F. C. S. Schiller

“ Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they become dangerous engines of destruction. ”

“ Human institutions, like the human body, are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of man’s nature. ”

“ The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes [24] for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure, the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. ”

“ At present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by some miraculous rally of human intelligence, [47] these convulsions should be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent destruction of the human race by war will only be more dramatic: it will not be more fatal than its gradual decay as its arts and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness. ”

“ Its future has always been precarious, because it has always been uncertain whether it would use its knowledge well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself. It has always had a choice between alternative policies, and it has so now.
What sense then is there in making such a fuss about the present crisis? It is a particularly plain case of the perennial choice of Hercules. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain speaking to a society more than usually debauched by a long regime of flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge. Mankind can make a fool of itself, as it always could ”

“ If it is called ‘pessimism’ to point out the methods by which men may escape destruction, because men do not care to adopt them, I suppose it must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently and open-eyed down a precipice, and to expect to be saved by a miracle. ”

“ If scientific eugenics can put a stop to the contra-selection incidental to civilization, Man will recover the plasticity and the progressiveness he once possessed, and will be able to evolve further—in whatever direction seems to him best. We need not take alarm at this possibility, for with his superior knowledge he may surely be trusted to make a better job of his evolution than the Lemur and the Pithecanthropus, who were our progenitors and managed to evolve into modern man. ”

“ And, secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless, to progress in other respects, in knowledge, in power, and in culture?
To answer the first question we cannot do better than argue back from what is now the most salient feature about man’s biological position, namely that his survival is determined far more by his relations to the social group to which he belongs than by personal efficiency: hence he can draw on the collective resources of his tribe, and, to a growing extent, gets emancipated from the control of natural selection. ”

“ Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I read in Mr Haldane’s Daedalus the wonderful things that Science was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s Icarus how easily both we and it might come to grief in consequence, it at once became plain to me that of all the heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be the one best fitted to prognosticate the probable future of Man. ”

“ It is clear that if these tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time become unteachable, and not worth learning.
Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and [25] seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory. The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach. ”

“ The true ‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else matters. ”

“ For neither now nor at any time has social intelligence shown itself equal to devising a training for the youth of the highest classes that would provide them with adequate stimuli to develop their faculties, and to lead a strenuous life of social service. ”

“ For as we can no longer assume, with Plato and the other Utopians, that perfection may be postulated, provision has always to be made for the improvement of 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 changed [56] conditions 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. ”

“ But if psychologists should take it into their heads to settle down to business, to recognize the primary obligation of every science to develop methods and conceptions capable of working upon its subject-matter, and so tried to authenticate their ‘truth’ after the ordinary fashion of the other sciences, namely by the pragmatic test of successful working, some surprising effects might be elicited even from the actual human mind. ”

“ Indeed, the highest or ruling class nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.
The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies, even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability, discover it, and reward it by social promotion. ”

“ Upon these two inventions may be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social, and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost mechanical accumulation of knowledge.
Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with which he can be crammed ”

“ Alike in mentality and in moral, modern man is still substantially identical with his palæolithic ancestors. He is still the irrational, [32] impulsive, emotional, foolish, destructive, cruel, credulous, creature he always was. Normally the Yahoo in him is kept under control by the constant pressure of a variety of social institutions; but let anything upset an established social order, and the Yahoo comes to the front at once. The history of the past fifty years abundantly proves that man is still capable of atrocities equal to any in his record. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The different classes in a society have different birth-rates and death-rates, and the differences between these yield their several net rates of increase or decrease. Now, whereas under the conditions of savage life class differences can hardly exist, or, at least cannot be accentuated, so that the whole tribe flourishes or perishes together, and among barbarians the upper classes have a very great advantage and the tribe recruits itself chiefly from the children of the chiefs, because the conditions of life are so severe that the lower classes are not able to rear many children ”

“ It is, moreover, the science most directly concerned with affairs of this sort. Psychology, the science of human mentality, is, by common consent, in a deplorably backward state. It has remained a ground for metaphysical excursions and a playground for the arbitrary pedantries of classificatory systematists. Its efforts to become scientific have only led it to ape assumptions and to borrow notions found to be appropriate in sciences with widely different problems and objects. ”

“ It is superfluous to insist either on the fatuity of a social organization such as this, or on the certainty of racial degeneration which it entails: but it may be well to draw attention to the rapidity with which these degenerative processes are at present sapping the vitality and value of our civilized races. The failure to reproduce does not, as in former times, affect merely the aristocracy in the highest social strata ”

“ 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 own [49] throat in cutting his neighbour’s. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic times man had established his ascendency over nature and perfected his social organization sufficiently to render these services to his fellows, we have suggested a possible cause of the cessation of biological progress. ”

“ 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 the toleration of differences of opinion as among the cardinal principles of a sanely progressive social order. ”

“ Not only have we lived through the greatest political and the deadliest natural convulsion, the Great War and the Tokio earthquake, but the Russian Revolution has outdone the French and Landru the legendary Bluebeard, while for mingled atrocity and baseness the murders of Rasputin and of Alexander of Serbia are unsurpassed in [33] history. The painful truth is that civilization has not improved Man’s moral nature. ”

“ The advantages are obvious; it is no longer essential for a member of a society that collectively controls the conditions of existence to develop any high degree of personal capacity, in order to survive. A single wise and provident minister, like Joseph, is enough to keep alive millions of Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean years of famine. ”

“ Consequently, modern man has no right to ‘boast himself far better than his fathers’—in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically, i.e. apart from the effects of culture and social training, it is probable that he is slightly inferior in capacity to his own ancestors, while very markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the Greeks) in their hey-day. ”

“ Hence the social order must be plastic, 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. ”

“ For social influences are as likely as not [18] to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to tend to preserve by preference the stocks which are less viable from a merely biological point of view. They are markedly so at present, and it would be asking too much to expect the tribal chiefs of early men to have been wise and provident enough to see to it that their social institutions were eugenical in their effects. ”