OUR COLLECTIVE STUPIDITY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 98

OUR COLLECTIVE STUPIDITY.

THE NECESSITY FOE FOOLKILLING.

Dr F. C. S. Schiller, M.A., D.Sc, has a striking article in the Eugenics Review, in which he points out our collective stupidity and the need for a rational policy of society. "For all her 'uniformity,' " he says, "Nature never repeats herself, and it seems that somewhere at her core there must he an exuberant well-spring of novelty that irrigates the dull expanses of routine." —Nature's Prodigality.— He quotes Professor Wm. James's saying that: "Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to accompany it. Without too much, you cannot have enough of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of" bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens in. either kind being realised. The gold dust comes to birth with the quartz sand all round it." "True, most true," comments Dr Schiller ; "but is it anything even a philosopher could call rational? Surely the world must contain also contrivances for ridding itself of the superfluity of rubbish it engenders. It must contain apparatus for fool-killing, scavenging, and purifying itself; for discerning the precious and preferring it. And, of course, it does, if we will but see it. —What Societies Can Do.— "Societies are surely subject to the Law of Natural Selection as wholes, just as are their individual members," continues Dr Schiller. "By pursuing a policy, a society, like an individual, can save or destroy itself, and in either case the difference will depend on the ends it chooses and the intelligent adjustment of means thereto. Why should it not be possible, therefore, for a society to operate similarly upon its own constituents? Why should it not determine its own composition, the sort of members it con-* sidefs good and the means by which it may obtain them, then take steps to assure their production? -r-Unsystematic Social Selection. — ? 'We are not advocating any new and unheard-of principle in demanding that this social selection should be more efficient, systematic, and. intelligent than, it •actually is. For at present nations aTe sd imperfectly organised that the process, of social selection is as a whole unsyete* matic and haphazard. The selection is

largely left to individuals, with the idea, presumably, that the interplay of individual egoisms will issue in social benefits. But the individuals are not taught that by their private choices of what is pleasant or conducive to their personal purposes they are moulding and perhaps altering the nature of the nation which supports them. They have not in consequence any consciousness of social responsibility in the exercise of their tastes. —Effect of Golf Instead of Sermon.— "The London business man who prefers Sunday golf to a sermon is not aware that he is thereby contributing to the survival of the caddy as against the preacher, nor does the man who buys a ticket for musical comedy instead of for a play of Shakespeare realise that he is aiding the degradation of artistic taste, nor is the ordinary citizen conscious that by attending race meetings he may accelerate, and by attending meetings of the Eugenics Society he may arrest, the decadence of his country. There is, in short, very little reflection on the social consequence of individual preference. —Nations Which Do Not Think.— "Yet individual thoughtfulness is far greater than collective. Collectively the nation, and those who profess to consider its interests, do not seem to think at all. Else it would hardly happen that the ends aimed at in the national self-selection should be so often incapable of withstanding the least reflection, and that the means adopted should so often defeat the in view. The collective stupidity even of the most intelligent and civilised societies is stupendous. They seem habitually to organise themselves so as to fester what they detest and to destroy what they admire. "A society will profess to believe in human equality, and yet maintain enormous differences of social position. It will destroy distinctions of rank and thereby leave the field open for the most insidious and irresponsible form of power, that of plutocracy. Its democratic jealousy will debar the upper classes from all access to honourable and useful careers of jocial service, and it will thereupon complain of the idle rich. It will try to cure poverty by, almsgiving, and to restrain, animalism by preaching celibacy. —Some National Stupidities. — "It will turn the law into the most powerful engine of injustice. It will organise churches for the promotion of the religious spirit, and be astonished when they proceed to fossilise, and crush it. It will set up professional teachers of various branches of knowledge, and permit their pedantry and futile formalism to make every form of learning seem detestable, and then join them in deploring the laziness of youth. It will set up schools for the teaching of games, and make these compulsory, while work becomes optional. It will make all its games professional, and turn, all its professions into games for dilettantes. —Supreme Social Fatuity.— "The supreme instance of social fatuity is the fact that in all civilised societies the rate of reproduction is lowest in the highest and highest in the lower (though not always in the very lowest) classes. For what does this mean, but that the social order operates so as to discriminate against the very qualities which it deems most valuable? —Man Not Yet Master of His Destiny.— "The natural result is that, though there is an enormous amount of self-selec-tion continually going on in societies, now favouring one set of qualities and now another, there is no unity of plan or purpose controlling the whole, and consequently no definite tendency or intelligent direction.. Hence the* whole process is of the lower and non-intelligent type, which we call Natural Selection, and not consciously selective. Man does not exercise the same intelligent control over his own development as he does over that of .the other beings (such as cultivated plants and domesticated animals) in whom he is interested. He is not yet master and maker of his own destiny. _ "Are we still collectively too stupid and too ignorant to think out a consistent scheme of a good life which a nation can safely enjoin on its members ? so, it might certainly be better to let ' Nature,' meaning thereby the existing habits of things, blindly take its course, than to attempt to direct it. —Maximise the Good. — "It is true, no doubt, that the world is made for the average man; but the average man should never be allowed to forget that it was not made by him, and that it left to his own devices he would rot in the ruts of routine. "Theoretically, therefore, it is an ideal, which every society should set before itself and inculcate into its members, to conceive a social order which will ever be intent to maximise the good and to minimise the bad in the conditions of human existence.. And, having conceived this ideal, it should consciously strive to realise it, ordering all its institutions and selecting all its types so as to provide it. —Essence of the Social Ideal.— "To be of practical value a social ideal must differ from those of nearly all Utopians in two essential particulars : (1) It must be from the outset intended for a progressive world, and so must itself be capable of progressive self-correction and improvement, and (2) it must be applicable to the existing order, and must not postulate a revolution in human nature and institutions as a preliminary to its exercising any influence. For the operation of any ideal must necessarily be on the actual order; hence its application to the actual will have to be gradual aaid discreet. For it is folly to ignore the potency of Habit; the inertia of ages cannot be undone in the day of reckon-

