American ideals, and other essays, social and political

by Theodore Roosevelt

To increase greatly a race must be prolific, and there is no curse so great as the curse of barrenness, whether for a nation or an individual. When a people gets to the position even now occupied by the mass of the French and by sections of the New Englanders, where the death rate surpasses the birth rate, then that race is not only fated to extinction but it deserves extinction. When the capacity and desire for fatherhood and motherhood is lost the race goes down, and should go down; and we need to have the plainest kind of plain speaking addressed to those individuals who fear to bring children into the world. But while this is all true, it remains equally true that immoderate increase in no way furthers the development of a race, and does not always help its increase even in numbers. The English-speaking peoples during the past two centuries and a half have increased faster than any others, yet there have been many other peoples whose birth rate during the same period has stood higher.

Yet, again, Mr. Kidd, in speaking of the stress of the conditions of progress in our modern societies fails to see that most of the stress to which he refers does not have anything to do with increased difficulty in obtaining a living, or with the propagation of the race. The great prizes are battled for among the men who wage no war whatever for mere subsistence, while the fight for mere subsistence is keenest among precisely the classes which contribute very little indeed to the progress of the race. The generals and admirals, the poets, philosophers, historians and musicians, the statesmen and judges, the law-makers and law-givers, the men of arts and of letters, the great captains of war and of industry—all these come from the classes where the struggle for the bare means of subsistence is least severe, and where the rate of increase is relatively smaller than in the classes below. In civilized societies the rivalry of natural selection works against progress. Progress is made in spite of it, for progress results not from the crowding out of the lower classes by the upper, but on the contrary from the steady rise of the lower classes to the level of the upper, as the latter tend to vanish, or at most barely hold their own. In progressive societies it is often the least fit who survive; but, on the other hand, they and their children often tend to grow more fit.

The mere statement of these facts is sufficient to show not only how incorrect are many of Mr. Kidd’s premises and conclusions, but also how unwarranted are some of the fears which he expresses for the future. It is plain that the societies and sections of societies where the individual’s happiness is on the whole highest, and where progress is most real and valuable, are precisely these where the grinding competition and the struggle for mere existence is least severe. Undoubtedly in every progressive society there must be a certain sacrifice of individuals, so that there must be a certain proportion of failures in every generation; but the actual facts of life prove beyond shadow of doubt that the extent of this sacrifice has nothing to do with the rapidity or worth of the progress. The nations that make most progress may do so at the expense of ten or fifteen individuals out of a hundred, whereas the nations that make least progress, or even go backwards, may sacrifice almost every man out of the hundred.

This last statement is in itself partly an answer to the position taken by Mr. Kidd, that there is for the individual no “rational sanction” for the conditions of progress. In a progressive community, where the conditions provide for the happiness of four-fifths or nine-tenths of the people, there is undoubtedly a rational sanction for progress both for the community at large and for the great bulk of its members; and if these members are on the whole vigorous and intelligent, the attitude of the smaller fraction who have failed will be a matter of little consequence. In such a community the conflict between the interests of the individual and the organism of which he is a part, upon which Mr. Kidd lays so much emphasis, is at a minimum. The stress is severest, the misery and suffering greatest, among precisely the communities which have made least progress—among the Bushmen, Australian black fellows, and root-digger Indians, for instance.

Moreover, Mr. Kidd does not define what he means by “rational sanction.” Indeed one of his great troubles throughout is his failure to make proper definitions, and the extreme looseness with which he often uses the definitions he does make. Apparently by “rational” he means merely selfish, and proceeds upon the assumption that “reason” must always dictate to every man to do that which will give him the greatest amount of individual gratification at the moment, no matter what the cost may be to others or to the community at large. This is not so. Side by side with the selfish development in life there has been almost from the beginning a certain amount of unselfish development too; and in the evolution of humanity the unselfish side has, on the whole, tended steadily to increase at the expense of the selfish, notably in the progressive communities about whose future development Mr. Kidd is so ill at ease. A more supreme instance of unselfishness than is afforded by motherhood cannot be imagined; and when Mr. Kidd implies, as he does very clearly, that there is no rational sanction for the unselfishnsess of motherhood, for the unselfishness of duty, or loyalty, he merely misuses the word rational. When a creature has reached a certain stage of development it will cause the female more pain to see her offspring starve than to work for it, and she then has a very rational reason for so working. When humanity has reached a certain stage it will cause the individual more pain, a greater sense of degradation and shame and misery, to steal, to murder, or to lie, than to work hard and suffer discomfort. When man has reached this stage he has a very rational sanction for being truthful and honest. It might also parenthetically be stated that when he has reached this stage he has a tendency to relieve the sufferings of others, and he has for this course the excellent rational sanction that it makes him more uncomfortable to see misery unrelieved than it does to deny himself a little in order to relieve it.

However, we can cordially agree with Mr. Kidd’s proposition that many of the social plans advanced by would-be reformers in the interest of oppressed individuals are entirely destructive of all growth and of all progress in society. Certain cults, not only Christian, but also Buddhistic and Brahminic, tend to develop an altruism which is as “supra-natural” as Mr. Kidd seemingly desires religion to be; for it really is without foundation in reason, and therefore to be condemned.

