OUR OVERWORKED INSTINCTS
Instinct is a good thing in its place. We, in common with other animals, have instincts, especially in our racial youth; but as reason waxes, instinct wanes. At present, thanks to the development of the brain and even the beginnings of education, we have few instincts left. What we have, we work pretty hard.
Among both men and women, the most primal instincts are still deified. The instinct of self-preservation, which in every species is promptly subordinated to race preservation, we solemnly hail as “Nature’s First Law!” It may be first, as creeping comes before walking, but is no more honorable for that!
Then there is the sex instinct, a good second to this first, an ancient, useful and generally pleasant incentive to action; but we, in our simplicity, have set up this contributive impulse as the Lord of Life. “The Life Force,” we call it; when it is only one form of expression for the Life Force, and a limited one.
Self-preservation does very well to keep the cards on the table, and race preservation goes on giving us a new deal, but neither of them alone, nor both of them together, is The Game.
What we are really here for is Growth, Improvement, Progress—and we have a deep and UNIVERSAL instinct towards that, too; but little is said about it! It is our primitive animal instincts we are so proud of: our social instincts we scarcely recognize.
Men have the instinct of combat, a very useful thing in its place. But in their exclusive preoccupation of being men, they have assumed this masculine proclivity to be something of universal importance and solemnly assure us that “Life is a Struggle.”
Life is a Growth, a Progress, a Journey, if you will. It may be interrupted by having.to stop and struggle, but the struggling is at its best only incidental. Nature, seeking always the line of least resistance, avoids opposition when possible: the masculine instinct of combat courts it, and he idealizes his own instincts.
So also the woman. She has her one, great original maternal instinct; and both man and woman worship it. They assume something intrinsically holy in the feelings of a mother, and something superlatively efficacious in her ministrations. Motherhood is a beautiful and useful institution, but it is not enough to take right care of children.
Every furry animal has a mother: every naked savage has a mother: every ignorant peasant has a mother; and every mother has a compelling instinct which causes her to love and protect her young. But furry animal, naked savage, ignorant peasant they remain for all of their mothers.
Evolution needs more than mothers! It is not enough to live, not enough to reproduce one’s kind: we have to change, progress, improve—and instinct is no help here. Instinct is nothing but inherited habit. It always dates a long way behind us. It is never any guide in new conditions or a incentive to betterment. Instinct holds us in chains to the past; or it would if it could.
In human life—especially in modern human life—conditions change so rapidly that we have scant time to form individual habits, much less develop instincts. What we have left are very old ones, prehuman or savage in origin and mostly applying to physical relations. Suppose we recognize these early assistants, regard them with respect as once useful, and lay them where they belong—on the shelf.
Instinct is no guide to proper food to-day: we have to use our brains and learn what is right to eat. It is no guide to proper clothing—as witness the unhealthy, uncomfortable, unbeautiful garments we wear. It is no guide to success in any kind of human industry, business, science or art. These things have to be learned: they do not come “by instinct.” It is no suitable guardian of our behavior, either in public or private: all good manners and established government are achieved at considerable expense to “our natural instinct.” And assuredly our instincts are not reliable as leaders in education, religion or morality.
Why then, seeing the inadequacy of instinct in all these lines, are we so sure of its infallible guidance in the care of babies? A modern human mother has far less instinct to guide her than her arboreal ancestors: the real advantage her babies profit by are obtained through the development of the father—in reason, in knowledge, in skill, in the prosperity and progress of the world he makes.
He prepares for his children a Home, a School, a Church, a Government, a Nation: he provides them all manufactured articles—each last and least dish, utensil, piece of furniture, tool, weapon, safeguard, convenience, ship, bridge, plaything, jewel. He makes the world.
Into this world of reason, knowledge, skill, training and experience comes the baby, richer in each generation by a new and improved father. He is born and cherished, however, by the same kind of mother, bringing to her tremendous task no new tool worthy of the time, but merely the same old dwindling, overworked “maternal instinct.”
The children of today need mothers of today, and they must begin to supplement their primitive impulse by the very fullest, highest, richest powers of the human intellect and the human heart—the real human heart, which cannot be satisfied until every child on earth is more than mothered.