Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
T >>
Thomas H. Huxley >> Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 | 16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23
And those who desire, as I most emphatically desire, to be just to Mr.
Booth, however badly they may think of the working of the organization
he has founded, will bear in mind that some astute backers of his
probably care little enough for Salvationist religion; and, perhaps,
are not very keen about many of Mr. Booth's projects. I have referred
to the rubbing of the hands of the Socialists over Mr. Booth's
success;* but, unless I err greatly, there are politicians of a
certain school to whom it affords still greater satisfaction. Consider
what electioneering agents the captains of the Salvation Army,
scattered through all our towns, and directed from a political
"bureau" in London, would make! Think how political adversaries could
be harassed by our local attorney--"tribune of the people," I mean;
and how a troublesome man, on the other side, could be "hunted [194]
down" upon any convenient charge, whether true or false, brought by
our Vigilance-familiar!**
* See Letter VIII.
** See Letter II.
I entirely acquit Mr. Booth of any complicity in far-reaching schemes
of this kind; but I did not write idly when, in my first letter, I
gave no vague warning of what might grow out of the organised force,
drilled in the habit of unhesitating obedience, which he has created.
[195]
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IN HUMAN SOCIETY.
[1888].
The vast and varied procession of events, which we call Nature, affords
a sublime spectacle and an inexhaustible wealth of attractive problems
to the speculative observer. If we confine our attention to that
aspect which engages the attention of the intellect, nature appears a
beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation of a faultless logical
process, from certain premises in the past to an inevitable conclusion
in the future. But if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more
human, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed to influence
our judgment, and we permit ourselves to criticise our great mother as
we criticise one another; then our verdict, at least so far as
sentient nature is concerned, can hardly be so favourable.
In sober truth, to those who have made a study of the phenomena of life
as they exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, [196] the
optimistic dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds, will
seem little better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only
another instance to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a
priori speculators who, having created God in their own image, find no
difficulty in assuming that the Almighty must have been actuated by
the same motives as themselves. They are quite sure that, had any
other course been practicable, He would no more have made infinite
suffering a necessary ingredient of His handiwork than a respectable
philosopher would have done the like.
But even the modified optimism of the time-honoured thesis of
physico-theology, that the sentient world is, on the whole, regulated
by principles of benevolence, does but ill stand the test of impartial
confrontation with the facts of the case. No doubt it is quite true
that sentient nature affords hosts of examples of subtle contrivances
directed towards the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain;
and it may be proper to say that these are evidences of benevolence.
But if so, why is it not equally proper to say of the equally numerous
arrangements, the no less necessary result of which is the production
of pain, that they are evidences of malevolence?
If a vast amount of that which, in a piece of human workmanship, we
should call skill, is [197] visible in those parts of the organization
of a deer to which it owes its ability to escape from beasts of prey,
there is at least equal skill displayed in that bodily mechanism of
the wolf which enables him to track, and sooner or later to bring
down, the deer. Viewed under the dry light of science, deer and wolf
are alike admirable; and, if both were non-sentient automata, there
would be nothing to qualify our admiration of the action of the one on
the other. But the fact that the deer suffers, while the wolf inflicts
suffering, engages our moral sympathies. We should call men like the
deer innocent and good, men such as the wolf malignant and bad; we
should call those who defended the deer and aided him to escape brave
and compassionate, and those who helped the wolf in his bloody work
base and cruel. Surely, if we transfer these judgments to nature
outside the world of man at all, we must do so impartially. In that
case, the goodness of the right hand which helps the deer, and the
wickedness of the left hand which eggs on the wolf, will neutralize
one another: and the course of nature will appear to be neither moral
nor immoral, but non-moral.
This conclusion is thrust upon us by analogous facts in every part of
the sentient world; yet, inasmuch as it not only jars upon prevalent
prejudices, but arouses the natural dislike to that which is painful,
much ingenuity has been exercised in devising an escape from it.
From the theological side, we are told that [198] this is a state of
probation, and that the seeming injustices and immoralities of nature
will be compensated by and by. But how this compensation is to be
effected, in the case of the great majority of sentient things, is not
clear. I apprehend that no one is seriously prepared to maintain that
the ghosts of all the myriads of generations of herbivorous animals
which lived during the millions of years of the earth's duration,
before the appearance of man, and which have all that time been
tormented and devoured by carnivores, are to be compensated by a
perennial existence in clover; while the ghosts of carnivores are to
go to some kennel where there is neither a pan of water nor a bone
with any meat on it. Besides, from the point of view of morality, the
last stage of things would be worse than the first. For the
carnivores, however brutal and sanguinary, have only done that which,
if there is any evidence of contrivance in the world, they were
expressly constructed to do. Moreover, carnivores and herbivores
alike have been subject to all the miseries incidental to old age,
disease, and over-multiplication, and both might well put in a claim
for "compensation" on this score.
