Chapter V: Man Versus Civilization

Now to my biological analogy: It was recently my privilege to be conducted over the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. You will remember that to it some millions of dollars have been assigned, for the purpose of discovering the cause and cure of bacterial diseases. In one department of the Institute a Japanese professor showed under the rays of the ultra-microscope specimens of a remarkable bacillus, the existence of which he had been the first to detect. It was that kind of bacillus which, if it is present in the marrow of a man's spinal cord, induces a state of the body that is called locomotor-ataxy. This state is one in which the man who manifests it is unable to control properly the movements of his feet and legs. He has lost command from the supreme cerebral centre; the lower nerve ganglia seem to have become insubordinate and to act on their own initiative. But is locomotor-ataxy a disease? Clearly your answer will depend upon whether you are on the side of the man or the microbe. If you sympathize with the man and are thinking of him, it is a disease; but if your heart is with the microbe there in the spinal cord, the locomotor-ataxy will be to you life and health abundant, and that not only for the individual specimen whom you pick out for observation, but for his whole family which, as the ataxy advances, reproduces itself proportionately, and with an inconceivable rapidity.

What is to determine whether you are on the side of the man or the microbe? Surely the constitutional bent of your emotional and volitional preference. It is not a matter for the science of fact to consider. Mere intellect, mere reason, knows nothing of health and disease, unless it assumes this distinction as its starting-point. It knows only the order of sequences. Suppose, then, we were to find that civilization had pitted itself against Man, so that it was a case of Man _versus_ Civilization, as Herbert Spencer conceived an antagonism between Man and the State. Should we not be compelled, in order to decide what condition of things was one of health, to open up conscious relations with our deepest trend of heart and will, and find out whether we flowed with humanity or with civilization? Nor would there be any escape from the necessity of remaining true to our own trend and favoring whatever flowed the same way. In case of a clash between the social order and humanity, the health of each is to the other as a disease and, therefore, the question inevitably arises, "Which is in our judgment to be preserved?" and each one's answer must depend on whether he finds himself after full deliberation irresistibly drawn to the one side or the other. Civilization may be to man as the microbe to the locomotor-ataxy subject; but innate civilizationists would delight in the surrender of humanity to the social order. To them what would humanity be but civilization's opportunity, its habitat, its food-supply? I am saying that, to prove trade immoral it is not enough to show that man is a sacrifice to the economic order; you would be required also to demonstrate that man ought not to be sacrificed to any social order, that he must always be the final end, and never a mere means. But that is exactly what you can never demonstrate to any one who is not innately, spiritually, naturally, on the side of man against all other objects of interest. I mean that there is no arguing with any one who constitutionally hesitates to side with man. You might pray for such a one; but it would be folly to reason with him, for the foundation is not in him upon which your reasonings could mount. All this seems to me necessary to say, because I get the impression from books on political economy that most writers and readers first dehumanize themselves as a prerequisite to a discussion of the morals of trade.