A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical PrinciplesClapperton, Jane Hume
Philosophy
A Vision of the Future, Based on the Application of Ethical Principles
Clapperton, Jane Hume
Ethics, Evolutionary; Social evolution
main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and
Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its
greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in
individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to
guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker,
nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed
causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been
instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and
pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and
civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political
supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s
workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue
accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is
towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the
joys and blessings of universal peace.
But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general
brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common
enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are
rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to
hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all
strongly in evidence.
The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no
genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we
consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race
inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for
surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.
In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not
begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during
our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no
subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than
on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed
by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the
prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares
to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to
picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for
future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of
others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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