Chapter XI: Edward Carpenter's Indictment of Civilization

Equally must we guard against the fallacy of attributing only the beneficent effects of civilization to its inherent principle, while we trace all the evils which have arisen in its train to extrinsic causes--to human nature, or to superficial and local obstructions. This word of warning brings me back to Mr. Edward Carpenter's essay on _Civilization: Its Cause and Cure_; for when I first read it he appeared to me to exaggerate out of all proportion the evils in modern life as compared with the good in it: especially did I feel that he erred in that he accounted the evils as permanent and organic characteristics of the civilizing process itself, and believed that they must increase with its development and could not be eradicated except with its extinction. During the last twenty-six years, however, I have learned a thing or two. I have not lost one jot or tittle of my early faith in man, and I have even gained fresh hope for a speedy issue of the human race out of most of its sufferings and sins; but I have gained this fresh hope only because I have been drawn by wider and closer observation of economic events--and especially of the new developments of trade and politics the world over--to the conclusion that the evils, however great, are to be traced to the false principle that animates the civilizing process, and that they will fall away of themselves when once that principle has been exchanged for another that is already well known, and which, as I have remarked, began four centuries ago to disintegrate the established order.

Carpenter's indictment of civilization seems to me incontrovertible. The best way for me to present it briefly will be by means of a number of typical quotations, in which he indicates the nature of disease and shows that such is the state--mental, physical, social, and moral--induced in man by the organization of enforced labor and the whole of the adopted method of making citizens out of wild beasts:--

When we come to analyze the conception of disease, physical or
mental, in society or the individual, it evidently means ... loss
of unity. Health, therefore, should mean unity. ... The idea should
be a positive one--a condition of the body in which it is an
entirety, a unity, a central force maintaining that condition; and
disease being the break-up--or break-down--of that entirety into
multiplicity.... Thus in a body, the establishment of an
insubordinate centre--a boil, a tumor, the introduction and spread
of a germ with innumerable progeny throughout the system, the
enlargement out of all reason of an existing organ--means disease.
In the mind, disease begins when any passion asserts itself as an
independent centre of thought and action.... What is a taint in the
mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has started the
original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human system.
The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct
threats, menaces made against the central authority--against the
Man himself. For the man must rule, or disappear; it is impossible
to imagine a man presided over by a Stomach--a walking Stomach,
using hands, feet, and all the other members merely to carry it
from place to place, and serve its assimilative mania. So of the
Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in no
organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all
organs, and assigning them their parts to play. Disease, then, in
mind or body, is ... the abeyance of a central power and the growth
of insubordinate centres--life in each creature being conceived of
as a continual exercise of energy or conquest, by which external or
antagonistic forces (or organisms) are brought into subjection and
compelled into the service of the creature, or are thrown off as
harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we find that plants or
animals, when in good health, have a remarkable power of throwing
off the attacks of any parasites which incline to infest them;
while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the same. A
rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey to
the aphis, though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to
no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in
the field are weakly from want of water, the entire crop is
sometimes destroyed by the turnip-fly, which then multiplies
enormously; but if a shower or two of rain comes before much damage
is done, the plant will then grow vigorously, its tissues become
more robust and resist the attacks of the fly, which in its turn
dies. Late investigations seem to show that one of the functions of
the white corpuscles of the blood is to devour disease-germs and
bacteria present in the circulation,--thus absorbing these
organisms into subjection to the central life of the body,--and
that for this object they congregate in numbers toward any part of
the body which is wounded or diseased.