Degradation

“ Instead of the degradation so dreaded, was the strange ennobling and purifying which made men despise all the things for which they ordinarily strive, and glory in the sternest hardships, the most bitter self-denials and cruel suffering and death. ”

“ It will scarce be urged against the degradation theory, that those races which, tried by the tests of defect or misplacement of parts, we deem degraded, are not less fitted for carrying on what in their own little spheres is the proper business of life, than the non-degraded orders and families. ”

“ The swift process of reduction of the masses into a condition of depravity and degradation, as is evinced by the number of men out of employment, shows us clearly where we are going. We cannot deny it. No thinking man, no reasoning man, no friend of his kind, can ignore the fact that we are going rapidly on to a precipice. ”

“ No longer among the individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each, but evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various degradation; features seamed with sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse; bodies consumed with sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored in foul uses; intellects without power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and devilish ”

“ Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system,—and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end—namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers,—and something worse than ruin,—degradation! ”

“ So long as, by the effect of laws and of customs, social degradation shall continue in the midst of civilization, making artificial hells, and subjecting to the complications of chance the divine destiny of man ”

“ But such deterioration or degradation is not an isolated evil, or the mere negation of a better state; for it acts as a positive energy in developing moral evil, and brings in its train perverseness, destructiveness, loss of natural decency in habits, conversation and conduct, and many other ills which render their subjects painfully humiliating as human beings, and a source of trouble, annoyance, and expense to all those concerned with them. ”

“ A universal degradation, from whose blight even the most illustrious were not exempt, pervaded all classes,—a condition which had at last reached its climax after its gradual development through centuries, and was finally disclosed by that perversion of manners, morals, government, and laws which so significantly indicates the corruption and the decadence of nations. ”

“ The awful thing is the vast extent of misery and distress which prevails, and the evidence of the rotten foundation on which the whole fabric of this gorgeous society rests, for I call that rotten which exhibits thousands upon thousands of human beings reduced to the lowest stage of moral and physical degradation, with no more of the necessaries of life than serve to keep body and soul together, whole classes of artisans without the means of subsistence. ”

“ So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; ”

“ To do this, we must distinguish between degradation and a mere degeneration which involves a return to simpler conditions as an adaptation to changed environment. Such degeneration as adaptation to circumstances, in an individual or a society as a whole, is progress. Fish who become blind by living in the dark become thus better fitted to their circumstances, and the like is true of moral degeneration under simpler conditions. ”

“ The feeling this system of degradation has produced must be changed; and no effort has been left untried to restore this race of men to a better sense of their condition than that which they at present entertain. ”

“ But while that country exhibits the most authentic proofs of the uniform course of nature, it affords also the most evident examples of the degradation of the human mind. It is there we find the cause of those ruins that astonish, and the desolation that afflicts. Had men continued their exertions, the labour of their hands would not have fallen to decay. ”

“ The chief reflection that arose from it was, that human sentiment must be in a deplorable state of degradation indeed, when such a circumstance could occur from the notion that a man was as much an asset or piece of property, could be transferred by the same means, and moved in the same unfeeling manner, as any portion of inert matter that makes up a bale of merchandize. ”

“ The degradation-theory would expect savages to hold beliefs and customs intelligible as broken-down relics of former higher civilization. The development-theory would expect civilized men to keep up beliefs and customs which have their reasonable meaning in less cultured states of society. ”

“ Indeed there is much evidence going to show that in an earlier age of the world's history the degradation of mankind, through the abuse of the creative functions, had not been accomplished, and the ills of life resulting from such abuse were unknown. ”

“ If the former were the true, then the well-spring of his being was polluted, nor might he by any death fling aside his degradation, or show himself other than defiled in the eyes of the old dwellers in “those high countries,” where all things seem as they are, and are as they seem. ”

“ Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation. ”

“ If in many instances he is degraded, by moral and political slavery to the practice of the basest vices it engenders, and that below the level of ordinary degradation; let us reflect that the corruption of the best produces the worst, and that habits which subsist only in relation to a peculiar state of social institution may be expected to cease so soon as that relation is dissolved. ”

“ In those persons of a better organised structure, who yield themselves up to the mesmeric degradation, the physical causes are less operative; but the moral causes are still more influential. In all cases the prostration is self-induced. ”

“ In the same manner, if, either from the influence of the social institutions of a country, or from the operation of natural causes which human power is unable to control, there is a class of men too low, and degraded, and miserable to be reached by the ordinary inducements to daily toil, so certain are they to grow corrupt and depraved, that degradation has become in all languages a term almost synonymous with vice. ”

“ Wherever you see want, or misery, or degradation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error. ”

