XXIX
SOME PRINCIPLES OF NATIONAL EVOLUTION
And now, having studied somewhat in detail various distinctive Japanese characteristics, it is important that we gain an insight into the general principles which govern the development of unified, national life. These principles render Japanese history luminous.
Let us first fix our attention on the fact that every step in the progress of mankind has been from smaller to larger communities. In other words, human progress has been through the increasing extension of the communal principle. The primitive segregative man, if there ever really was such a being, hardly deserves to be called man. Social qualities he had very slight, if at all; his altruistic actions and emotions were of the lowest and feeblest type. His life was so self-centered—we may not call it selfish, for he was not conscious of his self-centeredness—that he was quite sufficient to himself except for short periods of time. It was a matter of relative indifference to him whether his kinsmen survived or perished. His life was in only the slightest degree involved in theirs. The first step of progress for him depended on the development of some form of communal life. The primary problem of the social evolution of man was that of taking the wild, self-centered, self-sufficient man, and of teaching him to move in line with his fellow-men. And this problem confronted not only mankind at the beginning, but it has also been the great problem of each successive stage. After the individual has been taught to live with, to work with and for, and to love, his immediate kinsmen (in other words to merge his individual interests in those of the family, and to count the family interests of more importance than his own), the next step was to induce the family to look beyond its little world and be willing to work with and for neighboring families. When, after ages of conflict, this step was in a measure secured and the family-tribe was fairly formed, this group in turn must be taught to take into its view a still larger group, the tribal nation. Throughout the ages the constant problem has been the development of larger and larger communal groups. This general process has been very aptly called by Mr. Bagehot the taming process. The selfward thoughts and ambitions of the individual man have been thus far driven more and more into the background of fact, if not of consciousness. The individual has been brought into vital and organic relations with ever-increasing multitudes of his fellow-men. It is, therefore, pre-eminently a process of social or associational development. It not only develops social relations in an ever-increasing scale, but also social qualities and ideals and desires.
Now this taming, this socializing process, has been successful because it has had back of it, always enforcing it, the law of the survival of the strongest. What countless millions of men must have perished in the first step! They consisted of the less fit; of those who would not, or did not, learn soon enough the secret of existence through permanent family union. And what countless millions of families must have perished because they did not discover the way, or were too independent, to unite with kindred families in order to fight a common foe or develop a common food supply. And still later, what countless tribes must have perished before the secret of tribal federation was widely accepted! In each case the problem has been to secure the subordination of the interests of the smaller and local community to those of the larger community. Death to self and life to the larger interest was often the condition of existence at all. How slow men always have been and still are to learn this great lesson of history!
The method whereby this taming process has been carried on has been through the formation of increasingly comprehensive and rigid customs and ideas. Through the development and continued existence of a common language, series of common customs, and sets of common ideas, unity was secured for the community; these, indeed, are the means whereby a group is transformed into a community. As the smaller community gave way to the larger, so the local languages, customs, and ideas had to break up and become so far modified as to form a new bond of unity. Until this unity was secured the new community was necessarily weak; the group easily broke up into its old constituent elements. We here gain a glimpse into one reason why the development of large composite communities, uniting and for the most part doing away with smaller ones, was so difficult and slow.
The process of absorption of smaller groups and their unification into larger ones, when carried out completely in any land, tends to arrest all further growth, not simply because there is no further room for expansion by the absorption of other divergent tribes, but also because the "cake of custom" is apt to become so hard, the uniformity enforced on all the individuals is liable to become so binding, that fruitful variation from within is effectually cut off. The evolution of relatively isolated or segregated groups necessarily produces variety; and the process whereby these divergent types of life and thought and organization are gradually brought together into one large community provides wide elements of variation, in the selection and general adoption of which the evolution of the whole community may be secured. But let the divergent elements of the lesser groups once be entirely absorbed by the composite community and let the "cake of custom" become so rigid that every individual who varies from it is branded as a heretic and a traitor, and the progressive evolution of that community must cease.
The great problem, therefore, which then confronts man and seems to threaten all further progress is, how to break the bondage of custom so as to secure local or individual variations. This can be done only through some form of individualism. The individual must be free to think and act as experience or fancy may suggest, without fear of being branded as a traitor, or at least he must have the courage to do so in spite of such fears. And to produce an effect on the community he must also be more or less protected in his idiosyncrasies by popular toleration.
He must be allowed to live and work out his theories, proving whether they are valuable or not. But since individualism is just what all previous communal development has been most assiduous in crushing out, how is the rise of individualism possible, or even desirable? If the first and continued development of man depended on the attainment and the maintenance of the communal principle, we may be sure that his further progress will not consist in the reversal of that principle. If, therfore, individualism must be developed, it must manifestly be of a variety which does not conflict with or abrogate communalism. Only as the individualistic includes the communal principle will it be a source of strength; otherwise it can only be a source of weakness to the community. But is not this an impossible condition to satisfy? Certainly, before the event, it would seem to be so. The rarity with which this step in human evolution has been taken would seem to show that it is far more difficult to accomplish than any of the previous steps. To give it a name we may call it communo-individualism. What this variety of individualism is, how this forward step was first actually taken, and how it is maintained and extended to-day, we shall consider in a later chapter. In the present place its importance for us is twofold. First we must realize the logical difficulty of the step—its apparently self-contradictory nature. And secondly we need to see that fully developed and continuously progressive national life is impossible without it. The development of a nation under the communal principle may advance far, even to the attainment of a relatively high grade of civilization. But the fully centralized and completely self-conscious nation cannot come into existence except on the basis of this last step of communo-individualism. The growth of nationalism proper, and the high development of civilization through the rise of the sciences and the arts based upon individualism, all await the dawn of the era of which communo-individualism is the leading, though at first unrecognized, characteristic.