The way the world is going

Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human life. “Human nature” never alters, we are assured; man in the Stone Age, any Stone Age, was exactly what he is now, or rather more so; he felt the same things; he imagined the same things; he travelled the same round; his fears, his hopes were identical. Save for a few superficialities, human life has always been the same and will always be the same, and neither the past nor the future can be allowed to cast a reflection by difference upon our satisfaction with the lives we lead to-day. Life as we know it is, in fact, the cream and the whole of existence. There was nothing very different behind us and there is nothing better ahead.

Quite similarly we protect our self-esteem by the persuasion that life under all sorts of circumstances and in all social positions is very much of a muchness. It gratifies our inherent grudgingness to think that life in a palace differs in no essential quality from life in our own cottage, that all the grapes above our heads are sour, and it eases our social conscience to reflect over the fire in the evening that the miner cramped in his seam or the out-of-work on tramp is so attuned to his level of existence that for all practical purposes he has just as much fun and contentment in life as we do. There is no real inequality, we assure ourselves, just as there is no progress. Our lives are as good as any lives can be. “Riches,” we all say, “cannot buy happiness,” and it seems hardly to touch that statement that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the completest enjoyment of existence who would be cripples or dead if they had not been able to command the services of expensive surgeons, undergo costly treatments or take imperative holidays at this or that crisis in their careers. In any other age, under any available conditions, they would be cripples or dead. But it makes us happier to deny that, just as it makes us happier to think that the life of our times will always be regarded with respect by posterity. Our heroes will always be the most heroic of heroes; the great men we have made our symbols will shine as stars of the first magnitude for ever; the art, the literature that delight us will last for “all time.” Our Newton is for ever; our Shakespeare is for ever; Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon are for ever; it is almost as if we were for ever.

This sort of consolation is so natural to most of us, so near to being a necessity, that to run over a few of the facts that make it absurd can rob hardly a soul of the pleasure of it. For everyday purposes we believe what we want to believe, and if we do not want to believe the truth, we do generally contrive to dispose of it as a sort of extravaganza. In that spirit most of us contemplate the fact that human life, the tune, the quality, the elements, are changing visibly before our eyes. Human life, as a matter of fact and not as a matter of sentiment, is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different. The scope of it and the feel of it and the spirit of it change. Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided, and comprehensive a process of change as ours to-day. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.

These papers, of which this is the first, will all consider some aspect or other of this great change that is going on. In them we will release our imaginations to the truth that we are things that pass, and do not leave our like, and that the ways and experiences of our children and our children’s children promise to be profoundly different from the life we lead at the present time. We will give a rest to our practical working belief in the security of things as they are. We will take the rest and refreshment of a few glances at the longer realities.

Man has always been a changing animal. The earliest human remains of a few score thousand years ago are of creatures so different that they are now regarded as a distinct species of Homo. Only within twenty or thirty thousand years does man seem to have been truly man. There is a disposition in some quarters to exaggerate the resemblance of the later Stone Age men to modern types, and to minimize the changes that have occurred since the onset of civilization. What is called the Cro-Magnon race was a race of big individuals, and, as in the case of their brutish predecessors, the Neanderthalers (Homo Neanderthalensis), that bigness extended to the brain case—in quantity at least their brains were above our present average—but they were beings of a coarser texture than the average modern, and there has been the most preposterous nonsense written about their artistic gifts and their general intelligence. They drew and carved—about as well as recent Bushmen have drawn and carved. They were so far “modern” in their art that at times it was strikingly obscene.

A brain is known by its fruits, and the total product of this Cro-Magnon brain, of which certain excited anthropologists have made a marvel, was the precarious life of painted, wandering savages. In build and skull type and general character this Cro-Magnon people differed from any race now flourishing in this world. Industrious search may find odd individuals here and there, in Central France and the Canary Isles, for example, rather after the Cro-Magnon type. They are rarely eminent individuals.

Throughout the whole historical period the races of men have been changing. In a recent lecture Sir Arthur Keith noted some of the differences between the average Briton of to-day and his predecessor of only a few centuries ago. The former has, for instance, a “scissor bite” of the teeth instead of an edge-to-edge bite; his face is finer and longer and his palate narrower; his nose is thinner and more prominent. These are the modifications wrought upon him by the comparatively slow and slight alterations in his circumstances, extended and altered dietary, increased clothing, and the like, that went on during the Middle Ages and the subsequent two or three centuries. They are unimportant in comparison with the modifications that are being pressed upon him by the changing circumstances of to-day.

