IV (2)

In following out the psychical argument against regarding nations as final social areas, I seem to have wandered very far from the biological basis, the alleged necessity of maintaining conflicts between nations for purposes of "natural selection." In reality I have come round precisely to the point of divergence. Assuming it were possible to enthrone the will of the peoples and so to secure institutions of internationalism with a suspension of war, would the individuality of a nation suffer, would it lose vigour, become less efficient and perish? Is the maintenance of physical conflict essential to the "natural selection" of nations?

Turn to the suspension of the cruder physical struggle which takes place in the evolution of tribal or national solidarity. As such national organisation becomes stronger and more skilful the ravages of intestine strife, starvation, and certain diseases cease to be selective instruments, and the kind of individual fitness which was tested by them is superseded; the vast expenditure of individual energy formerly engaged in protecting life and in securing necessaries of life is reduced to insignificant dimensions; but the struggle for individual life is not abated, it is simply shifted on to higher planes than that of bare animal existence, nourishment, and propagation. Instead of struggling for these simpler vital ends, individuals now struggle with all the extra energy spared from the earlier struggles for other ends of an enlarged and more complex life, for comfort and wealth, for place and personal honour, for skill, knowledge, character, and even higher forms of self-expression, and for services to their fellow-men, with whom they have identified themselves in that expanded individuality we term altruism or public spirit.

Individuality does not suffer but greatly gains by the suppression of the lower struggle; there is more energy, greater scope for its expression, a wider field of close competitors; and higher and more varied forms of fitness are tested and evoked. It is not even true that the struggle ceases to be physical; the strain and the support of the higher forms of struggle, even in the topmost intellectual and moral planes, are largely physical; the health and nervous energy which take part in the struggles of the law or literature or on any intellectual arena are chief requisites if not the supreme determinant of success. In all the higher forms of struggle an elimination of the physically unfit is still maintained, though the criteria of physical unfitness are not quite the same as in the primitive human struggles. How arbitrary are the convenient distinctions between physical, intellectual, and moral qualities and defects is nowise better illustrated than in the elaborate methods which modern complex civilisation evolves for the detection, degradation, and final extinction of bad stock whose "degeneracy" is attested not less by physical than by mental and moral stigmata. The struggle for physical fitness never flags, but the physical forms part of a higher and more complex test of character determined by a higher standard of social utility. The point is this: national government, or State socialism, using the term in its broad sense, as a coercive and educative force, does not, in so far as it is wisely exercised, diminish the individual struggle, repress individual vigour, reduce the arena for its display. It does just the opposite; it quickens and varies the struggle; by equalising certain opportunities it keeps a fairer ring, from which chance or other factors alien to personal fitness are excluded; it admits on more equal terms a larger number of competitors, and so furnishes a better test of fitness and a more reliable selection of the fittest.

Professor Pearson rightly urges that truly enlightened national government will insist on mending the slow painful, and irregular elimination of bad stock which goes on through progressive degeneracy by substituting some rational control of parentage, at least to the extent of preventing through public education, or if necessary by law, the propagation of certain surely recognised unfitnesses.

Does a nation thus firmly planted in rational self-government, with individual competition within its ranks conducted most keenly upon a wide variety of different fields, furnishing the keenest incentive to the education, and display of every kind of personal originality, really require a maintenance of the crude form of physical struggle with other nations in order to maintain its character and progress? If individuality does not disappear with the removal of the cruder struggle for life within the nation, why should the valid force of nationality disappear if a corresponding change takes place in the nature of international conflict?

Biology furnishes no reason for believing that the competition among nations must always remain a crude physical struggle, and that the substitution of "rational" for "natural" selection among individual members of a nation cannot be extended to the selection of nations and of races.