War has thrust upon us a new
internationalism. To-day the world is united by starvation,
disease and misery. We are enjoying the ironic internationalism
of hatred. The victors are forced to shoulder the burden of the
vanquished. International philanthropies and charities are
organized. The great flux of immigration and emigration has
recommenced. Prosperity is a myth; and the rich are called upon
to support huge philanthropies, in the futile attempt to sweep
back the tide of famine and misery. In the face of this new
internationalism, this tangled unity of the world, all proposed
political and economic programs reveal a woeful common
bankruptcy. They are fragmentary and superficial. None of them go
to the root of this unprecedented world problem. Politicians
offer political solutions,--like the League of Nations or the
limitation of navies. Militarists offer new schemes of
competitive armament. Marxians offer the Third Internationale and
industrial revolution. Sentimentalists offer charity and
philanthropy. Coordination or correlation is lacking. And matters
go steadily from bad to worse.
The first essential in the
solution of any problem is the recognition and statement of the
factors involved. Now in this complex problem which to-day
confronts us, no attempt has been made to state the primary
facts. The statesman believes they are all political. Militarists
believe they are all military and naval. Economists, including
under the term the various schools for Socialists, believe they
are industrial and financial. Churchmen look upon them as
religious and ethical. What is lacking is the recognition of that
fundamental factor which reflects and coordinates these essential
but incomplete phases of the problem,--the factor of
reproduction. For in all problems affecting the welfare of a
biological species, and particularly in all problems of human
welfare, two fundamental forces work against each other. There is
hunger as the driving force of all our economic, industrial and
commercial organizations; and there is the reproductive impulse
in continual conflict with our economic, political settlements,
race adjustments and the like. Official moralists, statesmen,
politicians, philanthropists and economists display an astounding
disregard of this second disorganizing factor. They treat the
world of men as if it were purely a hunger world instead of a
hunger-sex world. Yet there is no phase of human society, no
question of politics, economics, or industry that is not tied up
in almost equal measure with the expression of both of these
primordial impulses. You cannot sweep back overpowering dynamic
instincts by catchwords. You can neglect and thwart sex only at
your peril. You cannot solve the problem of hunger and ignore the
problem of sex. They are bound up together.
While the gravest attention is
paid to the problem of hunger and food, that of sex is neglected.
Politicians and scientists are ready and willing to speak of such
things as a «high birth rate,» infant mortality, the dangers of
immigration or over-population. But with few exceptions they
cannot bring themselves to speak of Birth Control. Until they
shall have broken through the traditional inhibitions concerning
the discussion of sexual matters, until they recognize the force
of the sexual instinct, and until they recognize Birth Control as
the PIVOTAL FACTOR in the problem confronting the world to-day,
our statesmen must continue to work in the dark. Political
palliatives will be mocked by actuality. Economic nostrums are
blown willy-nilly in the unending battle of human
instincts.
A brief survey of the past
three or four centuries of Western civilization suggests the
urgent need of a new science to help humanity in the struggle
with the vast problem of to-day's disorder and danger. That
problem, as we envisage it, is fundamentally a sexual problem.
Ethical, political, and economic avenues of approach are
insufficient. We must create a new instrument, a new technique to
make any adequate solution possible.
The history of the industrial
revolution and the dominance of all- conquering machinery in
Western civilization show the inadequacy of political and
economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population. The
advent of the factory system, due especially to the development
of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset
all the grandiloquent theories of the previous era. To meet the
new situation created by the industrial revolution arose the new
science of «political economy,» or economics. Old political
methods proved inadequate to keep pace with the problem presented
by the rapid rise of the new machine and industrial power. The
machine era very shortly and decisively exploded the simple
belief that «all men are born free and equal.» Political power
was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their
supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians
allied themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political
theories and practices were totally inadequate to control the new
situation or to meet the complex problems that grew out of
it.
Just as the eighteenth century
saw the rise and proliferation of political theories, the
nineteenth witnessed the creation and development of the science
of economics, which aimed to perfect an instrument for the study
and analysis of an industrial society, and to offer a technique
for the solution of the multifold problems it presented. But at
the present moment, as the outcome of the machine era and
competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new
situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by
political or economic weapons.
