Read Ebook: Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin Spencer Marx) by Ferri Enrico La Monte Robert Rives Translator

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sm and Darwinian selection may be reconciled, is it not obvious that the survival of the fittest tends to establish an aristocratic gradation of individuals, which is contrary to socialistic leveling?

I have already answered this objection in part by pointing out that socialism will assure to all individuals--instead of as at present only to a privileged few or to society's heroes--freedom to assert and develop their own individualities. Then in truth the result of the struggle for existence will be the survival of the best and this for the very reason that in a wholesome environment the victory is won by the healthiest individuals. Social Darwinism, then, as a continuation and complement of natural Darwinism, will result in a selection of the best.

To respond fully to this insistence upon an unlimited aristocratic selection, I must call attention to another natural law which serves to complete that rhythm of action and reaction which results in the equilibrium of life.

To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities we must add another law which is inseparable from it, and which Jacoby, following in the track of the labors of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Caudole, Ribot, Spencer, Royer, Lombroso, and others, has clearly demonstrated and expounded.

This same Nature, which makes "choice" and aristocratic gradation a condition of vital progress, afterwards restores the equilibrium by a leveling and democratic law.

"From the infinite throng of humanity there emerge individuals, families and races which tend to rise above the common level; painfully climbing the steep heights they reach the summits of power, wealth, intelligence and talent, and, having reached the goal, they are hurled down and disappear in the abysses of insanity and degeneration. Death is the great leveler; by destroying every one who rises above the common herd, it democratizes humanity."

Every one who attempts to create a monopoly of natural forces comes into violent conflict with that supreme law of Nature which has given to all living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents: air and light, water and land.

Everybody who is too much above or too much below the average of humanity--an average which rises with the flux of time, but is absolutely fixed at any given moment of history--does not live and disappears from the stage.

The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural or social monsters, and Nature inexorably blasts them with degeneracy or sterility, no matter whether they be the product of the organic life, or the effect of the social organization.

And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind--monopoly of power, of wealth or of talent--are inevitably destined to become in their latest offshoots imbeciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to become extinct. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of millionaires--all follow the common law which, here again, serves to confirm the inductions--in this sense, equalitarian--of science and of socialism.

FOOTNOTES:

MAX NORDAU, Conventional Lies of our Civilization. Laird & Lee, Chicago, 1895.

SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.

Not one of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism, which Haeckel formulated, and which so many others have echoed since, resists a candid and more accurate examination of the natural laws which bear the name of Charles Darwin.

I add that not only is Darwinism not in contradiction with socialism, but that it constitutes one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing but a logical and vital corollary, in part of Darwinism, in part of Spencerian evolution.

It is true that Darwin did not declare himself an atheist and that Spencer is not one; it is also true that, strictly speaking, the theory of Darwin, like that of Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief in God, since it may be admitted that God created matter and force, and that both afterward evolved into their successive forms in accordance with the initial creative impulse. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that these theories, by rendering the idea of causality more and more inflexible and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, since there always remains this question: And God, who created him? And if it is replied that God has always existed, the same reply may be flung back by asserting that the universe has always existed. To use the phrase of Ardig?, human thought is only able to conceive the chain which binds effects to causes as terminating at a given point, purely conventional.

It is for this very reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the unknown.

And if this is one of the consequences of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is quite obvious.

The disappearance of faith in the hereafter, where the poor shall become the elect of the Lord, and where the miseries of the "vale of tears" will find an eternal compensation in paradise, gives greater strength to the desire for some semblance of an "earthly paradise" here below even for the unfortunate and the poor, who are the great majority.

Hartmann and Guyau have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions include, with various other matters, the promise of happiness; but the primitive religions concede that this happiness will be realized during the life of the individual himself, and the later religions, through an excess of reaction, place its realization after death, outside the human world; in the final phase, this realization of happiness is once more placed within the field of human life, no longer in the ephemeral moment of the individual existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all mankind.

Therefore, it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has many traits in common with, for example, primitive Christianity, notably that ardent faith in the ideal that has definitively deserted the arid field of bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc., admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace by its humanitarian faith the faith in the hereafter of the former religions.

More direct and potent than these relations are, however, the relations which exist between socialism and the belief in God.

It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific culture. This is why socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to disappear. It has assumed this attitude although it knows that the absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip.

And this is so true that the most clear-sighted conservatives, even though they are atheists, regret that the religious sentiment--that precious narcotic--is diminishing among the masses, because they see in it, though their pharisaism does not permit them to say it openly, an instrument of political domination.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the religious sentiment cannot be re-established by royal decree. If it is disappearing, the blame for this cannot be laid at the door of any particular individual, and there is no need of a special propaganda against it, because its antidote impregnates the air we breathe--saturated with the inductions of experimental science--and religion no longer meets with conditions favorable to its development as it did amid the superstitious ignorance of past centuries.