Very few of us realize the enormous distortions that are now going on in the life cycle of the human animal. There is a biological revolution in progress—of far profounder moment than any French or Russian revolution that ever happened. The facts come dripping in to us, here a paragraph in a newspaper, there a book, now a chance remark; we are busy about our personal affairs and rarely find time to sit back and consider the immense significance of the whole continuing process. We forget this before we hear of that, and do not put two and two together.

Here, to begin with, is a specimen of the kind of quiet-looking fact that gets by most of us without betraying a shadow of its enormous implications. I find it mentioned casually in “Rejuvenation,” a book by Dr. Norman Haire, which I chance to be consulting upon a point I shall deal with later. It is that since the opening of the present century insurance statistics, presumably British—Dr. Haire does not say—show that the average length of human life within the scope of these statistics has been increased by twelve years. This, when we make the necessary inquiries, does not mean that people are living on to two-and-eighty instead of the traditional three score and ten, but that the hope of survival for every infant born in Britain has been increased in a brief quarter-century by about a third. It may expect to live four years for every three it could have hoped for if it had been born in 1900. That is the latest step in a series of changes that have been going on for a much longer period. It points forward to a time when nearly every child born into a civilized community will live to maturity. Because of late marriages and other more disputable causes, there are in every thousand individuals of a modern Atlantic population twenty or less infants of under one year, and upon that such populations can and do increase. This marks a quite novel rarity of children in the new world. To judge by Oriental cities in which medieval conditions still prevail and the tombstones in old English churches, something like fifty out of the thousand of our ancestral populations, before the day of our great-great-grandmothers, were infants under one year, of which thirty or more were doomed to die in childhood or adolescence. A lot of that thirty died in the first year; a lot of the survivors from the previous year were, at the same time, dying in their second year, and so on. Proportionately there were more ailing children in that vanished state of affairs among our populations than all the children in our community to-day. Upwards of half the human beings then alive lived what we should now regard as tragically foreshortened existences. And the rest of the population, the moiety that contrived to grow up, must have been mainly occupied in mothering, fathering, and nursing this superfluity of offspring.

As we examine the dry-looking figures of birth-rates and death-rates in the vital statistics that have become available in the past hundred years, and touch them with imaginative understanding, we begin to realize that the life of man so far, up to our own times—and of women far more so—has been almost wholly a sexual one; that—with the exception of a few priests, nuns, eccentrics, and unattractive women—the full round of life for every one who could achieve it, who wasn’t killed too soon, that is, was to grow up, to pair, to produce and sustain a large family, burying most of it, and so to decay and age and die. The whole adult life was consumed by sex and its consequences; the business of the family, of making it and of toiling for it, of weeping over the dead and beginning again, was the complete circle of life. Man was almost as sexual as a cat with its ever-recurring kittens. In the past the normal existence fell wholly into the frame of the family. Man was a family animal. Now this is no longer the case. Now family life becomes merely a phase in an ampler experience. Human life escapes beyond it.

Human life, which was formerly almost completely filled by that reproductive business, the family, has come very suddenly upon conditions under which the necessity for sexual preoccupations has enormously diminished. That means a biological revolution of quite primary quality. Women and men can no longer use themselves up, even if they would, in that immemorial round. The release of women—if we may regard it as a release and not as a deprivation—is conspicuously immense. Homo Sapiens, departing from the usual practice of the animal kingdom, is beginning to breed much later than his physical adolescence, to conserve all his offspring, and so to free and render available, for good or evil, an amount of individual time and energy unprecedented in the history of life. He has changed these cardinal points in his biological process in the last hundred years almost unawares. So far he is already a different sort of animal from his ancestors, or, indeed, from any species of vertebrated creature that has ever lived upon earth.

The change in conditions is all too recent to appear in any inherent quality. Adaptation to the new conditions has to be individual, just as education to the old conditions had to be. If the new conditions last long enough, a specific modification facilitating adaptation will go on, as Professor Mark Baldwin showed a decade or so ago, in his far too much neglected discussion of the evolutionary process, “Development and Evolution.” That will be an affair of many generations, but it will come. And no doubt it will be made evident by visible physical differences as well as physiological alterations.

