Let us take any book we please, by any modern writer, who is attempting to deal with any social subject scientifically, and whenever he is calling attention to the great intellectual triumphs which have caused the progress of civilisation, or to any developments of human nature which have marked it, we shall find that these triumphs or developments are always attributed indiscriminately to the largest mass of people with whom they have any connection—sometimes to “the nation,” sometimes to “the age,” sometimes to “the race,” and more frequently still to “man.”
Reference has been made already to Mr. Kidd’s work on Social Evolution, which, on its publication, attained an extraordinary popularity, and which, whatever its value otherwise, is interesting as a type of contemporary sociological reasoning. It is peculiarly interesting as illustrating the point which we are now discussing. Most of Mr. Kidd’s reasoning, especially in the crucial parts of it, is not {18} only conducted, but is actually represented by a terminology which refers everything to “the race,” “the age,” or “man.” And it would be hard to find better examples in the works of any other writer of the condition of thought underlying the use of these phrases, and of the extraordinary consequences to which it leads.
Three examples will be enough. The two first shall be from two other writers, whom Mr. Kidd quotes with admiration; the third shall be from himself. We will begin with the following passage, taken from a contemporary economist, which Mr. Kidd singles out for emphatic approval as “a very effective statement” of one of the truths of social science.
“Man,” so the passage runs, “is the only animal whose wants can never be satisfied. The wants of every other living thing are uniform and fixed. The ox of to-day aspires no more than did the ox when man first yoked him. . . . But not so with man [himself]. No sooner are his animal wants satisfied, than new wants arise. . . . [He] has but set his feet on the first step of an infinite progression. . . . It is not merely his hunger, but taste, that seeks gratification in food. . . . Lucullus will sup with Lucullus; twelve boars roast on spits that Antony’s mouthful of meat may be done to a turn; every kingdom is ransacked to add to Cleopatra’s charms; and marble colonnades, and hanging gardens, and pyramids that rival the hills, arise.”
This passage is taken from Mr. Henry George. {19} Our second example shall be a passage which Mr. Kidd has borrowed from a far more educated thinker—M. Emile de Lavelaye. Mr. Kidd quotes M. de Lavelaye as saying that the eighteenth century brought the following message to “man.” “Thou shalt cease to be the slave of the nobles and despots who oppress thee. Thou shalt be free and sovereign.” But the realisation of the promise thus given has, in the present century, he goes on to say, confronted us with this strange problem, “How is it that the Sovereign often starves? How is it that those who are held to be the source of power often cannot, even by hard work, provide themselves with the necessaries of life?”
Now all these passages, if we consider them carefully, will be seen to consist of statements, every one of which is false to fact. To say that man’s wants are less stationary than those of the ox is not even rhetorically true, unless we mean by “man” certain special races of men; whilst the statements that follow are not true, rhetorically or otherwise, of any race at all, but only of scattered individuals. A really fine and discriminating taste in food is, as every epicure knows, rare even amongst the luxurious classes. Antony and Lucullus are types of what is not the rule, but the exception. So too are the individuals who either desire hanging gardens, or could design them; and more exceptional still are the individuals whose personal pride and power either desire or can secure the erection of pyramids for their tombs. {20}
In M. de Lavelaye’s utterances there is an analogous misstatement and misconception of every fact with which he deals. The promises of political democracy, as he describes them, were never addressed to “man,” nor ever professed to be. The whole point of them was that they were addressed to certain classes of men only; and that, as addressed to other classes, they were not promises, but threats. But a still graver confusion arises when the “Sovereign” is spoken of as starving. If by the “Sovereign” M. de Lavelaye really means “Man” as a whole, it is perfectly obvious that the “Sovereign” never starves. The statement is equally untrue if the Sovereign is taken to mean not man as a whole, but the immense majority of men; and to ask why the Sovereign often does something which it never does, is not to formulate an actual problem loosely, but to convert an actual problem into one that is quite imaginary. The actual problem is not why the whole or the immense majority of mankind often starves, but why there are nearly always small sections of men who do so, the majority all the while obtaining its normal nutriment; and the absurd result of confusing these two very different things is seen in the second form which M. de Lavelaye gives his question. “How is it,” he asks, “that those who are held to be the source of power often cannot, even by hard work, provide themselves with the necessaries of life?” The answer is that the particular groups of workers who, at any given time, happen to be unemployed, {21} were never held to be the source of power by anybody. M. de Lavelaye might as well take one half of the passengers on a Dover packet, and treating them as identical with the British nation at large, ask how it is that those who are held to rule the waves can hardly set foot on a deck without clamouring for the steward’s basin.
And now let us turn to Mr. Kidd himself. The object of his book is to vindicate supernatural religion by exhibiting it as advantageous to its possessors in the social struggle for existence. He endeavours to make good his position by two distinct lines of argument. The first of these is that the social struggle for existence, though it produces progressive communities, and communities fitted to endure, is injurious to the majority of those who at any given time are engaged in it, and benefits only a minority, described by him as “the power-holding classes.” This minority, according to his account, could always, if it pleased, as it has pleased in all former ages, defend its position and keep the majority in subjection; but it is now beginning, under the pressure of a religious impulse, to surrender to its inferiors voluntarily advantages which they could never have extorted from it; and in this great fact our hope for the future lies.
Such is one of the two main portions of Mr. Kidd’s message to the world; and here follows the other, which will be found to be fundamentally inconsistent with it. “Man,” if he had chosen to do so, Mr. Kidd maintains—and this assertion {22} is repeated by him with the utmost precision and emphasis—could at any period in his history have “suspended the struggle for existence” and “organised society on a socialistic basis”; and seeing that the struggle for existence, although essential to progress in the long-run, is injurious to the majority of each generation that takes part in it, man, if his chief guide had been reason or self-interest, would have been suspending this struggle constantly for the sake of his own present advantage, and leaving the future to take care of itself. Now, seeing that he does not, as a fact, pursue this obviously reasonable course, it follows that some power opposed to reason must have withheld him; and this power, argues Mr. Kidd, can be nothing else than religion. Here, he says, are the two functions of religion in evolution. It induces man to submit to the hardships of the evolutionary struggle, at the same time it redeems him from them by softening the hearts of the minority.
Now with Mr. Kidd’s views about religion we have nothing to do here. We are concerned only with the extraordinary self-contradiction involved in these his principal lines of argument, and also with the cause which has led to it, and made it possible. At one moment he says that the majority in all progressive communities have been forced to submit to conditions of life that are prejudicial to them, by a powerful minority to whom these conditions are beneficial, and who, if they chose to do so, would still be able to maintain them. At {23} another moment he says that this surprisingly patient majority could have easily “suspended these conditions” at any period of its history, and only failed to do so because religion prompted it to forbear. How a contradiction of this kind could have found its way into the reasoning of a really painstaking thinker, and been actually allowed to form the backbone of it, may at first sight seem inexplicable; but it is simply a typical result of the practice we are now considering—that practice, common to all our modern sociologists, of grouping the men they deal with into the largest aggregate possible, and treating mixed classes of men as one single class—“man.”