INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



an ankylosis, a rigidity, a biological petrification, analogous in some 

 ways to the armour-plating in which so many extinct animals spent 

 their efforts. Jennings quite rightly says^ that biology does not 

 support democracy if democracy is defined as the belief that all 

 human beings are alike or equal. It takes only common sense to see 

 that they are each quite different from the other. But they all have 

 needs and desires which could be satisfied and they all have contri- 

 butions to make to the executive and productive power of the human 

 collectivity (rcr TrXripcoyia rrj? ^EKKXrjala? as Chrysostom would 

 have said). If democracy is defined as such a constitution of society 

 that any part of the mass can in time supply individuals fitted for all 

 its functions, then biology sanctions democracy. A democracy that 

 produces experts.^ Now it is painfully clear that in a class-stratiiied 

 society there are very grave hindrances to this free utilisation of 

 existing ability. There is no real equality of opportunity. Ninety 

 per cent of the leaders are drawn from 1 5 per cent of the community. 

 Geniuses and unusual types are likely to be stifled in childhood. 

 There is a crushing effect on the very birth of initiative and constructive 

 ability among the masses of the workers. "Not merely poverty and 

 bad living-conditions, but soul-killing cap-touching subjection to a 

 master class and the consciousness of toiling to produce profits for 

 that class, deadens initiative and rouses hostility and antagonism to 

 the whole industrial machine."^ 



But not only does society, in this lower stage of organisation, fail 

 to draw upon anything like the full force of good gene-combinations 

 that exist within it; it also fails to create as many of these as would 

 otherwise exist. The whole rationale of the sexual reproductive 

 system, from its beginning among the lower invertebrates upwards, 

 can only be understood as a mechanism for producing an almost 

 infinite diversity of qualities among the individuals of a species. 

 Gene packs are shuffled anew in every reproductive act. The wider 

 the range of individual differences the greater the chance of favourable 

 variations. Yet in class-stratified human societies very severe checks 

 are placed upon the mating-choices of individuals, a procedure quite 

 irrational sociologically and ripe for conscious abolition. 



The fact that the class-stratification has arisen, as we have said, 

 from differences in the relations of men to tools and productive 



^ H. S. Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (London, 1931), p. 221. 



^ Jennings, loc. cit. 



^ Britain without Capitalists (London, 1936), p. 48. 



261 



