The Ethical Kinship
I. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle
The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. Humanity is only a habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s ‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply the sloughing off of this inherited animality.
To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts.
II. Egoism and Altruism
Everything has been evolved—everything—from daffodils to states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe. That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.
Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world.
‘I saw the fishes playing there;
I saw all that was in the whole world round;
In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,
All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.
All these I saw, and say to you,
That nothing lives among them without hate.’
Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been brought about largely through war—war between individuals and between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness. Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses, because beings hated and exterminated each other before they tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed cooperation as a factor in life evolution.
There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition. Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is also prominent in all social activities.
The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world, what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.
Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity, public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer: there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have learned to stand by each other and help each other against their common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal have gone down.
The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by causes or considerations different from those which actuate a society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things. The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.
The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism. The ethical systems of all peoples are, and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among those associating more or less closely as a group, and having interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad influences operating as race experience and race selection enable men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures, interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and kinship.
III. The Ethics of the Savage
The ethics of the savage is, almost without exception, purely tribal in its extent. A marked distinction is everywhere made by primitive peoples between injuries to persons inside the tribe and injuries to those outside the tribe. Crimes which are looked upon as felonious when committed by a savage against the members of his own tribe may be regarded as harmless, or even highly commendable, when perpetrated on those outside the tribe. Acts are not judged according to their intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to whether they are performed on outsiders or on insiders. The Balantis (Africa) punish with death a theft committed against a fellow-tribesman, but encourage and reward thieving from other tribes. The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her son may be a successful robber—not a robber of her own people, but of other peoples—and in order that he may become proficient in crime teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in the wall. By certain Bedouin tribes the ‘strenuous life’ is held in such high honour that ‘it is considered a disgrace to die in bed’; and among the man-eating Fijians ‘men who have not slain an enemy suffer the most degrading of all punishments’.1a In the paradise of the Kukis (India) the cut-throats who have in life killed the largest number of aliens not only inherit the highest places, but these adepts of the knife are supposed to be attended in their celestial comings and goings by their victims as slaves.1b In his dealings with the other members of his tribe, the savage observes a certain rude code of morals, this code being usually, as in the case of the civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and hypocrisy. But the savage recognises no moral obligations to any being outside of his tribe, clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing more positively than this. Consanguinity and self-interest are the only bases of savage friendship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be attacked, robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or enslaved, with perfect propriety. It was this general hostility of foreigners that Cain feared when he was turned out from his countrymen after his crime upon Abel. He knew that he was liable to be set upon by the first stranger that came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set a mark upon him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him.’
‘There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers,’ says Sir Henry Maine, in speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and Semitic races, ‘except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to another, there was nothing between them. He was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging, indeed, to the craftiest and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely be too strong to assert that the dogs which followed the camp had more in common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe’.2a Among some tribes of savage men the ethical code is reversed in dealing with outsiders, and enmity toward aliens is considered a duty.
This same senseless hostility toward every one from abroad, so spitefully exhibited by primitive men, is also manifested by ants, who immediately recognise and pounce upon an individual introduced from a foreign colony, but welcome with every demonstration of joy, even after a lapse of weeks or months, a returning member of their own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness is found also in elephants. If by accident an elephant becomes separated from his herd, he becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being permitted in any circumstances to attach himself to another herd.3
That the savage should entertain feelings of friendship for those belonging to the same social unit as himself is, considering the circumstances in which it takes place, a perfectly natural phenomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the savage, the beings among whom he has come into existence, and in the midst of whom he has grown up. He knows and understands them, and is known and understood by them. They speak the same language as himself, and cherish the same customs and traditions. They have the same sacred trees, the same gods, the same experiences day after day, and the same memories, as he himself. They are his associates in the chase, his allies in war, and his comrades in sorrow and success. They are the only beings into whose lives he has ever entered. They constitute his world, and are to him the only real beings in the universe.
The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the savage, for the most part, his kinspeople. If they are not actually related to him by blood, they are usually conceived by him to be so related. The co-villagers of an Indian community call each other brothers. It is a characteristic of all the Aryan and Semitic races when in the tribal state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and all subdivisions of them, are descended each from a single male ancestor. The savage sees the living family of which he forms a part descended from a single living man and his wife or wives. This family group with which he is familiar and other similar groups make up the tribe. And the process by which each family has been brought about is in his mind identical with the process by which the community as a whole has been formed.2b It is a conception of this kind, handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal times, which causes the Jews even to-day to regard themselves as the ‘seed’ of that venerable sheik who, so many centuries ago, led them as a band of nomads in their memorable migration westward from the plains of Mesopotamia. It is not strange, therefore, considering all of the circumstances in the midst of which the savage lives and moves, that he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as beings to be distinguished by him from all other beings in the universe.
Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental sterility of the savage, his lack of travel and imagination, the meagerness of his experiences, and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the community in which he lives, that he should look upon and treat all outsiders as nobodies—as beings without any claims whatever upon his humanity or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power of the mind, the power by which beings are able to get out of themselves and into the places of others, the power which enables us to view the world comparatively—that is, from different points of view. This power of mind, which imparts to the higher types of intelligence their mobility and sympathy, is rudimentary in the savage. This has been proved by Tylor in his study of the comparative mythology of savages. It is this lack of imagination in the savage, combined with his ignorance and his simplicity of life, which gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him inaccessible to those higher sentiments of justice and righteousness which are—well, which are, at least, dreamed about and theorised about by the more evolved savages of the ‘civilised world.’ The world, to the simple mind of the savage, is, as it is to the mind of the child, the world in which he lives and moves—the world which he feels, hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boundary of the universe. Beings beyond his tribe are outside of the world. If they exist at all, it is as a very different order of beings from him and his people. They are not of kin to him, speak a strange tongue, and have monstrous customs and superstitions. How could they be in any way related to him? They are his enemies—vague villainous apparitions who appear to him only in the horrible ordeals of battle. His chief occupation is the waging of war against them, and his keenest gratification is felt in laying them low. The accounts of all travellers testify that the intertribal relations of savages are, with few exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility. The irreconcilable antagonism between the savage and those around him begets in the savage nature its dominating impulse—hate, hatred and hostility toward other men, as well as toward all other beings. In fact, the savage makes no moral distinction between man and the other animals, but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes, whom he must either use or remove from the face of the earth. The savage hunts men about as he hunts other animals, and for a like purpose. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt antelopes to-day.
1a. 1b. Spencer: Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893..
2a. 2b. Maine: Early History of Institutions; New York, 1869.
3. Tennent: Natural History of Ceylon; London, 1861.
IV. The Ethics of the Ancient
But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples. Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they have evolved.
Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever. International cooperation, such as exists among the political societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown. International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and victimisation, not as friends.
Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching their young men adroitness.
The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance, politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his ‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands. ‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).
The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’ Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves eternally infamous’.1
To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world, and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain, which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans, who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot. ‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.2 The conception of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that ‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’ It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.
Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities, but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’ To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily, except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the ‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon. Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron. The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry sand.3a There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.
Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting. Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves for each different function in the household. There were the cubicularii, who acted as housemaids; the triclinarii, who waited at table; the culinarii, who acted as kitchen drudges; and the balnearii, who looked after the baths. Then there were tonsores or barbers; criniflores, or hair-crimpers; calceatores, who took care of the feet; and lectores, whose business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the bath, or in bed. The ostiarius, who was sometimes chained in the vestibule like a dog, was the porter; the invitator summoned the guests; and the servus ab hospitiis looked after their lodgment. There was the slave called the sandalio, whose sole duty was to care for his master’s sandals; and another, called the nomenclator, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most ignominious and agonising circumstances.4
‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as “vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and exposure’.3b Slaves were practically without any rights whatever to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat non-humans—as mere prey.
1. Spencer: Principles of Ethics, vol. i.; New York, 1893. 2. Myers: Ancient History, part i.; Boston, 1899. 3a. 3b. Myers: Ancient History, part ii.; Boston, 1899. 4. Preston and Dodge: The Private Life of the Romans; Boston, 1896.
