Handbook of Ethical Theory - George Stuart Fullerton (chrome ebook reader txt) 📗

24. THE STRUGGLE WITH NATURE.—It is not possible to disentangle from each other and to consider quite separately the diverse elements which enter into the environment of man and which influence his development. His environment is two-fold, material and social; but his material setting may affect his social relations, and it is social man, not the individual as such, that achieves a conquest over nature. However, it is possible, and it is convenient, to direct attention successively upon the one and the other aspect of his environment.

At every stage of his development, man must have food, shelter, some means of defense. If they are not easily obtainable, he must strain every nerve to attain them. Are his powers feeble and his intelligence undeveloped, it may tax all his efforts to keep himself alive and to continue the race in any fashion. The rules which determine his conduct seem rather the dictates of a stern necessity than the products of anything resembling free choice.

He who is lashed by hunger and haunted by fear, who cannot provide for the remote future, but must accept good or ill fortune as the accident of the day precipitates his lot upon him, lives and must live a life at but one remove from that of the brute. In such a life the instincts of man attain to a certain expression, but intelligence plays a feeble part. The man remains a slave, under dictation, and moved by the dread of immediate disaster. For an interest in what is remote in time and place, for the extension of knowledge for its own sake, for the development of activities which have no direct bearing upon the problem of keeping him alive and fed, there can be little place. One must be assured that one can live, and live in reasonable security and physical well-being, before the problem of enriching and embellishing life can fairly present itself as an important problem. One must be set free before one can deliberately set out to shape one’s life after an ideal.

Not that a severe struggle with physical nature is necessarily and of itself a curse. It may call out man’s powers, stimulate to action, and result in growth and development. Where a prodigal nature amply provides for man’s bodily necessities without much effort on his part, the result may be, in the absence of other stimulating influences giving rise to new wants, a paralyzing slothfulness, an animal passivity and content. This may be observed in whole peoples highly favored by soil and climate, and protected by their situation from external dangers. It may be observed in certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In the midst of a strenuous activity adapted to call out the best intellectual and moral powers of man, they may remain unaffected by it, incapable of effort, unintelligent, slothful, the weak and passive recipients of what is brought to them by the labor of others.

But the struggle with physical nature, sometimes a spur to progress and issuing in triumph, may also issue in defeat. Nature may be too strong for man, or, at least, for man at an early stage of his development. She may thwart his efforts and dwarf his life. It was through no accident that the Athenian state rose and flourished upon the shores of the Aegean; no such efflorescence of civilization could be looked for among the Esquimaux of the frozen North.

25. THE CONQUESTS OF THE MIND.—Physical environment counts for much, but the physical environment of man is the same as that of the creatures below him who seem incapable of progress. It is as an intelligent being that he succeeds in bringing about ever new and more complicated adjustments to his environment.

From the point of view of his animal life in many respects inferior to other creatures—less strong, less swift, less adequately provided with natural means of defense, less protected by nature against cold, heat and the inclemencies of the weather, endowed with instincts less unerring, less prolific, through a long period of infancy helpless and dependent— man nevertheless survives and prospers.

He has conquered the strong, overtaken the swift, called upon his ingenuity to furnish him with means of defence. He has defied cold and heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the torrid sun of the tropics. Intelligence has supplemented instinct and has guaranteed the survival of the individual and of the race.

It has even protected man against himself, against the very dangers arising out of his immunity from other dangers. A gregarious creature, increasing and multiplying, he would be threatened with starvation did not his intelligent control over nature furnish him with a food-supply which makes it possible for vast numbers of human beings to live and thrive on a territory of limited extent. Moreover, he has compassed those complicated forms of social organization which reveal themselves in cities and states, solving problems of production, transportation and distribution before which undeveloped man would stand helpless.