The industrial revolution and
the development of machinery in Europe and America called into
being a new type of working-class. Machines were at first termed
«labor-saving devices.» In reality, as we now know, mechanical
inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and increasingly
enormous demand for «labor.» The omnipresent and still existing
scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine
production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated
and exploitable populations. Large production and the huge
development of international trade through improved methods of
transport, made possible the maintenance upon a low level of
existence of these rapidly increasing proletarian populations.
With the rise and spread throughout Europe and America of machine
production, it is now possible to correlate the expansion of the
«proletariat.» The working-classes bred almost automatically to
meet the demand for machine-serving «hands.»
The rise in population, the
multiplication of proletarian populations as a first result of
mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers of
population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of
overcrowding still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It
is a significant though neglected fact that when, after long
agitation in Great Britain, child labor was finally forbidden by
law, the supply of children dropped appreciably. No longer of
economic value in the factory, children were evidently a drug in
the «home.» Yet it is doubly significant that from this moment
British labor began the long unending task of
self-organization.[1]
Nineteenth century economics
had no method of studying the interrelation of the biological
factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork, the
progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine
discipline, as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous
consequences upon human character and human habits.[2] Paternalistic philanthropies and
sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only
tended to increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the
physiological and psychological point of view, the factory system
has been nothing less than catastrophic.
Dr. Austin Freeman has
recently pointed out [3]
some of the physiological, psychological, and racial effects of
machinery upon the proletariat, the breeders of the world.
Speaking for Great Britain, Dr. Freeman suggests that the
omnipresence of machinery tends toward the production of large
but inferior populations. Evidences of biological and racial
degeneracy are apparent to this observer. «Compared with the
African negro,» he writes, «the British sub-man is in several
respects markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually
quite helpless and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or
knowledge of handicraft, or indeed knowledge of any kind... Over-
population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the
unfit, and it is mechanism which has created conditions favorable
to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.» The
whole indictment against machinery is summarized by Dr. Freeman:
«Mechanism by its reactions on man and his environment is
antagonistic to human welfare. It has destroyed industry and
replaced it by mere labor; it has degraded and vulgarized the
works of man; it has destroyed social unity and replaced it by
social disintegration and class antagonism to an extent which
directly threatens civilization; it has injuriously affected the
structural type of society by developing its organization at the
expense of the individual; it has endowed the inferior man with
political power which he employs to the common disadvantage by
creating political institutions of a socially destructive type;
and finally by its reactions on the activities of war it
constitutes an agent for the wholesale physical destruction of
man and his works and the extinction of human
culture.»
It is not necessary to be in
absolute agreement with this diagnostician to realize the menace
of machinery, which tends to emphasize quantity and mere number
at the expense of quality and individuality. One thing is
certain. If machinery is detrimental to biological fitness, the
machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel Butler's
«Erewhon.» But perhaps there is another way of mastering this
problem.
Altruism, humanitarianism and
philanthropy have aided and abetted machinery in the destruction
of responsibility and self-reliance among the least desirable
elements of the proletariat. In contrast with the previous epoch
of discovery of the New World, of exploration and colonization,
when a centrifugal influence was at work upon the populations of
Europe, the advent of machinery has brought with it a
counteracting centripetal effect. The result has been the
accumulation of large urban populations, the increase of
irresponsibility, and ever-widening margin of biological
waste.
Just as eighteenth century
politics and political theories were unable to keep pace with the
economic and capitalistic aggressions of the nineteenth century,
so also we find, if we look closely enough, that nineteenth
century economics is inadequate to lead the world out of the
catastrophic situation into which it has been thrown by the
debacle of the World War. Economists are coming to recognize that
the purely economic interpretation of contemporary events is
insufficient. Too long, as one of them has stated, orthodox
economists have overlooked the important fact that «human life is
dynamic, that change, movement, evolution, are its basic
characteristics; that self- expression, and therefore freedom of
choice and movement, are prerequisites to a satisfying human
state».[4]
Economists themselves are
breaking with the old «dismal science» of the Manchester school,
with its sterile study of «supply and demand,» of prices and
exchange, of wealth and labor. Like the Chicago Vice Commission,
nineteenth-century economists (many of whom still survive into
our own day) considered sex merely as something to be legislated
out of existence. They had the right idea that wealth consisted
solely of material things used to promote the welfare of certain
human beings. Their idea of capital was somewhat confused. They
apparently decided that capital was merely that part of capital
used to produce profit. Prices, exchanges, commercial statistics,
and financial operations comprised the subject matter of these
older economists. It would have been considered «unscientific» to
take into account the human factors involved. They might study
the wear- and-tear and depreciation of machinery: but the
depreciation or destruction of the human race did not concern
them. Under «wealth» they never included the vast, wasted
treasury of human life and human expression.
