Causes and Consequences

by John Jay Chapman

Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him primarily as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on the selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include, first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind. Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise, a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends upon a dogma that man must be primarily selfish because he must eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly. The individuals would support each other.

But let us start square and remember that it is a question of science. Take the other hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and propagates his species because he is fond of the species. Incidentally he gets protected. It is through the illusion that he loves his fellows that his own welfare is secured. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom, self-protection the result.

It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They perish.

The regard that every custom receives from the individual who supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is self-surrender.

But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it, like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on this trouble. Every country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind upon a disease of the savage.

The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of man. Give two men the New Testament—and each man sees himself in it, and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious; the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered at all.

Of course, when a custom arises it is turned on the instant into something that can be used by egoism, and here comes the pivot of the matter. Custom renders men similar to each other. The letter killeth. But the letter does much more than kill. It educates, it trains, it transmits. Hence the two contradictory functions of an institution which we found at work in England, the one to educate, the other to limit.

In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have much to find in that study which will enlarge and illustrate that knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in the greenhouse and the menagerie.

Let us look at the social life of the ants.

The ant seems to show a stage of progress in which the individuals have grown alike through a slavish observance of certain institutions. It is certain that the ant is a ritualistic being, formal, narrow, intolerant, incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. He hates any one differing from himself, whether more or less virtuous. He would regard any suggested improvement in the arrangement of his house as a sacrilege. He works constantly for the public with a devotion that nothing but religious zeal can explain, and is in his own limited way completely happy. But the tyranny of public opinion, the subserviency to a State church goes far to make him contemptible.