Dean Inge, while recognizing the widespread degeneracy and physiological botchedness to which allusion has been made, does not seem to perceive, as our observer has, the singular readiness with which all modern people overlook or condone it in themselves and others, and he argues, plausibly enough, that our regrettable physical condition is due to our industrialism and hypertrophic urbanism.
But this is tantamount to regarding the latest accompanying symptom of our condition as its chief cause. For, in the first place, it is extremely doubtful whether the Industrial Revolution could ever have come about without that contempt for the body and its needs which lies embedded in our ruling values. Secondly, does Dean Inge find no signs of that contempt of the body before the Industrial Age? How about the Middle Ages? How about the Great Rebellion in England? The present writer once went to the pains of tracing all the Puritan contempt for the body, and the fatal consequences it had for the English people, to the values that Dean Inge upholds. He was even able to show that, without those values, the seeds of modern industrialism could hardly have been sown, as they were in the middle of the seventeenth century.[[2]] Was not this before the so-called Industrial Revolution?
[2]. Vide A Defence of Aristocracy (Constable and Co., London: 1915).
How could the food-conditions in this country ever have become as appalling as they are without an old tradition involving the neglect of bodily concerns? These things antecede the Industrial Revolution, as the present writer has shown elsewhere, by hundreds of years. Evidently, then, strict standards about the body had already gone long before the Industrial Age. And, when the latter came, it found no barriers in the English people’s prejudices regarding the body and health: otherwise it could never have proceeded as successfully as it did to a further debilitation of the national physique.
We may take it, then, that the spiritual environment of all modern sub-human people is the outcome of our fundamental values, as is also their sub-humanity; and that this spiritual environment is characterized by a tendency to neglect and despise the body and bodily considerations.
At all events, to put it in the mildest and most moderate terms, it is impossible altogether to absolve these fundamental values from responsibility in the matter; and to ignore their influence, and to join the Eugenic movement, without first reckoning with their power, as Dean Inge has done, is to be guilty of a confusion of thought unworthy of anyone who professes to guide public opinion.
Now what is the material environment of our population?—Quite clearly, it is one in which the mechanical elaboration of daily life has been carried to a degree entirely bewildering. These sub-human people of the twentieth century live among marvels of technical skill and ingenuity; and the appliances, apparatus, and general equipment of their every-day life have reached a complexity and perfection quite unprecedented in history. Far from having learnt any lesson from the doctrines Darwin taught last century, all our energy and skill have been concentrated in precisely the opposite direction. Progressive evolution is no longer a fact with us; for, as a species we are steadily falling back to a level below that attained by our race in former ages. While we ourselves, however, steadily recede along the scale of quality, our environmental conditions, our tools, our means, acquire ever greater perfection.
The onus of evolution has, as it were, been transferred from our own shoulders to the shoulders of our environment. Blinded by the dazzling achievements of the mechanical and other sciences, we still speak about ourselves as if it were we, as living organisms, who were continuing to evolve. But, truth to tell, it is nothing of the sort. Even in the sphere of intellectual powers, we are miserably below standards already achieved.
To the bulk of unobservant and unthinking mankind, this state of affairs is largely hidden; because, while science increases the efficiency of our extra-corporeal equipment, it has also, pari passu with our degeneration, provided us with the means of keeping our corporeal equipment going. Almost as fast as we have wanted them, the sciences of chemistry and of medicine have given us the means of replacing lost parts of our bodies, and of supplementing failing functions. A whole sphere of activity—indeed a whole world of interests and ingenuity—has been created by modern physical degeneracy. The patent-medicine, patent-appliance, and patent-food industries, alone represent some of the largest going concerns in the land. In fact, it might be said that these industries themselves are but the reverse of the medal representing our fundamental values. Where you have values such as ours, you will necessarily possess a huge and flourishing medical profession and a vast army of dentists, chemists, and osteopaths, daily directing their wits towards making good the increasing defects of the human body. You will also be compelled to have your patent-drug, patent-appliance, and patent-food magnates, who, taking advantage of the universal physiological depravity of their contemporaries, amass large fortunes in merely offering “salvation” at popular prices to the physiologically depraved.
To be strictly logical, even the nature of scientific research should be added to the consequences of a people’s ruling values; because the ultimate goal of scientific investigation is necessarily determined by the desiderata implicit in values. If the values of an age tend more and more towards tolerating bodily defects, and towards securing satisfaction merely by patching or artificially replacing them, scientific research will concentrate ever more and more on those discoveries which promise either to alleviate physical degeneration or else to conceal it. And, as fast as we slough off further parts of our bodies, or lose further powers of functioning, we may rely upon science being ever ready with artificial aids, to make our lives just possible notwithstanding.