Part 2

Nevertheless there is little doubt that, in the main, humanity is still Yahoo-manity. Alike in mentality and in _moral_, modern man is still substantially identical with his palæolithic ancestors. He is still the irrational, impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive, cruel, credulous, creature he always was. Normally the Yahoo in him is kept under control by the constant pressure of a variety of social institutions; but let anything upset an established social order, and the Yahoo comes to the front at once. The history of the past fifty years abundantly proves that man is still capable of atrocities equal to any in his record. Not only have we lived through the greatest political and the deadliest natural convulsion, the Great War and the Tokio earthquake, but the Russian Revolution has outdone the French and Landru the legendary Bluebeard, while for mingled atrocity and baseness the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander of Serbia are unsurpassed in history. The painful truth is that civilization has not improved Man’s moral nature. His moral habits are still mainly matters of custom, and the effect of moral theories is nugatory everywhere. Thus civilization is not even skin deep; it does not go deeper than the clothes.

V

Clearly it is risky to expose the inelastic nature of so stubbornly conservative a creature to new conditions at a rapid rate. He may not be able to adapt himself quickly enough, and his old reactions, which did little or no harm before, may become extremely dangerous. Yet this is just what has happened. Science has exposed the palæolithic savage masquerading in modern garb to a series of physical and mental shocks which have endangered his equilibrium. It has also enormously extended his power and armed him with a variety of delicate and penetrating instruments which have often proved edge tools in his hands and which the utmost wisdom could hardly be trusted to use aright. Under these conditions the fighting instinct ceases to be an antiquated foible, like the hunting instinct, and becomes a deadly danger. No wonder the more prescient are dismayed at the prospect of the old savage passions running amok in the full panoply of civilization!

VI

Nor is this the final item in our tale of woe. A third and most sinister fact which has to be faced is that Civilization, as at present constituted, is very definitely a deteriorating agency, conducing to the degeneration of mankind. This effect of Civilization is nothing new, but has been operating, it would seem, from the beginning, though not probably as intensively as now: its discovery, however, is very recent. It is quite indirect, unintended, and fortuitous, but cumulative, and in the long run has probably been a chief cause in the decay of States and civilizations, as well as an important factor in the arrest of biological development which we have had to recognize.

A simple and easily observable sociological fact is at the bottom of the mischief. The different classes in a society have different birth-rates and death-rates, and the differences between these yield their several net rates of increase or decrease. Now, whereas under the conditions of savage life class differences can hardly exist, or, at least cannot be accentuated, so that the whole tribe flourishes or perishes together, and among barbarians the upper classes have a very great advantage and the tribe recruits itself chiefly from the children of the chiefs, because the conditions of life are so severe that the lower classes are not able to rear many children; in civilized societies these conditions are reversed. It is found that though both birth-rates and death-rates grow as we descend the social scale, so does the net rate of increase. Indeed, the highest or ruling class nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.

The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies, even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability, discover it, and reward it by social promotion. But (2) as this promotion means passing into a class with a relatively inadequate rate of reproduction, the biological penalty attaching to social promotion is racial extinction. Thus (3) the ultimate reward of merit is sterilization, and society appears to be an organization devoted to the suicidal task of extirpating any ability it may chance to contain, by draining it away from any stratum in which it may occur, promoting it into the highest, and there destroying it. It is exactly as though a dairyman should set in motion apparatus for separating the cream from the milk, and then, as it rose, skim it off, and throw it away!

At present it is calculated that the highest classes in the chief civilized societies only reproduce themselves to the extent of fifty per cent. of their number in each generation, so that the hereditary ability of half of them is lost in each generation. But even then the remainder is largely wasted. It is churned into froth and scum by social forces. For neither now nor at any time has social intelligence shown itself equal to devising a training for the youth of the highest classes that would provide them with adequate stimuli to develop their faculties, and to lead a strenuous life of social service. The children of the rich are tempted to live for ‘society’ in the narrower sense, which means frittering away one’s life on a round of vacuous amusement; and they rarely resist the temptation.

Naturally it is difficult to trace the accumulation of ability in the upper social strata which is theoretically to be expected. On the other hand, in some subjects at any rate, the symptoms of a world-wide dearth of ability are becoming unmistakable. The Great War, though it made abundantly manifest the prevalence of incompetents in high places, did not reveal the existence either of a great general or of a great statesman anywhere.

It is superfluous to insist either on the fatuity of a social organization such as this, or on the certainty of racial degeneration which it entails: but it may be well to draw attention to the _rapidity_ with which these degenerative processes are at present sapping the vitality and value of our civilized races. The failure to reproduce does not, as in former times, affect merely the aristocracy in the highest social strata; it has spread to the whole of the professional and middle classes, and to most classes of skilled labour. It is not too much to say that, with the exception of the miners, none of the desirable elements in the nation are doing their bit to keep up the population, and that its continued growth is mainly due to the unrestrained breeding of the casual labourers and the feeble-minded.

In the rest of the population its increase is checked by birth-control and the postponement of marriage, neither of which affects the undesirables. They are too stupid, reckless, and ignorant to practise the former, and have nothing to gain by the latter. Also, to make it quite certain that they shall form a true ‘proletariate,’ the wisdom of our rulers ordains that a knowledge of birth-control shall be a (fatal) privilege reserved for the intelligent and well-to-do. They instruct the police to prevent it from penetrating to the poor and stupid--apparently from the mistaken idea that the State needs plenty of cheap labour and cheap cannon-fodder. So child-bearing remains compulsory for the wretched women of the poor, whereas elsewhere only those women produce children who desire them, and natural selection is thus allowed gradually to eliminate the temperament of the unwilling (and, therefore, probably less competent) mother.