V. Modern Ethics
But the peoples of the ancient world are not the only human beings who have suffered from the psychological bequests of savages. Modern states and peoples, notwithstanding their far-flung professions of righteousness, manifest, though in a somewhat weakened form, the same ethnic prejudices and the same senseless antipathies as those displayed by the ancients. Remnants of the primitive tribal morality are found in the moral habits and conceptions of every people, however emancipated they may imagine themselves to be. Many a person who would not think of swindling one of his neighbours will not hesitate to swindle a foreigner, especially if the foreigner happens to be of a nationality much removed in language, colour, manners, or interests from his own. Morality is genetic. It is not a consistent something—something reasoned out and framed according to the facts. It has grown up. It is essentially tribal—whether it is confined to a family, as is done by some, to a corporation or trade, to a nation, to an artificial fraternity, or to a species. We are, in fact, all of us, even the broadest and most illuminated, simply savages more or less leafed out. We all suffer, as men have always suffered, from the over-vividness of the presentative powers of the mind (sensation and perception) compared with the representative powers (memory and imagination). We all exaggerate out of their proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe the things that are around us and about us—the events we witness or take part in, the things that are ours, and the affairs of the street, city, state, neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live. Every human being (the sage less than the savage, but the sage to some extent) is inclined to lump together as foreign to him, and as more or less useless and shadowy in themselves, the things, beings, and events that are distant, and to consider them, of less reality than those with which he is directly concerned, and of which his knowledge is immediate. The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena that are more and more distant in both space and time.
The Chinese call their country ‘the flower of the middle,’ and believe it to be the central and choicest portion of the earth’s surface. All those beyond the bounds of ‘The Heavenly Flower Kingdom’ are, by those on the inside, venomously lumped together as ‘foreign devils.’ The people of Spain look upon themselves in much the same way as the Chinese look upon themselves, although they are in reality the most belated of all peoples to-day pretending to be civilised. There are a few travelled and educated Spaniards who realise the pitiful place held by their country in the family of reputable states. ‘But the great mass of the people are not only perfectly satisfied with their condition, but consider themselves the most fortunate of all God’s creatures. They never go outside of their country and never read a foreign newspaper or book. Like the Chinese, they consider other nations barbarians, and point to Madrid as the centre of civilisation.’ The French, down to the nineteenth century, confiscated the property of all aliens who died within the realm; and the savage practice of punishing one alien for the crimes of another alien was sanctioned by the laws of England down to the middle of the fourteenth century. It has been only a day in the history of the world since Caucasians hunted their dusky brothers in Africa like ‘wild animals,’ and sold and loaned and lashed them as we do horses to-day. Men now living can remember when it made no difference how exalted in character men might be: if a certain pigment of their bodies was dark, they were ‘niggers.’ They had no ‘souls’ as pale men had, and no more chance of paradise than cattle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, incredible as it may seem, every country of Europe and America held slaves, and was engaged in the soulless avocation of man-hunting in Africa. Tens of thousands of Africa’s children were annually seized by prowling pirate bands and exported to distant lands to wear their lives out in disgrace and drudgery. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that civilised nations, following the initiative of England, finally abolished human slavery, the United States and Brazil being the last to act. The Christian sneers at all who do not bow down to his deities and worship according to his ritual, as ‘heathens’ or ‘freethinkers,’ and to the Moslem all who are not followers of ‘the True Prophet’ are ‘infidel dogs.’ The history of these two religions is a chronicle of almost unparalleled crimes upon disbelievers.
But it is not necessary to go to Arabia or Cathay, nor even necessary to read history, in order to find examples of bigotry and provincialism. It is only necessary to open our eyes. Americans are not a peculiar people—unless it be in the unbridled character of their conceit. All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us. History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would look into a mirror. The old savage spirit still circulates in our veins. The ‘foreigner’ is not an enemy, but he is still an individual whose chief significance is in his ‘fleece.’ If the ‘foreigner’ did not ease our economic theories by benevolently ‘paying the tax,’ it would be hard to tell what would become of him. Those who suffer from a different government, speak a different language, or laud other gods are regarded by us as distinctly inferior to ourselves. Millions of dollars are annually squandered by self-righteous societies in sending missionaries to the other side of the planet to peoples who need evangels of mercy and humanity far less than we do ourselves. In these times of ecclesiastical enterprise, however, missionaries are being superseded, as agents of evangelisation, by the more effective inventions of Messrs. Maxim and Krupp. ‘American’ is regarded by us as the synonym of perfection, and to be ‘patriotic’ is to give unthinking enthusiasm to every scheme incubated by wolfish spoilsmen. Crimes of conquest carried on by others become, when undertaken by us, shining masterpieces of ‘benevolent assimilation.’ We are not so far from the naked and unkempt contemporaries of the cave-bear and sabre-toothed lion as we imagine we are. To carry a bayonet, and especially to redden it with an alien’s blood, is here in this degenerate land of Jefferson, more glorious than to create a book. Captains particularly competent as butchers, though their characters be as coarse as a savage chief’s, are hailed as heroes by thousands besides silly women, and held up, like the cutthroats of the Kukis, as the highest exemplars of right-doing. Old Rameses, holding by their hair a half-dozen dwarfs, and ostentatiously cutting off their heads with a single sweep of his sword, finds his modern counterpart in miserable Americans pompously gloating over the offhand slaughter of the children of distant archipelagoes.
VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings
But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world. With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that an individual is a man—that is, that he belongs to the human species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of every human being who comes into the world.
But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions are outsiders. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked upon as mere things—mere moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves. They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions, tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact (‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of the planet.
It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere ‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and ‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically confine its application to the members of their own crowd, notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying. Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.
The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals and upon different individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct. There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves as ends and of others as their means—the refusal to recognise the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others would not act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe.
Every being is an end. In other words, every being is to be taken into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—to all of them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon whom the usurpation is practised. A tyrant who puts his own welfare and aggrandisement in the place of the welfare of a people, and compels the whole people to act as a means to his own personal ends, is not more certainly a usurper than is a species or variety which puts its welfare in the place of the welfare of all the inhabitants of a world. The refusal to put one’s self in the place of others and to act toward them as one would that they would act toward him does not depend for its wrongfulness upon who makes the refusal or upon whether the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set. Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be done or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe. The basic mistake that has ever been made in this egoistic world in the judging and classifying of acts has been the mistake of judging and classifying them with reference to their effects upon some particular fraction of the inhabitants of the universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged as good or bad solely with reference to the results, immediate or remote, which that conduct produces, or is calculated to produce, on the self. To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects favourably or unfavourably himself or his tribe. And this sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been shown, characterised the moral conceptions of the peoples of all times. The practice human beings have to-day—the practice of those (relatively) broad and emancipated minds who are large enough to rise above the petty prejudices and ‘patriotisms’ of the races and corporations of men, and are able to view ‘the world as their country’ (the world of human beings, of course)—the practice such minds have of estimating conduct solely with reference to its effects upon the human species of animals is a practice which, while infinitely broader and more nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs logically in the same category with it. The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity.
‘The world is my country,’ said Thomas Paine, and every man, woman, and child capable of appreciating the exalted sentiment applauded. But ‘the world’ of the great freethinker was inhabited by men only.
The following lines were written by Robert Whitaker, and first printed in a San Francisco newspaper:
‘My Country is the world! I count
No son of man my foe,
Whether the warm life currents mount
And mantle brows like snow,
Or whether yellow, brown, or black,
The face that into mine looks back.
‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,
And all men are my kin,
Whether of rude or gentle birth,
However steeped in sin;
Or rich or poor, or great or small,
I count them brothers one and all.
‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,
Woven without a seam,
Where dawn and sunset colours lie,
Fair as an angel’s dream,
The Flag that still unstained, untorn,
Floats over all of mortal born
‘My Party is all humankind,
My Platform, brotherhood;
I count all men of honest mind
Who work for human good,
And for the hope that gleams afar.
