HUMAN WORK
OTHER BOOKS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
❦
_Women and Economics, Concerning Children_
_In This Our World_
_The Home_
HUMAN WORK
BY
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMIV
_Copyright, 1904, by_
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published, May, 1904, N
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 5
II. MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION 19
III. CONCEPT AND CONDUCT 37
IV. SOME FALSE CONCEPTS 59
V. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (I) 79
VI. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II) 99
VII. THE SOCIAL SOUL 125
VIII. THE SOCIAL BODY 157
IX. THE NATURE OF WORK (I) 179
X. THE NATURE OF WORK (II) 203
XI. SPECIALISATION 227
XII. PRODUCTION 249
XIII. DISTRIBUTION 275
XIV. CONSUMPTION (I) 299
XV. CONSUMPTION (II) 321
XVI. OUR POSITION TO-DAY 341
XVII. THE TRUE POSITION 367
HUMAN WORK
I: INTRODUCTORY
_Summary_
_Common facts hard to understand. Social phenomena most important to
modern life, yet least understood. Complexity no obstacle if system is
known. Practical knowledge of sociology quite possible. Coexistence does
not prove true association. Social rudiments cause pain. Human pain
always conspicuous. “The Star of Suffering.” Religions rest on
conception of essential pain. Suicide a human specialty. Pain a social
condition, remediable and preventable. Physical environment largely
mastered, present difficulties social. Past societies died of internal
diseases. Social indigestion. Human nature progressive. Language
retarded by ignorance and superstitions. Civilisation retarded by same
things. Economic difficulties our principal ones to-day. “The root of
all evil.” Innutrition, over-nutrition, mal-nutrition, wrong action in
body politic. Difficulty lies in false ideas. Effect of woman labour and
slave labour. Consciousness proof of power. Modern society increasingly
conscious. Pain most conspicuous, pathology precedes physiology. Errors
of early therapeutics, personal and social. Need of scientific social
physiology, as base of treatment. Must understand works to mend watch,
or society. Knowledge enough to begin. This book a study of the economic
processes of Society._
I
INTRODUCTORY
The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand. This is
described by Ward as “the illusion of the near.” Because of nearness we
get no perspective; because of continual presence we become used to one
view and fail to perceive others.
To the consideration of new facts we come with comparatively open minds,
impressed by each item and its relation to the rest; but facts long
known are supposed to be understood, and we resent the slight offered to
our intelligence in the proposal to reconsider. Yet the most
revolutionary discoveries have been made among precisely the most
familiar facts; as in the nature and use of steam, or the endless
potentialities of coal tar.
We had, and used, and supposed we knew, our own bodies, through long
centuries of living and dying, yet our late-learned physiology was able
to show us facts most vitally important which we had never dreamed of.
Social phenomena have been going on about us since we began to be human;
they are as familiar as physical or physiological phenomena, but even
less understood. Yet the interaction of social forces and social
conditions form increasingly prominent factors in human life.
Primitive man was most affected by physical conditions, he had to adjust
himself mainly to the exigencies of climate, of the soil, of animal
competitors. Modern man has to adjust himself mainly to social
conditions; he is most affected by governments, religions, economic
systems, education, general customs. Yet the study of this especially
pressing and important environment is but little advanced. The
smooth-worn commonplace facts slip through our fingers, and we fail to
see the meaning of our most important surroundings simply because we
have always had them. Also we allow ourselves to be discouraged by the
extent and complexity of social conditions. This is quite needless.
Grass may be studied in any patch, regardless of the acreage of our
prairies, or the height of the plumes of the Pampas. A tree would seem
appallingly complex if we tried to understand it from a cross-section
taken through the branching top; but from root to leaf it is not so hard
to follow. Moreover, early writers on this subject have frightened us
with technicalities. Mention some patent fact about our social
composition, show a relation, suggest a law, and your alarmed hearer
cries: “Oh, that is Political Economy! I cannot understand that, it is
too difficult!” It is really a pity that such awe should be felt in the
contemplation of our social processes; as though a man were afraid to
learn anything about his digestion on the ground that it was
“physiology.”
The statement, “Hens lay eggs,” expresses a fact in Ornithology,
Zoölogy, and Biology—but it is none the more difficult to grasp. The
special student may, if he so desires, amass enough knowledge in these
lapping sciences to appall the uninitiated; but a mere practical farmer
can learn enough of the nature and habits of hens to insure a profitable
supply of eggs, without overtaxing his brain. There may be fields of
sociological science quite beyond the average mind, and rightly left to
the learned specialist; but that is no reason why we should not learn
enough of the nature and habits of society to insure a more profitable
and pleasant life.
