It is well to remember that, even in the most advanced
of modern civilizations, whatever the degree of enlightenment
and the power enjoyed by the community as a whole,
it is quite possible for the individual to be condemned
to a life little different in essentials from that
of the lowest savage. He whose feverish existence
is devoted to the nerve-racking occupation of gambling
in stocks, who goes to his bed at night scheming how
he may with impunity exploit his fellow-man, and who
rises in the morning with a strained consciousness
of possible fluctuations in the market which may overwhelm
him in irretrievable disaster, lives in perils which
easily bear comparison with those which threaten the
precarious existence of primitive man. To masses
of men in civilized communities the problem of the
food supply is all-absorbing, and may exclude all
other and broader interests. The factory-worker,
with a mind stupefied by the mechanical repetition
of some few simple physical movements of no possible
interest to him except as resulting in the wage that
keeps him alive, has no share in such light as may
be scattered about him.
The control of the forces of nature brings about great
changes in human societies, but it may leave the individual,
whether rich or poor, a prey to dangers and anxieties,
engaged in an unequal combat with his environment,
absorbed in the satisfaction of material needs, undeveloped,
unreflective and most restricted in his outlook.
Of emancipation there can here be no question.
And a civilization in which the control of the forces
of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of
development may furnish a background to the darkest
of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which
callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality,
play their parts naked and unashamed. That some
men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions
live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others
have taken up from their environment the habit of
dining in evening dress, is to the moralist a relatively
insignificant detail. He looks at the man, and
he finds him in each case essentially the same—a
primitive and undeveloped creature who has not come
into his rightful heritage.
CHAPTER X
MAN’S SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
27. MAN IS ASSIGNED HIS PLACE.—The
old fable of a social contract, by virtue of which
man becomes a member of a society, agreeing to renounce
certain rights he might exercise if wholly independent,
and to receive in exchange legal rights which guarantee
to the individual the protection of life and property
and the manifold advantages to be derived from cooperative
effort, points a moral, like other fables.