My comrades in the holy war.
‘My Country is the world! I scorn
No lesser love than mine,
But calmly wait that happy morn
When all shall own this sign,
And love of country, as of clan,
Shall yield to love of Man.’
Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement on the ‘jingo.’ But you are still too small. There are conceptions as much more prophetic and exalted than yours as your conception is superior to that of the Figian.
Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called ‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is still a sectionalist, a partialist. He represents but a stage in the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared with the universalist, just as the savage is small compared with the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’ ‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the existing generation and which are yet unborn—that conception which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each generation linked to an unending posterity.
Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for his skin is murder, and those who do these things or cause them to be done are murderers just as actually as highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their guineas. If these things seem untrue it is not because they are untrue, but because those to whom they seem so are unable to judge conduct from the quadrupedal point of view. If there were in this world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’ these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not only preposterous, but fiendish.
VII. The Origin of Provincialism
Human provincialism, all of it, is the consequence of a common cause—the provincialism of the savage. Back of the provincialism of the savage is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of all men, and as such has imparted to all men their general characters of mind and heart. Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a human being, a grass blade, or a race, grows from something. This something, this germ or embryo from which each thing springs, imparts to the thing its fundamental characters. However far anything may evolve, and however much it may come to differ superficially from its original, it will always remain at heart more or less faithful to the facts of its genesis. This hereditary tendency of everything, this tendency toward invariability, is the conservative, or inertial tendency of the universe. All races, colours, and conditions of men—civilised, slightly civilised, and barbarous—extend back to, and take root in, savages, just as all savages have probably sprung in some still more remote period of the past from a single stirp of anthropoids. The savage is, therefore, the author of human nature and philosophy. Just as the fish, which is the common ancestor of all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, has predetermined the general structural style of all subsequently evolved vertebrates, so the savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the general mental and dispositional make-up of all higher men. That civilised and semi-civilised men are naturally narrow and revengeful, selfish and superstitious, and find it next to impossible to feel and act toward others as they would like to have others feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more mysterious than that vertebrates have red blood, two eyes, two pairs of limbs, and a backbone with a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it. Just as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child persist, often but slightly modified, in the full-grown man or woman, so the habits, beliefs, and conceptions, formed by the race in its childhood, continue, under the influence of the same laws of inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial development. Human nature changes with great reluctance, and only in its superficial aspects at that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive ideas and practices of the Stone Age, and men in the pastoral and hunting stages of mankind, in all the highest societies of men. There is scarcely a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or trait of character, found among men of the past but may be seen still among our contemporaries.
Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as egoism (self-love) is. There is not so much of it in the world as there is of egoism. But that is simply the misfortune of our place of existence. There is no reason why there might not have been as much, or even more, under different conditions. With the same antecedents, nothing can, of course, happen differently from what does happen. But with different antecedents, different causes, the results are bound to be different. Civilised men are not beings of altruism, because they are not the effects of that kind of causes. But there is no reason why there might not be a world—several of them, in fact, or even a universeful—where the inhabitants have never known or heard of such an indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves to others—where it is as natural for them to act toward each other according to what we call the Golden Rule as it is for us terrestrial heathens to violate it. It is possible to conceive of beings with even too much altruism. The ideal condition is one of balanced egoism and altruism—one in which each thinks as much of others as he does of himself, no more and no less. And if beings were endowed with natures rendering them not only willing but determined to act primarily in the interests of others, and this condition of things were universal, there would be about as much discord and strife as if everyone acted in the interest of himself. The Golden Rule among a lot of hypothetical otherists like this would be the opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the importance of others as we do, they would need to encourage regard for self. Wouldn’t it seem original to live in a world where men were sent to gaol for over-benevolence, and where sermons had to be preached on such texts as, ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’; ‘It is more blessed to receive than to give’; ‘Avoid doing to yourself that which you do not like when done to others’; ‘The Lord loves a cheerful taker’; and the like?
The persistence with which savage ideas and instincts continue to influence men long after those ideas and instincts have really become anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by civilised men and women everywhere. The sun continues to ‘rise’ and ‘set’ in all civilised lands just as it used to do to the savage, although men have long since learned that it does not do either. Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual subterranean region, and heaven was an abode located a few hours’ journey above the supposedly flat earth. To-day we continue to say ‘up to heaven,’ and ‘down to hell’ (never ‘down to heaven’ and ‘up to hell’), and always think of these places as being thus relatively located, although it is extremely doubtful whether any really sane mind continues to believe that hell is on the inside of the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and although up means simply away from the centre of the earth, and away from the centre of a ball means literally every possible direction. The theological theories of the origin, nature, and destiny of man and of the universe in general, all of which originated in savage or semi-savage minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable traces of their origin, continue to cling to the minds of the masses of civilised men, notwithstanding the inherent absurdity of these theories, and notwithstanding the fact that their unsoundness is vouched for by the most positive and unanimous assurances from the scientific world. Why should civilised men and women, any of them, be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or find delight in such loathsome avocations as the fishing and hunting of their fellow-creatures? Because their ancestors were savages, and they are not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the instincts of their savage sires. There is no other explanation. No human being could enjoy seeing a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a poor harmless hare—unless he were a savage. No human being could go out to the abodes of the squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous balls into their beautiful bodies for food or fun—unless he were a savage. No human being would lounge all day about the margins of a brook, blind to the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the lips of those whom he deceives, and drag them from their waters to suffocate in the sun—unless he were a savage. No human being would have palaces and parks and yachts and equipages, townships of lands, packs of hounds, and studs of horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when all around him are the men and women who made this wealth, half clad and half starved, suffocating in shanties and working like wretches from morning till night—unless he were a savage. All of these deeds are savage deeds, deeds of exceeding thoughtlessness and brutality, and, instead of being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind positively painful.
Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief occupations of savage life. Back of the activities displayed in these occupations are powerful instincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised peoples are devoted primarily to the arts of industry and peace. But there are enough savages in every civilised society, and enough of the savage spirit in those who pretend to approximate the civilised state, to give to civilised life a decidedly barbaric aspect. War is a more or less regular exercise, and killing and competing and torturing enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples. Next to eating, fighting, in one form or another, is the favourite pursuit of men nearly everywhere on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever human beings have any energy or time left over from what they are required to spend in maintaining their existence, they use it in fighting somebody or in watching somebody else fight. And generally the more brutal and sanguinary the conflict, the more popular and satisfying it is. Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and the baseball and slugball battles of the Americans, where eager thousands gather and roar for hours like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or set of animals punish or discredit another. If there are no pigeons to shoot, or if the community is ruled by men and women who are too emancipated to allow such things, we make glass birds and heroically bang away at them, supplying by our imaginations the blood and agony of real carnage. And if we can’t do anything else, we take some poor pig, that never did anyone any harm in the world, and grease it and turn it loose, and then take after it with knives, as Chicago butchers do on vacation days, and see who can cut its throat the quickest. This amusement, in pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty near the top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. Maybe it is outclassed by that other contest sometimes advertised as a feature of butchers’ barbecues, in which a band of professional cutthroats compete to see who can kill, skin, and eviscerate the largest number of their fellow-beings in a given time.
Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us. The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs, are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.
Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples are more horrible to an emancipated mind than that of bull-fighting. It is the national amusement of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who have acquired their natures and institutions from the Spanish. ‘Every Sunday afternoon, whenever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men and women, representing every class of society, mothers and grandmothers, priests and monks, assemble at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid to witness the most brutal spectacle the human taste approves. Six bulls are tortured and worried until they are exhausted. Then they are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a matador, who is the most popular person in the community and makes more money than any other man. Often as many as twelve horses are ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls, and are allowed to die in the presence of the audience, with blood gushing from their wounds and their entrails dragging upon the ground. This sort of thing is carried on not only in Madrid, but is a regular weekly festival in all the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded, so they cannot even see what attacks them. The men who torture the bulls have wooden screens behind which they can dodge when pursued, and if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely upon any of its tormentors, the other matadors throw a blanket over its head. It is not sport, for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to escape or to fight back. It is simply slow butchery, an exhibition of unmitigated cowardice and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish people are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per cent, of the population approve this atrocious barbarism—not only approve it, but demand that the King shall appear in the royal box at every bull-fight, or have his throne upset.’