—Chances for Exceptional Men.— “The answer to the objection that there would be no place for individual initiative in the Eugenical State is simply that the social ideal can and should work through and on individuals, and that a reasonablyorganised society would leave far more to them than does the existing order, and would utilise individuals of exceptional ability far sooner and far better, £or, as things go, society hears of the exceptional man about the time when he is getting too old to render the social services he could have rendered 30 years before. The world knows nothing of its greatest men because by the time it knows something about them they have ceased to be the greatest. The Eugenical State, we may reasonably hope, would alter all that. —ln the Eugenical State. — “It would contemplate the selection of the fit, not as the premature promotion of youngsters who can wait, but as something vitally concerning its own welfare. And it would possess a definite ideal and standard of value whereby it would discriminate far better than at present between the valuable and the noxious departures from the current types. As things are, a large proportion of social reforms’ are fraudulent or- illusory or retrograde; and, as nobody has any clear idea as to where we are going or ought to go, the social valuation of innovations usually goes wrong, at least at first. Hence the best thing we can do is to let the tares grow up with the wheat, lest we destroy them both together. But the greater our ability to discriminate between them, the freer would be the field left open to the wheat. , “Our leading politicians are sure to be the last persons to be converted to the necessity for a eugenical policy,” continues Dr Schiller; but he adds: By stimulating reflection upon the desirability of agreement, the Eugenical State may gradually attain all of it it requires, while the elasticity of its structure will always be ample to protect it against breaking strains in practice. . •—Revise the Social Status. — “One of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revi-. sion of social status. It must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. And it must induce a greater feeling of responsibility about the popular valuations and trans-valuations of functions, which are constantly exalting the position of the caterers to individual pleasures above the consolidators of man’s permanent welfare. It is not good for a society that a cricketer or a prize-fighter or a dancer should be esteemed and rewarded more highly than the man who discovers a cure for malaria or cancer.” Dr Schiller “concludes with considerable confidence that National S elf-selection is not impossible because it is actual, and that it is capable and deserving of being turned into a great instrument for good.”