Economists to-day are awake to
the imperative duty of dealing with the whole of human nature,
with the relation of men, women, and children to their
environment--physical and psychic as well as social; of dealing
with all those factors which contribute to human sustenance,
happiness and welfare. The economist, at length, investigates
human motives. Economics outgrows the outworn metaphysical
preconceptions of nineteenth century theory. To-day we witness
the creation of a new «welfare» or social economics, based on a
fuller and more complete knowledge of the human race, upon a
recognition of sex as well as of hunger; in brief, of
physiological instincts and psychological demands. The newer
economists are beginning to recognize that their science
heretofore failed to take into account the most vital factors in
modern industry--it failed to foresee the inevitable consequences
of compulsory motherhood; the catastrophic effects of child labor
upon racial health; the overwhelming importance of national
vitality and well-being; the international ramifications of the
population problem; the relation of indiscriminate breeding to
feeble-mindedness, and industrial inefficiency. It speculated too
little or not at all on human motives. Human nature riots through
the traditional economic structure, as Carlton Parker pointed
out, with ridicule and destruction; the old-fashioned economist
looked on helpless and aghast.
Inevitably we are driven to
the conclusion that the exhaustively economic interpretation of
contemporary history is inadequate to meet the present situation.
In his suggestive book, «The Acquisitive Society,» R. H. Tawney,
arrives at the conclusion that «obsession by economic issues is
as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To
future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of
the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears to- day;
indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is
concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames
every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant
ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry
until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry
in its proper perspective. IF IT IS TO DO THAT IT MUST REARRANGE
THE SCALE OF VALUES. It must regard economic interests as one
element in life, not as the whole of life... »[5]
In neglecting or minimizing
the great factor of sex in human society, the Marxian doctrine
reveals itself as no stronger than orthodox economics in guiding
our way to a sound civilization. It works within the same
intellectual limitations. Much as we are indebted to the Marxians
for pointing out the injustice of modern industrialism, we should
never close our eyes to the obvious limitations of their own
«economic interpretation of history.» While we must recognize the
great historical value of Marx, it is now evident that his vision
of the «class struggle,» of the bitter irreconcilable warfare
between the capitalist and working classes was based not upon
historical analysis, but upon on unconscious dramatization of a
superficial aspect of capitalistic regime.
In emphasizing the conflict
between the classes, Marx failed to recognize the deeper unity of
the proletariat and the capitalist. Nineteenth century capitalism
had in reality engendered and cultivated the very type of working
class best suited to its own purpose--an inert, docile,
irresponsible and submissive class, progressively incapable of
effective and aggressive organization. Like the economists of the
Manchester school, Marx failed to recognize the interplay of
human instincts in the world of industry. All the virtues were
embodied in the beloved proletariat; all the villainies in the
capitalists. The greatest asset of the capitalism of that age
was, as a matter of fact, the uncontrolled breeding among the
laboring classes. The intelligent and self-conscious section of
the workers was forced to bear the burden of the unemployed and
the poverty- stricken.
Marx was fully aware of the
consequences of this condition of things, but shut his eyes
tightly to the cause. He pointed out that capitalistic power was
dependent upon «the reserve army of labor,» surplus labor, and a
wide margin of unemployment. He practically admitted that
over-population was the inevitable soil of predatory capitalism.
But he disregarded the most obvious consequence of that
admission. It was all very dramatic and grandiloquent to tell the
workingmen of the world to unite, that they had «nothing but
their chains to lose and the world to gain.» Cohesion of any
sort, united and voluntary organization, as events have proved,
is impossible in populations bereft of intelligence,
self-discipline and even the material necessities of life, and
cheated by their desires and ignorance into unrestrained and
uncontrolled fertility.
