We are beginning to learn now something of the true history of our race—what we rose from, and how we have risen; what forces urged us most, what conditions helped us most. We are seeing with increasing clearness the desirable lines of action, and how best to follow them. Alert, intelligent, and active among the great currents of social evolution, we can do much to promote their effects. Here we can let them alone, there we can oppose our allied wills against some eddy of reversionary tendency, or check the growth of some disadvantageous excess; we can use our consciousness to choose between the varying forces, and such individual power as we possess to steer among them.
To see our line of progress, to see the tremendous currents that push us upward and take advantage of them; to see also the pitfalls and stumbling-blocks, the reaction and inertia to which mere genetic progress is exposed; and then to use our telic energy to assist nature and go farther—that will make man a far more useful factor in social evolution.
III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
Summary
Human evolution. New faculties and instincts. Egoistic concept useful to individual animal. Disadvantage of outgrown ideals. Persistence of social rudiments explained. Need of social scrap-heap. Social relations psychic. Despot only a concept. Concepts internal environment. Shipwreck and character. Maternal and sex instinct and concepts. Negro hero, power of concept on conduct. Man’s efforts to check his growth. Prejudice a physical brain condition. Healthy brain must be used. Virtue of “believing.” Natural organic tendency to consistency,—how perverted. Belief in luck. Charades. Basic concepts wrong. Superior past traditions. Ancestor worship. Fanaticism. Forced inconsistency. Concepts antedate facts. French Revolution. Slavery. Undertow of old brain habits. Increase of social convenience. Brain as developed by natural selection, by social selection. Apparent injustice. Individual hunter. On his own head. Mistakes most possible in highest grades. Peasant grade always preserved. Rub out and do over. Society the best culture for fools. Present concepts in economics, primitive, false, injurious. Ego concept. If bees were “idiots.”
III
CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
Human evolution involves the development of a number of individual animals into specialised functionaries of organic social life. This requires the gradual assumption of new faculties, new desires, new instincts, and new activities; and the gradual disuse and discarding of older ones. The egoistic mental make-up of a solitary animal, of a low savage, of any reversionary self-supporting human hermit, is advantageous to him as a separate creature; but disadvantageous to a society to which he might become attached, and, if he was so attached, to himself.
A given society, in any age, possesses certain dominant ideas and feelings proper to it; and the individuals manifesting most of those ideas and feelings are most beneficial to that society and so to themselves. But if members of a given society persist in maintaining and acting upon social ideals of a previous age, they are injurious to their society and so to themselves. Social evolution, in any given place and time, is visibly checked by the number of persons who do not keep up with it; but insist on feeling and thinking after long-past standards, and trying to act on that basis.
This peculiar persistence of social rudiments in all stages of our progress requires some special explanation.
When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then increasingly injurious, continues to force itself upon a growing civilisation, there must be some strong agency to account for it. Naturally, it would have been gradually eliminated by proven undesirability, as cartwheels of solid wood were eliminated. In our material development we have moved steadily on, growing into ever newer and better methods, simplifying, cheapening, quickening, easing, following nature’s methods exactly—the conservation of energy—the line of least resistance. Our American industrial supremacy is attributed to precisely this willingness to grow, to discard the old things, to our constant resort to the scrap-heap. But in social development we seem to have no scrap-heap, or never to use one unless compelled to, making history a sort of sacred junk-shop.
In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.