Is civilization a disease? Part 3

Are there persons in America who say what, until the present war, many in Old England thought--that there is nothing new under the sun? Then I would call their attention to the unprecedented and revolutionary character of the contact in the United States, on a basis of relative political and social equality, of immigrants from some fifty-one different nations of the Old World. These people will mix their blood, their temperaments, and their traditions, and not only will a new variety of human being emerge, but the mixing of opposites in idea and temperament will quicken self-consciousness and heighten mental power and speed up its activity. The opportunity of the blond beasts of prey has lain in the torpor and inactivity and ignorance of the mult.i.tude.

But I find no torpor in California. And where there is no one that will allow himself to be preyed upon, even blond beasts take up the new enterprise of co-operation among equals. This is an inevitable result of the contact of many varieties of unlikes, the unification, not of equals, but of supplementary equivalents. When such psychic conditions have prevailed for a century or more, it is inconceivable that trade can continue to consist of compet.i.tion between individuals and the permission of the successful to ama.s.s and h.o.a.rd fortunes. Either production and distribution will become communal, or the community will tax large fortunes into the state and national treasury.

But there are three other distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of the twentieth century which make for the replacing of civilization by humanization, and for the transition of trade from the harshness of the law into the abounding grace of the gospel.

XXII. THE POWER TO TRANSMIT HUMAN LIFE, ITS SOCIAL CONTROL

First, the limiting of population by the will of human individuals. In the beginning men stole fire from the G.o.ds; but life they allowed the Almighty to continue to dispense at his own inscrutable pleasure, while they remained his pleased but puzzled agents in its transmission. It was only in the eighties of the last century, after a hundred thousand years, that man hit upon the idea and the practice of controlling life as he had controlled fire. From the beginning, he had planted the fire-seed according to his own purpose and social need. And now at last he has come to look upon the life-seed as not simply in his keeping as a trust for another, but as his own property to control in the interest of his own future. Can human audacity reach higher? Can the a.s.sumption of divine and creative responsibility by man out-strip this latest act of self-government? From beast to citizen, did we say? But have we not found the process during the last four hundred years to be from citizens.h.i.+p to G.o.ds.h.i.+p, from creature to creator? It was one of your American reformers who ent.i.tled a book _Man as Social Creator_. From beast to citizen seemed dull enough; but from citizen to G.o.d--what intoxication of zest does this thought engender! Can the creature dare it? Is this the great venture? Is this the meaning of the travail of the ages? Or is it only a process from citizen to man, from tamed beast to free spirit feeling the Soul of All at the inmost centre of himself, and finding the means at last of incarnating that soul in the community, in politics, trade, and domestic life? Howsoever the new facts and the newer outlook are to be interpreted, it becomes quite clear that if civilization was the taming of beasts, something that is not civilization has begun to a.s.sert itself. The liberating of citizens, as it moves to triumphant attainment, must sc.r.a.p many an inst.i.tution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of taming animals, when young women can--and know that they can--as war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never choose for the fruit of their love.

But, secondly, close upon the invention of means for controlling the transmission of life has followed the idea that this control shall not rest with the individuals most intimately concerned, but with the will of the community--of the nation--of federated humanity. If a man has no exclusive right to do as he pleases with his power of labor, to withhold it or direct it irrespective of the general welfare and the will of the commonweal, how much less, say the advocates of eugenic marriage, shall men and women be permitted to follow their own whim and their selfish pleasure as regards the use or waste of the power to communicate life? This new doctrine that men are only trustees for the nation and posterity in their central power to control the future quant.i.ty and quality of human beings whom they may bring into existence, recognizes no division of society into the tamed and the tamers. There is no cla.s.s suggested of monopolists of social power who will regulate the rest of the community, as the owner of cattle controls the breeding of them. The general will of the community, administered under diffused public opinion and through the educated judgment of the individual himself, will decide. Only in cases of what are agreed to be downright crimes will the law step in to condemn and prevent, and then only through agents who are directly accountable to an enlightened and alert public opinion. The retaining of this new mastery of man over the quant.i.ty and quality of human life, by the communal conscience against all monopolists, is the transcendent feature of the new order. But if this be so, then trade, our system of producing and distributing wealth, ceases to be merely a question of the control of labor and becomes a question of the control of the transmission of human life. Such control might have been accounted a possible privilege among Virginian breeders of slaves. But so to regard it seems monstrous, now that chattel slavery has been universally condemned, thanks to the triumphant levellers of the last hundred years. What is more, all trade is beginning to be regarded as a question ultimately, not of the manufacture of machines and their products, nor of the propagation of plants and animals, but of the begetting of spiritual agents, who in their turn are to become the makers and masters of the universe in which they are to live.

