The Universal KinshipMoore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Philosophy
The Universal Kinship
Moore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Evolution; Human beings; Sociology
Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and
countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called
‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the
political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is
still a _sectionalist_, a _partialist_. He represents but a _stage_
in the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared
with the _universalist_, just as the savage is small compared with
the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’
‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big
for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make
the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that
grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live
and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared
with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the
present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends
longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in
space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the
existing generation and which are yet unborn—_that conception
which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and
immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each
generation linked to an unending posterity_.
Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of
conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather
than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help
knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim
or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not
different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as
robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the
same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and
belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal
and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or
to kill a sheep for his skin is _murder_, and those who do these
things or cause them to be done are _murderers_ just as actually as
highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their
guineas. If these things _seem untrue_ it is not because they _are_
untrue, but because those to whom they seem so _are unable to judge
conduct from the quadrupedal point of view_. If there were in this
world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are
more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard
themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a
fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should
look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’
these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few
generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to
realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not
only preposterous, but fiendish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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