In 1905, barely a year into the Moro War in
the Philippines (1904-1914), a brutal, horrific massacre of 900 Moros on the
island of Mindanao on top of Mount Badjo inspired Twain to pen this piece. Unlike his other major anti-war, or rather
anti-imperialist, piece, this was published in the same year it was written,
and later became part of his Letters
From Earth.
I have been studying
the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called), and contrasting
them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to
the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now
seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and
truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the
Higher Animals. In proceeding toward
this unpleasant conclusion I have not guessed or speculated or conjectured, but
have used what is commonly called the scientific method. That is to say, I have subjected every
postulate that presented itself to the crucial test of actual experiment, and
have adopted it or rejected it according to the result. Thus I verified and established each step of
my course in its turn before advancing to the next. These experiments were made painstakingly in
the London Zoological Gardens, and covered many months of painstaking and fatiguing
work.
Before
particularizing any of the experiments, I wish to state one or two things which
seem to more properly belong in this place than further along. This in the interest of clearness. The massed
experiments established to my satisfaction certain generalizations, to wit:
1. That the human race
is of one distinct species. It exhibits
slight variations–in color, stature, mental caliber, and so on–due to climate,
environment, and so forth; but it is a species by itself, and not to be
confounded with any other.
2. That the
quadrupeds are a distinct family, also. This family exhibits variations–in
color, size, food preferences and so on; but it is a family by itself.
3. That the other
families–the birds, the fishes, the insects, the reptiles, etc.–are more or
less distinct, also. They are in the procession. They are links in the chain
which stretches down from the higher animals to man at the bottom.
Some of my
experiments were quite curious. In the
course of my reading I had come across a case where, many years ago, some
hunters on our Great Plains organized a buffalo hunt for the entertainment of
an English earl–that, and to provide some fresh meat for his larder. They had charming sport. They killed seventy-two of those great
animals; and ate part of one of them and left the seventy-one to rot. In order to determine the difference between
an anaconda and an earl–if any–I caused seven young calves to be turned into
the anaconda’s cage. The grateful
reptile immediately crushed one of them and swallowed it, then lay back
satisfied. It showed no further interest
in the calves, and no disposition to harm them. I tried this experiment with
other anacondas; always with the same result. The fact stood proven that the difference
between an earl and an anaconda is that the earl is cruel and the anaconda
isn’t; and that the earl wantonly destroys what he has no use for, but the
anaconda doesn’t. This seemed to suggest
that the anaconda was not descended from the earl. It also seemed to suggest that the earl was descended
from the anaconda, and had lost a great deal in the translation.
I was aware that
many men who have accumulated more millions of money than they can ever use
have shown a rabid hunger for more, and have not scrupled to cheat the ignorant
and the helpless out of their poor servings in order to partially appease that
appetite. I furnished a hundred
different kinds of wild and tame animals the opportunity to accumulate vast
stores of food, but none of them would do it. The squirrels and bees and certain birds made
accumulations, but stopped when they had gathered a winter’s supply, and could
not be persuaded to add to it either honestly or by chicane. In order to bolster up a tottering reputation
the ant pretended to store up supplies, but I was not deceived. I know the ant.
These experiments convinced me that
there is this difference between man and the higher animals: he is avaricious
and miserly, they are not.
In the course of my
experiments I convinced myself that among the animals man is the only one that
harbors insults and injuries, broods over them, waits till a chance offers,
then takes revenge. The passion of revenge is unknown to the higher animals.
Roosters keep
harems, but it is by consent of their concubines; therefore no harm is done. Men keep harems, but it is by brute force,
privileged by atrocious laws which the other sex were allowed no hand in
making. In this matter man occupies a
far lower place than the rooster. Cats are loose in their morals, but not
consciously so. Man, in his descent from
the cat, has brought the cat’s looseness with him but has left the
unconsciousness behind–the saving grace which excuses the cat. The cat is innocent, man is not.
Indecency,
vulgarity, obscenity–these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of
them. They hide nothing; they are not
ashamed. Man, with his soiled mind, covers himself. He will not even enter a drawing room with his
breast and back naked, so alive are he and his mates to indecent suggestion. Man is “The Animal that Laughs.” But so does
the monkey, as Mr. Darwin pointed out; and so does the Australian bird that is
called the laughing jackass. No–Man is
the only Animal that Blushes. He is the
only one that does it–or has occasion to.