I have thus shown the direct influence of modern science, science based on observation and experiment,--which has substituted the idea of natural causality for the ideas of miracle and divinity,--on the extremely rapid development and on the experimental foundation of contemporary socialism.

Democratic socialism does not look with unfriendly eyes upon "Catholic Socialism" , since it has nothing to fear from it.

When the peasants shall have become familiar with the views of Catholic socialism, it will be very easy for democratic socialism to rally them under its own flag--they will, indeed, convert themselves.

Socialism occupies an analogous position with regard to republicanism. Just as atheism is a private affair which concerns the individual conscience, so a republican form of government is a private affair which interests only a part of the bourgeoisie. Certainly, by the time that socialism draws near to its day of triumph, atheism will have made immense progress, and a republican form of government will have been established in many countries which to-day submit to a monarchical regime. But it is not socialism which develops atheism, any more than it is socialism which will establish republicanism. Atheism is a product of the theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present bourgeois civilization, and republicanism has been and will be, in the various countries, the work of a portion of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as was recently said in some of the conservative newspapers of Milan , when "the monarchy shall no longer serve the interests of the country," that is to say of the class in power.

Socialism then has no more interest in preaching republicanism than it has in preaching atheism. To each his role , is the law of division of labor. The struggle for atheism is the business of science; the establishment of republicanism in the various countries of Europe has been and will be the work of the bourgeoisie themselves--whether they be conservative or radical. All this constitutes the historical progress toward socialism, and individuals are powerless to prevent or delay the succession of the phases of the moral, political and social evolution.

FOOTNOTES:

Darwin never made a declaration of atheism, but that was in fact his way of looking at the problem .

While Haeckel, concerned solely with triumphing over the opposition, said at the Congress of Eisenach that Darwin was not an atheist, B?chner, on the contrary, published shortly afterward a letter which Darwin had written him, and in which he avowed that "since the age of forty years, his scientific studies had led him to atheism."

In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself a Socialist, but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is made evident by his autobiography and his posthumous fragments on Socialism.

Its usual form in America.--Translator.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES.

It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by an examination of the different modes of conceiving of the individual in relation to the species.

This individualism led directly to that artificiality in politics, which I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic anarchists,--since both alike imagine that the social organization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,--more or less murderous.

Every living object is an association, a collectivity.

The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of biological individuality, is also an aggregate of various parts , and each one of them in its turn is an aggregate of molecules which are aggregates of atoms.

The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible and impalpable and it does not live.

And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation of the parts constantly increases with the ascent in the zoological series from protozoa to Man.

Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the metaphysics of individualism, just as the conception of national and international federalism corresponds to the scientific character of modern socialism.

The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of tissues, organs and anatomical machinery; the organism of a society can consist of nothing but a federation of communes, provinces and regions; the organism of humanity can be nothing but a federation of nations.

If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head should have to move in the same fashion as the extremities and all of whose extremities would have to perform the same motions simultaneously, there is no less absurdity in a political and administrative organization in which the extreme northern province or the mountainous province, for instance, have to have the same bureaucratic machinery, the same body of laws, the same methods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the province made up of plains, solely through the passion for symmetrical uniformity, that pathological expression of unity.

If we disregard those considerations of a political order which make it possible to conclude, as I have done elsewhere, that the only possible organization for Italy, as for every other country, appeared to me to be that of an administrative federalism combined with political unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of the nineteenth century the individual, as an independent entity, is dethroned alike in biology and sociology.

The individual exists, but only in so far as he forms a part of a social aggregate.

Robinson Crusoe--that perfect type of individualism--can not possibly be aught but a legend or a pathological specimen.

The species--that is to say, the social aggregate--is the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as has been demonstrated by Darwinism and confirmed by all the inductive sciences from astronomy to sociology.

At the close of the eighteenth century Rousseau thought that the individual alone existed, and that society was an artificial product of the "social contract" and, as he attributed a permanent human character to the transitory manifestations of the period, such as the rottenness of the regime under which he lived, he further thought that Society was the cause of all evils, and that individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive sciences agree in recognizing that society, the social aggregate, is a fact of Nature, inseparable from life, in the vegetable species as in the animal species, from the lowest "animal colonies" of zoophytes up to societies of mammals , and to human society.

All that is best in the individual, he owes to the social life, although every phase of evolution is marked at its decline by pathological conditions of social decay--essentially transitory, however--which inevitably precede a new cycle of social renovation.

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