Chapter 3

A hundred thousand years ago, among our ancestors, who then were only inarticulate mammals, living in trees and caves, one of them by himself, or a little group of them together, hit upon the use of articulate vocal signs as a means of conveying to his mates his needs, his fears, his desires and threats. It was probably by a happy fluke that he hit upon this use, or by some transcendent flash of insight due to a spontaneous variation of ability above that of the average ape; or else some unusual stress of hunger or danger of attack drove even a mediocre individual to an unwonted exercise of ingenuity. In any case, by inventing articulate speech, he brought into existence a new species of mammal--man. I must leave to your imagination the thousand transforming effects of this new device for communicating perceptions, feelings, and intentions. The speaking ape stood to his own species, and through them to other kinds of animals and to the material universe, in a different relation from that in which the speechless stood. The power of combined action among the members of any group became immeasurably greater than it had previously been. A social unity of will was possible that could never have existed on earth hitherto. For all we know, thirty thousand years may have passed away before any other event occurred among human beings comparable in practical importance to the invention of spoken language. This, however, was all the time being gradually perfected under the stress of new experiences in general and of trying predicaments in particular.

Then, in the fulness of time, and once more by a happy fluke, or by a stroke of spontaneous genius, or under the pressure of some unprecedented danger, or through the educative influence of some new order of experience, one of the speaking apes hit upon the use of fire, and thereby introduced a new era in the advancement of man. Practically infinite was the increase of man's new mastery over Nature. Into temperate and even icy regions he could now penetrate and, as it were, create around him a little temporary zone of tropical warmth. With speech had come social unity; with fire at man's disposal came mastery over matter. But the unity thereby suffered a change. With the invention of means of creating artificial warmth the social homogeneity of the tribe began to be broken. Whoever controlled fire controlled the rest of his group, since no other way for the tribal appropriation of the blessings of regulated fire was possible among talking apes, except that one individual, or a very few, should assume the office of owner of the sticks or flints for igniting the fire, and should become dispenser of the flame. The group thus was divided into the controller and the controlled, the owner and the owned, the master and the man, the governor and the governed, the chief and his followers.

XIV. THE TWO MARKS OF ALL CIVILIZATION

Such a differentiation of society was, among apes, the condition for any sort of social unity; but control by the few could at the first have been only rudimentary and intermittent. Fire is not everything, and was indispensable only on certain occasions, as when the group were caught unexpectedly in some wintry region. Then the choice for any man might lie between freezing or obeying. Be it observed that fire under such circumstances would be shared by all, but the power of social control would be monopolized by one. Had you been there, but not the mightiest of your group, the condition of your surviving the cold would have been that you surrendered whatever individual initiative you had had. You gained fire, but lost freedom. At this point, by some innate sense of logical identity, my mind is carried forward a hundred thousand years to that centre of to-day's highest civilization--Detroit, and to its very palladium, the Ford Motor Works. For in that far-famed institution is to be found a very striking similarity to the primeval monopoly of initiative which arose with the first control of fire. Mr. Henry Ford has been magnanimously ready to share profits with his men, but, so far as I can learn, no iota of the industrial control.

Before I go to the next step towards citizenship, I would call attention to the fact that thus, near to the beginning of things human, when the use of fire was introduced, we are able to detect the two distinguishing characteristics of all civilization, and of trade in particular, which are the sharing by the tribe of the blessings of man's mastery over Nature, but, as the condition of the sharing, a monopoly of power and initiative by the few who dispense the blessings. So much of good and of goods--but no more--could the mass of men enjoy as was compatible with the continuance of the master's ascendancy over the men and over the public. We shall find no other than these marks in all future civilization, to distinguish it from savagery and barbarism. The only difference will be that in the period of civilization proper--that is, from ten thousand years ago to the end of the fifteenth century after Christ, when the established social order began to break up--the monopoly of initiative and control is practically absolute. As we trace the future steps in human evolution, we shall see how this concentration of power in the hands of rulers occurred. But it must be further observed that it is not only rudimentary civilization which we detect as ensuing upon the introduction of the use of fire: it is trade, socialized wealth, the division of the community into the "haves" and the "have-nots," the introduction of the working of the law, that to him that hath shall be given and that from him that hath nothing but his labor to offer shall be taken with it his liberty also. It should likewise be borne in mind that with the stealing of fire from heaven came also that coalition of government with trade, of politics with commerce, of the monopolists of economic power with the dictators of life and death, of peace and war, which is manifested to the highest conceivable degree to-day in the states most assertive of their leadership in the vanguard of civilization. I said that with the use of fire came the enslavement of men; but government and enslavement were one and the same thing. Neither, however, was as yet dominant over social life.

