ing; but parental love cares for these things-obedience to this law of the family is so natural and customary that its neglect is rare. But the shield which social life casts around each individual member of the band preserves him in part, and more fully as life attains higher planes, from the immediate action of outer physical forces which have hitherto maintained the operation of the first great law-the law of earned benefits-securing the survival of the fittest. This fundamental rule of adult life is not abrogated, its strength is no wise lessened; but its immediate pressure is in part transferred from the individual to the social group. Thus society becomes, as it were, responsible to nature for the acts of all its members; for the danger immediately arises that the adult may no longer receive, in general, the good and evil consequences of his own character and conductthat those ill fitted to live, and either negatively or positively harmful to the community, will be preserved, causing the weakening and final destruction of the body social, and the death of the individuals composing it. Herds of wild horses or wild cattle are stronger than the strongest of the solitary beasts of prey. When united they will not only defend themselves successfully, but will even trample their enemy to death. Only when through fear, or some other cause, the group ranks are broken and mutual aid ceases, can the lion kill his victim. Almost all that is best in life is cultivated directly by this communal living together, with its mutual helpfulness and mutual self-restraint. Society confers unnumbered benefits upon its members, but the individual must do his part; as more is given him, from him more is required. In a word, the social being must live up to a certain standard of right action; and since association has in part removed from him the pressure of crude 1 1 Kropotkin, pp. 702-712. 382 Educative Social Selection natural forces, and these forces would now be utterly inefficient in producing the type of character requisite, society must itself compel its members to live up to this necessary standard at its peril, on pain of social and individual degeneration and destruction. This compulsion is fundamentally instinctive, and at first largely unreasoning, but it becomes with time a process distinctly willed and shaped by the social group. It is primarily, and for all time, an effort of nature to promote upward growth by a less wasteful process, using the awakened individual intelligence, combined with the inherited social instinct, to induce evolution from within the group, by encouraging useful variation from the average, thus producing the leader, and punishing harmful variation, -thus ultimately converting the mere malefactor into the criminal. Intelligent, educative, social selection is thus substituted more and more fully, by the workings of natural law, for the crude, destructive, physical selection which is at first exclusively dominant. Social pressure from within the group unites with the pressure from without to uplift and socialize the individual. One of the most important forms of this inner pressure is called among men criminal prosecution and punishment. A social group is fundamentally a kindred group. Its members feel a resemblance among themselves, and a sense of safety and of pleasure develops. There is general likeness with individual variation. A social type is being formed. Divergence from this type is disliked, and antagonistic variation meets with conscious or unconscious persecution. "Relatively unintelligent though they are," writes Herbert Spencer, "inferior gregarious creatures inflict penalties for breaches of the needful restrictions, showing how regard for them has come to be unconsciously established as a condition to persistent social life. No higher warrant can be imagined," and therefore we may accept "the law of equal freedom as an ultimate ethical principle, having an authority transcending every other." Morality seems in its beginnings to have been social rather than individual,' a morality of action rather than a morality of motive. The moral act, the good act, is that which conduces to the social welfare. The good individual is he whose conduct aids his social group. Morals, ethics, Sitten (German) all mean habits, customs, established ways. The moral act was originally the customary act. Among the lower animals, which possess not the moral sense-the knowledge of what is right and wrong, and consciousness of power to choose between them-the customary act is that which has been enforced by nature's inexorable laws. It is a right choice for them, but they do not know that it is right. We find moral actions before a perception of what is moral. Good and bad are insisted upon by stern processes of selection, and destruction of those which do not grow aright, by laws of nature and nature's God. There are no mistakes here. Not until human society is reached, and the moral sense developed with higher intelligence, do acts become regarded and named as good and evil, right and wrong. It is then that mistakes begin to be made by the social group, the good being called bad, and punished, and the bad, good, and rewarded. Ultimately nature judges and 1 Spencer, Justice, p. 61, and see Chapter II of this book. The claims of nature upon society, that the operation of its laws upon the individual must be maintained by human legislation, have often been recognized by the nations of mankind. As Sir Henry Sumner Maine well puts it: "The happiness of mankind is, no doubt, sometimes assigned, both in the popular and in the legal literature of the Romans, as the proper object of remedial legislation; but it is very remarkable how few and faint are the testimonies to this principle, compared with the tributes which are constantly offered to the overshadowing claims of the Law of Nature." Ancient Law, p. 79. "In ancient times," writes Maine, "the moral elevation and moral debasement of the individual appear to be confounded with, or postponed to, the merits and offences of the group to which the individual belongs." Ancient Law, p. 127. 384 Changing Standards of Morality chooses between social groups; those which obey her laws prospering, and those which disobey degenerating and disappearing from the earth. Even among savages "who make hatchets of stones and rub sticks for a fire," we can see, writes Tylor," that morality and happiness belong together -in fact that morality is the method of happiness." This is undoubtedly true of the lasting happiness of the social group, and in this low stage of social development, the happiness of the individual is most closely intertwined with the continued welfare of the horde to which he belongs. But the morality necessary among such people is something very different, much lower, more crude and simple than that demanded among civilized nations. The moral man among savages-the man possessing the type of character requisite for the performance of acts most useful to the social group-is the ferocious fighter, cruel and bloodthirsty, the man who insists on his right of personal vengeance.for every fancied wrong, the despotic and brutal tyrant. Might makes right. The hero of the stone or bronze age would be the criminal of to-day. Early morality, early ideas of good and evil, were suited to the needs of the dark ages, were necessary for the uplifting of a low humanity to the next higher stage of development. With increasing intelligence, and with growing interdependence of social life, there is a progressive enlargement of ethical view, and a widening and strengthening social demand that the individual shall live up to this higher morality, avoiding more and more actions seen to be socially harmful, and imitating more and more fully the growing ideal of the social type. For as Dr. James Martineau has well said: 3 The authoritative measure of our duty to our fellow men is (in every age) "the mutually understood ideal." "Only in 2 Tylor, Anthropology, p. 408. proportion as men have come to understood concurrence on matters of right have they claims inter se." The social mind has reached a certain, estimate of conduct as good or bad, and the bad actions which the community punishes as wrongs against itself it calls crimes. This is the explanation of crime and of the necessity for its punishment. Individual variations, actively antagonistic to the prevalent social type, exist in all the higher social groups. Commonly they are social laggards, who have not kept pace with the average development toward the social ideal. The rebellious social laggard is the true criminal; other laggards belong to the pauper class. Even the higher animal societies collectively punish the most dangerous antisocial acts. Much the same conduct, with a few additions, is punished by the lowest human societies now known upon the earth; and, as social life attains to higher planes, more and more actions become socially harmful, are generally recognized as such, and added to the list of crimes-that is, the list of actions which society punishes as wrongs against itself, for the sake of the general welfare, for the preservation of the social life, for the elevation of the individual toward the ideal of the social type. Thus the production of crime and criminals is one of the saving processes of nature, substituting a lesser for a greater evil, promoting upward progress at a smaller cost. For if nature had not induced this increasingly severe social selection and pressure within the group, toward the elevation of the individual and the improvement of the type, then that primitive and unreasoning form of pressure from physical 'This sets bounds to the acts which are rightly criminal in each stage of evolution. Individuals may and do have a much higher estimate of good and bad, but until they convince society that their standard is the true one, crimes remain as before. The measure of a man's duty to society is fixed by the social estimate of good and evil; his duty towards God is co-extensive with his own ideal, and often goes far beyond the just claims of men upon him. |