IV. The Natural Environment and the Artificial or Social Environment

The action of the environment is not merely direct, it is exercised not merely upon the organ which functions, upon the hand in the case of the pianist and the ditch digger, upon the moral sense in that of the honest woman and prostitute; it is again indirect and reacts upon all the organs. This generalisation of the action of the environment which Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire designated under the characteristic name of subordination of the organs and which modern naturalists call law of correlation, Cuvier explains thus: “Every organised being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, whose parts correspond to each other and contribute to the same definite action by a reciprocal action. None of these parts can change without the other parts also changing.” For example, the form of the teeth of an animal cannot be modified from any cause whatever without involving modifications in the jaws, the muscles which move them, the bones of the skull to which they are attached, the brain which the skull encases, the bones and muscles which support the head, the form and length of the intestines, indeed in all parts of the body. The modifications which are produced in the fore limbs as soon as they have ceased to serve for walking have led to organic transformations which have definitely separated man from the anthropoid apes.

It is not always possible to foresee and understand the modifications involved by the change which has occurred in any certain organ: for example, why the breaking of a leg or the removal of a testicle in the stag family causes the atrophy of the horn on the opposite side; why white cats are deaf; why mammals with hooves are herbivorous and those with five toes armed with claws are carnivorous.

A simple change in the habits, by subjecting one or more organs to an unaccustomed use, sometimes results in radical modifications in the whole organism. Darwin says that the mere fact of constantly browsing on steep slopes has occasioned variations in the skeletons of certain breeds of Scottish cows. Naturalists agree in regarding the cetacean – whales, cachalots and dolphins – as former terrestrial mammals which, finding in the sea food more abundant and easier to procure, became swimmers and divers: this new sort of life transformed their organs, reducing to a rudimentary state those no longer used, developing the others and adapting them to the needs of the aquatic environment. The plants of the Sahara Desert, to adapt themselves to the arid environment, have been obliged to dwarf themselves, to reduce the number of their leaves to two or four, to take on a layer of wax to prevent evaporation, and to prolong their roots enormously in search of moisture: their periodic changes come counter to the ordinary seasons; they are dormant in summer during the hot season and vegetate in the winter, in the season relatively cold and moist. Plants in other deserts present analogous characteristics: a given environment implies the existence of beings showing a combination of definite characteristics.

The cosmic or natural environments, to which vegetables and animals must adapt themselves under pain of death, constitute, like the organised being of which Cuvier speaks, combinations, complex systems without precise limits in space, the parts of which are: the geologic formation and composition of the soil, nearness to the equator, elevation above the sea level, courses of rivers which irrigate it, quantity of rain which it receives and the solar heat which it stores up, etc., and plants and animals which live in it. These parts correspond to each other in such a way that one of them cannot change without involving change in the other parts: the changes in the natural environment, although less rapid than those produced in organised beings, are nevertheless appreciable. The forests, for example, have an influence on the temperature and the rains, consequently on the humidity and the physical composition of the soil. Darwin has shown that animals apparently insignificant, like the worm, have played a considerable part in the formation of vegetable mold; Berthelot and the agricultural experts Hellriegal and Willfarth have proved that the bacteria which swarm in the protuberances of the roots of the leguminosae are active in fertilising the soil. Man by tillage and cultivation exercises a marked influence over the natural environment; forest clearings begun by the Romans have transformed fertile countries in Asia and Africa into uninhabitable deserts.

Vegetables, animals and man in a state of nature, all of which are subject to the action of the natural environment, without other means of resistance than the faculty of adaptation of their organs, must end by differentiating themselves, even though they might have a common origin, if, during hundreds and thousands of generations they live in different natural environments. The unlike natural environments thus tend to diversify men as well as plants and animals. It is, in fact, during the savage period that the different human races were formed.

Man does not merely modify by his industry the environment in which he lives, but he creates out of whole cloth an artificial or social environment, which permits him, if not to remove his organism from the natural environment, at least to reduce this action considerably. But this artificial environment in its turn operates upon man as he comes to it from his natural environment. Man, like the domesticated plant and animal, thus undergoes the action of two environments.