And from the problem of living at all he has passed to that of living well. He has created new wants and has satisfied them. He has built up for himself a rich and diversified life, many of the activities of which appear to have the remotest of bearings upon the mere struggle for existence, but the exercise of which gives him satisfaction. Thus, the primitive instinct of curiosity, once relatively aimless and insignificant, has developed into the passion for systematic knowledge and the persistent search for truth; the rudimentary aesthetic feeling which is revealed in primitive man, and traces of which are recognizable in creatures far lower in the scale, has blossomed out in those elaborate creations, which, at an enormous expense of labor and ingenuity, have come to enrich the domains of literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. Civilized man is to a great extent occupied with the production of what he does not need, if need be measured by what his wants are at a lower stage of his development. But these same things he needs imperatively, if we measure his need by his desires when they have been multiplied and their scope indefinitely widened.

26. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE AND THE WELL-BEING OF MAN.—It is evident that the successful exploitation of the resources of material nature is of enormous significance to the life of man. It may bring emancipation; it offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to reflect, that the development of the arts and sciences, the increase of wealth and of knowledge, must in the nature of things increase human happiness.

One is tempted, further, to maintain that an advance in civilization must imply an advance in moralization. Man has a moral nature which exhibits itself to some degree at every stage of his development. What more natural to conclude than that, with the progressive unfolding of his intelligence, with increase in knowledge, with some relaxation of the struggle for existence which pits man against his fellow-man, and subordinates all other considerations to the inexorable law of self-preservation, his moral nature would have the opportunity to show itself in a fuller measure?

When we compare man at his very lowest with man at his highest such judgments appear to be justified. But man is to be found at all sorts of intermediate stages.

His knowledge may be limited, the development of the arts not far advanced, his control over nature far from complete, and yet he may live in comparative security and with such wants as he has reasonably well satisfied. His competition with his fellows may not be bitter and absorbing. The simple life is not necessarily an unhappy life, if the simplicity which characterizes it be not too extreme. In judging broadly of the significance for human life of the control over nature which is implied in the advance of civilization, one must take into consideration several points of capital importance:

(1) The multiplication of man’s wants results, not in happiness, but in unhappiness, unless the satisfaction of those wants can be adequately provided for.

(2) The effort to satisfy the new wants which have been called into being may be accompanied by an enormous expenditure of effort. Where the effort is excessive man becomes again the slave of his environment. His task is set for him, and he fulfills it under the lash of an imperious necessity. The higher standard may become as inexorable a task-master as was the lower.

(3) It does not follow that, because a given community is set free from the bondage of the daily anxiety touching the problem of living at all, and may address itself deliberately to the problem of living well, it will necessarily take up into its ideal of what constitutes living well all those goods upon which developed man is apt to set a value. A civilization may be a grossly material one, even when endowed with no little wealth. With wealth comes the opportunity for the development of the arts which embellish life, but that opportunity may not be embraced. Man may be materially rich and spiritually poor; he may allow some of his faculties to lie dormant, and may lose the enjoyments which would have been his had they been developed. The Athenian citizen two millenniums ago had no such mastery over the forces of nature as we possess today. Nevertheless, he was enabled to live a many-sided life beside which the life of the modern man may appear poor and bare. It is by no means self-evident that the good of man consists in the multitude of the material things which he can compel to his service.

(4) Moreover, it does not follow that, because the sum of man’s activities, his behavior, broadly taken, is vastly altered, by an increase in his control over his material environment, the result is an advance in moralization. An advance in civilization—in knowledge, in the control over nature’s resources, in the evolution of the industrial and even of the fine arts—does not necessarily imply a corresponding ethical advance on the part of a given community. New conditions, brought about by an increase of knowledge, of wealth, of power, may result in ethical degeneration.

What constitutes the moral in human behavior, what marks out right or wrong conduct from conduct ethically indifferent, we have not yet considered. But no man is wholly without information in the field of morals, and we may here fall back upon such conceptions as men generally possess before they have evolved a science of morals. In the light of such conceptions a simple and comparatively undeveloped culture may compare very favorably with one much higher in the scale of civilization.

In the simplest groups of human beings, justice, veracity and a regard to common