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.