The artificial or social environments which men have successively created differ among themselves in their degree of elaboration and complexity, but environments of the same degree of elaboration and complexity offer great resemblances among themselves, whatever may be the human races which have created them, and whatever may be their geographical habitats: so that if men continue to undergo the diversifying action of unlike natural environments, they are equally subject to the action of similar artificial environments which operate to diminish the differences of races and to develop in them the same needs, the same interests, the same passions and the same mentality. Moreover, the same natural environments, as for example, those situated at the same latitude and altitude, exercise an equal unifying action on the vegetables and animals which live in them; they have an analogous flora and fauna. Like artificial environments thus tend to unify the human species, which unlike natural environments, have diversified into races and sub-races.

The natural environment evolves with such extreme slowness that the vegetable and animal species which adapt themselves to it seem immutable. The artificial environment, on the contrary, evolves with an increasing rapidity, thus the history of man and of his societies compared with that of animals and vegetables is extraordinarily mobile.

The artificial environments, like organised being and the natural environment, form combinations, complex systems without precise limits in space and time, the parts of which correspond to each other and are so closely bound together that one alone cannot be modified without all the others being shaken and being compelled to undergo retouchings in their turn. The artificial or social environment, of an extreme simplicity and consisting of a small number of parts in savage peoples, becomes complicated in proportion as man progresses by the addition of new parts and by the development of those already existing. It has been formed, since the historic period by economic, social, political and legal institutions, by traditions, customs, manners and morals, by common sense and public opinion, by religious literatures, arts, philosophies, sciences, modes of production and exchange, etc., and by the men who live in it. These parts, by transforming themselves and by reacting on each other, have given birth to a series of social environments more and more complex and extended, which, in proportion to the extension, have modified men; for, like the natural environment, a given social environment implies the existence of men presenting a certain combination of analogous characteristics, physical and moral. If all these corresponding parts were stable or varied only with excessive slowness, like those of the natural environment, the artificial environment would remain in equilibrium and there would be no history; its equilibrium, on the contrary, is extremely and increasingly unstable, constantly put out of balance by the changes working in one or another of the parts, which then reacts on all the others.

The parts of an organised being, like those of a natural environment, react upon each other directly, mechanically, so to speak: when in the course of animal evolution the upright posture was definitely acquired by man, it became the point of departure for transformation of all the organs: when the head, instead of being carried by the powerful muscles at the back of the neck, as in the other animals, was supported by the spinal column, these muscles and the bones to which they are attached became modified, and with their modifications modified the skull, the brain, etc. When the layer of vegetable soil in a locality increases through any cause whatever, instead of bearing stunted plants it nourishes a forest, which increases the rainfall, which again increases the volume of the water courses, etc. But the parts of an artificial environment can react on each other only through the intermediary of man. The part modified must begin by transforming physically and mentally the men whom it causes to function, and must suggest to them the modifications which they must bring to the other parts to put them on the level of the progress realised in it, in order that they may not hinder it in its development, and in order that they may again correspond to it. The parts not modified manifest their inconvenience precisely by the useful qualities which formerly constituted their “good side”, which by becoming superannuated are hurtful and then constitute so many “bad sides”. They are the more insupportable according as the modifications which they should have undergone are more important. The re-establishment of the equilibrium in the parts of the artificial environment is often accomplished only after struggles between the men particularly interested in the part in course of transformation and the men concerned in the other parts.

A few historical facts, too recent to be forgotten, will illustrate the interplay of the various parts of the artificial environment through the medium of man.

