CHAPTER V
RACIAL DEGENERATION AND THE NECESSITY FOR RATIONALIZATION OF THE MORES
Racial decay in modern society; Purely "moral" control dysgenic in civilized society; New machinery for social control; Mistaken notion that reproduction is an individual problem; Economic and other factors in the group problem of reproduction.
From the discussion in the preceding chapter, it becomes apparent that for the half of the female element in a savage society possessing the most vigor and initiative to turn away from reproduction would in the long run be fatal to the group. Yet this is what occurs in large measure in modern civilized society. Reproduction is a biological function. It is non-competitive, as far as the individual is concerned, and offers no material rewards. The breakdown of the group's control over the detailed conduct and behaviour of its members is accompanied by an increasing stress upon material rewards to individuals. So with growing individualism, in the half of the race which can both bear children and compete in the social activities offering rewards, i.e., the women who are specialized to the former and adapted to the latter, there is a growing tendency among the most successful, individualized strains, to choose the social and eschew the biological functions.
Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic ways of civilization and then being swamped in their turn by barbarians. This is especially pronounced in our own times because popularized biological and medical knowledge makes it possible for a tremendous class of the most successful and enlightened to avoid reproduction without foregoing sex activity.
In primitive groups, a "moral" control which kept all women at reproduction was neither eugenic nor dysgenic unless accompanied by systematic destruction of the least fit children. By "moral" control is meant the use of taboo, prejudice, religious abhorrence for certain acts and the like. The carefully nurtured moral ideas about sex and reproduction simply represent the system of coercion which groups have found most effective in enforcing the division of reproductive and other activities among the individual members. When this social machinery grew up, to regulate sexual activity was in general to regulate reproduction. The natural sex desire proved sufficiently powerful and general to still seek its object, even with the group handicaps and regulations imposed to meet the reproductive necessity. But contraceptive knowledge, etc., has now become so general that to regulate sex activity is no longer to regulate reproduction. The taboo or "moral" method of regulation has become peculiarly degenerating to race quality, because the most intelligent, rationalized individuals are least affected by it.
There is no turning back to control by ignorance. Even theoretically, the only way to stop such a disastrous selection of the unfit would be to rationalize reproduction—so that nobody shall reproduce the species through sheer ignorance of how to evade or avoid it. This done, some type of social control must be found which will enable civilized societies to breed from their best instead of their worst stock. Under the old scheme, already half broken down, natural selection favours primitive rather than civilized societies through decreased birth-rates and survival of the unfit in the latter. Even this is true only where the savage groups are not interfered with by the civilized, a condition rapidly disappearing through modern occidental imperialism and the inoculation of primitive peoples with "civilized" diseases such as syphilis, rum-drinking and rampant individualism.
To continually encourage the racially most desirable women to disregard their sexual specialization and exploit their social-competitive adaptation must, obviously destroy the group which pursues such a policy. The only way to make such a course democratic is to carefully instruct all women, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, in the methods of avoiding reproduction and to inject the virus of individualism in all alike. Then the group can get its population supply only by a new system of control. To remove any economic handicaps to child-bearing is certainly not out of harmony with our ideas of justice.
In removing the economic handicaps at present connected with the reproductive function in women, care must also be taken that the very measures which insure this do not themselves become dysgenic influences. Such schemes as maternity insurance, pensions for mothers, and most of the propositions along this line, may offer an inducement to women of the poorer classes to assume the burdens connected with their specialization for child-bearing. But their more fortunate sisters, who find themselves so well adapted to modern conditions that they are even moderately successful in the competition for material rewards, will hardly find recompense thus for turning from their social to their biological functions. To these highly individualized modern women must be presented more cogent reasons for taking upon themselves the burden of reproducing the group.
It is obvious that from just this energetic female stock we should obtain a large part of the next generation if we are at all concerned over the welfare of the group and its chances of survival. One suggestion is that we may be able to turn their very individualism to account and use it as a potent factor in the social control of their reproductive activities. If we can demonstrate on the basis of sound biological data that the bearing of children is necessary for the full and complete development of the individual woman, physically and mentally, we shall have gone a long way toward securing voluntary motherhood. Only such argument will induce the highly individualized, who may also be the most vital, woman to turn of her own accord from competitive social activities to the performance of the biological function for which she is specialized. This is especially true, as has been intimated above, since contraceptive knowledge now permits the exercise of sexual functions without the natural consequences, and the avoidance of motherhood no longer involves the denial of expression to the sexual urge.
Even if we are able to utilize this method of control, it will not obtain the requisite number of offspring to maintain the eugenic quality of the group, since the bearing of one or two children would be all that individual development would require. If the group must have on the average three children from each of its women in order to replace itself, the larger part of the reproductive activities will still be confined to the more ignorant, or if they also make use of contraceptive knowledge, the group will simply die out from the effects of its own democratic enlightenment. Thus it becomes apparent that we must find some more potent force than this narrow form of self-interest to accomplish the social purposes of reproduction. When reproduction is generally understood to be as thoroughly a matter of group survival as for example the defensive side in a war of extermination, the same sentiment of group loyalty which now takes such forms as patriotism can be appealed to. If the human race is unsocial it will perish anyway. If it has not become unsocial—and it does not display any such tendency, but only the use of such impulses in mistaken directions—then a group necessity like reproduction can be met. Whatever is required of the individual will become "moral" and "patriotic"—i.e., it will be wreathed in the imperishable sentiments which group themselves around socially necessary and hence socially approved acts everywhere and always.