Mr. Kidd repeats again and again that the scientific development of the nineteenth century confronts us with the fact that the interests of the social organism and of the individual are, and must remain, antagonistic, and the latter predominant, and that there can never be found any sanction in individual reason for individual good conduct in societies where the conditions of progress prevail. From what has been said above it is evident that this statement is entirely without basis, and therefore that the whole scheme of mystic and highly irrational philosophy which he founds upon it at once falls to the ground. There is no such necessary antagonism as that which he alleges. On the contrary, in the most truly progressive societies, even now, for the great mass of the individuals composing them the interests of the social organism and of the individual are largely identical instead of antagonistic; and even where this is not true, there is a sanction of individual reason, if we use the word reason properly, for conduct on the part of the individual which is subordinate to the welfare of the general society.

We can measure the truth of his statements by applying them, not to great societies in the abstract, but to small social organisms in the concrete. Take for instance the life of a regiment or the organization of a police department or fire department. The first duty of a regiment is to fight, and fighting means the death and disabling of a large proportion of the men in the regiment. The case against the identity of interests between the individual and the organism, as put by Mr. Kidd, would be far stronger in a regiment than in any ordinary civilized society of the day. Yet as a matter of fact we know that in the great multitude of regiments there is much more subordination of the individual to the organism than is the case in any civilized state taken as a whole. Moreover, this subordination is greatest in precisely those regiments where the average individual is best off, because it is greatest in those regiments where the individual feels that high, stern pride in his own endurance and suffering, and in the great name of the organism of which he forms a part, that in itself yields one of the loftiest of all human pleasures. If Mr. Kidd means anything when he says that there is no rational sanction for progress he must also mean that there is no rational sanction for a soldier not flinching from the enemy when he can do so unobserved, for a sentinel not leaving his post, for an officer not deserting to the enemy. Yet when he says this he utters what is a mere jugglery on words. In the process of evolution men and societies have often reached such a stage that the best type of soldier or citizen feels infinitely more shame and misery from neglect of duty, from cowardice or dishonesty, from selfish abandonment of the interests of the organism of which he is part, than can be offset by the gratification of any of his desires. This, be it also observed, often takes place, entirely independent of any religious considerations. The habit of useful self-sacrifice may be developed by civilization in a great society as well as by military training in a regiment. The habit of useless self-sacrifice may also, unfortunately, be developed; and those who practice it are but one degree less noxious than the individuals who sacrifice good people to bad.

The religious element in our development is that on which Mr. Kidd most strongly dwells, entitling it “the central feature of human history.” A very startling feature of his treatment is that in religious matters he seemingly sets no value on the difference between truth and falsehood, for he groups all religions together. In a would-be teacher of ethics such an attitude warrants severe rebuke; for it is essentially dishonest and immoral. Throughout his book he treats all religious beliefs from the same standpoint, as if they were all substantially similar and substantially of the same value; whereas it is, of course, a mere truism to say that most of them are mutually destructive. Not only has he no idea of differentiating the true from the false, but he seems not to understand that the truth of a particular belief is of any moment. Thus he says, in speaking of the future survival of religious beliefs in general, that the most notable result of the scientific revolution begun by Darwin must be “to establish them on a foundation as broad, deep, and lasting as any the theologians ever dreamed of.” If this sentence means anything it means that all these religious beliefs will be established on the same foundation. It hardly seems necessary to point out that this cannot be the fact. If the God of the Christians be in very truth the one God, and if the belief in Him be established, as Christians believe it will, then the foundation for the religious belief in Mumbo Jumbo can be neither broad, deep, nor lasting. In the same way the beliefs in Mohammed and Buddha are mutually exclusive, and the various forms of ancestor worship and fetichism cannot all be established on a permanent basis, as they would be according to Mr. Kidd’s theory.

Again, when Mr. Kidd rebukes science for its failure to approach religion in a scientific spirit he shows that he fails to grasp the full bearing of the subject which he is considering. This failure comes in part from the very large, not to say loose, way in which he uses the words “science” and “religion.” There are many sciences and many religions, and there are many different kinds of men who profess the one or advocate the other. Where the intolerant professors of a given religious belief endeavor by any form of persecution to prevent scientific men of any kind from seeking to find out and establish the truth, then it is quite idle to blame these scientific men for attacking with heat and acerbity the religious belief which prompts such persecution. The exigencies of a life and death struggle unfit a man for the coldness of a mere scientific inquiry. Even the most enthusiastic naturalist, if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark. A less important but amusing feature of his argument is that he speaks as if he himself had made an entirely new discovery when he learned of the important part played in man’s history by his religious beliefs. But Mr. Kidd surely cannot mean this. He must be aware that all the great historians have given their full importance to such religious movements as the birth and growth of Christianity, the Reformation, the growth of Islamism, and the like. Mr. Kidd is quite right in insisting upon the importance of the part played by religious beliefs, but he has fallen into a vast error if he fails to understand that the great majority of the historical and sociological writers have given proper weight to this importance.