When industry had utilised the elasticity of steam as a motor power, it demanded new means of transportation to carry its fuel, its raw material and its products. It suggested to the interested manufacturers the idea of steam traction on iron rails which began to be practised in the coal fields of Gard in 1830 and in those of the Loire in 1832; it was in 1829 that Stephenson’s first locomotive drew a train in England. But when it was desired to extend this mode of locomotion, active and various opposition was encountered, which delayed its development for years. M. Thiers, one of the political leaders of official capitalism, and one of the authorised representatives of its common sense and public opinion, opposed it energetically, because, he declared, “a railroad cannot work”. Railroads, indeed, upset the most reasonable and established ideas: they required, along with other impossible things, grave changes in the mode of property – serving as a basis for the social edifice of the bourgeoisie then in power. Till then a capitalist created an industry or a mercantile establishment with his own money, increased, at the most, by that of one or two friends and acquaintances who had confidence in his honesty and skill; he directed the use of the funds and was the real and nominal proprietor of the factory or the commercial house. But the railroads were obliged to amass such enormous capitals that it was therefore necessary to induce a great number of capitalists to confide their money, which they had never left out of their sight, to people whose names they scarcely knew, still less their ability or morality. When they let go of the money they lost all control over its use; they had no personal proprietorship in the stations, cars, locomotives, etc., which it served to create; instead of pieces of gold or silver, having volume, weight and other solid qualities, they received back a narrow, light sheet of paper, representing fictitiously, an intangible morsel of the collective property, the name of which it bore, printed in big letters. Never in bourgeois memory had property taken on such a metaphysical form. This new form, which depersonalised property, was in such violent contradiction with that which summed up the joys of the capitalists, that which they had known and handed down for generations, that to defend it and propagate it no one could be found but the men charged with all the crimes and denounced as the worst disturbers of social order, – the Socialists. Fourier and St. Simon welcomed the mobilisation of property in paper stock-certificates. We find in the ranks of their disciples the manufacturers, engineers and financiers who prepared the revolution of 1848 and were the plotters of December 2: they profited by the political revolution to revolutionise the economic environment by centralising the nine provincial banks into the Bank of France, by legalising the new form of property and causing it to be accepted by public opinion, and by creating the network of French railways.

The great mechanical industry, which must draw its fuel and its raw material from a distance, and which must scatter its products widely, cannot tolerate the parcelling of a nation into little autonomous States, with tariffs, laws, weights and measures, coins, paper currencies, etc., of their own; it requires, on the contrary, the development of unified and centralised nations. Italy and Germany have met these requirements of the great industry, but only at the cost of bloody wars. MM. Thiers and Proudhon, who had numerous points of resemblance, and who represented the political interests of the little industry, became ardent defenders of the independence of the States of the Church and the Italian princes.

Since man successively creates and modifies the parts of the social environment, therefore, in him reside the motive forces of history, – so Vico and popular wisdom hold, rather than in Justice, Progress, Liberty, and other metaphysical entities, as the most philosophical historians stupidly repeat. These confused and inexact ideas vary according to the historical epochs and according to the groups or even the individuals of the same epoch; for they are the mental reflections of the phenomena produced in the different parts of the artificial environment; for example, the capitalist, the magistrate, and the wage-worker have different ideas of Justice. The Socialist understands by justice the restitution to the wage-working producers of the wealth which has been stolen from them, while to the capitalist justice is the conservation of this stolen wealth, and as the latter possesses the economic and political power, his notion predominates and makes the law, which, for the magistrate, becomes justice. Precisely because the same word covers contradictory notions, the capitalist class has made of these ideas an instrument of deceit and of domination.

That portion of the artificial or social environment in which a man functions gives him a physical, intellectual, and moral education. This education by things, which engenders ideas in him and excites his passions, is unconscious; so when he acts, he imagines he is following freely the impulses of his passions and ideas, while he is only yielding to the influences exercised on him by one of the parts of the artificial environment, which can react on the other parts only through the intermediary of his ideas and passions. Obeying instinctively the indirect pressure of the environment, he attributes the direction of his actions and emotions to a God, a divine intelligence, or to ideas of Justice, Progress, Humanity, etc. If the march of history is unconscious, since as Hegel says, man always finishes with a result other than that which he sought, it is because thus far he has been unconscious of the cause which makes him act and directs his actions.

