Part 10

It is apparent after very little consideration that the extent of man’s individual mental development is a factor which has produced many novel characters in his manifestations of the social habit, and has even concealed to a great extent the profound influence this instinct has in regulating his conduct, his thought, and his society.

Large mental capacity in the individual, as we have already seen, has the effect of providing a wide freedom of response to instinctive impulses, so that, while the individual is no less impelled by instinct than a more primitive type, the manifestations of these impulses in his conduct are very varied, and his conduct loses the appearance of a {121} narrow concentration on its instinctive object. It needs only to pursue this reasoning to a further stage to reach the conclusion that mental capacity, while in no way limiting the impulsive power of instinct, may, by providing an infinite number of channels into which the impulse is free to flow, actually prevent the impulse from attaining the goal of its normal object. In the ascetic the sex instinct is defeated, in the martyr that of self-preservation, not because these instincts have been abolished, but because the activity of the mind has found new channels for them to flow in. As might be expected, the much more labile herd instinct has been still more subject to this deflection and dissipation without its potential impulsive strength being in any way impaired. It is this process which has enabled primitive psychology so largely to ignore the fact that man still is, as much as ever, endowed with a heritage of instinct and incessantly subject to its influence. Man’s mental capacity, again, has enabled him as a species to flourish enormously, and thereby to increase to a prodigious extent the size of the unit in which the individual is merged. The nation, if the term be used to describe every organization under a completely independent, supreme government, must be regarded as the smallest unit on which natural selection now unrestrictedly acts. Between such units there is free competition, and the ultimate regulator of these relations is physical force. This statement needs the qualification that the delimitation between two given units may be much sharper than that between two others, so that in the first case the resort to force is likely to occur readily, while in the second case it will be brought about only by the very ultimate necessity. The tendency to the enlargement of the social unit has been going on with certain temporary relapses throughout human history. {122} Though repeatedly checked by the instability of the larger units, it has always resumed its activity, so that it should probably be regarded as a fundamental biological drift the existence of which is a factor which must always be taken into account in dealing with the structure of human society.

The gregarious mind shows certain characteristics which throw some light on this phenomenon of the progressively enlarging unit. The gregarious animal is different from the solitary in the capacity to become conscious in a special way of the existence of other creatures. This specific consciousness of his fellows carries with it a characteristic element of communion with them. The individual knows another individual of the same herd as a partaker in an entity of which he himself is a part, so that the second individual is in some way and to a certain extent identical with himself and part of his own personality. He is able to feel with the other and share his pleasures and sufferings as if they were an attenuated form of his own personal experiences. The degree to which this assimilation of the interests of another person is carried depends, in a general way, on the extent of the intercommunication between the two. In human society a man’s interest in his fellows is distributed about him concentrically according to a compound of various relations they bear to him which we may call in a broad way their nearness. The centrifugal fading of interest is seen when we compare the man’s feeling towards one near to him with his feeling towards one farther off. He will be disposed, other things being equal, to sympathize with a relative as against a fellow-townsman, with a fellow-townsman as against a mere inhabitant of the same county, with the latter as against the rest of the country, with an Englishman as against a European, with a European as against an Asiatic, and so on until a limit is reached beyond {123} which all human interest is lost. The distribution of interest is of course never purely geographical, but is modified by, for example, trade and professional sympathy, and by special cases of intercommunication which bring topographically distant individuals into a closer grade of feeling than their mere situation would demand. The essential principle, however, is that the degree of sympathy with a given individual varies directly with the amount of intercommunication with him. The capacity to assimilate the interests of another individual with one’s own, to allow him, as it were, to partake in one’s own personality, is what is called altruism, and might equally well perhaps be called expansive egoism. It is a characteristic of the gregarious animal, and is a perfectly normal and necessary development in him of his instinctive inheritance.

