You may perhaps recall Professor James's astonishing picture of his visit to a Chautauqua. Here he found modern culture at its best, no poverty, no drunkenness, no zymotic diseases, no crime, no police, only polite and refined and harmless people. Here was a middle-class paradise, kindergarten, and model schools, lectures and classes, and music, bicycling and swimming, and culture and kindness and elysian peace. But at the end of a week, he came out into the real world, and he said,
Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama, without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,—I can not abide with them.
What men want, he says, is something more precipitous, something with more zest in it, with more adventure. Nearly all the Utopias paint the life of the future as a kind of giant Chautauqua, in which every man and woman is at work, all are well fed, satisfied and cultivated. But as man is now constituted he would probably find such a life flat, stale and unprofitable.
Man is not originally a working animal. Civilization has imposed work upon man, and if you work him too hard, he will quit work and go to war. Nietzsche says man wants two things—danger and play. War represents danger.
It follows that all our social Utopias are wrongly conceived. They are all based on a theory of pleasure economy. But history and evolution show that man has come up from the lower animals through a pain economy. He has struggled up—fought his way up through never-ceasing pain and effort and struggle and battle. The Utopias picture a society in which man has ceased to struggle. He works his eight hours a day—everybody works—and he sleeps and enjoys himself the other hours. But man is not a working animal; he is a fighting animal. The Utopias are ideal—but they are not psychological. The citizens for such an ideal social order are lacking. Human beings will not serve.
Our present society tends more and more in its outward form in time of peace toward the Chautauqua plan, but meanwhile striving and passion burn in the brain of the human units, till the time comes when they find this insipid life unendurable. They resort to amusement crazes, to narcotic drugs, to political strife, to epidemics of crime and finally to war. The alcohol question well illustrates the tendencies we are pointing out. Science and hygiene have at last shown beyond all question that alcohol, whether in large or smaller doses, exerts a damaging effect upon both mind and body. It lessens physical and mental efficiency, shortens life and encourages social disorder. In spite of this fact and what is still more amazing, in spite of the colossal effort now