“ Hence, the extreme eccentric errors are the consequence of diseases and far-reaching social imperfections which lead to genuine deviations from the normal, including pathological and degenerate malformations, and associated with them the lowest forms of individual degradation, both intellectual and moral. ”

“ Unless we do, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day. ”

“ So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. ”

“ But yet there is time to change our ways. Give up all those old discussions, old fights about things which are meaningless, which are nonsensical in their very nature. Think of the last six hundred or seven hundred years of degradation when grown-up men by hundreds have been discussing for years whether we should drink a glass of water with the right hand or the left, whether the hand should be washed three times or four times, whether we should gargle five or six times. ”

“ A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation. ”

“ The evil effects attendant upon the useful arts in general, from such a system, are certainly great, but by no means to be compared with the degradations, and consequent imbecility, inseparable from the total suppression of every thing tending to excite emulation. ”

“ I think most of the clothes ugly and dirty, most of the food bad, the houses wretched, the schools starved and feeble, the amusements dull, the monetary methods silly, our ways of trading base and wasteful, our methods of production piecemeal and wasteful, our political arrangements solemnly idiotic. Most of my activities have been to get my soul and something of my body out of the customs, outlook, boredoms, and contaminations of the current phase of life. ”

“ Your novels have interested me for this reason: you are aware of the baneful influences which surround us, which so often sway or actuate us. I have followed the working of these agencies even in chemical reactions, in the growth and decay of trees, flowers, minerals. I feel that the processes of physical decomposition, as well as the similar mental and moral processes, are due entirely to them.
"In brief, I have postulated a monistic evil, which is the source of all death, deterioration, imperfection, pain, sorrow, madness and disease. ”

“ It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions. When I think of these inexplicable dissolvent centres that have come into being in our globe—these quap heaps are surely by far the largest that have yet been found in the world; the rest as yet mere specks in grains and crystals—I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. ”

“ And no less clearly and forcibly may we trace the truly natural place of degeneration in our own physical history: since, as physiology teaches and daily experience declares, not an action is wrought or a thought conceived without the presence of change and decay of tissue a process this which, limited in early life by progressive growth and by development, at last comes in our latter days to assume the reins of government, and in time to dissipate our energy and substance into the nothingness of physical and corporate extinction. ”

“ She dwells once again, with solemn insistence, on the "aged sorrow," the inheritance of evil transmitted from generation to generation, an evil too intimately entwined with the complex conditions of society to be violently uprooted, but only to be gradually eradicated by the persistent cultivation of knowledge, industry, judgment, sobriety, and patience. ”

“ The old struggle against the forces of nature [Pg 9] once relaxed, men grew effeminate and women weak; diseases increased; physical fibre softened and atrophied and withered away; moral fibre went the same path to destruction; dry rot attacked the foundations of society, and eventually the whole fabric toppled over, or was swept aside, to be built up again by some conquering horde of barbarians, which in its turn grew civilized, and in its turn succumbed to the virulent poison that seemed inherent in the very nature of civilization, and for which there seemed to be no antidote. ”

“ From this passage has come abundance of reviling of the physical system. Memoirs of good men are full of abuse of it, as the clog, the load, the burden, the chain. It is spoken of as pollution, as corruption,—in short, one would think that the Creator had imitated the cruelty of some Oriental despots who have been known to chain a festering corpse to a living body. ”

“ In other words, degeneration, losing of meaning and purpose, or death, may belong to the conditions of actual progress—something that ever appears in the form of a will and way to greater power and is accomplished at the expense of numberless lesser powers. ”

“ Since the world began there have been good and bad elements among the peoples that inhabited it, but the good elements alone have survived, the bad or the evil has gone down into ruin. Nations that sought to waylay and throttle progress for their own selfish ends, and immoral purposes have been forced out into the world’s Gehenna, and in the garbage heap there are still rummaging many of the split races of the earth, and many individuals bury themselves in its reek refusing to emerge into the clear sunlight. ”

“ To endeavor to reshape this divinely appointed life and mold it after an earthly, man-made pattern is the height of folly, yet this is the demand of very much of our modern social life. Society employs a system of repression, the subduing and crushing of deep emotions, and substituting a shallow artificiality. It curbs all naturalness in development and demands a conformity to certain rigid molds in which every word, gesture, thought, and impulse must be cast. ”

“ One would think that the wretched frame-dwellings, ruined by the subsidence of the ground on which they were built, and begrimed with the smoke which factories belch all day, would disgust humanity. But it seems the man who works in dirt and ruin accepts dirt and disorder as something not wrong in themselves, quite tolerable, something even to be desired, a condition of freedom. ”