Altruism is a quality the understanding of which has been much obscured by its being regarded from the purely human point of view. Judged from this standpoint, it has been apt to appear as a breach in the supposedly “immutable” laws of “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as a virtue breathed into man from some extra-human source, or as a weakness which must be stamped out of any race which is to be strong, expanding, and masterful. To the biologist these views are equally false, superfluous, and romantic. He is aware that altruism occurs only in a medium specifically protected from the unqualified influence of natural selection, that it is the direct outcome of instinct, and that it is a source of strength because it is a source of union.

In recent times, freedom of travel, and the development of the resources rendered available by education, have increased the general mass of intercommunication to an enormous extent. Side by side with this, altruism has come more and more into recognition as a supreme moral law. There is {124} already a strong tendency to accept selfishness as a test of sin, and consideration for others as a test of virtue, and this has influenced even those who by public profession are compelled to maintain that right and wrong are to be defined only in terms of an arbitrary extra-natural code.

Throughout the incalculable ages of man’s existence as a social animal, Nature has been hinting to him in less and less ambiguous terms that altruism must become the ultimate sanction of his moral code. Her whispers have never gained more than grudging and reluctant notice from the common man, and from those intensified forms of the common man, his pastors and masters. Only to the alert senses of moral genius has the message been at all intelligible, and when it has been interpreted to the people it has always been received with obloquy and derision, with persecution and martyrdom. Thus, as so often happens in human society, has one manifestation of herd instinct been met and opposed by another.

As intercommunication tends constantly to widen the field of action of altruism, a point is reached when the individual becomes capable of some kind of sympathy, however attenuated, with beings outside the limits of the biological unit within which the primitive function of altruism lies. This extension is perhaps possible only in man. In a creature like the bee the rigidly limited mental capacity of the individual and the closely organized society of the hive combine to make the boundary of the hive correspond closely with the uttermost limit of the field over which altruism is active. The bee, capable of great sympathy and understanding in regard to her fellow-members of the hive, is utterly callous and without understanding in regard to any creature of external origin and existence. Man, however, with his infinitely greater capacity for assimilating {125} experience, has not been able to maintain the rigid limitation of sympathy to the unit, the boundaries of which tend to acquire a certain indefiniteness not seen in any of the lower gregarious types.

Hence tends to appear a sense of international justice, a vague feeling of being responsibly concerned in all human affairs and by a natural consequence the ideas and impulses denoted under the term “pacifism.”

One of the most natural and obvious consequences of war is a hardening of the boundaries of the social unit and a retraction of the vague feelings towards international sympathy which are a characteristic product of peace and intercommunication. Thus it comes about that pacifism and internationalism are in great disgrace at the present time; they are regarded as the vapourings of cranky windbags who have inevitably been punctured at the first touch of the sword; they are, our political philosophers tell us, but products of the miasm of sentimental fallacy which tends to be bred in the relaxing atmosphere of peace. Perhaps no general expressions have been more common since the beginning of the war, in the mouths of those who have undertaken our instruction in the meaning of events, than the propositions that pacifism is now finally exploded and shown always to have been nonsense, that war is and always will be an inevitable necessity in human affairs as man is what is called a fighting animal, and that not only is the abolition of war an impossibility, but should the abolition of it unhappily prove to be possible after all and be accomplished, the result could only be degeneration and disaster.

Biological considerations would seem to suggest that these generalizations contain a large element of inexactitude. The doctrine of pacifism is {126} a perfectly natural development, and ultimately inevitable in an animal having an unlimited appetite for experience and an indestructible inheritance of social instinct. Like all moral discoveries made in the haphazard, one-sided way which the lack of co-ordination in human society forces upon its moral pioneers, it has necessarily an appearance of crankiness, of sentimentality, of an inaptitude for the grasp of reality. This is normal and does not in the least affect the value of the truth it contains. Legal and religious torture were doubtless first attacked by cranks; slavery was abolished by them. Advocacy by such types does not therefore constitute an argument of any weight against their doctrines, which can adequately be judged only by some purely objective standard. Judged by such a standard, pacifism, as we have seen, appears to be a natural development, and is directed towards a goal which unless man’s nature undergoes a radical change will probably be attained. That its attainment has so far been foreseen only by a class of men possessing more than the usual impracticability of the minor prophet is hardly to be considered a relevant fact.

