If civilisation, with its novel modes of living, be regarded as an essentially artificial process, in which considerations of organic welfare exercise no regulative influence, there seems no limit to the amount of disutility or illfare which may attach to the consumption of our national income.This appears, indeed, to be the view of some of our social critics.
Even those who do not go so far as Mr.Edward Carpenter in diagnosing civilisation as a disease, yet assign to it a very wide departure from the true path of human progress.Indeed, it would be idle to deny that this income, not only in the terms of its distribution but also in its consumption, contains very large factors of waste and disutility, and that the higher, later elements carry larger possibilities of waste than the earlier.
But this admission must not lead us to conceive of the so-called 'artificial'
factors in a standard of consumption as the products, either of chance, or of some normal perversity in the development of tastes which foists upon consumption elements destitute of human value.
For there are two possibilities to bear in mind.The first is that even in the higher, less material, more 'artificial' ingredients of consumption, the test of 'survival value' may still in some measure apply.A too comfortable or luxurious mode of life may impair vitality, lessen the desire or capacity of parenthood, or may introduce some inheritable defect injurious to the stock.Such results may follow, not merely from bad physical habits, but from what are commonly accounted good intellectual habits.For it is believed that the high cerebration of an intellectual life is inimical to human fertility.Again, so far as sexual attractions determine marriage and parenthood, modes of living which either impair or overlay the points of attraction will continue to be eliminated by natural selection.Habits of living, which damage either manliness or womanliness will thus continue to be curbed by Nature.
But Nature may possess another safeguard of a more general efficacy.
For any intelligible theory of evolution, either of an individual organism or a species, involves the presence and operation of some central power which, working either through particular instincts, as in lower animals, or largely through a coordinating 'reason', as in man, not only conserves but develops.This organic purpose, or directive power, cannot be regarded as confined to mere physical survival, either of the individual or the species.It must also be considered as aiming at development, a fuller life for individual and species.Now the evolution of human wants and standards of consumption must be regarded as an aspect of this wider process of development.
Whatever measure, then, of control be accorded to the central directive power in organic development, must operate to determine economic wants and economic standards of life.If such directive action were infallible, securing, through the central cerebral control, a completely economical policy of conservation and development, no problems of a distinctively social or moral character would arise.The existence of error, waste, sin, attests the fallibility of this directive power.Aiming to keep the individual and the species to lines of conduct that are psycho-physically beneficial, its directions are either falsified or set aside by the force of some particular impulse or emotion, usurping or defying the central authority.The liability to such error and waste appears to grow pari passu with organic development.
