Chapter XII: Carpenter's False Remedy

To cast Carpenter's metaphor, according to which civilization is a thing to be cured, into the form of an analogy, we might say that the civilizing process has been to man what the bringing indoors is to a rose-tree, or the coming of a drought to the turnips in a field. And I ask you to assume with me that this is so; as it will help me to get on with my argument, which, as it advances, will reveal more and more whether it be inherently weak or strong. Nor do I anticipate much opposition to Carpenter's mere indictment of civilization. At least it is only when he outlines his remedy that my own protest is aroused. And I suspect that many a reader will feel with me, that while to cure a rose-tree or a turnip plant may require only the taking of the one out of doors again and the falling of the kindly showers upon the other, the restoration of civilized man to health would necessitate something more than a mere return on his part to Nature and savagery. Indeed, such a return may be altogether impossible, and even undesirable. In my judgment, man having (as Carpenter himself points out) become "self-conscious," can never go back to Nature, since he is no longer the same being he was when he emerged from his more primitive state. Yet what Carpenter recommends so far as he recommends any cure, is exactly this: Human beings are to wear less clothes--if any at all; man will again live out of doors, for the most part, instead of in houses; he will return to the eating of uncooked food--mainly fruit and grains; he will begin to feel himself one again with Nature; he is to lose his sense of sin; every man will do the work he likes--and presumably not do the work he does not like. "As to External Government and Law, they will disappear," says Carpenter, "for they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes of Inward Government and Order." In religion, there is to be a like return to Nature. The author says:--

And when the civilization-period has passed away, the old
Nature-religion--perhaps greatly grown--will come back.... Our
Christian ceremonial is saturated with sexual and astronomical
symbols; and long before Christianity existed, the sexual and
astronomical were the main forms of religion.... On the high tops
once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory
of the human form and the great processions of the stars....

Carpenter sees signs already here and there of the beginning of this return:--

The present competitive society is more and more rapidly becoming a
mere dead formula and husk within which the outlines of the new and
_human_ society are already discernible. Simultaneously, and as if
to match this growth, a move toward Nature and Savagery is for the
first time taking place from within, instead of being forced upon
Society from without. The Nature-movement, begun years ago in
Literature and Art, is now among the more advanced sections of the
civilized world rapidly realizing itself in actual life, going so
far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex
products of Civilization, and developing among others into a gospel
of salvation by sandals and sunbaths!

In order to help us to judge aright whether a return to Nature and a primitive communism would restore to man that centrality and health of which we assume that civilization has deprived him, we should do well to consider what it was that happened ten thousand years ago and proved so sinister in changing the relation of men and women to the community in which they lived, and to the physical universe. But of that event we cannot gain an adequate appreciation unless we view it in perspective along the line of analogous events, some six, which had occurred from time to time during the ninety thousand years preceding.