But these current changes in the natural history of mankind during the last few decades, great as they are, pale before certain others that are now promising to alter the whole tenor of the life experience in quite another direction. A series of possibilities and practicabilities are being opened to us by recent research that amount in effect to a huge artificial extension of the fully adult stage of life. Homo Sapiens in the past was a creature who normally went to work at the end of childhood, became adult, married, had a large, distressful, onerous family, lost his teeth, lost the power of accommodating his eyes to distance, and came to an end. It is within quite a short period that man has eked out his failing powers with glasses and false teeth. “Nature,” says Sir Arthur Keith, “has worked out the evolution of the human family on a mean life tenure of forty-five years; she has hitherto run the human army on a short service system.” In the near future, on the contrary, man will not work until he is adult; he will marry much later; he will have a small, successful family; he will then go on for some score of years, it may be, before he exhibits any of the characteristic decadence of age. Instead of breaking down and being left by the way, the oculist, the dentist, the surgeon, will perform the necessary roadside repairs, and carry him on through a prolongation of his efficiency. But that is not all; something more than patching and carrying on is possible; his essential vitality can be, and will be, prolonged.

The researches on which our belief in the last and most hopeful of these possibilities is based—that is, the suspension of senility—are recent; the great bulk of them have been published since this century began, but they amount now to a substantial mass of entirely confirmatory evidence. Metchnikoff was one of the earliest to make the attack upon senile decay, and his dietetic suggestions and his schemes for a sort of hygienic evisceration have not proved of any great value, but since his time an increasing number of investigators, working chiefly upon the internal secretions of the animal body, have shown more and more convincingly that by simple and easy treatment it is possible to sustain a human being in a state of adult vigour far beyond Shakespeare’s sixth and seventh ages. Haire gives the results of a score of able workers in Germany, Britain, America, and other countries, Steinach, Lichtenstern, Voronoff, and their pupils, associates, and rivals, who have gradually built up certainties out of speculations and experiments. In the last month or so Professor Cavazzi, of Bologna, has published claims that greatly reinforce and extend these assurances. Adult vigour can be restored, and it can be kept up to at least the end of the normal life. It can probably be maintained for many years beyond that limit. At first it may be only a few prosperous and enterprising individuals, with access to the best and most skilful advice, who will extend the span of their activity in this way, but it is unlikely that “prolongation” will be allowed to remain the privilege of a small class. The average active human life, we may conclude, in the quite near future, will be not only unencumbered but prolonged, in comparison with any but exceptionally sturdy and lucky lives in the past.

We seem to be passing on now towards a state of human society in which there will be no children but hopeful and active children, and though many people will be full of years, none will be “aged”; a state of society, in fact, in which the average man and woman will be of riper years, far maturer in outlook and far less deeply immersed in sexual and family affairs. It will be a community of grown-up people to an extent quite beyond our present community. In most of our forecasts and imaginings of times to come, we are apt to disregard this biological revolution which is in progress, and the mental and social consequences that must follow upon it. It seems to indicate the possibility of a world with a different and probably a graver emotional tone, with an art and a literature much less obsessed by the love story and the elementary adventures of life, and with a political and social life less passionate and impatient and more circumspect. It is not a metaphor, it is a statement of material fact that mankind is growing up, and that we are passing towards a more distinctly adult life as the main stretch of existence, in comparison with the feverishly youthful and transitory life of the past.

The development of the speculations that arise out of this statement would carry us far beyond the scope of the present article. Later I hope to return to some of the most striking of them. But the great mass of current discussion about moral codes and standards of conduct, about the ethics and sentiment of married and business and religious life and the like, this searching and probing into fundamental things which make our contemporary literature and journalism so different from that of the last century, arises, I believe, very largely out of a need, felt rather than recognized, of altering and adjusting our working habits and traditional methods to this very imperfectly apprehended change in human biology, this shifting of the centre point of life from the twenties up towards the fifties, this rapid and disconcerting change, in the course of a generation or so, of Homo Sapiens into a more completely developed, longer living, and more persistently vital animal.

9 January, 1927.