The third characteristic event of our century which is to help us to slough off civilization, as our ancestors ten thousand years ago rid themselves of the wild-beast features of barbarism and savagery, is the awakening of women. Their claim to social initiative and responsibility is the extremest possible reach of democratic self-a.s.sertion. The remarkable peculiarity of their entrance into trade is not, however, that they are women, but that they are the one half of mankind who have never worked for hire, but always from love, and who have desired the wage less than the approval of those they served. The morals of trade, as it has existed under the relation of master to wage-earner, even the ethics of trades-unionism, cannot survive the censure of women, who on other principles demand for themselves the right of maintenance by the state to protect them in the bearing and rearing of children and the making of homes, and the nursing of the wounded and the sick. Now that women no longer allow themselves as social agents to be ignored, they will insist that not only the morals of marriage and of democratic relations must become humane, but that all trade, as well as all legislation, must be guided by the eugenic motive.

XXIII. FOREIGN TRADE THE BEGETTER OF WARS

I have presumed to say that modern trade discloses civilization in its acutest form. The strict sobriety of this a.s.sertion we cannot, perhaps, appreciate to the full, unless we note the relation of trade during the last three hundred years to aggressive warfare. There prevails in the public mind the false notion that somehow peace and trade are akin in spirit and identical in their interests. This notion has been a.s.siduously foisted upon the public by kings of industry and some professors of sociology, who possibly believe that it is true. But the facts of history prove that every great war during the last three centuries has been undertaken in the service of foreign traders, who call upon their government to back their claims. According to Sir John Seeley, the greatest political historian of the British Empire, foreign trade and modern war have always been one and the same thing. Some small nation-state resented the advent and methods of the foreign traders, and began to prepare for self-defence, a.s.serting that it wished to be left alone, and that it meant to defend its own sacred traditions. This the government that backed the traders would not permit, and a clash of arms ensued. Or two rival sets of foreigners were jealous of each other in their effort to possess one and the same market and induced their respective governments to spring at each other's throats. Under such circ.u.mstances war does not always arise, because the mere show of vastly superior might is often sufficient to compel immediate submission. Such was the case when the United States in 1853 exhibited in the harbors of bewildered and terrified j.a.pan a fleet of great steams.h.i.+ps. The threatened nation, having admitted no foreigners since the Jesuits in the seventeenth century plotted against its political independence, and not knowing how to use steam to propel engines, saw that there was no alternative to violent conquest by their uninvited guests but peaceful submission on their own part.

Such peace, however, is not the holy thing which some persons declare all peace to be. When a man holds up his hands in answer to the challenge of a highway robber, bloodshed is avoided; but the outrage is none the less detestable because perfect quiet prevails. Nor is it the kind of social calm which the angels meant when they proclaimed peace on earth to men of good will. On the contrary, it is that stillness of unchallenged iniquity of which our Lord expressed his menacing hate when He declared that He came not to bring peace but a sword. Trade ill.u.s.trates civilization in its highest degree of intelligence and elaboration; and foreign trade is only trade in its widest transactions. But foreign trade being the cause of all war, the only way to end warfare is to displace civilization by a system of wealth produced and distributed under communal control. Then commerce will no longer be inspired by the financial interest of private investors, but by the total welfare of the whole people of the nation. But I have touched upon the ident.i.ty of war and trade only to show their vital connection with civilization as a whole.

