Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

Nevertheless, what has been achieved is of value, and it is childish to depreciate it. Paradoxical minds, like J. J. Rousseau and his parrot-like imitators, may deny the use of all civilization and declare that the so-called state of nature, the ignorance and helplessness of undeveloped man amid all too mighty Nature, is preferable. That is an intellectual joke which is not very amusing. We have not vanquished death, but we have prolonged life, as the mortality statistics prove. We cannot cure all diseases; crowded dwellings in great cities, the nature and intensity of our occupations—civilization, in short—bring diseases from which we should probably not suffer if we were savages; but the cave-dwellers, too, were subject to illnesses, and our antisepsis and hygiene effectually prevent many and grave bodily ills. Division of labour makes the individual dependent on the whole economic organism; it makes it easier for the favoured few to exploit the many and to be parasites at their expense, but nevertheless the individual can more easily satisfy his needs than if, being completely free and independent, he alone had to provide all the objects he requires. The speed and facility with which the exchange of goods is effected, thanks to ever new and ever more excellent means of communication, often give rise to artificial wants; cheap travel occasions useless restlessness, but the emancipation of the individual from the place of his birth, the conversion of the whole globe into one single economic domain, of which every part with its own particular superabundance of men and products supplies the lack of the same in other parts, has at least this invaluable advantage, that it makes man more independent of local hazards and makes the earth more habitable for him. Many things provided by civilization are obtainable only by the rich, and the spectacle of the luxury of these favoured mortals makes the lot of the poor harder to bear, but the possibility of working one's way up into the ranks of the fortunate is a mighty spur to strong characters, and gives rise to efforts which are profitable to many. All the great technical achievements of civilization can certainly not bring happiness either to the individual or to the community, because happiness is a spiritual state which does not depend on bodily satisfactions and, though it may be troubled by material conditions, can never be created by them; but the moments of happiness which the individual experiences derive an extraordinary intensity from the instruments of civilization which surround and serve us.

Certainly civilization has its bad points, and it requires no great cleverness to discover them, to point them out and to exaggerate them. Certainly many of its most boasted, supposed benefits are not really a blessing, but either merely imaginary or else unimportant—little, superfluous things which may be pleasant, but lacking which we can live without great deprivation, and for which we undoubtedly pay far too dearly. But, on the whole, it is a mighty achievement of man's struggling intellect, an invaluable improvement of the lot of man, and if anyone denies this he forfeits any claim to serious refutation. Rousseau's state of nature may be a very pleasant change for a summer holiday, but every man of sound common sense would decline it as a permanent abode.

We may therefore freely concede the fact of progress in civilization in so far as the latter implies greater safety, facility, order and equability of life, deeper and more widely diffused knowledge and more perfect adaptation of man to the natural conditions in which he finds himself. For it is no reservation to note in the course of evolution both individual deviations from the path which leads to the goal of civilization, the amelioration of the constitution of mankind, and occasional relapses into bygone barbarisms. To make use of Gumplowicz's expression, it is not an acrochronic and acrotopic illusion (that is, a form of self-deception which consists in thinking the time when one lives and the place where one lives the best of all times and the most wonderful of all places) if we place the present far above all past ages and declare our civilization to be incomparably richer and more perfect than anything that has preceded it. The laudator acti, the cross-grained Nestor who praises the past at the expense of the present, the enthusiast for "the good old times," is a figure that has always been familiar. But it proves nothing. This tender love of the past is not the outcome of objective comparison and consideration, but an impulse of subjective psychology. It is simply the emotion and longing which fill an old man's heart when he looks back on his youth. He remembers the pleasurable emotions which once accompanied all his impressions and which are now unknown to his worn-out organism, and he thinks the world was better because he found more joy in it. The aged man is convinced that in his youth the sky was bluer, the rose more odorous, the women more beautiful than now, but an impartial observer would pityingly shake his head at this.

But can the progress, which cannot reasonably be denied in civilization, also be traced in Morality? Philosophers who are by no means negligible have roundly replied in the negative. Buckle declares uncompromisingly that the only progress possible to man is intellectual, and by this he means that mankind grows in knowledge, foresight and clarity of thought, but not at the same time in Morality, which, according to him, differs from the intellect and understanding and is not included in them. Buckle's unfavourable judgment has been turned into a formula which has often been repeated. Scientifically, technically, we progress; morally we stand still or slip back; the two orders of development move neither in the same direction nor with the same speed. That is a view that is widely held. Fr. Bouillier comes to the same conclusion as Buckle, though from different considerations. He asserts that "a savage who obeys his conscience, however ignorant this may be, can be as virtuous as a Socrates or an Aristides; one can even go so far as to defend the view that social progress instead of strengthening individual morality weakens it, for society, in proportion as it is better ordered, saves the individual the trouble of a great many virtuous actions."