XV. ARROWS AND EARTHENWARE

The talking, fire-using anthropoid in the course of time invented the bow and arrow. So great and so enduring were the benefits of this new device that it is almost impossible for us, who have profited by them, to imagine the state of human society when men could kill animals or destroy enemies only by throwing stones or clubs, or by striking with the fist. But it is easy to see that the chief of a tribe of men received an incalculable increase of power when, besides the instruments of ignition, bows and arrows were in his possession to deal out at his will. Whatever equality of initiative and diffused sovereignty had existed before the use of fire was known, it now began to vanish, and the men of any tribe saw power concentrated in the will and word of the chief and those nearest him, while submission to his command was the condition of survival. And no doubt, with the loss of that individual liberty and that self-reliance which characterize the lower animals, there also died away a certain joyousness and zest of spontaneous self-fulfilment, such as we observe in wild creatures so long as they are free from hunger and thirst and secure from the pursuit of enemies.

It was perhaps another ten thousand years before one more new link in the chain of man's mastery over Nature and the chief's mastery over his men was forged. This time it was probably a woman who--again by a happy chance or by necessity of maternal solicitude--noticed the effect of heat upon clay and introduced the art of pottery. Until then men had no utensils that could withstand the action of fire; they could not boil water except by dropping hot stones into some receptacle of wood or skin. Now, by the new device of boiling, the food-supply was enormously increased. The blessing of another mastery over matter was henceforth shared by all the members of the tribe. But, at the same time, there was a corresponding force added to the chief's grip upon his men. We see the law illustrated, that every new invention, owned by the few, becomes one more trap for the many. The differentiation between the owner of the tribe's wealth and the propertyless became with the introduction of pottery fixed and hopeless. The master dealt out not only fire and arrows, but cooking-utensils; or he withheld all these if he saw fit; and if you had been there, but not in command, you, too, would have tamely submitted or have died.

XVI. ANIMALS TAMED AND IRON SMELTED

The word "tamely" which I have just used, brings me to the next great event which moved mankind perceptibly nearer to civilization proper. It is an event which was not only a literal fact of prime importance, but which is eternally a symbol of man's own fate. It was probably first the dog that lent himself to the imagination of the speaking, fire-making, arrow-shooting, clay-baking, anthropoid ape, as a stimulus to the idea that captive animals might be of service to human beings. Man began to tame not only the dog, but the sheep, the ox, the camel, the goat, the horse, and the elephant. The gain to all the tribe was enormous. The men all shared in the profit, but once more their master appropriated the new increment in power. He became the owner of the domesticated animals as well as of the inanimate pot and arrow and flame. But at this stage it must have seemed to all the other members of the tribe that they also were owned, soul and body, by their chief. They could not help seeing, nor could he, that they were _his_ men. And how natural it was for them to rejoice in the fact that they belonged to some one who was mightier than themselves, and who identified his own prosperity with that of the tribe, and of every individual in it who served it according to his will. Loyalty to the beloved community became loyalty to the chief. But it is evident that what mankind had caused to happen to the dog and the horse, the chief had accomplished in regard to the human beings who had come under his power. He had tamed them; they were no longer wild animals. They had rendered up individual liberty and self-reliant independence such as we see among many species of wild beasts. But instead, as the price of obedience to a will outside their own, they had received a thousand creature-comforts.

Only one more invention was needed to lift them to the highest and latest stage of barbarism. Some one now hit upon the art of smelting iron--the first invention that had not directly to do with the supplying of food. By leaps and bounds the art of smelting iron advanced man in the equipment of war, in the building of houses, roads, and vehicles of transportation. Now what magnificent returns individuals received for having surrendered their original liberty to do as they pleased! After all, what would independent initiative have been worth without fire or arrow or earthern kettle, or cow or horse or wheel, or sword and shield? Who would not have forfeited the bare birthright of empty (although healthy) independence for participation in the ever richer conquest over the physical resources of Nature?

XVII. CIVILIZATION PROPER

But now at last, only ten thousand years ago, the event occurred which put forever out of the question any possibility of prudence in any waywardness of individual whim, or any deviation from the rule dictated by the owner of things. This time the something that happened did not cause an increase of man's mastery over physical Nature. It was, instead, like that initial invention which turned apes into men. And again, like spoken language, it was a device to facilitate communication of mind with mind. In some one of the many groups of beings who had learned the use of fire, arrows, pots, sheep, and swords, some genius hit upon the idea of written signs as a medium of communication with those distant in space, and as a means of perpetuating a knowledge of the will of the dead among his survivors. But be it observed that only the master, never the man, only the owner of things, the controller of circumstances, was in a position to embody and preserve his judgment and desire in written signs. The new art of writing enhanced the power of rulers, of chiefs. The Pharaoh, not the fellah, dictated the inscription that was to be engraved. Thus all the rulers of the past were now able to perpetuate their power by adding their sanction to the word of the living chief, while no voice from the ranks of the governed would be allowed to immortalize itself in written speech. This is the reason that written language introduced civilization proper. There was no longer any chance for the wildness of the beast to crop out. Here began the empire of the dead over the living; but it was the empire of dead rulers over living slaves. The mastery over Nature and the monopoly of social power thereby became practically infinite. The tamers were now omnipotent in comparison with the tamed. It must be noticed that the process of transforming beasts into citizens was one to which only the tamed, but not the tamers, were subjected. The ruler stood outside of and above the rule he made. The law was for his subjects. This was the case with Henry VIII at the acme of civilization as it had been with the first of the Pharaohs.