In pointing out the
limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian opinion, my
purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of the Socialists aiming
to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me
the greatest and most neglected truth of our day:--Unless sexual
science is incorporated as an integral part of
world-statesmanship and the pivotal importance of Birth Control
is recognized in any program of reconstruction, all efforts to
create a new world and a new civilization are foredoomed to
failure.
We can hope for no advance
until we attain a new conception of sex, not as a merely
propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for the
perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue
of expression. It is the limited, inhibited conception of sex
that vitiates so much of the thought and ideation of the
Eugenists.
Like most of our social
idealists, statesmen, politicians and economists, some of the
Eugenists suffer intellectually from a restricted and inhibited
understanding of the function of sex. This limited understanding,
this narrowness of vision, which gives rise to most of the
misconceptions and condemnations of the doctrine of Birth
Control, is responsible or the failure of politicians and
legislators to enact practical statutes or to remove traditional
obscenities from the law books. The most encouraging sign at
present is the recognition by modern psychology of the central
importance of the sexual instinct in human society, and the rapid
spread of this new concept among the more enlightened sections of
the civilized communities. The new conception of sex has been
well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary civilization
is well-nigh immeasurable. «Sexual activity,» Havelock Ellis has
written, «is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when
propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended
vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great
social institutions. It is the function by which all the finer
activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be
developed and satisfied.»[6]
No less than seventy years
ago, a profound but neglected thinker, George Drysdale,
emphasized the necessity of a thorough understanding of man's
sexual nature in approaching economic, political and social
problems. «Before we can undertake the calm and impartial
investigation of any social problem, we must first of all free
ourselves from all those sexual prejudices which are so vehement
and violent and which so completely distort our vision of the
external world. Society as a whole has yet to fight its way
through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual taboos.»
Drysdale's words have lost none of their truth even to-day:
«There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than
the degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that
have been attached to the genital and excretory organs. The
former have been regarded, like their corresponding mental
passions, as something of a lower and baser nature, tending to
degrade and carnalize man by their physical appetites. But we
cannot take a debasing view of any part of our humanity without
becoming degraded in our whole being.»[7]
Drysdale moreover clearly
recognized the social crime of entrusting to sexual barbarians
the duty of legislating and enforcing laws detrimental to the
welfare of all future generations. «They trust blindly to
authority for the rules they blindly lay down,» he wrote,
«perfectly unaware of the awful and complicated nature of the
subject they are dealing with so confidently and of the horrible
evils their unconsidered statements are attended with. They
themselves break through the most fundamentally important laws
daily in utter unconsciousness of the misery they are causing to
their fellows... »
Psychologists to-day
courageously emphasize the integral relationship of the
expression of the sexual instinct with every phase of human
activity. Until we recognize this central fact, we cannot
understand the implications and the sinister significance of
superficial attempts to apply rosewater remedies to social
evils,--by the enactment of restrictive and superficial
legislation, by wholesale philanthropies and charities, by
publicly burying our heads in the sands of sentimentality.
Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral «moralists,» makeshift
legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries,
diseases, and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by
enforcing the primitive taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions,
and outworn laws, which at every step hinder the education of the
people in the scientific knowledge of their sexual nature.
Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in education and religion is
as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution or the venereal
scourges. «We are compelled squarely to face the distorting
influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the
wastefulness of seducers,» Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared.
«Man arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can
only refine but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would
destroy the fountains of energy that maintain civilization and
make life worth living and the world worth beautifying... We do
not have a problem that is to be solved by making repressive laws
and executing them. Nothing will be more disastrous. Society must
make life worth the living and the refining for the individual by
conditioning him to love and to seek the love-object in a manner
that reflects a constructive effect upon his fellow-men and by
giving him suitable opportunities. The virility of the automatic
apparatus is destroyed by excessive gormandizing or hunger, by
excessive wealth or poverty, by excessive work or idleness, by
sexual abuse or intolerant prudishness. The noblest and most
difficult art of all is the raising of human
thoroughbreds.»[8]
<--warning - avertissement | <--index | -->next chapter