On the evolutionist side, on the other hand, we are told to take
comfort from the reflection that the terrible struggle for existence
tends to final good, and that the suffering of the ancestor is paid
for by the increased perfection of the progeny. There would be
something in this argument if, in [199] Chinese fashion, the present
generation could pay its debts to its ancestors; otherwise it is not
clear what compensation the Eohippus gets for his sorrows in the fact
that, some millions of years afterwards, one of his descendants wins
the Derby. And, again, it is an error to imagine that evolution
signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process
undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in
adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those
conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall
be upward or downward. Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive
metamorphosis. If what the physical philosophers tell us, that our
globe has been in a state of fusion, and, like the sun, is gradually
cooling down, is true; then the time must come when evolution will
mean adaptation to an universal winter, and all forms of life will die
out, except such low and simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic
and antarctic ice and the Protococcus of the red snow. If our globe is
proceeding from a condition in which it was too hot to support any but
the lowest living thing to a condition in which it will be too cold to
permit of the existence of any others, the course of life upon its
surface must describe a trajectory like that of a ball fired from a
mortar; and the sinking half of that course is as much a part of the
general process of evolution as the rising.
From the point of view of the moralist the [200] animal world is on
about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly
well treated, and set to fight--whereby the strongest, the swiftest,
and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no
need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He must admit
that the skill and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut
his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is
the meed of both vanquished and victor. And since the great game is
going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute;
since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of
hell to hear--
. . . sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai.
Voci alte e floche, e suon di man con elle
--it seems to follow that, if the world is governed by benevolence, it
must be a different sort of benevolence from that of John Howard.
But the old Babylonians wisely symbolized Nature by their great
goddess Istar, who combined the attributes of Aphrodite with those of
Ares. Her terrible aspect is not to be ignored or covered up with
shams; but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a
foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a
nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. Error which is
not pleasant is surely the worst form of wrong.
[201] This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that
it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may
find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth,
who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in
pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any
reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in fact do, get on
fairly well with vastly less happiness and far more misery than find
their way into the lives of nine people out of ten. If each and all of
us had been visited by an attack of neuralgia, or of extreme mental
depression, for one hour in every twenty-four--a supposition which
many tolerably vigorous people know, to their cost, is not
extravagant--the burden of life would have been immensely increased
without much practical hindrance to its general course. Men with any
manhood in them find life quite worth living under worse conditions
than these.
There is another sufficiently obvious fact, which renders the
hypothesis that the course of sentient nature is dictated by
malevolence quite untenable. A vast multitude of pleasures, and these
among the purest and the best, are superfluities, bits of good which
are to all appearances unnecessary as inducements to live, and are, so
to speak, thrown into the bargain of life. To those who experience
them, few delights can be more entrancing than such as are afforded by
natural [202] beauty, or by the arts, and especially by music; but
they are products of, rather than factors in, evolution, and it is
probable that they are known, in any considerable degree, to but a
very small proportion of mankind.
The conclusion of the whole matter seems to be that, if Ormuzd has not
had his way in this world, neither has Ahriman. Pessimism is as little
consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism. If we
desire to represent the course of nature in terms of human thought,
and assume that it was intended to be that which it is, we must say
that its governing principle is intellectual and not moral; that it is
a materialized logical process, accompanied by pleasures and pains,
the incidence of which, in the majority of cases, has not the
slightest reference to moral desert. That the rain falls alike upon
the just and the unjust, and that those upon whom the Tower of Siloam
fell were no worse than their neighbours, seem to be Oriental modes of
expressing the same conclusion.
In the strict sense of the word "nature," it denotes the sum of the
phenomenal world, of that which has been, and is, and will be; and
society, like art, is therefore a part of nature. But it is
convenient to distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays the
part of immediate cause, as some thing apart; and, therefore, society,
like art, [203] is usefully to be considered as distinct from nature.
