“It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species.” John Stuart Mill
The year when he wrote this, some 161 years ago, was 1848, in Europe a year of revolutions. Then, as now, technological change was revolutionizing the life of the working classes. From Wikipedia: “A popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to spring up. A series of economic downturns and crop failures, particularly those in the year 1846, produced starvation among peasants and the working urban poor.”
This was also the year that Karl Marx published his The Communist Manifesto. At the time of course the workers of the world, who were to revolt, had little solidarity and practically no organization. Behind the revolutions of ’48 was rather a middle class desire for liberal reforms.
What, if any influence did these revolutionary stirrings taking place in numerous European cities have on the writings of John Stuart Mill I have no idea. But these times, his times had much in common with ours. And his writing is no less relevant today than then.
This quotation comes from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), written at a time when the population of the world had just reached one billion, 23 million of whom, compared to over 300 million now, were living in the United States.
I take the quoted passage from an email comment I happened to see, from Gary Peters posted on Andrew C. Revkin‘s Dot Earth Blog web site. Mill’s words are pretty amazing, I’m sure you’ll agree. And they’re a joy to read.
How many writers from the past are there who have important things to say to us about our own times? Countless numbers of them, I’m sure. Most often, however, and not surprising, although much to be regretted, their writings don’t reach us in the present.
Here is John Stuart Mill:
“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.
“It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on. Even the industrial arts might be as earnestly and as successfully cultivated, with this sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labour. . . . Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.”
