In the long agricultural and military periods we see the same thing. In the peasant the virtues of industry and patience were extolled: it takes industry and patience to raise corn. In the soldier the virtues of courage and obedience were extolled, and in every one the virtue of faith was the prime requisite of the existing religion. It took a great deal of faith to accept the religions of those times. The importance of faith as a virtue declines as religion grows more intelligible and applicable to life. It requires no effort to believe what you can understand and do. Slowly the industrial era dawned and grew, from the weak, sporadic efforts of the cringing packman and craftsman, the common prey of the dominant fighting class, to our colossal industrial organization, in which the soldier is ruthlessly exploited to some financial interests. With this change in economic conditions has changed the scale of virtues.
Physical courage has sunk: obedience, patience, faith, and the rest do not stand as they did. We praise and value to-day, as always, the virtues whereby we live. Every animal developes the virtues of his conditions: our human distinction is that we add the power of conscious perception and personal volition to the action of natural force. Not only in our own race, but in others, do we call “good” and “bad” those qualities which profit us; and the beasts that we train and use develope, of necessity, the qualities that profit them,—as, for instance, in our well-known friend, the dog.
The dog is an animal long since cut off from his natural means of support, and depending absolutely on man for food. As a free, wild dog, he was profited by a daring initiative, courage, ferocity. As a tame, slave dog, he is profited by abject submission, by a crawling will-lessness that grovels at a blow, and licks the foot that kicks it. We have quite made over the original dog; and his moral nature, his spirit, shows the change even more than his body. The force which has accomplished this is economic,—a change of base in the source of supplies and the processes of obtaining them.
Let us briefly examine the distinctive virtues of humanity, their order of introduction and development, and see how this one peculiar relation has affected them.
The main distinction of human virtue is in what we roughly describe as altruism,—“otherness.” To love and serve one another, to care for one another, to feel for and with one another,—our racial adjective, “humane,” implies these qualities. The very existence of humanity implies these qualities in some degree, and the development of humanity is commensurate with their development.
Our one great blunder in studying these things lies in our failure to appreciate the organic necessity of such moral qualities in human life. We have assumed that the practice of these social virtues involved a personal effort and sacrifice, and that there is an irreconcilable contest between the cosmic process of development and the ethical process, as Huxley puts it. Social evolution brings with it the essential qualities of social relation, and these are our much boasted virtues. The natural processes of human intercourse and interrelation develope the qualities without which such intercourse would be impossible; and this development is as orderly, as natural, as “cosmic,” as the processes of organic activity within the individual body. It is as natural for an industrial society to live in peace as for a hunting society to live in war; and this peace is not the result of heroic and self-sacrificing effort on the part of the industrial society; it is the necessity of their condition.
The course of evolution in human ethics is marked by a gradual extension of our perception of common good and evil as distinct from our initial perception of individual good and evil. This becomes very keen in the more socialized natures among us, as in the far-seeing devotion of statesmanship, patriotism, and philanthropy. Each of these words shows in its construction that the quality described is social,—the statesman, one who thinks and works for the State; the patriot, one who loves and labors for his country; the philanthropist, one who loves mankind. All these qualities, in their extreme and in their first beginnings, are a mere recognition of the equal right of the next man, common “fair play” and courtesy; they are but the natural product of social conditions acting on the individual through primal laws of economic necessity. The individual, in the absolute economic isolation of the beast, is profited by pure egoism, and he developes it. The individual, in the increasing economic interdependence of social relation, is profited by altruism; and he developes it.
All our virtues can be so traced and accounted for. The great main stem of them all, what we call “love,” is merely the first condition of social existence. It is cohesion, working among us as the constituent particles of society. Without some attraction to hold us together, we should not be able to hold together; and this attraction, as perceived by our consciousness, we call love. The virtue of obedience consists in the surrender of the individual will, so often necessary to the common good; and it stands highest in military organization, wherein great numbers of men must act together against their personal interests, even to the sacrifice of life, in the service of the community.
As we have grown into fuller social life, we have slowly and experimentally, painfully and expensively, discovered what kind of man was the best social factor. The type of a satisfactory member of society to-day is a man self-controlled, kind, gentle, strong, wise, brave, courteous, cheerful, true. In the Middle Ages, strong, brave, and true would have satisfied the demands of the time. We now require for our common good a larger range of qualities, a more elaborate moral organization. All this is a simple, evolutionary process of social life, and should have involved no more confusion, effort, and pain than any other natural process.
But the moral development of humanity is a most tempestuous and contradictory field of study. Some virtues we have developed in orderly fashion, hardly recognizing that they were virtues, because they came so easily into use. Accuracy and punctuality are qualities which were unknown to the savage, because they were not needed in his business. They have been developed in us, because they were required, and so have been gradually assumed under pressure of economic necessity. Obedience, even in its extreme form of self-sacrifice, has been produced in the soldier; and no quality is more altruistic, more unnatural, or more difficult of adoption by the sturdy individual will. The common, law-abiding citizen does not consider himself a hero; yet he is manifesting a high degree of social virtue, often at great personal sacrifice.