The notorious ‘Juke’ family of criminals, who sprang from a single ruffian who lived in 1720, has cost the State of New York millions of dollars in money and incalculable misery and crime. But the initial savage progenitors of the human species have stocked the earth with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers—knaves, felons, kings, warriors, barbarians, butchers, brutalitarians, kleptomaniacs, and thugs—that has ever (let us hope) brought damnation to a world.
VIII. Universal Ethics
There are the same reasons for the recognition by human beings of ethical relations to non-human beings as there are for the recognition by human beings of ethical relations among themselves Analyse the reasons for being considerate toward men, any variety of men, and you will find the same reasons to exist for being considerate toward all men. And analyse the reasons for being altruistic toward men—for being kind and sympathetic toward them—and you will find the same reasons to exist for being altruistic toward those who are not men. The doctrine that we human beings may perform upon the other inhabitants of the earth all sorts of injurious acts, and that these acts when so performed by us are perfectly right and proper, but that these same things when done by others to us are crimes, is the logic of pure brutalitarianism. It is a doctrine utterly without intelligence, at variance with every sentiment of justice and humanity, and has no legitimate existence outside the fibrous brains of ruffians.
Right and wrong are qualities belonging to two diverse kinds of conduct. They are the qualities which render conduct respectively proper and improper. All terrestrial races (unless the very lowest) have the power of experiencing two kinds of conscious states—the desirable (pleasurable) and the undesirable (painful). Now, if beings were indifferent as to what sort of conscious states entered into and made up their experiences, there would manifestly be no such thing as propriety and impropriety in the causing of these states. But they are not indifferent. The pleasurable experiences are the experiences all beings are seeking, and the painful ones are the ones they are all seeking to avoid. Those acts which help or tend to help beings to those experiences for which they are striving are, therefore, right and proper, and are, they and their authors, called good. While those acts which compel beings to undergo that which they are striving to avoid are improper and wrong, and are, they and their authors, called bad. Kindness, courtesy, justice, mercy, generosity, sympathy, love, and the like, are good, and selfishness, cruelty, deceit, pillage, injustice, and murder, are bad, because they are respectively the promoters and destroyers of wellbeing and happiness in the world.
But these two kinds of conduct produce the same respective effects upon non-human beings as they do upon human beings. The emotion of a mangled sensory—is it not the same terrible thing whether the sensory hang to the brain of a quadruped or a man? Do shelter and food not affect shivering and empty cattle, horses, and fowls, precisely as they do human beings? Thunder harsh words at your dog. Will he not shrink and suffer, just as your child or hired hand will under like acts of terrorisation? Speak kindly to him, love him, and accord to him a quarter of the consideration you claim for yourself. Is he not caused to be one of the happiest and most devoted of associates? To take squirrels or song-birds, the most active of animals, and shut them up in narrow cages, and keep them there shut off from their companions and their own green world their whole lives long; to take an animal as sensitive and high-minded as the horse and put a pack on his back and a bit in his mouth, and then strike him dozens of times a day with a lash whose touch is like fire; to shoot off the legs and wings of birds and fill their vitals with lead, and leave them to flounder out a lingering death in the reeds and grasses—do these things not cause misery and desolation in the world? To place temptations in the way of fur-bearing animals and induce them to enter carefully concealed traps, and then allow them to remain in the villainous clutches of these devices, not minutes, but hours, perhaps days, until it suits the convenience of the ensnarer to knock out their brains, or until, crazed by pain, the poor wretches eat off their own limbs and escape—is not this a monstrous thing to do?
Oh that men everywhere were moved by the deep tenderness and the all-embracing sympathy of poor Robert Burns, who could apologise with real feeling to a frightened field-mouse whom he had accidentally upturned with his plough.
‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou needna start awa’ sae hasty,
Wi’ bick’ring brattle!
I had be laith to rin and chase thee,
Wi’ murd’rous pattle!
‘I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
And fellow-mortal.’
Long ago it was said, and truthfully, that the merciful man is merciful to his ox. The truly kind man, the truly honest and the truly humane man, is not kind and honest and humane to men only, but to all beings—to the humble and lowly as well as to the proud and powerful—to all that have the misfortune to feel and mourn. Benevolence is the same beautiful thing whether it pour sunshine into the dark and saddened souls of men or into the dark and saddened souls of other beings. John Howard never hearkened to a nobler duty when he lifted the darkness that hung over English gaols than will some inflamed soul some day who hears the cry of the lonely captives who to-day languish in menagerial dungeons to satisfy human curiosity. He who will emancipate horses from the hell in which they pass their lives—make them the associates of men instead of their slaves—will deserve to stand in the constellation of the world’s redeemers beside Garrison and Garibaldi. Is there he who holds in his heart-cups the love and compassion of Buddha? Let him go where the dagger drips and the heartless pole-axe crashes, and the meek-eyed millions of the meadows pour out their innocent existences in the soulless houses of slaughter. Let him lift from off the races the hounding incubus of fear, give back to them their birthright—the right to a free, unhunted life—and make the great monster (man) to be their high-priest and friend.
‘Among the noblest in the land,
Though he may count himself the least,
That man I honour and revere
Who, without favour, without fear,
In the great city dares to stand
The friend of every friendless beast,
And tames with his unflinching hand
The brutes that wear our form and face,
The were-wolves of the human race.’
If to do good is to generate welfare, then to cause welfare to a horse, a bird, a butterfly, or a fish, is to do good just as truly as to cause welfare to men. And if to do evil is to cause unhappiness and illfare, then to cause these things to one individual or race is evil just as certainly as to cause them to any other individual or race. And if to put one’s self in the place of others, and to act toward them as one would wish them to act toward him, is the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to gauge their conduct when acting toward each other, then this is also the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to regulate their conduct toward all beings. There is no escape from these conclusions, except for the savage and the fool.1
1. The deliberate causing of misery and death to criminals, whether they be human or non-human beings, individuals or species, is not, as is sometimes supposed, a violation or reversal of the general theory of ethics. When they are prompted by a spirit of tenderness and universal goodness rather than by a spirit of revenge, penalties are justifiable by the everyday assumption that it is sometimes wise to inflict or undergo a certain amount of illfare in order to avoid or forestall a larger amount. The problems of universal penology are not different from those of human penology, practically the same cases and perplexities being presented by all delinquents. See ‘Better-World Philosophy,’ by the author, pp. 218-227, for a discussion of the function of punishment.
IX. The Psychology of Altruism
The growth of altruism in the world has been largely cotemporaneous with the growth of the power of sympathy. Sympathy is the emotion a being has when by means of his imagination he gets so actually into the place of another that his own feelings duplicate more or less the feelings of that other. It is the ability or the impulse to weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who are glad. Sympathy is the substance and the only sure basis of morality—the only tie of sincere and lasting mutualism. Men have always been to a considerable extent, and are yet, disposed to think about and act toward each other from motives of mutual fear or advantage. But such motives are not the highest nor the most reliable bonds of fellowship and unity. True altruism and solidarity—true expansion and universalisation of the self—are found in sympathy. It is impossible for one individual to do in his heart to another as he would that another should do to him, unless he is at all times able and willing to get into the place of that other, and to realise in his own consciousness the results to the other of his acts. It is only when there is such an intertwining of the consciousnesses that the joys and sorrows of each individual consist to a greater or less extent of the reflexes of the joys and sorrows around him that there exists true social oneness. The great task of reforming the universe is, therefore, since the world is so steeped in selfishness and hate, the task of endowing beings, or the task of stocking the universe with beings, with dispositions to get out of themselves. If the far-away first parents of men and women had been broad-minded beings instead of narrow—had been beings whose most natural impulse was to be kind to others, and whose sympathies were as far-reaching as feeling—terrestrial life would not to-day present to the all-seeing understanding the disheartening spectacle it does present, and the long struggle for justice and amelioration would not have been.
