Our Oriental Heritage Page 5

  Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city.* For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the crossroads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant’s hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.

  There are no racial conditions to civilization. It may appear on any continent and in any color: at Pekin or Delhi, at Memphis or Babylon, at Ravenna or London, in Peru or Yucatan. It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical and economic create a culture, and the culture creates a type. The Englishman does not make British civilization, it makes him; if he carries it with him wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. Given like material conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan reproduces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth. Civilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation into a relatively homogeneous people.*

  These physical and biological conditions are only prerequisites to civilization; they do not constitute or generate it. Subtle psychological factors must enter into play. There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education—some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe—its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts—must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.

  The disappearance of these conditions—sometimes of even one of them—may destroy a civilization. A geological cataclysm or a profound climatic change; an uncontrolled epidemic like that which wiped out half the population of the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or the Black Death that helped to end the Feudal Age; the exhaustion of the land, or the ruin of agriculture through the exploitation of the country by the town, resulting in a precarious dependence upon foreign food supplies; the failure of natural resources, either of fuels or of raw materials; a change in trade routes, leaving a nation off the main line of the world’s commerce; mental or moral decay from the strains, stimuli and contacts of urban life, from the breakdown of traditional sources of social discipline and the inability to replace them; the weakening of the stock by a disorderly sexual life, or by an epicurean, pessimist, or quietist philosophy; the decay of leadership through the infertility of the able, and the relative smallness of the families that might bequeath most fully the cultural inheritance of the race; a pathological concentration of wealth, leading to class wars, disruptive revolutions, and financial exhaustion: these are some of the ways in which a civilization may die. For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

  Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

  CHAPTER II

  The Economic Elements of Civilization*

  IN one important sense the “savage,” too, is civilized, for he carefully transmits to his children the heritage of the tribe—that complex of economic, political, mental and moral habits and institutions which it has developed in its efforts to maintain and enjoy itself on the earth. It is impossible to be scientific here; for in calling other human beings “savage” or “barbarous” we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways. Doubtless we underestimate these simple peoples, who have so much to teach us in hospitality and morals; if we list the bases and constituents of civilization we shall find that the naked nations invented or arrived at all but one of them, and left nothing for us to add except embellishments and writing. Perhaps they, too, were once civilized, and desisted from it as a nuisance. We must make sparing use of such terms as “savage” and “barbarous” in referring to our “contemporaneous ancestry.” Preferably we shall call “primitive” all tribes that make little or no provision for unproductive days, and little or no use of writing. In contrast, the civilized may be defined as literate providers.

  I. FROM HUNTING TO TILLAGE

  Primitive improvidence—Beginnings of provision—Hunting and

  fishing—Herding—The domestication of animals—Agriculture—

  Food—Cooking—Cannibalism

  “Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.”4 There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence, as in many “savage” ways. The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears. The American Negro is making this transition today. “Of what are you thinking?” Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. “I do not have to think,” was the answer; “I have plenty of meat.” Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

  Nevertheless, there were difficulties in this carelessness, and those organisms that outgrew it came to possess a serious advantage in the struggle for survival. The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day—these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they, or other subtle creatures like them, who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer’s time of plenty.

  With what skill those ancestors ferreted out, from land and sea, the food that was the basis of their simple societies! They grubbed edible things from the earth with bare hands; they imitated or used the claws and tusks of the animals, and fashioned tools out of ivory, bone or stone; they made nets and traps and snares of rushes or fibre, and devised innumerable artifices for fishing and hunting their prey. The Polynesians
had nets a thousand ells long, which could be handled only by a hundred men; in such ways economic provision grew hand in hand with political organization, and the united quest for food helped to generate the state. The Tlingit fisherman put upon his head a cap like the head of a seal, and hiding his body among the rocks, made a noise like a seal; seals came toward him, and he speared them with the clear conscience of primitive war. Many tribes threw narcotics into the streams to stupefy the fish into cooperation with the fishermen; the Tahitians, for example, put into the water an intoxicating mixture prepared from the huteo nut or the hora plant; the fish, drunk with it, floated leisurely on the surface, and were caught at the anglers’ will. Australian natives, swimming under water while breathing through a reed, pulled ducks beneath the surface by the legs, and gently held them there till they were pacified. The Tarahumaras caught birds by stringing kernels on tough fibres half buried under the ground; the birds ate the kernels, and the Tarahumaras ate the birds.5

  Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death. For hunting was not merely a quest for food, it was a war for security and mastery, a war beside which all the wars of recorded history are but a little noise. In the jungle man still fights for his life, for though there is hardly an animal that will attack him unless it is desperate for food or cornered in the chase, yet there is not always food for all, and sometimes only the fighter, or the breeder of fighters, is allowed to eat. We see in our museums the relics of that war of the species in the knives, clubs, spears, arrows, lassos, bolas, lures, traps, boomerangs and slings with which primitive men won possession of the land, and prepared to transmit to an ungrateful posterity the gift of security from every beast except man. Even today, after all these wars of elimination, how many different populations move over the earth! Sometimes, during a walk in the woods, one is awed by the variety of languages spoken there, by the myriad species of insects, reptiles, carnivores and birds; one feels that man is an interloper on this crowded scene, that he is the object of universal dread and endless hostility. Some day, perhaps, these chattering quadrupeds, these ingratiating centipedes, these insinuating bacilli, will devour man and all his works, and free the planet from this marauding biped, these mysterious and unnatural weapons, these careless feet!

  Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of civilized society. Once the center of life, they are still its hidden foundations; behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual and art, stand the stout killers of Packingtown. We do our hunting by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields; but our memories of the chase linger in our joyful pursuit of anything weak or fugitive, and in the games of our children—even in the word game. In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the façade; in the rear are the shambles.

  To live by hunting was not original; if man had confined himself to that he would have been just another carnivore. He began to be human when out of the uncertain hunt he developed the greater security and continuity of the pastoral life. For this involved advantages of high importance: the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, and the use of milk. We do not know when or how domestication began—perhaps when the helpless young of slain beasts were spared and brought to the camp as playthings for the children.6 The animal continued to be eaten, but not so soon; it acted as a beast of burden, but it was accepted almost democratically into the society of man; it became his comrade, and formed with him a community of labor and residence. The miracle of reproduction was brought under control, and two captives were multiplied into a herd. Animal milk released women from prolonged nursing, lowered infantile mortality, and provided a new and dependable food. Population increased, life became more stable and orderly, and the mastery of that timid parvenu, man, became more secure on the earth.

  Meanwhile woman was making the greatest economic discovery of all—the bounty of the soil. While man hunted she grubbed about the tent or hut for whatever edible things lay ready to her hand on the ground. In Australia it was understood that during the absence of her mate on the chase the wife would dig for roots, pluck fruit and nuts from the trees, and collect honey, mushrooms, seeds and natural grains.7 Even today, in certain tribes of Australia, the grains that grow spontaneously out of the earth are harvested without any attempt to separate and sow the seed; the Indians of the Sacramento River Valley never advanced beyond this stage.8 We shall never discover when men first noted the function of the seed, and turned collecting into sowing; such beginnings are the mysteries of history, about which we may believe and guess, but cannot know. It is possible that when men began to collect unplanted grains, seeds fell along the way between field and camp, and suggested at last the great secret of growth. The Juangs threw the seeds together into the ground, leaving them to find their own way up. The natives of Borneo put the seed into holes which they dug with a pointed stick as they walked the fields.9 The simplest known culture of the earth is with this stick or “digger.” In Madagascar fifty years ago the traveler could still see women armed with pointed sticks, standing in a row like soldiers, and then, at a signal, digging their sticks into the ground, turning over the soil, throwing in the seed, stamping the earth flat, and passing on to another furrow.10 The second stage in complexity was culture with the hoe: the digging stick was tipped with bone, and fitted with a crosspiece to receive the pressure of the foot. When the Conquistadores arrived in Mexico they found that the Aztecs knew no other tool of tillage than the hoe. With the domestication of animals and the forging of metals a heavier implement could be used; the hoe was enlarged into a plough, and the deeper turning of the soil revealed a fertility in the earth that changed the whole career of man. Wild plants were domesticated, new varieties were developed, old varieties were improved.

