances, and it seems like divine retribution when these same theological and “Reverend” persons tumble over into the Socialist camp and bring their obsolete methods of thinking with them.
They dub themselves “Christian” Socialists and proceed to show that “Socialism is a philosophy concerning the social and economic life of man, and not the religious at all.” When Marx declared that political and legal and other social institutions and ideas were the result of economic conditions and class interests, religious institutions and ideas were, of course, exempt.
After a mental contortion like that, what is to prevent a reconciliation between the 17th century twaddle of the methodist pulpit and the materialist conception of history?
Those who break the second canon given, are not all theologians. Among those who ignore distinctions that do exist, the biological sociologist is entitled to conspicuous mention.
August Comte, who “attempted to make of sociology a sort of transcendental biology,” had at least this excuse that he wrote his positivist philosophy before Darwin published his “Origin of Species” and, therefore, while biology was yet in long clothes and sociology was unborn. Although Comte is generally regarded as the founder of sociology, these limitations made it impossible to do little more than invent the name and foresee its possibility.
These excuses, however, can scarcely be invoked for Haeckel, who, as we have already seen, wholly ignored in his inferences, fundamental differences between the division of labor in animal societies and that division in human societies. Haeckel’s biological sociology conveniently overlooks the rather important fact that while a working bee can not by any possibility act as a drone, the working man has at least no physical disabilities to prevent him from doing anything that pertains to the role of a prince. Reasoning by analogy is always dangerous, especially when the analogy itself breaks down.
While it is well to keep these rules in mind, it must be conceded that their critical application is somewhat limited when we come to Spencer’s famous analogy between animal organisms and human societies. The “synthetic” philosopher was much Haeckel’s superior in sociology, and he possessed an immense fund of biological lore that was unavailable to Comte writing a quarter of a century earlier.
Thus Spencer seems to recognize that his essay on “The Social Organism” is largely an ingenious analogy, from which conclusions must be drawn with caution. Not that bourgeois scientists have always exhibited a very scientific temper in this regard. On the contrary they have, on every possible occasion, proclaimed that certain alleged truths in physics or biology were in irreconcilable contradiction to certain Socialist conclusions in sociology.
But we may find a key to Spencer’s chariness in the matter of drawing conclusions in the rather surprising fact, which will appear presently, that the one legitimate conclusion which the analogy will thoroughly sustain, is an exact contradiction to all that Spencer had ever proclaimed on social questions.
The essay itself, like a great deal of Spencer’s writing, is prolix and wearisome, so we shall select only his most important and striking comparisons.
The introduction is excellent and has for its text Sir James Mackintosh’s great saying--great in his non-evolutionary age though very common-place today--“Constitutions are not made, but grow.” He then declares “the central idea of Plato’s model republic” to be “the correspondence between the parts of a society and the faculties of the human mind.”
Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury, comes next with his celebrated “Leviathan.” Hobbes sought to establish a still more definite parallelism; not, however between a society and the mind, but between a society and the human body. Hobbes’ “Leviathan” was the Commonwealth and he “carries this comparison so far as to actually give a drawing of the Leviathan--a vast human-shaped figure, whose body and limbs are made up of multitudes of men.”
Spencer criticizes these analogies of Plato and Hobbes in detail, but finds the chief error of both writers to consist in the assumption by both “that the organization of a society is comparable, not simply to the organization of a living body in general, but to the organization of a human body in particular. There is no warrant whatever for assuming this. It is in no way implied by the evidence; and is simply one of those fancies which we commonly find mixed up with the truths of early speculation.” But, insists Spencer: “The untenableness of the particular parallelisms above instanced, is no ground for denying an essential parallelism; since early ideas are usually but vague adumbrations of the truth.”
Lacking the great generalizations of biology, it was, as we have said, “impossible to trace out the real relations of special organizations to organizations of another order.” Therefore he proposes “to show what are the analogies which modern science discloses.”
Spencer then discovers four points in which an individual organism and a society agree, and four in which they differ. The points of agreement are:
(1.) “That commencing as small aggregations, they insensibly augment in mass; some of them eventually reaching ten thousand times what they originally were.”
(2.) “That while at first so simple in structure as to be considered structureless, they assume in the course of their growth a continually increasing complexity of structure.”