The primary fact prompting and underlying the exploitation of one being or set of beings by another is, and has always been. Selfishness. Whenever and wherever one people have exploited another—whether the exploiters have been savages, Jews, Romans, Caucasians, or men—they have done so primarily because the act of exploitation was a convenience and pleasure to them and in harmony with their natures. This selfishness, in the case of civilised peoples, has been acquired by them through inheritance from the savage tribes from whom they have severally evolved; and the selfishness of the savage is a legacy from the animal forms from whom the savage has come. Human selfishness is simply an eddy of an impulse that is universal—an impulse that has been implanted in the nature of the life-process of the earth by the manner in which life has been evolved.
But there is another fact which has generally, if not always, contributed to every act of exploitation in this world, and that is Ignorance—ignorance on the part of those who have executed the exploitation: not ignorance of grammar or geography or any other particular branch of human information or philosophy, but ignorance regarding those upon whom they have worked their will—unconsciousness on the part of the exploiters of the similarity which actually existed between themselves and their victims. However free an individual may be from naturally selfish impulses, he will never act in an altruistic manner toward others unless he is able to realise that these others, are similar to himself, and that acts toward them produce results of good and evil, of welfare and suffering, similar to what these same acts produce when done to himself. Altruistic conduct implies not only altruistic impulses, but altruistic conceptions as well. Tyrants hold, and have always held, themselves to be an entirely different order of beings from their subjects, and far more deserving. Read history—it is a tale told over and over. Between those who have ruled and those who have served—between the Ends and the Means—has ever yawned a chasm, wide, deep, and impassable. The exploited have always been, according to their masters, a fibrous set, unfavoured and unthought of by the gods, endowed with little feeling or intelligence, and brought into existence more or less expressly as adjuncts to their masters. This is the theory of the savage, and it is the theory of all those who have inherited his narrow and unfeeling philosophy. The Gentile had no rights because he was a ‘pagan.’ He was a human being, it is true, and had come forth from the womb of woman, just as the Jew had. But he spoke a different language from the Jews, had his own ways of life, belonged to a different order of things, and was irritatingly unconcerned about the gods and traditions of the ‘chosen people.’ The Gaul had no rights that were inconvenient to Romans, because he was a ‘barbarian.’ The fact that he had blood, and brains, and nerves, and love of life, and ambitions, and that he suffered when he was subjected to humiliation, hard treatment, and death, just as Romans did, was never really thought of by the arrogant and reckless Romans. Romans never realised in their minds what it meant for non-Romans to be treated as they were treated; and one reason why they never realised it was because it was convenient for them not to do so. To kill or enslave a Gaul or German we now know, who are able to judge these acts from an un-Roman and unprejudiced point of view, was practically the same crime as to kill or enslave a Roman. But it was not so to Romans. The most trifling offence against a Roman citizen was enough, according to Roman law, to condemn the offender to execution. But the most horrible outrages, when committed by Romans upon non-Romans, were nothing. Romans always thought and felt from the standpoint of Romans. They never got over into the world of the ‘barbarians,’ and really pictured to themselves—really felt—the misfortunes of their victims. It was the same way with the black man in the eyes of the white man a generation or two ago; it is the same way with the brown man to-day. The black man had no rights that were inconvenient for the white man to respect, because he was a ‘nigger,’ and had no ‘soul,’ and was the offspring of Ham. This spirit of unconsciousness, which has been so prominent throughout the history of mankind, still survives in the minds of civilised men and women to-day, as is shown by the conception (or misconception) cherished by the Caucasian toward the ‘nigger,’ by the Christian toward the ‘heathen,’ by the Moslem toward the ‘infidel,’ by the Protestant toward the Catholic, and vice versâ, by the plutocrat toward the proletarian, by men toward women, and by the human being toward the ‘animal.’
The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act of exploitation. The great first cause of man’s inhumanity to not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man’s inhumanity to man—Selfishness—blind, brutal, unconscionable egoism. Monopolist-like man thinks and cares only about himself. He has the heart of the bully—deriving from the contemplation of his fiendish supremacy a sort of monstrous satisfaction. But there is also present in this case the same half-sincere, half-fostered nescience as in all other cases of exploitation. The ox, the hare, the bird, and the fish have no rights in the world in which they live other than those that are convenient for men to allow to them, because they are ‘animals.’ They are assumed to belong to an order of beings entirely different from that to which human beings belong. They are filled with nerves, and brains, and bloodvessels; they love life, and bleed, and struggle, and cry out when their veins are opened, just as human beings do; they have the same general form and structure of body, their bodies are composed of the same organs busied with the same functions; and they are descended from the same ancestors and have been developed in the same world through the operation of the same great laws as we ourselves have. But all of these things, and dozens of others just as significant, are disregarded by us in our hard-hearted determination to exploit them. We have a set of words and phrases which we use in speaking of ourselves, and another very different set for other beings. The very same things are called by different names with wholly different connotations depending on whether it is a man that is referred to or some other being. It is ‘murder’ to take the life of a human being, but to take the life of a sheep or a cow is only ‘knocking it on the head.’ A man may murder squirrels or birds all day—that is, he may do that which when done to human beings is called murder—but it is only ‘sport’ when done to these humble inhabitants of the wilds. The dead body of a man is a ‘corpse’; the dead body of a quadruped is only a ‘carcass.’ A race of horses or dogs is a ‘breed’; but a breed of men and women is always respectfully referred to as a race. We perpetuate our blindness by the use of words. We accommodate our consciences by inventing ways of looking at things that will bring out our own lustre and relieve us from the ghastly faces of our crimes. For the human race to rob and kill other races is the same kind of activity exactly as it is for human beings to rob and kill each other. But it is not considered so to-day—except by a few lost-caste ‘visionaries’ scattered here and there over Christendom, and some millions of ‘heathens’ in Asia.
A short time ago a series of letters came into my hands written from Burmah by an American missionary in that country. According to this writer, one of the greatest obstacles the missionaries have to contend with in their work there is the hostility aroused in the people by the killing and flesh-eating habits of the missionaries themselves. The native inhabitants, who are the most compassionate of mankind, look upon the Christian missionaries, who kill and eat cows and shoot monkeys for pastime, as being little better than cannibals. Contemplate the presumption necessary to cause an individual to leave behind him fields white for mission-work, and travel, at great expense, halfway round the earth in order to preach a narrow, cruel, anthropocentric gospel to a people of so great tenderness and humanity as to be kind even to ‘animals’ and enemies!
We human beings feel at liberty to commit any kind of outrage upon other races, and these outrages are looked upon by us as nothing. But the most trifling annoyances of other races are deemed by us of sufficient consequence to justify us in visiting upon them the most fearful retributions. We can break up the laboriously built home of a mother mouse in the rubbish-heap of our back yard, scatter the pink babies of that mother over the ground to die of cold and starvation, and cause the frightened mother to flee at the risk of her very life—all to give to the terrier and ourselves a little moment of savage pastime. But if that same mother, some hard winter’s night, when she has failed in her search elsewhere for something to stay her hunger, comes into our larder and nibbles a bit of cheese or a few mouthfuls of crust from our pie, although she takes but a crumb in all, and is as dainty in her feeding as a lady, we immediately get out our traps and poisons and storm around as if a murder or some other irreparable wrong had been committed. We think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at all, entirely from the human point of view. We never take the time to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more comfortable not to do so—so much more comfortable to be blind and deaf and insane. We go on quieting our consciences, as best we can, by the fact that everybody else nearly is engaged in the same business as we are, and by the fact that so few ever say anything about the matter—anaesthetised, as it were, by the universality of our iniquities and the infrequency of disquieting reminders.