  Finally nature taught man the art of provision, the virtue of prudence,* the concept of time. Watching woodpeckers storing acorns in the trees, and the bees storing honey in hives, man conceived—perhaps after millenniums of improvident savagery—the notion of laying up food for the future. He found ways of preserving meat by smoking it, salting it, freezing it; better still, he built granaries secure from rain and damp, vermin and thieves, and gathered food into them for the leaner months of the year. Slowly it became apparent that agriculture could provide a better and steadier food supply than hunting. With that realization man took one of the three steps that led from the beast to civilization—speech, agriculture, and writing.

  It is not to be supposed that man passed suddenly from hunting to tillage. Many tribes, like the American Indians, remained permanently becalmed in the transition—the men given to the chase, the women tilling the soil. Not only was the change presumably gradual, but it was never complete. Man merely added a new way of securing food to an old way; and for the most part, throughout his history, he has preferred the old food to the new. We picture early man experimenting with a thousand products of the earth to find, at much cost to his inward comfort, which of them could be eaten safely; mingling these more and more with the fruits and nuts, the flesh and fish he was accustomed to, but always yearning for the booty of the chase. Primitive peoples are ravenously fond of meat, even when they live mainly on cereals, vegetables and milk.11 If they come upon the carcass of a recently dead animal the result is likely to be a wild debauch. Very often no time is wasted on cooking; the prey is eaten raw, as fast as good teeth can tear and devour it; soon nothing is left but the bones. Whole tribes have been known to feast for a week on a whale thrown up on the shore.12 Though the Fuegians can cook, they prefer their meat raw; when they catch a fish they kill it by biting it behind the gills, and then consume it from head to tail without further ritual.13 The uncertainty of the food supply made these nature peop
les almost literally omnivorous: shellfish, sea urchins, frogs, toads, snails, mice, rats, spiders, earthworms, scorpions, moths, centipedes, locusts, caterpillars, lizards, snakes, boas, dogs, horses, roots, lice, insects, larvae, the eggs of reptiles and birds—there is not one of these but was somewhere a delicacy, or even a pièce de résistance, to primitive men.14 Some tribes are expert hunters of ants; others dry insects in the sun and then store them for a feast; others pick the lice out of one another’s hair, and eat them with relish; if a great number of lice can be gathered to make a petite marmite, they are devoured with shouts of joy, as enemies of the human race.15 The menu of the lower hunting tribes hardly differs from that of the higher apes.16

  The discovery of fire limited this indiscriminate voracity, and coöperated with agriculture to free man from the chase. Cooking broke down the cellulose and starch of a thousand plants indigestible in their raw state, and man turned more and more to cereals and vegetables as his chief reliance. At the same time cooking, by softening tough foods, reduced the need of chewing, and began that decay of the teeth which is one of the insignia of civilization.

  To all the varied articles of diet that we have enumerated, man added the greatest delicacy of all—his fellowman. Cannibalism was at one time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribes, and among such later peoples as the Irish, the Iberians, the Picts, and the eleventh-century Danes.17 Among many tribes human flesh was a staple of trade, and funerals were unknown. In the Upper Congo living men, women and children were bought and sold frankly as articles of food;18 on the island of New Britain human meat was sold in shops as butcher’s meat is sold among ourselves; and in some of the Solomon Islands human victims, preferably women, were fattened for a feast like pigs.19 The Fuegians ranked women above dogs because, they said, “dogs taste of otter.” In Tahiti an old Polynesian chief explained his diet to Pierre Loti: “The white man, when well roasted, tastes like a ripe banana.” The Fijians, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.20