The Revolt Against Civilization
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1922. 8vo, xiv+274 pp. $2.50.
MR. STODDARD is one of the most stimulating writers on public affairs to-day, but like all stimulants he must be taken with due caution. The Revolt Against Civilization is a book to be pondered, but it is not a book to be swallowed whole.
Reëxamining the problem of social revolution in the light of biology and psychology, Mr. Stoddard discovers ‘three fatal tendencies which have always, sooner or later, brought civilizations to decline and ruin.’ These are (1) the tendency to ‘structural overloading,’ by which every civilization (and especially our own) tends to become too complex for humanity to master; (2) the tendency to ‘ biological regression,’ in other words the rapid breeding of the socially unfit, the ‘ undermen,’ who crowd out the finer types of humanity; and (3) the tendency to ‘atavistic revolt,’ that ‘menace of the underman’ which gives the book its subtitle.
To the last two Mr. Stoddard devotes most of his attention. Human capacity is determined by heredity, and is a fixed quantity in each individual. The army psychological tests indicate that only four and a half per cent of our population is of the highest intelligence and that ‘nearly one half of the whole population will never develop mental capacity beyond the stage represented by a normal twelve-year-old child.’
Now this mental capacity, being innate and hereditary, cannot be affected by the environment. Moreover — a commonplace of the population problem — the highly intelligent have so few children that they cannot maintain their numbers from generation to generation, whereas the unfit spawn at an alarming rate. Hence, ‘intelligence is to-day being steadily bred out of the American population’; and the unfit, instinctively resenting the inferior social position to which they are doomed by innate incapacity, constitute a smouldering mass of sullen resentment, ready to burst into destructive flame, as they did in the Paris Commune and as they have more recently done in Bolshevist Russia.
Will this process of degeneration and revolt destroy our civilization as it has so many others? Mr. Stoddard fears it may, unless we adopt his remedies, which include ruthless repression of incipient revolt (though conserving the right of free speech) ; birth-control for the masses as well asfor the classes, which will slow down the birthrate of the ‘underman’; and the establishment of a ‘neo-aristocracy’ of the eugenically fit. He lays no flattering unction, however, to the souls of the present upper classes, for ‘any thought of our existing social upper classes as “neoaristocracies” would be, to put it mildly, a bad joke.’ No, we must have flexible classes (not rigid castes) joined by a social ladder up which ability can swiftly make its way, and down which incapacity will ruthlessly be forced.
In his main conclusions Mr. Stoddard can hardly be refuted; in detail there is room for fault-finding. Company officers who knew their men during the war, and who watched the results of the psychological tests, may not altogether share his views of their infallibility. His biology, too, is of the library rather than the laboratory.
Remarkable here, as in all Mr. Stoddard’s writing, are his extraordinary lucidity, and the fascination with which he clothes social and biological questions that, in most hands, would be far drier than dust. To say that The Revolt Against Civilization is ‘as interesting as a novel ’ would perhaps be too flattering to the novelists.
JOHN BAKELESS.