pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our
forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat
to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast.
War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the
ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large
and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals
and families in the hunting stage.
The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the
competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some
fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than
others to meet the tests of survival. Since Nature (here meaning total reality
and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of
Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of
Man, we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and
psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group;
diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities
of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection
and evolution; identical twins differ in a hundred ways, and no two peas are
alike.
Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of
civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities;
every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional
individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than
before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates
abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. If we knew our
fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose
combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do
precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For
freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one
prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will