However, there are other moralists who take the opposite view. Shaftesbury cannot imagine a moral system in which there is no place for the idea of constant progress, of continuous improvement. The great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century are convinced of the moral rise of humanity. "The mass of mankind," says Turgot, "advances constantly towards an ever-growing perfection," and elsewhere: "Men taught by experience grow in ever greater measure and in a better sense humane." Condorcet defends no less emphatically the view that the faculty of growing more perfect is inherent in man. This is a case of pessimism and optimism which have their roots less in reasonable thought than in temperament. A worn-out, weary individual, or generation, looks back and spends the time in futile yearning and melancholy visions of the past; but a sturdy generation, full of life, and conscious of it, looks forward, and planning, inventing, and determined to realize its creative ideas, it conjures up the image of the future. Pessimism regrets and groans; optimism hopes and promises. The former, like Ovid, thinks the Golden Age is in the past, the latter, like the fathers of the great Revolution, looks for it in the future. In neither case do they reach conclusions as a result of observation and logical thought, rather they invent reasons afterwards for their conclusions, as they do interpretations of their observations. But he who regards life neither with bitterness nor with pride, and tries to understand it objectively, will come to the opinion that Morality too has its fair share in the progress of civilization.

Theological thought interprets moral perfection differently from scientific thought. According to the former it is independent of intellectual development and purely a matter of faith. God is the ideal of Morality, belief in Him the necessary condition for a moral life. Through its fall mankind withdrew from God and was left a prey to Immorality; original sin perpetually burdened it; by redemption and grace it has been purified from this inborn stain, led back to God and once more rendered capable of Morality. For mankind only one kind of progress in Morality was possible, and this took place, not gradually and step by step, but with one sudden swift advance, by which it immediately attained the highest degree of moral perfection possible, and that was when the true faith was revealed to it. Before the revelation mankind did not know real Morality, only its dim shadow, only a vague yearning for it; by the revelation at one blow it was in full possession of Morality, and now it is the business of every individual, whether he will draw near to the divine example by pious efforts or ruthlessly withdraw from it. Since the glad tidings of faith were announced to humanity there can be no question of moral progress for mankind as a whole; it has become a personal matter which everyone has to deal with himself. Criticism of this dogmatism is superfluous. It is quite enough to place it before the reader.

It is quite comprehensible, too, that those whose views permit them to talk with Bouillier of a savage who obeys his conscience should deny moral progress. They assume that a savage has a conscience, that conscience is an element of human nature, that it is a quality or a capacity like sensation or memory, that it is born with man like his limbs and organs. In that case it might well be asserted that subjective Morality has made no progress in historic and perhaps even in prehistoric times, and that actually a "savage who obeys his conscience can be just as virtuous as a Socrates or an Aristides."

It would hardly be possible to give a concrete proof of the contrary; if for no other reason because for a long time there have been no savages in the strict sense of the word anywhere on earth. By savages we mean human beings in their primitive, zoological condition who have developed solely according to the biological forms of the species and under the influence of surrounding Nature and have taken over nothing of an intellectual character from the group to which they belong. All savages of whom we know form societies which for the most part are not even loosely, but firmly, knit together, with laws that may seem nonsensical and barbaric to us, but are none the less binding with clearly defined duties which they impose on every member, with sanctions whose cruelty supersedes that of any punishment permitted by civilization. A man who is a member of a society, no matter how primitive it may be, may certainly have a conscience, but the point is that he is not a savage, but the contrary of a savage, namely: a social being who has received an education from his society, who is bound to conform to its habits, customs and views, and who in all his actions must consider its opinion. But these conditions, as I have shown, produce a conscience, the representative of society in the consciousness of the individual. Conscience is no innate feature of man uninfluenced by society, it is not a product of Nature, it is the result of education; he who possesses a conscience is no savage, but a person formed by discipline and subservient to it; conscience is the fruit of civilization, of a certain civilization; in itself it represents progress compared with the primitive state of man. Consequently it is an objectionable contradiction to talk of conscience and at the same time deny moral progress.

It is peculiarly arbitrary, too, to think that a savage, if he had a conscience, could obey it to the same extent, that is, be just as virtuous, as a Socrates or an Aristides. This would contradict all the observations and experience from which I have derived the doctrine that conscience works by means of inhibition, and that Morality and Virtue from the biological point of view are inhibition. For inhibition is developed by practice and use. Except in cases of morbid disturbance it develops simultaneously with the understanding which manipulates it and demands efficiency from it. There can be no two opinions about the fact that the understanding and the faculty of inhibition in living beings have developed progressively. There is no need to adduce any proof that the frog is intellectually superior to the zoospore, and man to the frog, and that as we ascend the scale of organisms we find their reactions to stimuli are increasingly subject to individual modification, and that there is a gradual transition from the original, purely mechanical tropism to differentiated reflex action, which, however, is still beyond the control of the will, and finally to resistances which suppress every externally visible reply on the part of the organism to the impression it has received.

In the course of this development the faculty of inhibition grows stronger and more efficient and obeys the behests of the understanding more and more swiftly, surely and reliably; it can reach a pitch of invincibility against which all the revolts of instinct, all the storms of passion, are powerless.