Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/13



is much in the stirring world scene of today to justify the definition of man as the animal who spends sixteen hours a day in mischief and only eight hours a day in innocence. Certainly a detached survey reveals a none too creditable history. He has been throughout an aggressively selfish creature continuously engaged in raising Gehenna for himself and all creation; for, not content with dominion over the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air, he long ago began preying on his own fellows on the principle that it is easier to seize power and wealth than to create them. Yet a quality of altruism, paradoxically enough, early grew out of man's selfishness when he found that in union there is strength.

After developing a settled manner of life, his evolution became a social process in which there is need for the social virtues. From that time on his life has been involved in a struggle, periodically violent, between the primeval urge of brute predaciousness and the humane, benevolent impulses engendered by social experience and struggle. Hence, as Louis Pasteur once said: Two opposing laws seem today to be in combat—a law of blood and death, which, daily devising new weapons of war, compels the people to be prepared always for the battlefield; and a law of peace, work and welfare, which is concerned only with the delivery of humanity from the scourges which beset it. The one seeks only violent conquests; the other the relief of mankind. The one places a human life above all victories; the other would sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to the ambition of one man."

Since the achievement of group coherence, the forces of human evolution have acted on the social organism rather than upon the individual, and the products have been in the main such social media as ideas, opinions, habits, relations, traditions and institutonsinstitutions [sic]. Biologically speaking, ideas and beliefs have various sorts of utility aside from any question of their objective validity or truth, an important one being the securing of group cohesion and mass action. Historically, people have preferred the security or stability of being one with the group, and there has been, along with a ready credulity, the age-old disposition to assign divine sanction to traditional beliefs and customs. The agency of ideas and beliefs, therefore, has proved a means of power wielded by leaders more potent beyond comparison than all the agencies at the disposal of individual man.

Through many centuries of human history ideals of justice and brotherly love have so influenced the activities of men that we have seemed at times about to enter the milleniummillennium [sic], only to witness the disintegration of this altruism under political and economic stress. When a leader or ruler abandons these ideals, however, he commonly feels bound to give to his action the flavor of morality. "Man must convince himself that he can rape in