National Life From the Standpoint of Science, 1900
Pearson's ideas, which are all about a social darwinistic, racist/nationalist,
notion of the superiority of Europeans was quite common at the time. It is
simply offensive today.
History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has
been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically
and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a
higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and
even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and
tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on
which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended. . .
The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in progress; but that
struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which the white man has reached his
present stage of development, and they account for the fact that he no longer lives in
caves and feeds on roots and nuts. This dependence of progress on the survival of the
fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for
existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer
metal. You may hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the plowshare, when
American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets of the
world for their raw material and for their food supply, when the white man and the dark
shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he lists. But, believe me, when
that day comes mankind will no longer progress; there will be nothing to check the
fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and
guided by natural selection. Man will stagnate; and unless he ceases to multiply, the
catastrophe will come again; famine and pestilence, as we see them in the East, physical
selection instead of the struggle of race against race, will do the work more
relentlessly, and, to judge from India and China, far less efficiently than of old. . . There is a struggle of race against race and of nation against nation. In the early
days of that struggle it was a blind, unconscious struggle of barbaric tribes. At the
present day, in the case of the civilized white man, it has become more and more the
conscious, carefully directed attempt of the nation to fit itself to a continuously
changing environment. The nations has to foresee how and where the struggle will be
carried on; the maintenance of national position is becoming more and more a conscious
preparation for changing conditions, an insight into the needs of coming environments. We have to remember that man is subject to the universal law of inheritance, and that a
dearth of capacity may arise if we recruit our society from the inferior and not the
better stock. If any social opinions or class prejudices tamper with the fertility of the
better stocks, then the national character will take but a few generations to be seriously
modified. The pressure of population should always tend to push brains and physique into
occupations where they are not a primary necessity, for in this way a reserve is formed
for the times of national crisis. Such a reserve can always be formed by filling up with
men of our own kith and kin the waste lands of the earth, even at the expense of an
inferior race of inhabitants. . . .
You will see that my view---and I think it may be called the scientific view of a
nation---is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by
insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up
to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially
recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by
contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle
for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply. This is the
natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can in its main features subvert
it. Some of you may realize it, and then despair of life; you may decline to admit any
glory in a world where the superior race must either eject the inferior, or, mixing with
it, or even living alongside it, degenerate itself. What beauty can there be when the
battle is to the stronger, and the weaker must suffer in the struggle of nations and in
the struggle of individual men? You may say: Let us cease to struggle; let us leave the
lands of the world to the races that cannot profit by them to the full; let us cease to
compete in the markets of the world. Well, we could do it, if we were a small nation
living on the produce of our own soil, and a soil so worthless that no other race envied
it and sought to appropriate it. We should cease to advance; but then we should naturally
give up progress as a good which comes through suffering. . . The man who tells us that he feels to all men alike, that he has no sense of kinship,
that he has no patriotic sentiment, that he loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother, is
probably deceiving himself. If he is not, then all we can say is that a nation of such
men, or even a nation with a large minority of such men, will not stand for many
generations; it cannot survive in the struggle of the nations, it cannot be a factor in
the contest upon which human progress ultimately depends. The national spirit is not a
thing to be ashamed of, as the educated man seems occasionally to hold. If that spirit be
the mere excrescence of the music hall, or an ignorant assertion of superiority to the
foreigner, it may be ridiculous, it may even be nationally dangerous; but if the national
spirit takes the form of a strong feeling of the importance of organizing the nation as a
whole, of making its social and economic conditions such that it is able to do its work in
the world and meet its fellows without hesitation in the field and in the market, then it
seems to me a wholly good spirit---indeed, one of the highest forms of social, that is,
moral instinct.
So far from our having too much of this spirit of patriotism, I doubt if we have
anything like enough of it. We wait to improve the condition of some class of workers
until they themselves cry out or even rebel against their economic condition. We do not
better their state because we perceive its relation to the strength and stability of the
nation as a whole. Too often it is done as the outcome of a blind class war. The coal
owners, the miners, the manufacturers, the mill-hands, the landlords, the farmers, the
agricultural laborers, struggle against each other, and, in doing so, against the nation
at large, and our statesmen as a rule look on. That was the correct attitude from the
standpoint of the old political economy. It is not the correct attitude from the
standpoint of science; for science realizes that the nation is an organized whole, in
continual struggle with its competitors. You cannot get a strong and effective nation if
many of its stomachs are half fed and many of its brains untrained. We, as a nation,
cannot survive in the struggle for existence if we allow class distinctions to permanently
endow the brainless and to push them into posts of national responsibility. The true
statesman has to limit the internal struggle of the community in order to make it stronger
for the external struggle. We must reward ability, we must pay for brains, we must give
larger advantage to physique; but we must not do this at a rate which renders the lot of
the mediocre a wholly unhappy one. We must foster exceptional brains and physique for
nation purposes; but, however useful prize cattle may be, they are not bred for their own
sake, but as a step toward the improvement of the whole herd. . .
Science is not a dogma; it has no infallible popes to pronounce authoritatively what
its teaching is. I can only say how it seems to one individual scientific worker that the
doctrine of evolution applies to the history of nations. My interpretation may be wrong,
but of the true method I am sure: a community of men is as subject as a community of ants
or as a herd of buffaloes to the laws which rule all organic nature. We cannot escape from
them; it serves no purpose to protest at what some term their cruelty and their
bloodthirstiness. . . Mankind as a whole, like the individual man, advances through pain and suffering only.
The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen
of the hecatombs of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the
greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the steppingstones on which
mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of today.
Source:
From: Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, 2d ed.,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), pp. 21-22, 26-27, 36-37, 43-47, 52-54,
62-64.
Scanned by: J. S. Arkenberg, Dept. of History, Cal. State Fullerton.
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© Paul Halsall, July 1998, updated 24 Oct 2019