It is the more desirable, and even necessary, to make this
distinction, since society differs from nature in having a definite
moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the
ethical man--the member of society or citizen--necessarily runs
counter to that which the non-ethical man--the primitive savage, or
man as a mere member of the animal kingdom--tends to adopt. The latter
fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, like any
other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of
setting limits to the struggle.*
In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no
more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of
the wolf and of the deer. However imperfect the relics of prehistoric
men may be, the evidence which they afford clearly tends to the
conclusion that, for thousands and thousands of years, before the
origin of the oldest known civilizations, men were savages of a very
low type. They strove with their enemies and their competitors; they
preyed upon things weaker or less cunning than themselves; they were
born, multiplied without stint, and died, for thousands of generations
alongside the mammoth, the urus, the lion, and the hyaena, whose lives
were spent in the same way; [204] and they were no more to be praised
or blamed on moral grounds, than their less erect and more hairy
compatriots.
* [The reader will observe that this is the argument of the
Romanes Lecture, in brief.--1894.]
As among these, so among primitive men, the weakest and stupidest went
to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, those who were best
fitted to cope with their circumstances, but not the best in any other
sense, survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the
limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of
each against all was the normal state of existence. The human species,
like others, plashed and floundered amid the general stream of
evolution, keeping its head above water as it best might, and thinking
neither of whence nor whither.
The history of civilization--that is, of society--on the other hand, is
the record of the attempts which the human race has made to escape
from this position. The first men who substituted the state of mutual
peace for that of mutual war, whatever the motive which impelled them
to take that step, created society. But, in establishing peace, they
obviously put a limit upon the struggle for existence. Between the
members of that society, at any rate, it was not to be pursued a
outrance. And of all the successive shapes which society has taken,
that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of individual
against individual is most strictly limited.
[205] The primitive savage, tutored by Istar, appropriated whatever
took his fancy, and killed whomsoever opposed him, if he could. On the
contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of
action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of
others; he seeks the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as
an essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and means with
him; and he founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint,
which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He
tries to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the
free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to
establish a kingdom of Man, governed upon tile principle of moral
evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its
perfection, social life, is embodied morality.
But the effort of ethical man to work towards a moral end by no means
abolished, perhaps has hardly modified, the deep-seated organic
impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course.
One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause, of the
struggle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without limit,
which man shares with all living things. It is notable that "increase
and multiply" is a commandment traditionally much older than the ten;
and that it is, perhaps, the only one which has been spontaneously and
ex animo obeyed by [206] the great majority of the human race. But, in
civilized society, the inevitable result of such obedience is the
re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for
existence--the war of each against all--the mitigation or abolition of
which was the chief end of social organization.
It is conceivable that, at some. in the history of the fabled Atlantis,
the production of food should have been exactly sufficient to meet the
wants of the population, that the makers of the commodities of the
artificer should have amounted to just the number supportable by the
surplus food of the agriculturists. And, as there is no harm in adding
another monstrous supposition to the foregoing, let it be imagined
that every man, woman, and child was perfectly virtuous, and aimed at
the good of all as the highest personal good. In that happy land, the
natural man would have been finally put down by the ethical man. There
would have been no competition, but the industry of each would have
been serviceable to all; nobody being vain and nobody avaricious,
there would have been no rivalries; the struggle for existence would
have been abolished, and the millennium would have finally set in. But
it is obvious that this state of things could have been permanent only
with a stationary population. Add ten fresh mouths; and as, by the
supposition, there was only exactly enough before, somebody must go on
short rations. The [207] Atlantis society might have been a heaven
upon earth, the whole nation might have consisted of just men, needing
no repentance, and yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar, non-moral
Nature, would have riven the ethical fabric. I was once talking with a
very eminent physician* about the vis medicatrix naturae. "Stuff!"
said he; "nine times out of ten nature does not want to cure the man:
she wants to put him in his coffin." And Istar-Nature appears to have
equally little sympathy with the ends of society. "Stuff! she wants
nothing but a fair field and free play for her darling the strongest."
* The late Sir W. Gull
Our Atlantis may be an impossible figment, but the antagonistic
tendencies which the fable adumbrates have existed in every society
which was ever established, and, to all appearance, must strive for
the victory in all that will be. Historians point to the greed and
ambition of rulers, to the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the
debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars
which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the
causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations,
and thereby point their story with a moral. No doubt immoral motives
of all sorts have figured largely among the minor causes of these
events. But beneath all this [208] superficial turmoil lay the
deep-seated impulse given by unlimited multiplication. In the swarms
of colonies thrown out by Phoenicia and by old Greece; in the ver
sacrum of the Latin races; in the floods of Gauls and of Teutons which
burst over the frontiers of the old civilization of Europe; in the
swaying to and fro of the vast Mongolian hordes in late times, the
population problem comes to the front in a very visible shape. Nor is
it less plainly manifest in the everlasting agrarian questions of
ancient Rome than in the Arreoi societies of the Polynesian Islands.
