The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the
chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the
chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier
life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as "animal among animals," and
despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape
ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing,
ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human
nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and
especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure
mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of
every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation,
leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our
seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have
begun the course of our truly human evolution we have come an immensely
long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all
to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition
in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection
into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of
elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning
days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that
we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical
characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits,
and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity;
and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made
possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but
concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters,
which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech,
writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one
generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in
the race.
This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of
the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid
principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly
swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today
contains all the present expression and future promise of man's higher
evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man's natural traits,
and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its
natural validity in the great strength it adds to man's position in
Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of
human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of
natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate
into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance
and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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