In whatever races finally survive, the women of good stock as well as poor—perhaps eventually the good even more than the poor—will reproduce themselves. Because of our ideals of individual liberty, this may not be achieved by taboo, ignorance or conscription for motherhood. But when it is found to be the personal interest to bear children, both as a means of complete physical and mental development and as a way of winning social approval and esteem, it will become as imperative for woman to fulfil the biological function to which she is specialized as it was under the old system of moral and taboo control. The increasing emphasis on the necessity of motherhood for the maintenance of a normal, health personality, and the growing tendency to look upon this function as the greatest service which woman can render to society, are manifest signs that this time is approaching. There is little doubt that woman will be as amenable to these newer and more rationalized mores as human nature has always been to the irrationally formed customs and traditions of the past.
To ignore the female specialization involved in furnishing the intramaternal environment for three children, on an average, to the group, is simply foolish. If undertaken at maturity—say from twenty-two to twenty-five years of age—and a two-year interval left between the three in the interest of both mother and children, it puts woman in an entirely different relation toward extra-reproductive activities than man. It does imply a division of labour.
In general, it would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be much more useful to society at other work. But let us not disregard fundamentals. It is obviously advantageous for children of normal, able parents to be cared for in the home environment. In a biologically healthy society the presumption must be that the average woman has some three children of her own. Since this obviously includes nurses and governesses, we see at once the futility of the oft-proposed class solution of hiring single women to care for the children of the fortunate. If such a servant is undesirable, she is not hired; if normal, in a biologically healthy society she would have her own children.
The female handicap incident to reproduction may be illustrated by the case of Hambletonian 10 mentioned in Chapter II. We saw that a female could not have borne the hundredth part of his colts. This simply means that the effort or individual cost of impressing his characters upon the new generation is less than one one-hundredth that required of a female.
Among domestic animals this is made use of to multiply the better males to the exclusion of the others, a valuable biological expedient which we are denied in human groups because it would upset all our social institutions. So we do the next best thing and make the males do more than half in the extra-biological activities of society, since they are by their structure prevented from having an equal share in the reproductive burden. This is an absolutely necessary equation, and there will always be some sort of division of labour on the basis of it.
Since reproduction is a group, not an individual, necessity, whatever economic burden it entails must eventually be assumed by society and divided up among the individuals, like the cost of war or any other group activity. Ideally, then, from the standpoint of democracy, every individual, male or female, should bear his share as a matter of course. This attitude toward reproduction, as an individual duty but a group economic burden, would lead to the solution of most of the problems involved. Negative eugenics should be an immediate assumption—if the state must pay for offspring, the quality will immediately begin to be considered. A poor race-contribution, not worth paying for, would certainly be prevented as far as possible.
Some well-meaning radical writers mistakenly suppose that the emancipation of women means the withdrawal by the group of any interest in, or any attempt to regulate, such things as the hours and conditions of female labour. That would simply imply that the group takes no interest in reproduction—in its own survival. For if the group does not make some equation for the greater burden of reproduction upon women, the inevitable result will be that that particular service will not be rendered by those most desirable to be preserved.
Given the fundamental assumption that the group is to survive—to be perpetuated by the one possible means—if it withdraws all solicitude about the handicap this entails to women as a whole, introducing a spirit of laissez-faire competition between men and women, the women with sense enough to see the point will not encumber themselves with children. For each one of these who has no children, some other woman must have six instead of three. And some people encourage this in the name of democracy!
The most involved problems must inevitably centre around the women who, to quote Mrs. Hollingworth, "vary from the mode," but are yet functional for sex. Some have no sex desires at all, some no craving for or attachment to children, some neither of these. It is a question still to be solved whether some of them ought, in the interest of the race, to be encouraged to reproduce themselves. In less individualized primitive society, seclusion, taboo and ignorance coerced them into reproduction. Any type of control involving the inculcation of "moral" ideas is open to the objection that it may work on those who should not reproduce themselves as well as those who should.
In a sense, this problem will tend to solve itself. With the substitution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition from the old standards to the new. The chief difference will be that many of the artificial forces which are acting as barriers to motherhood at the present time—as for example the economic handicap involved—will be removed, and woman's choice will therefore be more entirely in harmony with her native instinctive tendencies. Thus those women endowed with the most impelling desire for children will, as a rule, have the largest number. In all probability their offspring will inherit the same strong parental instinct. The stocks more poorly endowed with this impulse will tend to die out by the very lack of any tendency to self-perpetuation. It is only logical to conclude, therefore, that as we set up the new forces of social control outlined in this chapter, we are at the same time providing more scope for natural selection, and that the problem of aberrant types consequently becomes only a transitory one.