With our fertility of resource and high attainments in skill, knowledge,
power, and their material product, it is strange indeed that we have
made so little progress in the management of our social processes. The
civilisation natural to our age is conspicuously retarded by ignorance,
disease, crime, poverty, and other disagreeable anachronisms. These
things no more belong to this period of civilisation because they
coexist with it than do the Bushman and Hottentot because they coexist
with it, or than the vermiform appendix belongs to our stage of
physiological development because it still exists in it—a mischievous
rudiment. Our sociological rudiments cause us increasing pain.
The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by
a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of
human life; but we feel them, at first, only when they hurt. Our
individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish
and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier
man—and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoidable
privations, dangers, and mishaps, and his ingenious systems of
self-torture—had more to hurt him, but made far less fuss about it. For
many an age the pain of human life has formed so conspicuous a fact that
we have called the earth “The Star of Suffering.” Our common
illustrations of happiness are drawn from the lower animals: “as happy
as a clam,” we say; “as gay as a lark”; “as merry as a cricket.”
The world’s greatest religions have rested on a conception of general
human unhappiness. Divine curses are held to account for it, Divine
blessings to allay it, and a future life to recompense us for it—if we
are good; but the basic proposition is the unhappiness of human life.
Again, we are given a theory of reincarnation; of a slow transmigration
through many lines towards a plane where we do not feel, feeling being
admitted to mean pain. In Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, from the Happy
Hunting Grounds and Walhalla to our most refined conception of eternal
progress, the bliss of a future life is advanced as some countercheck to
the misery of this one, some hope to enable us to live.
So unbearable is the amount of human pain that we alone among all
animals manifest the remarkable phenomenon of suicide—a deliberate
effort of a form of life to stop living because living hurts so much.
Social evolution does not proportionately abate social suffering; it
improves external conditions and insures physical existence more and
more reliably; but it does not make us commensurately happier. We die of
different diseases, and we do not die so soon, but we continue to suffer
while alive, we continue to refer to “the sea of human misery,” we
continue to kill ourselves because we cannot bear the pain of being
alive.
All this distress, formerly borne by each man as simply his “lot,”—his
personal allowance,—was yet vaguely recognised by larger thinkers as
“our common lot”; even physical diseases, those most personal facts, we
have generalised as “the ills that flesh is heir to.” This generalising
is a most legitimate social instinct; now grown keener, more accurate,
felt by far more persons; and in its light we have begun to recognise
many of those long-borne “ills” as not only remediable, but preventable.
Yet, though we have done something, our condition remains lamentable.
The general causes of our still-existing difficulties are internal
rather than external.
Society has long since mastered the difficulties of adjustment with
physical conditions, but cannot arrange its own intersocial conditions
on a satisfactory basis. “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless
thousands mourn”—not nature’s. From the Arctic Circle to the Tropics man
gets along contentedly enough with natural obstacles; he may be checked
and modified in development, but he is not unhappy; he strikes a balance
with nature and is comparatively at rest. But in his progressive social
development he has not yet been able to strike a balance; his interhuman
relations are uncertain and mischievous. So far as history shows us,
each social group seems to have carried within it the seeds of disease;
to have grown worse as it progressed; and, while conquering all external
difficulties, to have succumbed in the end to its own inward disorders.
The suffering of an advanced society is not that of one struggling for
subsistence, or in combat with enemies, but of one in the throes of
disease. Society has safety, peace, shelter, warmth, enough to eat,—and
chronic indigestion!
Are these disadvantages of human life essential, as heretofore supposed;
or are they merely pathological phenomena and quite unnecessary? We are
now beginning to take the latter view, and a most cheerful one it is.
Instead of accepting “human nature” as a fixed condition of mingled pain
and pleasure, goodness and badness, with the pain and badness
preponderating, we are now recognising that human nature grows and
changes like the rest of created forms; that it has already greatly
changed and improved, and will continue to do so. We are learning that
the troubles of any race and time are partly external and subduable;
partly internal and these also subduable. See, for instance, a savage
tribe in North America. Their existence is retarded by certain
conditions of climate and geography; of the fauna and flora surrounding
them; of animal and human enemies and competitors; but also and more
seriously by their superstitions. The theory of witchcraft; the
ignorance as to hygiene and belief in “the medicine man”; the contempt
for women and so for productive labour—these kept the savage savage in
the same region where another race is civilised. That race, dominated by
larger and truer concepts, has conquered the same external difficulties
and risen to far higher levels.