In the ancient world, and in a large part of that in which we live,
the practice of infanticide was, or is, a regular and legal custom;
famine, pestilence, and war were and are normal factors in the
struggle for existence, and they have served, in a gross and brutal
fashion, to mitigate the intensity of the effects of its chief cause.
But, in the more advanced civilizations, the progress of private and
public morality has steadily tended to remove all these checks. We
declare infanticide murder, and punish it as such; we decree, not
quite so successfully, that no one shall die of hunger; we regard
death from preventible causes of other kinds as a sort of constructive
murder, and eliminate pestilence to the best of our ability; we
declaim against the curse [209] of war, and the wickedness of the
military spirit, and we are never weary of dilating on the blessedness
of peace and the innocent beneficence of Industry. In their moments of
expansion, even statesmen and men of business go thus far. The finer
spirits look to an ideal civitas Dei; a state when, every man having
reached the point of absolute self-negation, and having nothing but
moral perfection to strive after, peace will truly reign, not merely
among nations, but among men, and the struggle for existence will be
at an end.
Whether human nature is competent, under any circumstances, to reach,
or even seriously advance towards, this ideal condition, is a question
which need not be discussed. It will be admitted that mankind has not
yet reached this stage by a very long way, and my business is with the
present. And that which I wish to point out is that, so long as the
natural man increases and multiplies without restraint, so long will
peace and industry not only permit, but they will necessitate, a
struggle for existence as sharp as any that ever went on under the
regime of war. If Istar is to reign on the one hand, she will demand
her human sacrifices on the other.
Let us look at home. For seventy years peace and industry have had
their way among us with less interruption and under more favourable
conditions than in any other country on the face of the earth. The
wealth of Croesus was nothing to [210] that which we have accumulated,
and our prosperity has filled the world with envy. But Nemesis did not
forget Croesus: has she forgotten us?
I think not. There are now 36,000,000 of people in our islands, and
every year considerably more than 300,000 are added to our numbers.*
That is to say, about every hundred seconds, or so, a new claimant to
a share in the common stock or maintenance presents him or herself
among us. At the present time, the produce of the soil does not
suffice to feed half its population. The other moiety has to be
supplied with food which must be bought from the people of
food-producing countries. That is to say, we have to offer them the
things which they want in exchange for the things we want. And the
things they want and which we can produce better than they can are
mainly manufactures--industrial products.
* These numbers are only approximately accurate. In 1881, our
population amounted to 35,241,482, exceeding the number in 1871
by 3,396,103. The average annual increase in the decennial.
1871--1881 is therefore 339,610. The number of minutes in a
calendar year is 525,600.
The insolent reproach of the first Napoleon had a very solid
foundation. We not only are, but, under penalty of starvation, we are
bound to be, a nation of shopkeepers. But other nations also lie under
the same necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal in the same
goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to get the most and
[211] the best in exchange for their produce. If our goods are
inferior to those of our competitors, there is no ground, compatible
with the sanity of the buyers, which can be alleged, why they should
not prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take place on a
large and general scale, five or six millions of us would soon have
nothing to eat. We know what the cotton famine was; and we can
therefore form some notion of what a dearth of customers would be.
Judged by an ethical standard, nothing can be less satisfactory than
the position in which we find ourselves. In a real, though incomplete,
degree we have attained the condition of peace which is the main
object of social organization; and, for argument's sake, it may be
assumed that we desire nothing but that which is in itself innocent
and praiseworthy--namely, the enjoyment of the fruits of honest
industry. And lo! in spite of ourselves, we are in reality engaged in
an internecine struggle for existence with our presumably no less
peaceful and well-meaning neighbours. We seek peace and we do not
ensue it. The moral nature in us asks for no more than is compatible
with the general good; the non-moral nature proclaims and acts upon
that fine old Scottish family motto, "Thou shalt starve ere I want."
Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multiplication
goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is
likely to [212] be devised, no fiddle-faddling with the distribution
of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by
the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of that
struggle for existence the limitation of which is the object of
society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal
competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be;
however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative
pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the
positive pole;* this state of things must abide, and grow continually
worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle
of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or
later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 | 16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23