Many years ago an eccentric but gifted Englishman had a dream in which he saw the fortunes of the world reversed. Man was no longer master, but victim. The earth was ruled by the birds and quadrupeds, the mice and monkeys, who proceeded to inflict upon their erstwhile tyrant the same cruelties he had hitherto inflicted upon them. ‘Multitudes of human beings were systematically fattened for the carnivora. They were frequently forwarded to great distances by train, in trucks, without food or water. Large numbers of infants were constantly boiled down to form broth for invalid animals. In over-populous districts babies were given to malicious young cats and dogs to be taken away and drowned. Boys were hunted by terriers and stoned to death by frogs. Mice were a good deal occupied in setting mantraps, baited with toasted cheese, in poor neighbourhoods. Gouty old gentlemen were hitched to night-cabs, and forced to totter, on their weak ankles and diseased joints, to clubs, where fashionable young colts were picked up, and taken, at such speed as whipcord could extract, to visit chestnut fillies. Flying figures in scarlet coats, buckskins, and top-boots were run down by packs of foxes that had nothing else to do. Old cock-grouse strutted out for a morning’s sport, and came in to talk of how many brace of country gentlemen they had bagged. Gamekeepers lived a precarious life in holes and caves. They were perpetually harried by game and vermin; held fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled by stoats and martens; and finally, their eyes picked out by owls and kites, they were gibbeted alive on trees, head downwards, until the termination of their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case, a naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully among the topmost branches of a wood, while a mias underneath, armed with a gun, inflicted on him dreadful wounds. A veterinary surgeon of Alfort was stretched on his back, his arms and legs secured to posts, in order that a horse might cut him up alive for the benefit of an equine audience; but the generous steed, incapable of vindictive feelings, with one disdainful stamp on the midriff, crushed the wretch’s life out’.1
The following is from the Chinese. The speaker is an ox:
‘I request, good people, that you will listen to what I have to say. In the whole world there is no distress equal to that of the ox. In spring and summer, autumn and winter, I diligently put forth my strength; during the four seasons there is no respite to my labours. I drag the plough, a thousand-pound weight fastened to my shoulders. Hundreds of thousands of lashes are, by a leather whip, inflicted upon me. Curses and abuses, in a thousand forms are poured upon me. I am driven, with threatenings, rapidly along, and not allowed to stand still. Through the dry ground or the deep water I with difficulty drag the plough, with an empty belly; the tears flow from both my eyes. I hope in the morning that I shall be early released, but I am detained until the evening. If, with a hungry stomach, I eat the grass in the middle of the field, the whole family, great and small, insultingly abuse me. I am left to eat any species of herbs among the hills, but you, my master, yourself receive the grain that is sown in the field. Of the chen paddy you make rice; of the no paddy you make wine. You have cotton, wheat, and herbs of a thousand different kinds. Your garden is full of vegetables. When your men and women marry, amid all your felicity, if there be a want of money, you let me out to others. When pressed for the payment of duties, you devise no plans, but take and sell the ox that ploughs your field. When you see that I am old and weak, you sell me to the butcher to be killed. The butcher conducts me to his home and soon strikes me in the forehead with the head of an iron hatchet, after which I am left to die in the utmost distress. My skin is peeled off, my bones are scraped, and my skin is taken to cover the drum by which the country is alarmed.’
‘Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells
Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
To madness, while the savage at his heels
Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury.’
The angler brags about his ‘haul’ and the hunter about his ‘bag’ and his ‘big game’ with as little realisation of what these things mean as the slave-master boasts of his ‘niggers.’ Men talk of ‘chops’ and ‘steaks’ and ‘roasts’ with the same somnambulism, the same profound unconsciousness of what these things really signify in the psychic economies of the world, as the conqueror contemplates his ‘captives,’ the robber his ‘spoil,’ or the savage his ‘scalps.’ If before the eyes and in the mind of each individual who sits unconcernedly down to a parsleyed ‘steak’ could rise the facts in the biography of that ‘steak’—the happy heifer on the far western meadows, the fateful day when she is forced by the drover’s whip from her home,2 the arduous ‘drive’ to the village and her baffled efforts to escape, the crowding into cars and the long, painful journey, the silent heartaches and the low, pitiful moans, the terrible hunger and thirst and cold, her arrival, bruised and bewildered, in the city, her dazed mingling with others, the great murder-house, the prods and bellowings, the treacherous crash of the brain-axe, the death drop and shudder, the butcher’s knife, the gush of blood from her pretty throat, and the glassy gaze of her dead but beautiful eyes—there would be, in spite of the inherent hardness of the human heart, a great drawing back from those acts which render such fearful things necessary. If human beings could only realise what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no one of them, not even the most recreant, could find pleasure in such work. How painful to a person of tenderness and enlightenment is even the thought of rabbit-shootings, duck-slaughterings, bear-hunts, quail-killing expeditions, tame pigeon massacres, and the like! And yet with what light-hearted enthusiasm the mindless ruffians who do these atrocious things enter upon them! One would think that grown men would be ashamed to arm themselves and go out with horses and hounds and engage in such babyish and unequal contests as sportsmen usually rely on for their peculiar ‘glory.’ And they would be if grown men were not so often simply able-bodied bullies. If human beings could only realise what it means to live in a world and associate day after day with other beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves, and yet be regarded by these more intelligent individuals simply as merchandise to be bought and sold, or as targets to be shot at, they would hide their guilty heads in shame and horror.
The Being from whose breaking heart gushed these lines of sorrow and sympathy on seeing a wounded hare was a god:
‘Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye:
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!
‘Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field
The bitter little that of life remains;
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.
‘Seek, mangled one, some place of wonted rest,
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed;
The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head.
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom pressed.
‘Oft, as by winding Nith I, musing, wait
The sober eve or hail the cheerful dawn,
I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn.
And curse the ruffian’s aim and mourn thy hapless fate.’
We human beings, in our conduct toward the races of beings associated with us on this planet, are almost pure savages. We are not even half civilised. And this fact is certain to bring upon us the criticism and condemnation of the more enlightened generations to come. The fact is apparent to-day, however—just as apparent as the barbarity of the Romans—to everyone who will take the trouble to rid himself of the prejudices which enslave and blind him, and view human phenomena from an un-human, extra-terrestrial point of view.
To most persons—to all except to a few—everything is simply a matter of habit and education. And a majority of persons, too, can become educated to one thing about as easily and completely as they can to another. In Mr. Huxley’s ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ there is reprinted from an old volume the picture of a butcher’s shop as it is said to have existed among the savage Anziques of Africa in the sixteenth century. Mr. Huxley says that the original engraving claims to represent an actual fact, and that he has himself no doubt but it does really stand for just what it purports to represent, especially since the fact has been corroborated by Du Chaillu in comparatively recent times. The fact for which this old picture stands is a good illustration of the power of custom in shaping human ideas. In this savage ‘market’ pretty much the same line of goods appears as is found in modern ‘markets,’ except that, instead of the quartered corpses of sheep and bullocks, there hang the shoulders, thighs, and gory heads of men. The butcher is represented as standing beside the chopping-block in the act of cutting up the leg of a man. A child’s head and other fragments of the human body are piled up on another block, and behind these on pegs are ranged the more pretentious wares of the establishment. ‘Presently we passed a woman,’ says Du Chaillu, in speaking of the cannibalism of the Fans, who were probably identical with those referred to two centuries earlier as Anziques. ‘She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market and carry thence a roast of steak.’ We can easily imagine (by the help of the sights we see every day) the anthropophagous crowd standing around giving their early morning orders, and the enterprising assassin hustling about to wait on them. One of them wants an arm, another wants a leg, another a liver, another a half-dozen nice fat ribs. One fellow wants a tender ‘cut’ of young girl’s sirloin, and another would like an old man’s calf for soup. A little naked urchin, who has had to wait a long time in order to get a chance to buy anything at all, exchanges a few shells for a section of human bologna. One fellow wants to know the price of the boy’s head which lies on the neighbouring block, and a woman complains that the baby’s brains which she bought the day before, and which were recommended as being especially ‘fresh and nice,’ turned out to be ‘bad.’ We can see them go home with their gruesome purchases, cook them, and sit down and eat them, discussing their flavour or their lack of it, and remarking their tenderness, toughness, or juiciness, and finally throwing the bones out to the dogs—all with as little thought of the immorality of it as ‘Thanksgiving’ gluttons have to-day at their feasts of blood. There may have been an occasional ‘visionary’ among these people fanatical enough to ‘refuse to eat meat,’ or even to protest against the practice. Probably there was. There generally are a few such discordants in every generation of vipers. But ‘fanatics’ in those days were in all likelihood, as they are to-day, too few to be troublesome.