So we, in our present stage of civilisation, are partly retarded by
natural conditions of environment. We are still decimated by wild
beasts, though it takes a microscope to find them, and by still more
bloodthirsty vegetables, of similar dimensions. We are still frozen to
death, sunstruck, drowned, and shocked by lightning. We fight the
phylloxera, the cottony scale, and anopheles; we have to tunnel
mountains, irrigate deserts, bridge rivers, and cross seas; our struggle
with the environment is still highly educative. But meanwhile our
progress is retarded far more by conditions of social pathology—by
ignorance, poverty, and crime; and these conditions are no part of our
essential environment, but are due to economic errors and superstitions.
If we could straighten out our internal difficulties we could get on
gaily with the outside ones.
Now, since we can easily see in history how we have at given times
suffered from certain popular mistakes, and how on better knowledge we
have outgrown those errors and their painful consequences, why is it not
reasonable to assume that we may outgrow our present mistakes and
superstitions and their painful consequences? Is it not possible that
the persistence in society of certain morbid phenomena is due to an
equal persistence of certain false ideas? and that the one may be
removed by removing the other? So long as we believe in witchcraft, or
in the divine right of kings, or in chattel slavery, so long do we act
from that belief, and so long is our action injurious.
Our most conspicuous troubles to-day are economic. We have reached a
stage of religious freedom where the growing power of the human brain is
allowed to work unchecked toward higher perceptions of truth, and
beautiful results have followed. We have reached a stage of political
freedom where we can express the public will in public action, as far as
the great majority of one sex is concerned, and are rapidly advancing to
where the whole nation will share the same position. Here, too,
beautiful results have followed. But in economic development we find
that whereas there is a great extension and multiplication of economic
processes, and commensurately of wealth, yet there is a mighty product
of evil which seems to keep pace with the advance of civilisation.
So many of our troubles are patently due to economic sources that our
rough-and-ready philosophy has accepted the statement, “the love of
money is the root of all evil.” Some shorten the accusation to money
itself.
This general observation is right in its direction, but not sufficiently
accurate to be reliable. Money being a concrete fact, and in its
function as representative of all purchasable goods of fascinating
importance, we quite naturally attach to it directly the glaring evils
we find in its company. We see the misery and sin caused by too little
of it and the misery and sin caused by too much of it; we see the
various villainies practised to get it, from robbery so small and direct
that you catch the thief’s hand in your pocket, to robbery so large and
indirect that the thieving hand filches uncaught from a million pockets,
via hired railroads, hired legislators, and hired newspapers; we see all
this, and attach our condemnation to money itself, or, at farthest, to
the love of it.
Now, knowing more of the nature of society, we can begin to classify and
analyse its difficulties more intelligently and find them somewhat in
this order. Let us call poverty in-nutrition—a large part of our social
tissues are insufficiently nourished. Let us call wealth over-nutrition,
or repletion, or congestion, or fatty degeneration—a small part of our
social tissues are gorged and inflamed with too much nourishment. Then
let us call our large supply of poor, false, bad things: adulterated
articles of food, shoddy clothes, paper shoes,—all the flood of
worthless stuff society produces and consumes,—mal-nutrition; the blood
is bad and does not nourish. Back of these phenomena we find still more
important conditions, having to do not with the nourishment of the body
politic, but with its activities. There is wrong action in the social
organism; it does not work properly. Hence this local congestion of
wealth, this peculiar arrest of distribution which makes both rich and
poor dissatisfied in the widest field of life—work.
Work is the most conspicuous feature of human life. In the conditions of
work, in our ideas and feelings about work, in our habits, methods, and
systems of work, lies the subject-matter of this book. It is held that
our difficulties are to be found, not in any essential traits of human
nature, and not in any essential conditions of human life, but merely in
the preservation in our minds of certain ancient and erroneous ideas and
feelings which act continually upon the normal processes of social
economics, preventing the process and poisoning the product. See, for
instance, among our American savages, how the accepted theory, that work
is proper only to women, arrests their economic development and their
personal progress as well. See, in the Southern States of earlier years,
how the popular error, that work was proper only to slaves, arrested
development in many lines. It is here asserted that we have still in the
popular mind certain traditions—superstitions, falsehoods—about work,
and that to them is traceable the economic distresses so conspicuous
among us.
Our increasing consciousness of this distress is a most gratifying fact.