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It is impossible to leave this subject without some comment on the famous doctrine that war is a biological necessity. Even if one knew nothing of those who have enunciated this proposition, its character would enable one to suspect it of being the utterance of a soldier rather than a biologist. There is about it a confidence that the vital effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, {127} where facts are the masters of all. It may be supposed that even in the country of its birth the doctrine seemed more transcendently true in times of peace amid a proud and brilliant regime than it does now after more than twelve months of war. The whole conception is of a type to arouse interest in its psychological origin rather than in a serious discussion of its merits. It arose in a military State abounding in prosperity and progress of very recent growth, and based upon three short wars which had come closely one after another and formed an ascending series of brilliant success. In such circumstances even grosser assumptions might very well flourish and some such doctrine was a perfectly natural product. The situation of the warrior-biologist was in some way that of the orthodox expounder of ethics or political economy—his conclusions were ready-made for him; all he had to do was to find the “reasons” for them. War and war only had produced the best and greatest and strongest State—indeed, the only State worthy of the name; therefore war is the great creative and sustaining force of States, or the universe is a mere meaningless jumble of accidents. If only wars would always conform to the original Prussian pattern, as they did in the golden age from 1864 to 1870—the unready adversary, the few pleasantly strenuous weeks or months, the thumping indemnity! That is the sort of biological necessity one can understand. But twelve months of agonizing, indecisive effort in Poland and Russia and France, might have made the syllogism a little less perfect, the new law of Nature not quite so absolute.

These matters, however, are quite apart from the practical question whether war is a necessity to maintain the efficiency and energy of nations and to prevent them sinking into sloth and degeneracy. The {128} problem may be stated in another form. When we take a comprehensive survey of the natural history of man—using that term to include the whole of his capacities, activities, and needs, physical, intellectual, moral—do we find that war is the indispensable instrument whereby his survival and progress as a species are maintained? We are assuming in this statement that progress or increased elaboration is to continue to be a necessary tendency in his course by which his fate, through the action of inherited needs, powers, and weaknesses, and of external pressure is irrevocably conditioned. The assumption, though commonly made, is by no means obviously true. Some of the evidence justifying it will be dealt with later; it will not be necessary here to do more than note that we are for the moment treating the doctrine of human progress as a postulate.

Man is unique among gregarious animals in the size of the major unit upon which natural selection and its supposedly chief instrument, war, is open to act unchecked. There is no other animal in which the size of the unit, however laxly held together, has reached anything even remotely approaching the inclusion of one-fifth or one-quarter of the whole species. It is plain that a mortal contest between two units of such a monstrous size introduces an altogether new mechanism into the hypothetical “struggle for existence” on which the conception of the biological necessity of war is founded. It is clear that that doctrine, if it is to claim validity, must contemplate at any rate the possibility of a war of extremity, even of something like extermination, which shall implicate perhaps a third of the whole human race. There is no parallel in biology for progress being accomplished as the result of a racial impoverishment so extreme, even if it were accompanied by a closely specific {129} selection instead of a mere indiscriminate destruction. Progress is undoubtedly dependent mainly on the material that is available for selection being rich and varied. Any great reduction in the amount and variety of what is to be regarded as the raw material of elaboration necessarily must have as an infallible effect, the arrest of progress. It may be objected, however, that anything approaching extermination could obviously not be possible in a war between such immense units as those of modern man. Nevertheless, the object of each of the two adversaries would be to impose its will on the other, and to destroy in it all that was especially individual, all the types of activity and capacity which were the most characteristic in its civilization and therefore the cause of hostility. The effect of success in such an endeavour would be an enormous impoverishment of the variety of the race and a corresponding effect on progress.