What is the most unstable part of the social environment, that which is changed oftenest in quantity and quality, that which is most apt to disturb the whole?

The mode of production; answers Marx.

By mode of production Marx means not what is produced but the way of producing it; thus there has been weaving from prehistoric times, but it is only for about a century that there has been machine weaving. Machine production is the essential characteristic of modern industry. We have under our eyes an unparalleled example of its terrible and irresistible power to transform the social, economic, political and legal institutions of a nation. Its introduction into Japan has lifted that country in one generation from the feudal state of the middle ages into the constitutional state of the capitalist world, and has placed it in the front rank of world powers.

Multiple causes unite in assuring to the mode of production this omnipotence of action. Production absorbs, directly or indirectly, the energy of an immense majority of the individuals of a nation, while in the other parts constituting the social environment (politics, religion, literature, etc.) a slender minority is occupied, and even this minority can not but be interested in procuring the means of existence, material and intellectual. Consequently all men undergo mentally and physically, more or less, the modifying influence of the mode of production, while but a very small number of men are subjected to that of the other portions; now, as it is through the intermediary of men that the different parts of the social environment act on each other, that which modifies the most men possesses of necessity the most energy for moving the whole mass.

The mode of production, relatively unimportant in the social environment of the savage, takes on a preponderant and ever-growing importance through the incessant incorporation into production of the forces of nature, in proportion as man learns to know them: prehistoric man began this incorporation by using stones for weapons and tools.

Progress in the mode of production is relatively rapid, not only because production occupies an enormous mass of men, but again because, by enkindling “three furies of private interest”, it puts into play the three vices which, for Vico, are the moving forces of history, – hardheartedness, avarice and ambition.

Progress in the mode of production has become so headlong for the last two centuries that the men interested in production must constantly remodel the corresponding parts of the social environment to keep them on the level; the resistances which they encounter give rise to incessant conflicts, economic and political. Thus, to discover the first causes of historic movements, we must seek them in the mode of production of material life, which, as Marx says, dominates in general the development of the social, political and intellectual life.

Marx’s economic determinism takes away from Vico’s law of the unity of historical development its character of predetermination, which would carry the idea that the historic phases through which a nation passes, like the embryonic phases of an animal, are, as Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire thought, indissolubly linked to its very nature and determined by the inevitable action of an inner force, an “evolutionary force”, which would conduct it along pre-established paths toward ends marked out in advance; whence it would follow that all nations must progress, always and whether-or-no, at an equal pace and along one and the same path. The law of the unity of development, thus conceived, would be verified by the development of not one nation.

History, on the contrary, shows nations as they are, some limping through certain stages of evolution, which others traverse like race-horses, while others again go back from stages already reached. These delays, progressions, and recessions are explained only when we examine the social, political and intellectual history of the several nations in the light of the history of the artificial environments in which they have evolved, the changes in these environments, determined by the mode of production, determine in their turn historic events.

Since artificial environments are transformed only at the cost of national and international struggles, the historic events of a nation are thus subjected to relations which arise between the artificial environment to be transformed and the nation, fashioned as it has been by its natural environment and its hereditary and acquired characteristics. The natural environment and the historic past have impressed upon each nation certain original characteristics; so it follows that the same mode of production does not produce, with mathematical exactness, the same artificial or social environments, and consequently does not occasion historical events absolutely alike in different nations and at all moments in history, since vital international competition increases and intensifies in proportion to the growth in the number of nations arriving at the higher stages of civilisation. The historic evolution of nations, then, is not predetermined, any more than the embryonic evolution of individuals: if it passes through similar organisations of family, property, law, and politics, and through analogous forms of thought in philosophy, religion, art, and literature, it is because nations, whatever their race and geographical habitat, experience in their development material and intellectual wants which are substantially alike and must inevitably resort, for the satisfaction of these wants, to the same methods of production.