Consciousness always involves power. The power to feel implies the power
to act. Feeling was evolved as a guide to action; in nature’s wise
administration there would have been no reason for giving conscious pain
and pleasure to a creature which could neither avoid the one nor seek
the other. The sensory nerves are developed in careful proportion to the
motory: what feels can move, what moves can feel. This law is followed
all the way up through physical evolution to social, and is just as true
of the social body as of any other.
A comparatively inert primitive society reacts to injury or benefit as
does a plant, but shows little evidence of pain or pleasure. Modern
society, however, in proportion to its rapidly differentiating organism
and its increase in swift, accurate, complex activity, manifests a
corresponding increase in consciousness. We are now socially conscious
to an acute degree; and this proves our equal ability to act, to avert
injury, and seek benefit, not as individuals, but as a society.
Naturally pain is the most impressive fact, for pleasure is a normal
condition and only felt in contrast to pain. Pain is some interference
with natural law, and as such makes itself sharply felt. Man was led to
the study of physiology through pathology; the ache introduced us to the
stomach. So society feels first and most what hurts it, and our study of
sociology is prefaced by social pathology. And as men, in their first
gropings after relief from pain, practised all manner of tricks with
fetich-worship, with wild, noisy dances, with filthy medicines, with
murderous leeches and lances and poisonous pills; and as still, among
the ignorant, any wide-blazoned patent medicine is sure of acceptance if
it promises to cure the pain, felt but not understood; so society’s
first efforts at relief are superstitious, empirical, and often deadly
bad for its system.
We need the patient, scientific study of the social body, its structure
and functions, anatomy, physiology, and pathology, as we have had it for
the physical body; we need careful, recorded observation of the results
of previous remedies, and of new ones as well, and all this is a new
field of science. We have plenty of facts at hand; all history lies
behind us with its glaring records; all life is before us to-day in
every stage of development; but we have only begun to arrange and study
those facts from the point of view of the sociologist. If a watch goes
wrong, we examine its “works” for fracture, loss, misplacement, or some
“foreign body”; but to do this successfully involves knowledge of what a
watch is, what it is for, how it is made, and how it works. We must know
the mechanics of the thing if we are to mend it. So if Society goes
wrong we must examine its works, and we cannot tell if they are wrong,
nor set them right, unless we have some knowledge of what Society is,
what it is for, how it was made, and, above all, how it works.
This does not require all knowledge; no such complete information as
Tennyson spoke of in the “Flower in the crannied wall.” Flowers are
sufficiently understood for us to raise them in beauty and health and
profusion; and we can learn enough about this last great form of life,
Society, to mend its ways, without waiting for absolute wisdom.
This book is a study of the economic processes of society, explaining
the immediate causes of a large part of our human suffering, and
suggesting certain simple, swift, and easy changes of mind by which we
may so alter our processes as to avoid that suffering and promote our
growth and happiness.
II: MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION
_Summary_
_Social development affected by physical conditions. By our personal
choice. We have overestimated the latter. “Natural” in contradistinction
to “personal,” or genetic and teleological. Conscious acts most
conspicuous to man. Recognition of some other forces at work. Man’s
contribution to his own conduct. How individuals have promoted it, and
the mass always retarded. How we retard evolution. Pterodactyls as
conscious agents. Salutary effect of unconscious social processes. Our
conscious behaviour always behind the times. Historic instances. Nature
of the brain. Effect of education. Relative depth and size of early
impressions as compared with later. Our ability to preserve and transmit
ancient ideals. Folk-myth of a superior past. Reversionary tendencies,
upward tendency of new brains checked by education; effect on religious
progress. Should we have done better without conscious conduct? No.
Enormous benefit if rightly used. Race memory, use of past. Real value
of youth. Our attitude toward it. What it should be. Great advance in
education in social consciousness. How to adjust conscious conduct to
action of law._
II
MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION
The contribution of the human race to its own development is the
distinguishing feature in social evolution. That prompt and simple
reaction to the environment by which the evolution of sub-human species
has been accomplished, is complicated, with us, by a delayed and
uncertain reaction, due to stored energy and to the internal environment
of man’s conscious mind. We are of course modified by conditions, and
transmit the modification through heredity. The results in social
formation and conduct are clear and startling, but if man could in no
way alter these results or select among the causes, to study them would
be painful and useless.
Man has, however, a limited private supply of energy, his storage
battery of nerve force; not initial with him, but temporarily his to
use; and he has also, in the imaged world of his mind, an environment
which leads him to use that personal energy according to his separate
views of life; thus he can, and does, modify his conduct to a
considerable degree. His contribution varies widely in extent; some
individuals living very largely from personal initiative, and some
almost without; it varies as widely in value; being sometimes of a most
advanced grade, and at others distinctly primitive and reversionary.
