Plainly they do not. Man inherits the capacity for loyalty, but not the use to which he shall put it. The persons and causes (if any) to which he shall devote himself are suggested to him, often, indeed, imposed upon him, by education and environment. Nevertheless, they are his by choice, not by hereditary compulsion. And his choice may be bad. He may unselfishly devote himself to what is petty or vile, as he may to what is generous and noble. But on the possibility of error depends the possibility of progress; and if (to borrow a phrase from physics) our loyalty possessed as few “degrees of freedom” as that of ants or bees, our social organisation would be as rigid.
The most careless glance at the pages of history, or the world of our own experience, will show how varied are the forms in which this capacity for loyalty is displayed. The Spartans at Thermopylæ, the “Blues” and the “Greens” at Byzantium, rival politicians in a hard-fought election, players and spectators at an Eton and Harrow Match, supply familiar illustrations of its variety and vigour. And do not suppose that in thus bringing together the sublime, the familiar, and the trivial, I am paradoxically associating matters essentially disparate. This is not so. I am not putting on a moral level the patriot and the partisan, the martyr to some great cause and the shouting spectator at a school match. What I am insisting on is that they all have loyalty in common; a loyalty which often is, and always may be, pure from egoistic alloy.
Loyalties, then, which are characteristically human differ profoundly from those which are characteristically animal. The latter are due to instincts which include both the end to be sought for and the means by which it is to be attained. The former are rooted in a general capacity for, or inclination to, loyalty, with little inherited guidance either as to ends or means. Yet, if we accept selection as the source of the first, we can hardly reject it as the source of the second. For the survival value of loyalty is manifest. It lies at the root of all effective co-operation. Without it the family and tribe would be impossible; and without the family and the tribe, or some yet higher organisation, men, if they could exist at all, would be more helpless than cattle, weak against the alien forces of nature, at the mercy of human foes more capable of loyalty than themselves. A more powerful aid in the struggle for existence cannot easily be imagined.
We are indeed apt to forget how important are its consequences, even when it supplies no more than a faint qualification of other and more obvious motives. It acts like those alloys which, in doses relatively minute, add strength and elasticity even to steel. The relation (for example) between a commercial company and its officials is essentially a business one. The employer pays the market price for honesty and competence, and has no claim to more. Yet that company is surely either unfortunate or undeserving whose servants are wholly indifferent to its fortunes, feeling no faintest flicker of pride when it succeeds, no tinge of regret when it fails. Honourable is the tie between those who exchange honest wage and honest work; yet loyalty can easily better it. And a like truth is manifest in spheres of action less reputable than those of commerce. Mercenaries, to be worth hiring, must be partly moved by forces higher than punishment or pay. Even pirates could not plunder with profit were their selfishness unredeemed by some slight tincture of reciprocal loyalty.
There are, however, many who would admit the occasional importance of loyalty while strenuously denying that social life was wholly based upon it. For them society is an invention; of all inventions the most useful, but still only an invention. It was (they think) originally devised by individuals in their individual interest; and, though common action was the machinery employed, personal advantage was the end desired. By enlightened egoism social organisation was created; by enlightened egoism it is maintained and improved. Contrivance, therefore, not loyalty, is the master faculty required.
This is a great delusion—quite unsupported by anything we know or can plausibly conjecture about the history of mankind. No one, indeed, doubts that deliberate adaptation of means to ends has helped to create, and is constantly modifying, human societies; nor yet that egoism has constantly perverted political and social institutions to merely private uses. But there is something more fundamental to be borne in mind, namely, that without loyalty there would be no societies to modify, and no institutions to pervert. If these were merely well-designed instruments like steam-engines and telegraphs, they would be worthless. They would perish at the first shock, did they not at once fall into ruin by their own weight. If they are to be useful as means, they must first impose themselves as ends; they must possess a quality beyond the reach of contrivance: the quality of commanding disinterested service and uncalculating devotion.
III
I should therefore be ready to admit, as a plausible conjecture, that the capacity for altruistic emotions and beliefs is a direct product of organic evolution; an attribute preserved and encouraged, because it is useful to the race, and transmitted from parents to offspring by physiological inheritance. On this theory loyalty in some shape or other is as natural to man as maternal affection is natural to mammals. Doubtless it is more variable in strength, more flexible in direction, more easily smothered by competing egoisms; but the capacity for it is not less innate, and not less necessary in the struggle for existence. But when we ask how far selection has been responsible for the development of high altruistic ideals out of primitive forms of loyalty, we touch on problems of much greater complexity. Evidently there has been a profound moral transformation in the course of ages. None suppose that ethical values are appraised in the twentieth century as they were in the first stone age. But what has caused the change is not so clear.
There are obvious, and, I think, insurmountable difficulties in attributing it to organic selection. Selection is of the fittest—of the fittest to survive. But in what consists this particular kind of fitness? The answer from the biological point of view is quite simple: almost a matter of definition. That race is “fit” which maintains its numbers; and that race is fittest which most increases them. The judge of such “fitness” is not the moralist or the statesman. It is the Registrar-General. So little is “fitness” inseparably attached to excellence, that it would be rash to say that there is any quality, however unattractive, which might not in conceivable circumstances assist survival. High authorities, I believe, hold that at this moment in Britain we have so managed matters that congenital idiots increase faster than any other class of the population. If so, they must be deemed the “fittest” of our countrymen. No doubt this fact, if it be a fact, is an accident of our social system. Legislation has produced this happy adaptation of environment to organism, and legislation might destroy it. The fittest to-day might become the unfittest to-morrow. But this is nothing to the purpose. That part of man’s environment which is due to man does no doubt usually vary more quickly than the part which is due to nature; none the less is it environment in the strictest sense of the word. The theory of selection draws no essential distinction between (say) the secular congelation of a continent in the ice age, and the workings of the English Poor Law in the twentieth century. It is enough that each, while it lasts, favours or discourages particular heritable variations, and modifies the qualities that make for “survival.”
What is more important, however, than the fact that heritable “fitness” may be completely divorced from mental and moral excellence, is the fact that so large a part of man’s mental and moral characteristics are not heritable at all, and cannot therefore be directly due to organic selection. Races may accumulate accomplishments, yet remain organically unchanged. They may learn and they may forget, they may rise from barbarism to culture, and sink back from culture to barbarism, while through all these revolutions the raw material of their humanity varies never a bit. In such cases there can be no question of Natural Selection in the sense in which biologists use the term.