Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

I consider it unnecessary and a little ridiculous to quote authorities in support of the statement that twice two are four; what is reasonable and clear is convincing without further recommendation; nevertheless, it is a fact that may be worthy of mention that some of the best intellects of all nations have sided with the individual against the state. On the one side we have Plato, whose ideal is Sparta and who would like to see the despotism of this model state and its communal meals completed by the addition of community of property, of wives, and of children; we have Hegel, who has gone farther than any one in his idolatry of the state; we have Auguste Comte, who, in his zeal for his newly founded science of Sociology, conceives society as an organism biologically superior to the individual, and thereby has become the father of the Organicists. But against these we can put the Englishman, Jeremy Bentham, the embodiment of sound common sense, whom the muddle-headed fools that pose as deep thinkers have good reason to hate and fear, and whom they try to depreciate as vulgar and shallow; further, his compatriot, Herbert Spencer, who is his kindred spirit; the Frenchman, Frédéric Bastiat, whose writings sparkle with flashes of wit; the German, Wilhelm Humboldt, who bravely and successfully combated the state tyranny defended by Fichte. All these are convinced individualists who adduce irrefutable reasons for their views. We may also include Kant among them, as he gave utterance to this decisive sentence: "Man is his own aim and end, and must never be a mere means"; consequently it is never permissible to sacrifice the sovereignty of one's own person to that of the state, or make use of it for the realization of political aims by disregarding, and doing violence to, one's right of self-determination. Harald Höfding contends that progress should be measured by the extent to which, in Kant's sense of the words, man is recognized to be his own aim and end; but that is not only a measure of progress, it is the measure of all civilization.

For civilization, to my idea, means a state worthy of man, implying his mental, moral and material independence of all motive forces other than those of his own nature; its aim is the most complete attainment possible of this independence; its measure the extent to which the individual determines his own fate and is able to ward off from it undesired outside influences. At the first awakening of his consciousness primitive man was aware of being exposed to unknown forces which controlled him at will and against which his will was powerless. From the very beginning, at first dimly and then more and more clearly, man has felt this to be unworthy and intolerable. The best of the species have always laboured with all their strength to liberate themselves, and the great ambition of man throughout his development has always been not submissively to accept whatever fate was accorded him, but to work out his destiny according to his needs and his own ideas.

The anguish caused by wretched dependence upon external forces is the origin of religion as of superstition, which both spring from the same root. With the anthropomorphism peculiar to the earliest stages of thought, man personified the mysterious powers which ruled his fate. He created gods for himself, and then, as far as his knowledge permitted, he sought some relation between himself and them, and tried to get at them by every means available. He imagined them like unto himself, that is, vain, capricious, greedy, easily frightened by dark threats, and then, very reasonably on this hypothesis, he importuned them with prayers, sacrifices, hymns of praise and vows, as well as magic formulæ and incantations, always with the inflexible intention of making them serve his purposes, not of serving theirs. The contrite Jewish prayer: "Thy will be done, Lord, Thy will, not mine," is a new trait in the religious thought of man. The heathen always strives to have his will done in opposition to that of the gods, and to divert them from their decisions if he dislikes them.

In a state of advanced development theological thought gave way before the scientific. Man learnt to conceive Nature's rule, not transcendentally, but intrinsically. He recognized that the forces around him, which so often crossed his purpose, are not to be influenced by prayer and sacrifice, but that it is expedient and possible to discover their character and the conditions of their activity. By dint of long-sustained efforts he has succeeded in effectively standing up to hostile Nature and in warding off her undesired interference in his destiny. If the tribulations, which formerly suddenly brought his schemes to nought and often destroyed him, are not entirely overcome, it is merely because his practice does not conform closely enough to the directions evolved by his theoretical knowledge, because he is too careless or too clumsy to make proper use of the weapons against the elements with which science has armed him.

But this same man, who has learnt to be a match for Nature, his creator, is powerless against his creature, the state. He can neither evade it nor escape from it. The state disposes of him without his consent, against his most obvious interests, in spite of his powerless opposition; it hurls him hither and thither, annihilates him, crushes him by its will and is unmoved by the will of the individual.

True, man has sought to maintain his right of self-determination against the forces of politics, as against all others that broke his will and intervened in his life without his consent. For thousands of years all state development has tried to protect the modest individual, lost in the crowd and featureless, but nevertheless a person, that is, a world to himself, against the arbitrariness of rulers or leading statesmen. That is the one unchanging tendency which leads from Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the slayers of a tyrant, the rebellion of the elder Brutus, the murder of Cæsar, by way of the Revolt of the Netherlands and the execution of Charles I of England, to the great Revolution, the risings of 1848 and the struggle for constitutional government in all states of the Old World and the New. The formula has long been discovered whereby the individual can maintain the dignity of his sovereign personality and his own responsibility for the shaping of his destiny. It is civil freedom, constitutionalism, sovereignty of the people. There are arrangements, carefully thought out, nicely weighed, cleverly worked out to the smallest detail, by which the individual is fitted into his place in the community without being deprived of the management of his own affairs, by which the sacrifices needful for the fulfilment of collective tasks are exacted without his being reduced to a condition of slavery, by which the independence of the individual is safeguarded and yet a state of chaos and anarchy is avoided.

But this formula fares as do the doctrines of science: hitherto it has remained a theory everywhere. The franchise, representation of the people, responsibility of ministers, constitutional limitation of the ruler's power, are infallibly effective weapons or instruments, but no people has yet learnt how to handle them rightly. That is why pessimists speak of the bankruptcy of civilization, that is why the aim of civilization, the liberation of the person and the enforcement of its sovereignty, has nowhere been attained, that is why, to quote Napoleon I in his interview with Goethe at Erfurt, "In our times the power of fate is politics." And yet all these institutions of a modern constitutional state, from the ballot-paper and the voting of taxes in Parliament to the enforced resignation of the ministry on a vote of censure and the oath of the ruler to observe the constitution, recognize the rights of the individual as opposed to the state, and at least theoretically give the lie to the bold declaration that the state is everything and the individual nothing.

It is no less untrue to say that the state is superior to Morality and is not bound by it. In order to prove this we need only be brave enough not to be intimidated by the mysterious mien and gestures and the dark, pompous phrases of the mystics who worship the state, and to penetrate to the real, conceptual idea of the word.

The hocus pocus that the worshippers of the state perform around their idol puts one in mind of Kempelen, who created a sensation with his automaton in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This figure, got up as a Turkish woman, gave rise to astonishment and, among not a few, to superstitious fear. It played chess, and so well, too, that it almost always succeeded in winning, even against its most skilled opponents. People cudgelled their brains to solve the riddle, all sorts of explanations were suggested, one more impossible than the other, but still the mystery remained dark, until the owner, having made enough money and sick of the part of an itinerant swindler, revealed the trick. In the hollow figure there sat a clever chess player who worked its hands and with them carried out the moves on the board.

This anecdote can be applied literally to the state. Simpletons, drunk with phrases, and cunning cheats contend that the state is a supernatural creation in which the "spirit of the universe," the "spirit of history" takes shape, and through which it realizes its aims; these aims, utterly transcending the understanding of the individual, are unintelligible to man. Such overwhelming phrases strike the simple, credulous hearer dumb and send cold shudders of awe up his spine. But let us look at the inside of this magic machine whose works are driven by the "spirit of the world" and with whose help this spirit fulfils its impenetrable designs. What do we find? Men, quite ordinary mortals, who sit in the machine and work its levers; men whose intellectual powers are only in rare cases superior to those of their enslaved subjects bereft of will; men who are, as a rule, of average intelligence and not seldom even below the average.