Not only the blond beast of prey, but the swarthy also dictated an ethic for his subjects in order to keep himself in ascendancy. It was because Nietzsche admired all beasts of prey and felt contempt for their victims that he hated Jesus Christ and proudly assumed the title of Anti-Christ. For Christ had set up an ethic which encouraged the victims to protest and attempt to win back their primeval initiative, to take over the sovereignty which had been concentrated in the hands of the mighty and to diffuse it among the nobodies of the tribe. St. Luke goes so far as to assert that even before Jesus was born his Mother entertained levelling ideas. Into her lips he puts a song in which she magnifies the Lord because she believed her Son would bring down the mighty and exalt them of low degree. But alas! civilization went on for fifteen hundred years and succeeded in tying Christianity to the chariot-wheel of monopolized initiative.

XVIII. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AFTER CHRIST

Christianity had to wait for something to happen that would lend force to its Gospel. That something did not occur until the middle of the fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the door to the divine bridegroom of humanity.

I have said that in the fifteenth century after Christ a new principle began to work in society; but I did not say that it was then for the first time promulgated. Civilization was the organization of man's mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest; it was the giving only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is evidently not to be Christian any more than it is to be Buddhistic or Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured" without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power transferred to the general will of the community; if the community should relegate its administration to representatives, but should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the power entrusted to them, then something new--something as different from civilization as the airship from the horse-cart--would have begun to establish itself. A new species of social order can be nothing other than an order whose basic principle is totally new; and what greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that between self-interest and the interest of the community? Whenever the latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the song of the _Magnificat_. No such consummation of humanity has taken place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began to fulfil itself.

Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas.

These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was the accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of self-realization.

But it was only the beginning: the effects of the introduction of gunpowder, the compass, the printing-press and paper, and the new ideas about the heavens, and the opening-up of relatively uninhabited lands, were scarcely discernible for two centuries, and then only as a destructive force. Indeed, for still another hundred years the process was one chiefly of disintegration. There was taking place a transference of power from the few to the many; a diffusion of sovereignty, as well as a redistribution of wealth; and the change was accompanied by an awakening of the masses to the meaning of the transformation which they were undergoing. The people began to realize that the invention of gun-powder had raised the peasant as a fighter to the level of the armed knight; that the compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each new mechanical invention or discovery has had the unintended and undesired effect ultimately of scattering among the many the pent-up power of owners and rulers, and of creating in the many fresh psychic energy and a new capacity of invention.

This great process of levelling-up took again an enormous leap forward in the middle of the nineteenth century. The steam-engine advanced it almost as much as all the fifteenth-century inventions and discoveries together. The new facilities of travel brought new experiences, and these, by the psychological law of contrast and novelty, stimulated intelligence many-fold. The new speed in transportation made it possible for thousands to escape from oppression where scarcely one had been able to do so in former generations. The Irish peasants began to pour into America; then followed the Germans; soon Russians and Latins were helped to leave the Old World; sometimes in all came a million-odd in one year. Wealth was multiplied and scattered to a degree that had never been dreamed to be possible. Not only in the United States, but in France, Italy, Scandinavia, the British Empire, and South America, the diffusion of social initiative was taking place. First, power spread from the few to the many severally; but now, for a quarter of a century, the many, without surrendering, have been pooling their new power in the general will of the nation. There, in the unified and unifying purpose of nations like America, and of each of her federate States, the power is being safeguarded for the community and for its members severally by political devices which render public servants incapable of prolonged usurpation.

XIX. CIVILIZATION FACES ITS SUCCESSOR

Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was not triumphant until the invention of written language, so the new order--call it what you will: Christianity, the Meaning of America, the Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy, Humanity--this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.

But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization.

It would seem that the civilized, anticipating a move on the part of the humanized, and fearing an appropriation of the benefits of new inventions, stole a march upon the unsuspecting. The result is, that we saw at the outset of the war the latest appliances seized upon by the upholders of arbitrary power, and only now, after the first shock of attack, are the builders of an earthly paradise demonstrating their ability and intention to turn all the forces of Nature and devices of reason to the service of each in the brotherhood of the common life. We are beginning to see, also, that every one of the latest inventions is such in its nature that soon victory must come to the cause of economic and political equality.