The Law of Human Nature
Everyone has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds
funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I
believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of
things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone
did the same to you?"; "That's
my seat, I was there first";
"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"; "Why should you shove in first?"; "Give
me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"; "Come on, you
promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well
as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the
man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not
happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour
which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom
replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make
out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or
that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special
reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should
not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of
orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.
It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind
some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or
whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If
they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not
quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that
the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that
unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are;
just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a
foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called
the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the "laws of nature" we
usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry.
But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong "the Law of
Nature," they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that,
just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by
biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference,
that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not,
but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment
subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which
he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot
disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice
about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various
biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is,
he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law
which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals
or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought
that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not
mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who
did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no
ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human
idea of decent behaviour was obvious to everyone. And I believe they were right.
If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What
was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real
thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have
practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we
might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that
than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or
decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations
and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between
their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of,
say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans,
what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to
our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of
another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need
only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean.
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or
where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest
to him.
You might just as well try to imagine a country where two
and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be
unselfish to -- whether
it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they
have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has
never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or
four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you
liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a
man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the
same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you,
but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not
fair" before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not
matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the
particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not
matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong -- in other words, if there is no Law of Nature -- what is the difference
between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the
bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just
like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and
Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes
get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any
more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to
my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature.
If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much
better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And
now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I
am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone
else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or
this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise
ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all
sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when
you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money -- the one you have almost
forgotten -- came when
you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have
never done -- well, you
never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going
to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or
brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it -- and who the dickens am I,
anyway? I am just the same.
That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of
Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there
starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at
the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one
more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of
Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious
to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in
decency so much -- we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so -- that we cannot
bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift
the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that
we find all these explanations.
It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or
worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves. These, then, are
the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth,
have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot
really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way.
They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation
of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.
