Is civilization a disease?

by Stanton Coit

To cast Carpenter's metaphor, according to which civilization is a thing to be cured, into the form of an analogy, we might say that the civilizing process has been to man what the bringing indoors is to a rose-tree, or the coming of a drought to the turnips in a field. And I ask you to assume with me that this is so; as it will help me to get on with my argument, which, as it advances, will reveal more and more whether it be inherently weak or strong. Nor do I anticipate much opposition to Carpenter's mere indictment of civilization. At least it is only when he outlines his remedy that my own protest is aroused. And I suspect that many a reader will feel with me, that while to cure a rose-tree or a turnip plant may require only the taking of the one out of doors again and the falling of the kindly showers upon the other, the restoration of civilized man to health would necessitate something more than a mere return on his part to Nature and savagery. Indeed, such a return may be altogether impossible, and even undesirable. In my judgment, man having (as Carpenter himself points out) become "self-conscious," can never go back to Nature, since he is no longer the same being he was when he emerged from his more primitive state. Yet what Carpenter recommends so far as he recommends any cure, is exactly this: Human beings are to wear less clothes—if any at all; man will again live out of doors, for the most part, instead of in houses; he will return to the eating of uncooked food—mainly fruit and grains; he will begin to feel himself one again with Nature; he is to lose his sense of sin; every man will do the work he likes—and presumably not do the work he does not like. "As to External Government and Law, they will disappear," says Carpenter, "for they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government and Order." In religion, there is to be a like return to Nature. The author says:—

And when the civilization-period has passed away, the old Nature-religion—perhaps greatly grown—will come back.... Our Christian ceremonial is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols; and long before Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were the main forms of religion.... On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars....

Carpenter sees signs already here and there of the beginning of this return:—

The present competitive society is more and more rapidly becoming a mere dead formula and husk within which the outlines of the new and human society are already discernible. Simultaneously, and as if to match this growth, a move toward Nature and Savagery is for the first time taking place from within, instead of being forced upon Society from without. The Nature-movement, begun years ago in Literature and Art, is now among the more advanced sections of the civilized world rapidly realizing itself in actual life, going so far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products of Civilization, and developing among others into a gospel of salvation by sandals and sunbaths!

In order to help us to judge aright whether a return to Nature and a primitive communism would restore to man that centrality and health of which we assume that civilization has deprived him, we should do well to consider what it was that happened ten thousand years ago and proved so sinister in changing the relation of men and women to the community in which they lived, and to the physical universe. But of that event we cannot gain an adequate appreciation unless we view it in perspective along the line of analogous events, some six, which had occurred from time to time during the ninety thousand years preceding.

XIII. SPEECH AND FIRE

A hundred thousand years ago, among our ancestors, who then were only inarticulate mammals, living in trees and caves, one of them by himself, or a little group of them together, hit upon the use of articulate vocal signs as a means of conveying to his mates his needs, his fears, his desires and threats. It was probably by a happy fluke that he hit upon this use, or by some transcendent flash of insight due to a spontaneous variation of ability above that of the average ape; or else some unusual stress of hunger or danger of attack drove even a mediocre individual to an unwonted exercise of ingenuity. In any case, by inventing articulate speech, he brought into existence a new species of mammal—man. I must leave to your imagination the thousand transforming effects of this new device for communicating perceptions, feelings, and intentions. The speaking ape stood to his own species, and through them to other kinds of animals and to the material universe, in a different relation from that in which the speechless stood. The power of combined action among the members of any group became immeasurably greater than it had previously been. A social unity of will was possible that could never have existed on earth hitherto. For all we know, thirty thousand years may have passed away before any other event occurred among human beings comparable in practical importance to the invention of spoken language. This, however, was all the time being gradually perfected under the stress of new experiences in general and of trying predicaments in particular.

Then, in the fulness of time, and once more by a happy fluke, or by a stroke of spontaneous genius, or under the pressure of some unprecedented danger, or through the educative influence of some new order of experience, one of the speaking apes hit upon the use of fire, and thereby introduced a new era in the advancement of man. Practically infinite was the increase of man's new mastery over Nature. Into temperate and even icy regions he could now penetrate and, as it were, create around him a little temporary zone of tropical warmth. With speech had come social unity; with fire at man's disposal came mastery over matter. But the unity thereby suffered a change. With the invention of means of creating artificial warmth the social homogeneity of the tribe began to be broken. Whoever controlled fire controlled the rest of his group, since no other way for the tribal appropriation of the blessings of regulated fire was possible among talking apes, except that one individual, or a very few, should assume the office of owner of the sticks or flints for igniting the fire, and should become dispenser of the flame. The group thus was divided into the controller and the controlled, the owner and the owned, the master and the man, the governor and the governed, the chief and his followers.

XIV. THE TWO MARKS OF ALL CIVILIZATION

Such a differentiation of society was, among apes, the condition for any sort of social unity; but control by the few could at the first have been only rudimentary and intermittent. Fire is not everything, and was indispensable only on certain occasions, as when the group were caught unexpectedly in some wintry region. Then the choice for any man might lie between freezing or obeying. Be it observed that fire under such circumstances would be shared by all, but the power of social control would be monopolized by one. Had you been there, but not the mightiest of your group, the condition of your surviving the cold would have been that you surrendered whatever individual initiative you had had. You gained fire, but lost freedom. At this point, by some innate sense of logical identity, my mind is carried forward a hundred thousand years to that centre of to-day's highest civilization—Detroit, and to its very palladium, the Ford Motor Works. For in that far-famed institution is to be found a very striking similarity to the primeval monopoly of initiative which arose with the first control of fire. Mr. Henry Ford has been magnanimously ready to share profits with his men, but, so far as I can learn, no iota of the industrial control.