The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination are further intensified by other tendencies: (1) The advance of medicine and hygiene has enormously diminished selective mortality in all classes, and improved the chances of weaklings to survive and leave descendants. (2) The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the value of the survivors. The emotional appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so directly to the heart of civilized man that his head never reflects whether the particular baby is worth saving, and whether a baby from a different breed and with a better pedigree would not be better worth having. (3) Modern obstetrics save the lives of thousands of women, whose physique is such that in former times they would inevitably have died in child-birth. The result is that child-birth is becoming more difficult. Also babies brought up on the bottle, which has an irresistible attraction for microbes of all sorts, are apt to be less healthy than those nourished in the more primitive manner.

(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which used formerly to provide for a considerable infusion of the blood of the upper classes into the lower, has now practically ceased. Since the merry days of King Charles II, very few noble families of royal descent have been added to the peerage.

VII

Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. At present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by some miraculous rally of human intelligence, these convulsions should be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent destruction of the human race by war will only be more _dramatic_: it will not be more _fatal_ than its gradual decay as its arts and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness.

VIII

This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions. This again seems attainable in at least two ways.

The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any rate cease to cut his own throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth trying.

I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But the palæolithic Yahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘_God help us!_’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]

It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford to wait.

Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings, and perverted into an instrument to consolidate their power. He thinks that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C] and that the result would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.

This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.

But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything like the social momentum necessary to carry through any radical reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful, enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the primitive Yahoo. In either case, the process will be gradual, and its success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here, overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray, trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to retrace our steps when we have made a false one.

The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize, and will regard the _toleration_ of differences of opinion as among the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that _perfection_ may be postulated, provision has always to be made for the _improvement_ of the social order. It can never be accepted as absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle, of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves superior: under changed conditions they may become inferior, and may fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order must be _plastic_, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely adoption of such novelties.

But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved. Society cannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations, whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be valuable.

Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure is _essentially experimental_, and all that this implies. We do not know, at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and that no good can come of coddling and cultivating them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types. How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’ and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course that yields unsatisfactory results.

It is really one of the great advantages of eugenics that it cannot proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public. For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail, and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of social forces.

IX

If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve further--in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than the _Lemur_ and the _Pithecanthropus_, who were our progenitors and managed to evolve into modern man.

But the process will necessarily be a slow one, even though a comprehensive scheme of eugenics will be providing simultaneously _two_ sources of improvement, by the elimination of defectives at the bottom of the social scale, and by the increase of ability at the top. As, moreover, time presses, and sheer destruction may overtake us before eugenics have made much difference, it would be highly desirable if some means could be found to accelerate the change of heart required. For this purpose, I am much less inclined to put my trust in the advance of pharmacology than Mr Haldane and Mr Russell.[D] Hitherto new drugs have only meant new vices, sometimes (like cocaine) of so fascinating a character as to distract the whole police force from their proper function of repressing crime. So it seems legitimate to be very sceptical about moral transformation scenes to be wrought by pills and injections.

On the other hand there does seem to be a science from the possible progress of which something of a sensational kind might not unreasonably be expected. It is, moreover, the science most directly concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different problems and objects. The results, as the psychologists themselves confess, are meagre and disappointing; which, of course, only proves that the borrowed notions are inappropriate and incapable of making Psychology into an effective science. But if psychologists should take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind.

For there is reason to suppose that its present organization is very far from being the best of which it is capable. It has come about in a very haphazard manner, and we are not at present making anything like an adequate use of all our powers. Hence by changing the gearing and re-arranging the traditional coupling, so to speak, of our faculties, improvements might conceivably be wrought which would seem to us to border on the miraculous. Thus a pragmatically efficient Psychology might actually invert the miracle of Circe, and really transform the Yahoo into a man.

X

I have endeavoured in this very summary sketch to show that the doom of Tantalus is by no means unconditional, and that he can save himself if he chooses, and that by no superhuman effort, but merely by recognizing facts that are right before his nose and well within his comprehension, and by a little clear thinking upon their import. But I would not presume to predict that he _will_ save himself: history affords no unambiguous guide. It seems to show that something worse and something better than what actually happens is always conceivable, and that neither our hopes nor our fears are ever fully realized. If so, poor Tantalus, hoping against hope, fearing against reason, may muddle along for a good while yet, without repeating either his ancient error of imagining that he could sup with the gods, or his modern folly of using his reason, as Goethe’s Mephistopheles declared, only to become more bestial than any beast!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The most absurd perhaps was the clause, appearing in all the Peace Treaties, which made ‘reparations’ a first charge on all the assets of the defeated countries. This, of course, completely destroyed their credit, and incapacitated them from raising a loan, forcing them to have recourse to progressive inflation, and so into bankruptcy.

[B] This does _not_ mean, of course, that there are no Christians in the Churches, but only that they are not in control of these institutions.

[C] _Icarus_, p. 49.

[D] cf. _Daedalus_, p. 34; _Icarus_, p. 54.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.