XIV
“SOCIAL EVOLUTION”[22]
Mr. Kidd’s Social Evolution is a suggestive, but a very crude book; for the writer is burdened by a certain mixture of dogmatism and superficiality, which makes him content to accept half truths and insist that they are whole truths. Nevertheless, though the book appeals chiefly to minds of the kind which are uncharitably described as “half-baked,” Mr. Kidd does suggest certain lines of thought which are worth following—though rarely to his conclusions.
He deserves credit for appreciating what he calls “the outlook.” He sketches graphically, and with power, the problems which now loom up for settlement before all of us who dwell in Western lands; and he portrays the varying attitudes of interest, alarm, and hope with which the thinkers and workers of the day regard these problems. He points out that the problems which now face us are by no means parallel to those that were solved by our forefathers one, two, or three centuries ago. The great political revolutions seem to be about complete and the time of the great social revolutions has arrived. We are all peering eagerly into the future to try to forecast the action of the great dumb forces set in operation by the stupendous industrial revolution which has taken place during the present century. We do not know what to make of the vast displacements of population, the expansion of the towns, the unrest and discontent of the masses, and the uneasiness of those who are devoted to the present order of things.
Mr. Kidd sees these problems, but he gropes blindly when he tries to forecast their solution. He sees that the progress of mankind in past ages can only have been made under and in accordance with certain biological laws, and that these laws continue to work in human society at the present day. He realizes the all-importance of the laws which govern the reproduction of mankind from generation to generation, precisely as they govern the reproduction of the lower animals, and which, therefore, largely govern his progress. But he makes a cardinal mistake in treating of this kind of progress. He states with the utmost positiveness that, left to himself, man has not the slightest innate tendency to make any onward progress whatever, and that if the conditions of life allowed each man to follow his own inclinations the average of one generation would always tend to sink below the average of the preceding. This is one of the sweeping generalizations of which Mr. Kidd is fond, and which mar so much of his work. He evidently finds great difficulty in stating a general law with the proper reservations and with the proper moderation of phrase; and so he enunciates as truths statements which contain a truth, but which also contain a falsehood. What he here says is undoubtedly true of the world, taken as a whole. It is in all probability entirely false of the highest sections of society. At any rate, there are numerous instances where the law he states does not work; and of course a single instance oversets a sweeping declaration of such a kind.
There can be but little quarrel with what Mr. Kidd says as to the record of the world being a record of ceaseless progress on the one hand, and ceaseless stress and competition on the other; although even here his statement is too broad, and his terms are used carelessly. When he speaks of progress being ceaseless, he evidently means by progress simply change, so that as he uses the word it must be understood to mean progress backward as well as forward. As a matter of fact, in many forms of life and for long ages there is absolutely no progress whatever and no change, the forms remaining practically stationary.
Mr. Kidd further points out that the first necessity for every successful form engaged in this struggle is the capacity for reproduction beyond the limits for which the conditions of life comfortably provide, so that competition and selection must not only always accompany progress, but must prevail in every form of life which is not actually retrograding. As already said, he accepts without reservation the proposition that if all the individuals of every generation in any species were allowed to propagate their kind equally, the average of each generation would tend to fall below the preceding.
From this position he draws as a corollary, that the wider the limits of selection, the keener the rivalry and the more rigid the selection, just so much greater will be the progress; while for any progress at all there must be some rivalry in selection, so that every progressive form must lead a life of continual strain and stress as it travels its upward path. This again is true in a measure, but is not true as broadly as Mr. Kidd has stated it. The rivalry of natural selection is but one of the features in progress. Other things being equal, the species where this rivalry is keenest will make most progress; but then “other things” never are equal. In actual life those species make most progress which are farthest removed from the point where the limits of selection are very wide, the selection itself very rigid, and the rivalry very keen. Of course the selection is most rigid where the fecundity of the animal is greatest; but it is precisely the forms which have most fecundity that have made least progress. Some time in the remote past the guinea pig and the dog had a common ancestor. The fecundity of the guinea pig is much greater than that of the dog. Of a given number of guinea pigs born, a much smaller proportion are able to survive in the keen rivalry, so that the limits of selection are wider, and the selection itself more rigid; nevertheless the progress made by the progenitors of the dog since eocene days has been much more marked and rapid than the progress made by the progenitors of the guinea pig in the same time.
Moreover, in speaking of the rise that has come through the stress of competition in our modern societies, and of the keenness of this stress in the societies that have gone fastest, Mr. Kidd overlooks certain very curious features in human society. In the first place he speaks as though the stress under which nations make progress was primarily the stress produced by multiplication beyond the limits of subsistence. This, of course, would mean that in progressive societies the number of births and the number of deaths would both be at a maximum, for it is where the births and deaths are largest that the struggle for life is keenest. If, as Mr. Kidd’s hypothesis assumes, progress was most marked where the struggle for life was keenest, the European peoples standing highest in the scale would be the South Italians, the Polish Jews, and the people who live in the congested districts of Ireland. As a matter of fact, however, these are precisely the peoples who have made least progress when compared with the dominant strains among, for instance, the English or Germans. So far is Mr. Kidd’s proposition from being true that, when studied in the light of the facts, it is difficult to refrain from calling it the reverse of the truth. The race existing under conditions which make the competition for bare existence keenest, never progresses as fast as the race which exists under less stringent conditions. There must undoubtedly be a certain amount of competition, a certain amount of stress and strain, but it is equally undoubted that if this competition becomes too severe the race goes down and not up; and it is further true that the race existing under the severest stress as regards this competition often fails to go ahead as fast even in population as does the race where the competition is less severe. No matter how large the number of births may be, a race cannot increase if the number of deaths also grows at an accelerating rate.