VIII
This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions. This again seems attainable in at least two ways.
The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any rate cease to cut his ownthroat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth trying.
I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But the palæolithicYahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘God help us!’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]
It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford to wait.
Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings, and perverted into an instrument to consolidate theirpower. He thinks that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C]and that the result would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.
This prognostication would be very plausible, if we supposed eugenics to be introduced into the social structure from above, privily, and in small doses, and by way of administrative order, as under the existing Acts to check the spread of feeble-mindedness.
But this method would be impracticable. It would not generate anything like the social momentum necessary tocarry through any radical reform. To make it effective, it would have to be backed by a powerful, enthusiastic, and intelligent public sentiment. This presupposes that the public has been biologically educated to appreciate the actual situation, and has been thoroughly wrought up about the fatuity of our social order, and understands what is wrong with it. If it understands that much, it can also be made to see that it is fantastic to expect to leap to the Ideal State by a social revolution. No one now knows what the institutions of an Ideal State would be like, nor how they would work. We only know that they will have to be evolved out of our present institutions, even as the Superman has to be evolved out of the primitive Yahoo. In eithercase, the process will be gradual, and its success will depend upon details, on taking one step after another at the right rate in the right direction, making a new adjustment here, overcoming an old difficulty there, removing obstacles, smoothing over the shell-holes and scars dating from Man’s lurid past, and, in general, feeling one’s way systematically and scientifically to better things. Such a mode of progression may seem unheroic, but it has the great advantage that it is unlikely to go irretrievably wrong. If we know from the outset that we are tentatively feeling our way, we shall always be on the look out for traps and possibilities of going astray, trying out the value of our policies by their results, and willing to retrace oursteps when we have made a false one.
The social temper, therefore, will become far more intelligent and reasonable than it has been hitherto. It will be slow to dogmatize, and will regard thetolerationof differences of opinion as among the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. For as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, thatperfectionmay be postulated, provision has always to be made for theimprovementof the social order. It can never be accepted as absolutely good, but must always be regarded as capable, in principle, of being bettered. Even the best of established institutions are only good relatively to the alternatives to which they showed themselves superior: under changedconditions they may become inferior, and may fail us, or ruin us, if we do not make haste to transform them into something better fitted to the new conditions. Hence the social order must beplastic, and must never be allowed to grow rigid. There must always be room in it for experiments that have a reasonable prospect of turning out to be improvements. For progress will depend on the timely adoption of such novelties.
But society has no means of commanding them at will. It has to wait till they occur to some one. As biological variations have to arise spontaneously before they can be selected, so valuable new ideas have to occur in a human mind before they can be tried and approved. Societycannot originate discoveries, it can only refrain from so organizing itself as to stamp them out when they occur. It is vitally necessary, therefore, that we should beware of suppressing variations, whether of thought or of bodily endowment, that may prove to be valuable.
Also, of course, we shall have to realize that our whole procedure isessentially experimental, and all that this implies. We do not know, at the outset, what would be the best obtainable type, either of man or of society; true, but we mean to find out. Nor is it unreasonable to expect to do so as we go along. We start with a pretty shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and thatno good can come of coddling and cultivating them: we similarly are pretty sure that certain other types, say the intelligent, healthy, and energetic, are inherently superior to the former. We try, therefore, to improve and increase the better types. How precisely, and how most effectively we do not quite know, though we can make pretty good preliminary guesses. So we try. That will entail experimentation in a variety of directions, with ‘control experiments,’ and a modicum of mistakes. But our mistakes will not be fatal, because if we advance tentatively and with intelligent apprehension, we shall realize them in time, and shall not feel bound to persist in any course that yields unsatisfactory results.
It is really one of the great advantagesof eugenics that it cannot proceed upon any cut-and-dried scheme, but will have to be guided by the results of experiment and the fruits of experience, each of which will be followed and discussed by an intensely interested public. For the difficulties of eugenics are all difficulties of detail, and intelligent attention to detail may overcome them all. Thus the dysgenical working of civilized society, which has come about unintentionally through the unfortunate convergence of a number of tendencies, may be altered similarly, by changing the incidence of social forces.