To this line of speculation it may perhaps further be objected that the question is not of the necessity of war to the race as a whole, but to the individual nation or major unit. The argument has been used that when a nation is obviously the repository of all the highest gifts and tendencies of civilization, the race must in the end benefit, if this nation, by force if necessary, imposes its will and its principles on as much of the world as it can. To the biologist the weakness of this proposition—apart from the plain impossibility of a nation attaining an objective estimate of the value of its own civilization—is that it embodies a course of action which tends to the spread of uniformity and to limit that variety of material which is the fundamental quality essential for progress. In certain cases of very gross discrepancy between the value of two civilizations, it is quite possible that the destruction of the simpler by the more elaborate does not result in any great {130} loss to the race through the suppression of valuable varieties. Even this admission is, however, open to debate, and it may well be doubted whether in some ways the wholesale extermination of “inferior” races has not denied to the species the perpetuation of lines of variation which might have been of great value.

It seems remarkable that among gregarious animals other than man direct conflict between major units such as can lead to the suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon. They are, it may be supposed, too busily engaged in maintaining themselves against external enemies to have any opportunities for fighting within the species. Man’s complete conquest of the grosser enemies of his race has allowed him leisure for turning his restless pugnacity—a quality no longer fully occupied upon his non-human environment—against his own species. When the major units of humanity were small the results of such conflict were not perhaps very serious to the race as a whole, except in prolonging the twilight stages of civilization. It can scarcely be questioned that the organization of a people for war tends to encourage unduly a type of individual who is abnormally insensitive to doubt, to curiosity, and to the development of original thought. With the enlargement of the unit and the accompanying increase in knowledge and resources, war becomes much more seriously expensive to the race. In the present war the immense size of the units engaged and their comparative equality in power have furnished a complete _reductio ad absurdum_ of the proposition that war in itself is a good thing even for the individual nation. It would seem, then, that in the original proposition the word “war” must be qualified to mean a war against a smaller and notably weaker adversary. The German Empire was founded on such wars. {131} The conception of the biological necessity of war may fairly be expected to demonstrate its validity in the fate of that Empire if such a demonstration is ever to be possible. Every condition for a crucial experiment was present: a brilliant inauguration in the very atmosphere of military triumph, a conscious realization of the value of the martial spirit, a determination to keep the warrior ideal conspicuously foremost with a people singularly able and willing to accept it. If this is the way in which an ultimate world-power is to be founded and maintained, no single necessary factor is lacking. And yet after a few years, in what should be the very first youth of an Empire, we find it engaged against a combination of Powers of fabulous strength, which, by a miracle of diplomacy no one else could have accomplished, it has united against itself. It is an irrelevance to assert that this combination is the result of malice, envy, treachery, barbarism; such terms are by hypothesis not admissible. If the system of Empire-building is not proof against those very elementary enemies, any further examination of it is of course purely academic. To withstand those is just what the Empire is there for; if it falls a victim to them, it fails in its first and simplest function and displays a radical defect in its structure. To the objectivist practice is the only test in human affairs, and he will not allow his attention to be distracted from what did happen by the most perfectly logical demonstration of what ought to have happened. It is the business of an Empire not to encounter overwhelming enemies. Declaring itself to be the most perfect example of its kind and the foreordained heir of the world will remain no more than a pleasant—and dangerous—indulgence, and will not prevent it showing by its fate that the fruits of perfection and the promise of permanence are not demonstrated in the wholesale {132} manufacture of enemies and in the combination of them into an alliance of unparalleled strength.

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The doctrine of the biological necessity of war may, then, be regarded as open to strong suspicion on theoretical grounds of being contrary to the evolutionary tendency already plainly marked out for the human species. The fact that the nation in which its truth was most generally accepted has been led—and undoubtedly to some extent by it—into a war which can scarcely fail to prove disastrous suggests that in the practical field it is equally fallacious. It may well, therefore, be removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other pseudo-scientific dogmas of political “biologists”—the facile doctrines of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on Teutons and Celts, on Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races, and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have gulled the innocent so long.

IMPERFECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL HABIT IN MAN.