To anyone familiar with the pliability of the human conscience, or with the soundness and depth of intellectual sleep, these things are neither impossible nor strange. There is so little looking into the essence of things, so little looking at things as they are, and so much thinking and doing as we are accustomed or told to think and do—there are, in fact, so few who can really think at all—that if we had been accustomed and taught to do so from childhood, and the world were practically unanimous in its conduct and teachings on the matter, very few of us indeed would not sit down to a breakfast of scrambled infant’s brains, a luncheon of cold boiled aunt, or a dinner of roast uncle, with as little compunction, perhaps with the same horrible merriment, as we to-day attend a ‘barbecue’ or a ‘turkey.’ Why should we not make hash and sausages out of our broken-down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we do out of our worn-out horses, and help out the pigeons at our killing carnivals with a few live peasants? How much more artistic and civilised to pile our tables on holy days with the gold and crimson of the fields and orchards than to load them with the dead! And yet how strangely few are mature enough to care anything at all about the matter.
Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the human mind! There is no spontaneity, no originality, only the dead level of the machine. How impossible it is for us to think, to discover anything unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been pointed out to us even, if it is a little different from what we are used to! This, it seems to me, is one of the most pathetic things in all this world—this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness to inspect things from any other point of view than the one we inherit when we come into the world; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing to it), and never have the slightest suspicion of the fact. The human mind will certainly not always be this way. It will surely be different some time. It seems incredible that the planet will drag along in disgrace this way forever. The men of Europe and America are not so primitive as the junglemen, and the junglemen are superior in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles, and this gives reason for a little hope. But when that is the question, when will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world? Ages upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills.
1. Hamley: Our Poor Relations; Boston, 1872. 2. I have many times seen cows chased all over their native premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards, across streams and over fences—chased until the poor things were utterly exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their faces and backs were covered with wounds—before they could be compelled to leave for ever the old farm where they had been born and raised.
X. Anthropocentric Ethics
Anthropocentricism, which drifted down as a tradition from ancient times, and which for centuries shaped the theories of the Western world, but whose respectability among thinking people has now nearly passed away, was, perhaps, the boldest and most revolting expression of human provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any people. It was the doctrine that man was the centre about whom revolved all facts and interests whatsoever; and Judaism and its two children, Christianity and Mahometanism, were responsible for it. Everything, according to this conception, was interpreted in terms of human utility. Everything was made for man—including women. The sun and moon were luminaries, not worlds, hung there by the fatherly manufacturer of things for the convenience and delight of his children. The stars were perforations in the overarching concave through which eavesdropping prophets peered into celestial secrets, and errand-angels came and went with messages between gods and men. Not only the spheres in space, but the earth and all it contained—the rivers, seas, and seasons, all the plants that grow, and all the flowers that blow, and all the millions that swim and suffer in the waters and skies—were, according to this remorseless notion, the soulless adjuncts of man. Intrinsically they were meaningless. They had significance only as they served the human species. The hues and perfumes of flowers, the songs of birds, the dews, the breezes, the rains, the rocks, the ‘beasts of the field and the fowls of the air,’ the great forests, the mighty mountains, the fearful solitudes, even famine and pestilence, were all made for the being with the reinless imagination. Luther believed that the fly—festive little Musca domestica, who inhabits our homes, and sometimes unwittingly wanders over our tender places—was a pestiferous invention of the devil, maliciously sent to annoy him in his meditations. Garlic grew on the swamp brim as a handy antidote for human malaria. Fruits ripened in the summertime because the acids and juices which they contained were believed to be necessary for man’s health and refreshment. The great muscles of the ox were made to provide men with delicacies and leisure. The cloak of the ewe was made without any special thought, or without any thought at all, of the comforts of the ewe. It was placed there on the ewe by an all-tender creator, to be torn by his images from her bleeding back and worn. The fossil forms found in the rocks were not the bonâ fide remains of creatures that had lived and perished when the calcareous foundations of the continents were forming in ancient sea-beds. They were counterfeits, slyly designed by a suspicious providence, and sandwiched among the strata ‘to test human faith.’ The rainbow was a phenomenon with which the laws of reflection and refraction had nothing whatever to do. It was a sign or seal stamped on the retreating storms as a pledge that submersion would not be again used as a punishment for sinners. The universal ruler was conceived to be an individual of transcendent power and respectability, but was supposed to spend the most of his time and a good deal of anxiety on the regulation and repair of his illustrious likenesses.
The history of intellectual evolution is the history of disillusionment. The stars, we now know, are not hatchways, but worlds. They burn because they are fire. They blaze and circle in obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just as the earth does. They blazed and wheeled when the elemental matters of the earth mingled indistinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and they will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of this clod has dissolved into the everlasting atoms. The earth is not the capital of cosmos nor the subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a satrap of the sun—a subordinate among servants, not a sovereign with a retinue of stars. The earth and its contents were not made for man. They were not made at all. They were evolved. The concaves of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains upheaved, and the continents planted and peopled, by the same tendencies as those that hold the universes in their grasp. The primal matters of the earth came out of the substance of the sun, and by the play and activity of these elements and the play and activity of their derivatives were evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid, plant, animal, and society. The flowers that ‘blush unseen’ do not necessarily ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air,’ as the poet so melodiously imagines. The colours and scents of flowers serve their purposes—which are to secure the services of insects in fertilisation—quite as well when unperceived, as when perceived by human senses. The non-human races of beings were not made for human beings. They were evolved—the higher forms from the lower forms, and the lower forms from still lower—just as the higher societies of men have been evolved, under the eye of history, out of barbarism and savagery. They are our ancestors. They have made human life and civilisation possible. They made their homes on primeval land patches when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the seas. They lived and loved and suffered and died in order that a being intelligent enough to analyse himself and recreant enough to pick their bones might come into the world.
There are supposed to be something like a million (maybe there are several million) species of inhabitants living on the earth. The human species is one of these. Not more than a few thousand of these species are seriously advantageous to men. The harmful and useless species are many times more numerous than the helpful. Now, if the 999,999 non-human species were made for the human species, why were the hundreds of thousands of species made that are of no possible human importance, and the hundreds of thousands of other species that are a positive injury? And if by some miraculous stretch of imagination the 999,999 species now living on the earth are conceived to have been made for man, why were the 10,000,000 or 15,000,000 of species made that lived and passed away before there was a human being in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will say—accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with contempt—that they were made to invigorate human ‘faith.’
If the age of the human species be estimated at 50,000 years and the age of the life-process at 100,000,000 years, the time during which man has been on the earth is, when compared with the entire period during which the planet has been tenanted, as 1 to 2,000. And the time during which the earth has been inhabited—immense as that time is when compared with the little span of human history—is also insignificant when compared with the enormous lapse of time during which the planet was slowly cooling and solidifying preliminary to the existence of life. And the entire life of the planet—inconceivably vast as it is—is as nothing compared with that eternity, that duration without beginning or close, during which the sidereal millions have undergone, and are destined to continue to undergo, their countless and immeasurable transformations.
It is about as profound to suppose that the earth and its contents, and the suns, stars, and systems of space, were all made for a single species inhabiting an obscure ball located in a remote quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the gigantic body of the elephant was made for the wisp of hair on the tip of its tail. Man is not the end, he is but an incident, of the infinite elaborations of Time and Space.
XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution
The doctrine of organic evolution, which forever established the common genesis of all animals, sealed the doom of anthropocentricism. Whatever the inhabitants of this world were or were thought to be before the publication of ‘The Origin of Species,’ they never could be anything since then but a family. The doctrine of evolution is probably the most important revelation that has come to the world since the illuminations of Galileo and Copernicus. The authors of the Copernican theory enlarged and corrected human understanding by disclosing to man the comparative littleness of his world—by discovering that the earth, which had up to that time been supposed to be the centre and capital of cosmos, is in reality a satellite of the sun. This heliocentric discovery was hard on human conceit, for it was the first broad hint man had thus far received of his true dimensions. The doctrine of evolution has had, and is having, and is destined to continue to have, a similarly correcting effect on the naturally narrow conceptions of men. It tends to fry the conceit out of us. It has been impossible since Darwin for any sane and honest man to go around bragging about having been ‘made in the image of his maker,’ or to successfully lay claim to a more honourable origin than the rest of the creatures of the earth. And if men had accepted the logical consequences of Darwin’s teachings, the world would not to-day—a half-century after his revelation—be filled with practices which find their only support and justification in out-of-date traditions. But logical consequences, as Huxley observes, are the official scarecrows of that large and prolific class of defectives usually known as fools. The doctrine of evolution is accepted in one form or another by practically all who think. It is taught even in school primers. But while the biology of evolution is scarcely any longer questioned, the psychology and ethics of the Darwinian revelation, though following from the same premises, and almost as inevitably, are yet to be generally realised. Darwin’s revelation, like every other revelation that has come to the world, is perceived most tardily by those working in departments where the phenomena are the most intangible and complicated.
Darwin himself called ‘the love for all living creatures the most noble attribute of man.’ Giant as he was, he perceived more clearly than any of his contemporaries, more clearly even than his successors, the ultimate goal of evolving altruism. For he says: ‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. There is, then, only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. Experience, however, shows us how long it is, if such men are separated from him by great differences of appearance or habits, before he looks upon them as his fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man is one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except for their pets. The very idea of humanity, so far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue seems to arise from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.’1
The influences of a doctrine old enough and precious enough to have become embodied in the life and institutions of a race persist generally, through mere momentum, long after the substance of the doctrine has passed away. This is eminently true of that misconception which has come down to us regarding the nature and origin of man and his relations to the rest of the universe. Darwin has lived, shed his light over the world, and passed back to the dust whence he came. Men no longer believe that other races and other worlds were really made for them. But they continue to act in about the same manner as they did when; they did believe it. This assertion applies not simply to those half-baked intelligences who have only the rudest and most antiquated notions about anything but also to thousands of men and women who pretend to have up-to-date conceptions of themselves and the universe—men and women noted even for their activity in reminding others of their inconsistency—men and women who
‘Compound for sins they are inclined to,
By damning those they have no mind to.’
The doctrine of Universal Kinship is not a new doctrine, born from the more brilliant loins of modern understanding. It is as old almost as human philosophy. It was taught by Buddha twenty-four hundred years ago. And the teachings of this divine soul, spreading over the plains and peninsulas of Asia, have made unnumbered millions mild. It was taught also by Pythagoras and all his school of philosophers, and rigidly practised in their daily lives. Plutarch, one of the grandest characters of antiquity, wrote several essays in advocacy of it. In these essays, as well as in many passages of his writings generally, he demonstrates that he was far ahead of his contemporaries in the breadth and intensity of his moral nature, and in advance even of all except a very few of those living to-day, 2,000 years after him. Shelley among the poets of modern times, and Tolstoy in these latter days, are others among the eminent adherents of this holy cause.
Wherever Buddhism prevails, there will be found in greater or less purity, as one of the cardinal principles of its founder, the doctrine of the sacredness of all Sentient Life. But the Aryan race of the West has remained steadfastly deaf to the pleadings of its Shelleys and Tolstoys, owing to the overmastering influence of its anthropocentric religions. Not till the coming of Darwin and his school of thinkers was there a basis for hope of a reformed world. To-day the planet is ripe for the old-new doctrine. Tradition is losing its power over men’s conduct and conceptions as never before, and Science is growing more and more influential. A central truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition in all departments of human thought. Ignorance and Inertia are fearful facts. They endure like granite in the human mind. But the tireless chisels of evolution are invincible. And the time will come when the anthropocentric customs and conceptions, which are to-day fashionable enough to be ‘divine,’ will have nothing but a historic existence. The movement to put Science and Humanitarianism in place of Tradition and Savagery, which is so weak, languishing, and neglected to-day, is a movement which has for its ultimate destiny the conquest of the Human Species.
1. Darwin: Descent of Man, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.
XII. Conclusion
All beings are ends; no creatures are means. All beings have not equal rights, neither have all men; but all have rights. The Life Process is the End—not man, nor any other animal temporarily privileged to weave a world’s philosophy. Nonhuman beings were not made for human beings any more than human beings were made for nonhuman beings. Just as the sidereal spheres were once supposed by the childish mind of man to be unsubstantial satellites of the earth, but are known by man’s riper understanding to be worlds with missions and materialities of their own, and of such magnitude and number as to render terrestrial insignificance frightful, so the billions that dwell in the seas, fields, and atmospheres of the earth were in like manner imagined by the illiterate children of the race to be the mere trinkets of men, but are now known by all who can interpret the new revelation to be beings with substantially the same origin, the same natures, structures, and occupations, and the same general rights to life and happiness, as we ourselves.
In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer, some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a common mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?
Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self.
This is The Great Law, the all-inclusive gospel of social salvation. It is the rule of social rectitude and perfection which has been held up in greater or less perfection in all ages by the sages and prophets of the human species.
Hear Confucius, the giant of Mongolia, and the idol and law-giver of one-third of mankind:
‘What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.’
And again he says:
‘Do not let a man practise to those beneath him that which he dislikes in those above him.’
Over and over again the illustrious master repeats these precepts to his disciples and countrymen.
In the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Sanskrit, written by Indian moralists in various ages, and representing the accumulated wisdom of one of the most marvellous of all peoples, we find these words:
‘Treat others as thou wouldst thyself be treated.’
‘Do nothing to thy neighbour which thou wouldst not hereafter have thy neighbour do to thee.’
‘A man obtains a rule of action by looking upon his neighbour as himself.’
These same truths were also taught by Jesus, that godlike Galilean, the great teacher and saviour of the Western world:
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’
‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’
Oh that these words were etched in fire, and stamped in scorching characters on the dull, cold hearts of this world!
Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self.
Look upon and treat others as you do your own hands, your own eyes, your very heart and soul—with infinite care and compassion—as suffering and enjoying members of the same Great Being with yourself. This is the spirit of the ideal universe—the spirit of your own being. It is this alone that can redeem this world, and give to it the peace and harmony for which it longs. Yes,
‘So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.’
Oh the madness, and sorrow, and unbrotherliness of this mal-wrought world! Oh the poor, weak, poisoned, monstrous natures of its children! Who can look upon it all without pain, and sympathy, and consternation, and tears? What an opportunity for philanthropy, if the ‘All-mighty One’ of our traditions would only set about it!
Yes, do as you would be done by—and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low enough nor far enough to find those whose bowed and broken beings will not rise up at the coming of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink and darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you. Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird, and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught creatures! Into their dim and lowly lives strays of sunshine little enough, though the fell hand of man be never against them. They are our fellow-mortals. They came out of the same mysterious womb of the past, are passing through the same dream, and are destined to the same melancholy end, as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful to them.
‘Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them, then, in being merciful;
Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.’
Let us be true to our ideals, true to the spirit of Universal Compassion—whether we walk with the lone worm wandering in the twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and forests, the kine of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of the gladed river, the political blanks whom men call wives, or the outcasts of human industry.
Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant, fear-filled world! How can men be blind or deranged enough to think it is a good world? How can they be cold and satanic enough to be unmoved by the groans and anguish, the writhing and tears, that come up from its unparalleled afflictions?
But the world is growing better. And in the Future—in the long, long ages to come—it will be redeemed! The same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is to-day melting the white woman’s chains will to-morrow emancipate the working man and the ox; and, as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit shall banish Selfishness from the earth, and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of Peace, Justice, and Solidarity.