Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre

by Voltairine De Cleyre

The winter of death comes; the individual withers like the leaf; but the small item of growth that he has added is there, brown and barren though the twig appear. From him new buds will shoot, though its own leaves hereafter rustle in the deep green shadows of unconsciousness. As time passes away useless boughs wither and die, and are stricken utterly from the life of the race; such are the worthless lives, the abnormal growths, which no longer add anything either to the beauty or the service of the whole.

Or, to adopt one of Comrade Lum's own figures, the useless or brutish elements in man slowly sink down like sediment deposited by the moving current. Now, in a case where we are able to trace a strain of blood as far back as this of his, and further are able to look at the conscious work of the man, and see that the one was the offspring of the other, modified of course by circumstances, we are able to make the seemingly absurd statement that the belief proves its own correctness.

Let me particularize concerning this belief. First he was in all his writings the advocate of resistance, the champion of rebellion. But long before he had reduced the matter to a syllogism, he was a resistant in fact. What else could you expect from the Crusader, the Reformationist, the Revolutionist? It might be said by the people who believe in the supreme influence of circumstances, that it was his social environment which made him such—that given the ideal social order and he would have been as mild a pacificator as Jesus: which is equivalent to saying that given the outward circumstances and an ear of wheat will grow from a seed corn.

Lum was the resistant, the man of action; the man who while scarcely more than a boy, enlisted as a volunteer in the 125th New York infantry to fight a cause he then deemed just; who being taken prisoner, twice effected his escape; who sick of the inaction of superiors, while a third-time prisoner waiting to be exchanged, took his exchange in his own hands, at the risk of death for desertion, and within a month re-enlisted in the cavalry, where by sheer force of daring he rose from private to captain; the man who smashed the idol of the Greenback movement, sooner than let him betray its voters, reckless himself of the rebound of hate from the politicians; the man who cast all business prospects and journalistic hopes aside as so much chaff, when he picked up the fallen banner of the fight in Chicago, by editing the paper of Albert Parsons, then in prison and doomed to die; the man who could say to his well-beloved friend, when that friend asked him whether he should petition Governor Oglesby for his life, knowing that that petition would be granted, the man who, under these circumstances could say: "Die, Parsons"; the man who poor, defeated, dirty, ragged, hungry, could proudly refuse the proffered hand of the then king of the labor movement, that king who had kept his kingdom by repudiating the martyrs of Chicago from the limitless height of one soul over another, answer "there's blood on it, Powderly"; the man who faced a public audience to defend the shooting of Frick by Alexander Berkman, a few days after the occurrence, because he felt that when another has done a thing which you approve as leading in the direction of your own aspirations, it is your duty to share the effects of the counterblast his action may have provoked; the man who seized the unknown Monster, Death, with a smile on his lips—all of this man was germinating in the child of the pious home who even when a mere boy had dared Jehovah.

Having "weighed Him, tried Him, found Him naught," he threw the Jewish God and cosmogony overboard with as much equanimity as he would have eaten his dinner, and set about finding a more reasonable explanation of phenomena. In this, as in all other matters, the man of action has a certain advantage over a pure theorist, which is this: he plunges immediately into the conflict, he throws the gauntlet, rashly sometimes, but boldly; he settles the question at once; if there is any suffering attached to the attempt, he suffers once and has done with it; while the theorist, the fellow who walks tiptoe round the edge of the battle-field, dies a hundred times and still suffers on.

My own conversion from orthodoxy to freethought was of this latter sort. I never dared God; I always tried to propitiate him with prayers and tears even while I was doubting his existence; I suffered hell a thousand times while I was wondering where it was located. But my teacher winked at the heavens, braved hell, and then tossed the whole affair aside with a joke.

Nevertheless, he did not, as nearly all of our modern image-breakers have done, deny all religions in their entirety, because he had run a lance through a stuffed Mumbo-Jumbo. Indeed, the spirit of devotion to something greater than Self, which will be found as the kernel of every religion, was so thoroughly in him, or indeed was he himself that whether he fancied himself willing it or not, his inclinations directed all his conscious efforts to read the riddle of life into the channel of Buddhism. I do not know whether he ever accepted its peculiarly fanciful side or not; but if he did, it was early corrected by a no less characteristic trait, also an inheritance of the Tappan family, that of critical analysis. An omnivorous reader, he was always abreast of the times in matters of scientific discovery; and his inexorable logic would never have permitted him to retain a creed which necessitated any doctoring of facts; he rather doctored the creed to fit the facts and thus evolved a species of modern Buddhism which he called "Evolutional Ethics," whose principles may be briefly stated as follows:

Man is the continuation of the process of evolution up to date. He is thus united to all other products of evolution, and is governed by the same laws. The two factors which determine form in the organic world are adaptation and inheritance; and since evolution is no less a matter of psychology than physiology, the soul of man as well as the soul of animals and plants, must be moulded by these factors. That inheritance tends to crystallize existing forms, while adaptation, or the influence of environment, ever tends to modification of forms, whether physical or intellectual. That mind as much as body is unconscious, so far as there is perfect adaptation to surroundings; and that only when inharmony of the organism with the environment as the result of change in the latter, arises, can there be consciousness. That this consciousness is a state of pain, more or less sharply defined; and will continue to increase in intensity until the necessary adaptation is accomplished, when as a result a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure will ensue, gradually sinking into the blissful unconsciousness of perfect harmony. That progress thus demands this stepping constantly up the rough stairway of pain; and that not even one step is passed until moistened by the blood of many generations. That the path up the mountain side is not laid out by us, but for us, and that we must travel there whether it pleases us or not. That the chances are it will not please us; that our whole lives, in so far as they are conscious, will probably be one record of never achieved struggle; and that rest will come only when we descend to the unconsciousness of Death.

Thus he was a pessimist of the darkest hue; and yet he never wasted a moment's regret on the facts. He watched this passing spectre man, gliding among the whirling dance of atoms, contemplated his final extinction with composure, sneered at metaphysicians while he himself was buried in metaphysics, and cracked jokes either at his own expense or somebody else's.

The result of all this speculation was the conclusion that man, being a social animal, must adapt himself to social ends (not determined by him but for him—unconsciously); that therefore the one who sets himself and his egotistic desires against the social ideal is the supreme traitor. He had a peculiar power of expressing volumes in an epithet; and the epithet he gave to the Egoist was "Dung-Beetle." For the sake of those who may not be familiar with the insect referred to, I may explain that a dung-beetle is a sort of bug that exhibits its instincts by rolling a ball of dung, and who sometimes appears to meditate when he rolls over the ball that the universe has turned bottom up—because he has.