At the head of this
article we see how “three monks were burnt to death” a few weeks ago, and a
prior “put to death with atrocious cruelty.” Do we inquire into the details? No; or we should find out that the prior was
subjected to unprintable mutilations. Man–when he is a North American
Indian–gouges out his prisoner’s eyes; when he is King John, with a nephew to
render untroublesome, he uses a red-hot iron; when he is a religious zealot
dealing with heretics in the Middle Ages, he skins his captive alive and scatters
salt on his back; in the first Richard’s time he shuts up a multitude of Jew
families in a tower and sets fire to it; in Columbus’s time he captures a
family of Spanish Jews and–but that is not printable; in our day in England a
man is fined ten shillings for beating his mother nearly to death with a chair,
and another man is fined forty shillings for having four pheasant eggs in his
possession without being able to satisfactorily explain how he got them. Of all the animals, man is the only one that
is cruel. He is the only one that
inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher
animals. The cat plays with the
frightened mouse; but she has this excuse, that she does not know that the
mouse is suffering. The cat is
moderate–unhumanly moderate: she only scares the mouse, she does not hurt it;
she doesn’t dig out its eyes, or tear off its skin, or drive splinters under
its nails–man-fashion; when she is done playing with it she makes a sudden meal
of it and puts it out of its trouble. Man
is the Cruel Animal. He alone is of that
distinction.
The higher animals
engage in individual fights, but never in organized masses. Man is the only animal that deals in that
atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the
only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and
with calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages
will march out, as the Hessians did in our Revolution, and as the boyish Prince
Napoleon did in the Zulu war, and help to slaughter strangers of his own
species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.
Man is the only
animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country–takes possession of it and
drives him out of it or destroys him. Man
has done this in all the ages. There is
not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner,
or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by
force and bloodshed.
Man is the only
Slave. And he is the only animal who
enslaves. He has always been a slave in
one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in
one way or another. In our day he is
always some man’s slave for wages, and does that man’s work; and this slave has
other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who
exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.
Man is the only
Patriot. He sets himself apart in his
own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps
multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of
other people’s countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the
intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for
“the universal brotherhood of man”–with his mouth.
Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True
Religion–several of them. He is the only
animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology
isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard
of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness
and heaven. He was at it in the time of
the Caesars, he was at it in Mahomet’s time, he was at it in the time of the
Inquisition, he was at it in France a couple of centuries, he was at it in
England in Mary’s day, he has been at it ever since he first saw the light, he
is at it today in Crete–as per the telegrams quoted above–he will be at it
somewhere else tomorrow. The higher
animals have no religion. And we are
told that they are going to be left out, in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my
experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal. Note his history, as sketched above. It seems plain to me that whatever he is his
is not a reasoning animal. His record is
the fantastic record of a maniac. I
consider that the strongest count against his intelligence is the fact that
with that record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal of
the lot: whereas by his own standards he is the bottom one.
In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which the other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. T hey lived together in peace; even affectionately.
Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary,
and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbytarian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek
Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a
Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from
Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole
days. When I came back to note results,
the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a
chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh–not
a specimen left alive. These Reasoning
Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a
Higher Court.
One is obliged to concede that in true loftiness of
character, Man cannot claim to approach even the meanest of the Higher Animals.
It is plain that he is constitutionally
incapable of approaching that altitude; that he is constitutionally afflicted
with a Defect which must make such approach forever impossible, for it is
manifest that this defect is permanent in him, indestructible,
ineradicable. I find this Defect to be
the Moral Sense. He is the only animal
that has it. It is the secret of his
degradation. It is the quality which
enables him to do wrong. It has no other
office. It is incapable of performing
any other function. It could never have
been intended to perform any other. Without
it, man could do no wrong. He would rise
at once to the level of the Higher Animals.
Since the Moral Sense has but one office, the one
capacity–to enable man to do wrong–it is plainly without value to him. It is as valueless to him as is disease. In fact, it manifestly is a disease. Rabies is bad, but it is not so bad as this
disease. Rabies enables a man to do a
bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a thing which he
could not do when in a healthy state: kill his neighbor with a poisonous bite. No one is the better man for having rabies. The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways.
Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having
the Moral Sense. What, now, do we find
the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly
what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the
ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to
do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of
it in the doer of it.
And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from
some far ancestor–some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the
mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance–insect by insect, animal by
animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till
we have reached the bottom stage of development–namable as the Human Being. Below us–nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman.
There is only one possible stage below the Moral Sense; that
is the Immoral Sense. The Frenchman has
it. Man is but a little lower than the
angels. This definitely locates him. He is between the angels and the French.
Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of a thing, any way you
take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is
would have no market. On top of his
specialty–the Moral Sense–are piled a multitude of minor infirmities; such a
multitude, indeed, that one may broadly call them countless. The higher animals get their teeth without
pain or inconvenience. Man gets his
through months and months of cruel torture; and at a time of life when he is
but ill able to bear it. As soon as he
has got them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in
the first place, not worth the loss of a night’s rest. The second set will answer for a while, by being
reinforced occasionally with rubber or plugged up with gold; but he will never
ger a set which can really be depended on till a dentist makes him one. This set will be called “false” teeth–as if he
had ever worn any other kind.
In a wild state–a natural state–the Higher Animals have a
few diseases; diseases of little consequence; the main one is old age. But man starts in as a child and lives on
diseases till the end, as a regular diet. He has mumps, measles, whooping cough, croup,
tonsillitis, diptheria, scarlet fever, almost as a matter of course. Afterward,
as he goes along, his life continues to be threatened at every turn: by colds,
coughs, asthma, bronchitis, itch, cholera, cancer, consumption, yellow fever,
bilious fever, typhus fevers, hay fever, ague, chilblains, piles, inflammation
of the entrails, indigestion, toothache, earache, deafness, dumbness,
blindness, influenza, chicken pox, cowpox, smallpox, liver compliant,
constipation, bloody flux, warts, pimples, boils, carbuncles, abscesses, bunions,
corns, tumors, fistulas, pneumonia, softening of the brain, melancholia and
fifteen other kinds of insanity; dysentery, jaundice, diseases of the heart,
the bones, the skin, the scalp, the spleen, the kidneys, the nerves, the brain,
the blood; scrofula, paralysis, leprosy, neuralgia, palsy, fits, headache,
thirteen kinds of rheumatism, forty-six of gout, and a formidable supply of
gross and unprintable disorders of one sort and another. Also–but why continue the list? The mere names of the agents appointed to keep
this shackly machine out of repair would hide him from sight if printed on his
body in the smallest type known to the founder’s art. He is but a basket of pestilent corruption
provided for the support and entertainment of swarming armies of bacilli–armies
commissioned to rot him and destroy him, and each army equipped with a special
detail of the work. The process of
waylaying him, persecuting him, rotting him, killing him, begins with his first
breath, and there is no mercy, no pity, no truce till he draws his last one.
Look at the workmanship of him, in certain of its
particulars. What are his tonsils for? They perform no useful function; they have no
value. They have no business there. They are but a trap. They have but the one office, the one
industry: to provide tonsillitis and quinsy and such things for the possessor
of them. And what is the vermiform
appendix for? It has no value; it cannot
perform any useful service. It is but an
ambuscaded enemy whose sole interest in life is to lie in wait for stray
grapeseeds and employ them to breed strangulated hernia. And what are the male’s mammals for? For business, they are out of the question; as
an ornament, they are a mistake. What is
his beard for? It performs no useful
function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations
persecute it with a razor. And because
it is a nuisance and a discomfort, Nature never allows the supply of it to fall
short, in any man’s case, between puberty and the grave. You never see a man baldheaded on his chin. But his hair! It is a graceful ornament, it is a comfort, it
is the best of all protections against certain perilous ailments, man prizes it
above emeralds and rubies. And because
of these things Nature puts it on, half the time, so that it won’t stay. Man’s sight, smell, hearing, sense of
locality–how inferior they are. The
condor sees a corpse at five miles; man has no telescope that can do it. The bloodhound follows a scent that is two
days old. The robin hears the earthworm
burrowing his course under the ground. The cat, deported in a closed basket, finds
its way home again through twenty miles of country which it has never seen.
Certain functions lodged in the other sex perform in a
lamentably inferior way as compared with the performance of the same functions
in the Higher Animals. In the human
being, menstruation, gestation and parturition are terms which stand for
horrors. In the Higher Animals these
things are hardly even inconveniences.
For style, look at the Bengal tiger–that ideal of grace,
beauty, physical perfection, majesty. And
then look at Man–that poor thing. He is
the Animal of the Wig, the Trepanned Skull, the Ear Trumpet, the Glass Eye, the
Pasteboard Nose, the Porcelain Teeth, the Silver Windpipe, the Wooden Leg–a
creature that is mended and patched all over, from top to bottom. If he can’t get renewals of his bric-a-brac in
the next world, what will he look like?
He has just one stupendous superiority. In his intellect he is supreme. The Higher Animals cannot touch him there. It is curious, it is noteworthy, that no
heaven has ever been offered him wherein his one sole superiority was provided
with a chance to enjoy itself. Even when
he himself has imagined a heaven, he has never made provision in it for
intellectual joys. It is a striking
omission. It seems a tacit confession
that heavens are provided for the Higher Animals alone. This is matter for thought; and for serious
thought. And it is full of a grim
suggestion: that we are not as important, perhaps, as we had all along supposed
we were.
No comments:
Post a Comment