Chapter VIII: Two Instances of Civilization

We may come to wonder the less at this adverse judgment when we have considered two instances of the effects which the highest types of civilization have had upon the masses of mankind who were brought under its sway. Take ancient Egypt and ancient Athens. Go back to the building of the pyramids. Although they are among the earliest monuments of civilization, they are yet among the most marvellous illustrations of the mastery of the human mind over matter. Scarcely three had passed of the ten thousand years which have constituted the epoch that superseded barbarism, before these vast tombs, or whatever they are, began to be erected. Lost in admiration as he stands before the Great Pyramid, how can any one but resent the suggestion that the social order, which made it at last possible, was a disease, preying upon the body and spirit of men?

And yet, if one turns from it to examine that organization of human labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great fissures that rend the whole mass and one hears the foundations groan. To speak thus is only an imaginative way of saying, what all the anthropologists and archaeologists tell us, that to the building of any one of the great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is no ground for supposing that the feel of the whip, when the back of an Egyptian slave began to bleed, was different from what we should suffer if the stroke fell now on us: nor that cries of pain were any the less natural then. And we must remember that, according to the unanimous opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one of the essentials of civilization. Picturesque and vivid, but not exaggerated, is the saying of the author of that able book, _The Nemesis of Nations_: "Civilization begins with the crack of the whip." Lord Cromer quotes this dictum in his work on Egypt as giving an epitome of the kind of power behind the civilizing process as it has always manifested itself in the land of the Nile; and then, lest those of his readers who live in the glass house of English history should commit the ridiculous sin of unconscious hypocrisy, he gently but firmly reminds us that many inhumanities of a similar spirit, especially towards offenders against the laws of property, were not suppressed in England till the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In these comments of mine upon Egypt, I may seem to have appealed to your sentiment of humanity; but I have never for a moment forgotten that no instance from history can prove civilization a disease except to those who are intuitively on the side of the man instead of the microbe, of the people instead of the pyramid. Such instances, however, are of value in bringing those who listen to them to a clear self-consciousness of their own primal preference--and that is a distinct gain, even when the preference is for the pyramid.

It cannot be denied that the masses of Egypt were a sacrifice--and not willingly--to civilization. In the preceding periods of savagery and barbarism, there had been no such enslavement; the organization of enforced labor had not proceeded so far. The crack of the whip was still as yet intermittent. According to Lewis Morgan, civilization is the progress of man from beast to citizen. Well, until ten thousand years ago, man was more beast than citizen; but, happily for him, among the beasts of the field there is nothing parallel to this organization of labor through the will of one by means of the stroke of the courbash upon the backs of the many.

Some students who shrink in horror from the Egyptian type of civilization plead nevertheless for the type which was manifested in ancient Greece. Let us go, then, to Athens in the age of Pericles, that period of her glory concerning which Professor Freeman somewhere says that to have lived but ten years in the midst of it would have been worth a hundred of modern mediocrity. Who can think otherwise as he recalls the Athenian drama, eloquence and philosophy, architecture and sculpture? But when one turns to the organization of society, as it was in Athens, to find out at what human price the splendor was bought of that dazzling decade when the Parthenon was being built, one finds that of the inhabitants of that City of the Light scarcely more than thirty thousand were free men, while two hundred thousand were slaves. Again, the living foundations groan! And if our heart, by its nature, insists on going out to the sacrificed, our delight in Athenian _Kultur_ will be henceforth shot through with anguish. Our only way of escape will be by absorbing Nietzsche into our system until the poison paralyzes our impulse to pity. But you may think that if we shift our investigation, we shall find relief. Let us enquire, then, into the position of woman instead of the man-slave in Athens. Alas! we are now confronted with facts which reveal, on the part of one whole half of Greek mankind, the surrender of their distinctive humanity to civilization, to that process whereby sentient beings are transformed from beasts into citizens. Professor Westermarck sums up the attitude of civilization to women in these terms:--

Nowhere else has the difference in culture between men and women
been so immense as in the fully-developed Greek civilization. The
lot of a wife in Greece was retirement and ignorance. She lived in
almost absolute seclusion, in a separate part of the house,
together with her female slaves, deprived of all the educating
influence of male society, and having no place at those public
spectacles which were the chief means of culture.

He then calls attention to the startling absence from the whole of Greek literature of any evidence that any man who had received the training which Greek culture gave ever fell in love with any woman. In his chapter on the "Subjection of Wives," Professor Westermarck further says:--

The status of wives is in various respects connected with the ideas
held about the female sex in general. Woman is commonly looked upon
as a slight, dainty, and relatively weak creature, destitute of all
nobler qualities. Especially among nations more advanced in culture
she is regarded as intellectually and morally inferior to man. In
Greece, in the historic age, the latter recognized in her no other
end than to minister to his pleasure and to become the mother of
his children.

This author finds the Greek subjection of wives, as you will have noted, no exception to the universal rule as to the relation of culture to womanhood. After speaking of the status of woman among the ancient Hebrews, and the position assigned her by that greatest instrument of European civilization called the Roman Catholic Church, he repeats his generalization in these terms:--

Progress in civilization has exercised an unfavorable influence on
the position of woman by widening the gulf between the sexes, as
the higher culture was almost exclusively the prerogative of the
men. Moreover, religion, and especially the great religions of the
world, has contributed to the degradation of the female sex by
regarding woman as unclean.