XXIV. THE OPPOSITE OF A "RETURN TO NATURE"

Civilization is still advancing by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, at the same time, with a greater acceleration of development, the men are checkmating the master and transferring control and initiative to the will of the commonwealth. At least, not otherwise am I able to interpret the new deference for nationality which has been aroused in protest against aggressive militarism; nor the kind of industrial legislation that has been enacted during the last decade in California and other western states, in New Zealand and Australia, and even in Italy and England. It all means that the new inventions, although at first seized upon by monopolists, are seen to be such as to provide channels through which the pent-up instincts and hopes of the ma.s.ses can act with concerted power. It means that also political machinery is being devised for securing the public welfare and protecting opportunities for individual genius and talent. No man asks for more.

The world over we have reached the threshold of collective democracy, wherein the consuming of material wealth will be shared with approximate equality and wherein social control will be retained by the collective will, to safeguard individual initiative, and will be administered by public servants who have proved their superior ability, but who remain subject to almost instantaneous recall.

Such a subst.i.tute for civilization, however, is the opposite of a return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It presupposes the highest mastery of man over matter and social unity among all mankind co-operating as nation-states and federations of states.

As regards external government and law, it is the ant.i.thesis of Mr.

Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that external government, animated by the general will of a social democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be the law of his own being unless he has lost his manhood's centrality. A crus.h.i.+ng indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing during the twenty-six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths have become but items among the general products of industry and governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the British state, and the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of poetic hermits.

But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away, whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of trusts and monopolies to the general will of the community. In America you have changed your federal law and many of your state const.i.tutions, in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise through any legal barrier to the full a.s.sertion of the mind of the common life.

So in every particular of his cure for civilization Mr. Carpenter's wors.h.i.+p of savagery and barbarism is being rejected as fantastic. We may return to uncooked fruits and grains. But what a task for the most highly developed industrial state, to raise and distribute an adequate supply of grapes, apples, and nuts the year round for the 1,000,000,000 inhabitants of the globe! What a call for many wizards of California to produce new species of luscious edibles! It would seem to me that the curse of civilization has lain in the direction of too little of either cooked or uncooked food, instead of too much. If the common people are to come into their own, trade in every necessity and luxury must be more highly integrated. The difference of the new era as regards foreign commerce will chiefly be that nations as a whole by their governments will conduct it instead of private traders. In other words, foreign trade will be nationalized, in the way that social democrats have long demanded that land and capital should be. The community will own and control it through state agents for the common welfare. Nothing of good which civilization has brought forth will be lost, nor will the organization of wealth be relaxed.

Machinery will be multiplied a thousandfold. Like the human body itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this unity dominating a multiplicity of interests is attainable only through the entire mechanism of external government. And again, as the man resides in all the organs of the body, but is himself no organ, and as by the central unity of his life-energy is able to rush the white corpuscles to any part that is wounded or poisoned, so the general will, the community-self of the social democratic state, is beginning to direct all the healing agencies in the body politic to the rescue of the unfortunate. Such beneficence and benevolence, systematized and alert, is more than civilization. It is Christianity, it is the doing unto the least of one's fellow-men what self-interest prompts one never to do; but its power is equal to the redemptive goodness that inspires it. In motive and method it is not business, it is different from trade; for it is a progeny of pity. But nevertheless, it is socialized wealth and applied science and politics. It is government by the governed.

When civilization has been superseded by this democratic process, which in our century is advancing at such rapid gait, there will surely be in the sphere of religion no more return to Nature than in that of economics. There will be no more the wors.h.i.+p of any one instinct or organ, or any external object or agent. How could Carpenter have so far forgotten his own definition of health as to applaud the primitive ritualistic wors.h.i.+p of the glories of the human body and the procession of the stars? That ritual was itself the symptom of the break-up of man's character into multiplicity, and the insubordination of specific organs. Surely when man has gained centrality of health, he will wors.h.i.+p the unifying will which is dominant whenever health prevails.

He will adore the spirit which makes the many one. But men will never gain that centrality of health until they have established this wors.h.i.+p of the one heart that beats in every human breast and, being inspired with religious pa.s.sion for it, have brought the entire economic order into conformity with its behests.

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