We have heretofore gravely overestimated the relative extent of this
personally modified conduct or telic action, as compared with the
conduct which is the result of unconsciously transmitted forces, or
genetic action. In the dawn of human consciousness the field of personal
conduct was most prominent to man, and he took small note of what things
he did under the unobstructed action of natural tendencies.
The word “natural” is here used in contradistinction to “personal”; not
as holding man’s personal conduct to be un-, anti-, or super-natural,
but as distinguishing between the actions resultant from general laws,
and those resultant from the man’s choice and will; between the genetic
and the telic. Marriage, for instance, is a result of the natural laws
of sex-attraction, with their deeper bases in race-preservation;
celibacy is a result of personal choice and will, based on certain ideas
cherished by the individual; marriage is genetic—celibacy, telic. The
cerebral activity required to decide upon and enforce a given act, apart
from and perhaps in spite of the natural tendencies, makes such acts
more perceptible and more memorable; and man inevitably grew to
overestimate that part of his behaviour which had passed muster in the
front halls of the brain. In these cases he felt himself act, and
assumed that the acts which he felt were the sum of his conduct. Plainly
perceiving, however, that these acts of his were very irregular and
unreliable, often indeed differing widely from his intention, he soon
postulated other forces as working upon him, supposedly personal, for he
knew no others; and gods and devils were installed in his universe as
cogent factors in this perplexing mass of conduct. Some, feeling dimly
the larger currents of tendency pressing upon them, conceived of Fate,
Destiny, Karma, Fore-ordination—something high and invincible, governing
conduct from afar. In all the history of man’s conscious life he has
been struggling with his conduct, and seeking to modify it to what he
from time to time considered desirable ends.
That he has accomplished so much is due to the tremendous power he has
to use in this way; that he has accomplished so little is due to his
misapprehension of the best means of applying this power; and that he
has produced such strange, peculiar kinds of personally modified conduct
is due to his varying conception of the desired ends.
Overestimating his personal power, he constantly overdraws upon its
resources, exhorting the individual to behave thus and thus; as if all
conduct were telic. He has known little or nothing of the genetic laws
of human progress which would have guided his course and lightened his
task so wonderfully, could he but have understood them. Better housing
for the poor does more to develop chastity than preaching it to two
families who live in one small room.
As we now begin to grasp something of the position of man in nature, and
of the processes of social evolution, we see how irresistibly he was
urged upward by the progressive tendencies which lift mankind from
savagery as they lifted the savage from the brute; and also how he has
been held back by cumulative habits and earlier instincts. In this vast
field of evolutionary processes, man, as a conscious, self-directing
agent, flounders slowly along, now pushing violently toward a stage of
development quite beyond his immediate grasp; and now as violently
maintaining standards and ideals long since outgrown and become
retroactive and injurious.
The extremes of his influence are most marked. Again and again has the
race put forth a man with a specialised brain fitted to grasp a scheme
of conduct far superior to that obtaining in his time; and, under the
functional necessity of a member of society, urging this higher scheme
of conduct upon his fellows with sublime faith, courage, and endurance.
Social evolution has been markedly promoted by minds like these. Always
someone seeing ahead and proclaiming the advance, and the mass, as they
become able to grasp the new concepts, struggling mightily to modify
their conduct thereto. Looking only at this side of it, we should say
that man, as a factor in social evolution, worked most powerfully to
promote it.
There is quite another side to it, however. The human brain, while it
has the capacity to foresee future conditions, and to dictate conduct
modified to such improved ends, has also memory, the power to retain
past conditions, and to modify conduct upon them. If we can imagine
active self-consciousness in some stage of physical evolution, it is
easy to see how diversely it might have worked.
Take a high-minded pterodactyl, for instance—some poetic, philosophic,
progressive pterodactyl. He might have had dim concepts of larger wings
and lighter bones, of dryness and sunshine and wide spaces of sweet air;
he might even have had faint visions of soft feathers, of nestled eggs,
and the joyous music of love. If he were capable of transmitting these
ideals among his brethren, they might have been induced to soar more
assiduously and perch the higher—so sooner introducing the archeopteryx.
But if on the other hand we postulate our self-conscious pterodactyls as
possessing long memories and venerable traditions, ancestor worship and
a retroactive education, we should then find them forever yearning for
their reptilian past; forcibly re-immersing each aspiring young
generation in adhesive depths of mud, and piously destroying the
would-be birds as enemies to society. It is on this side of our
consciousness that man, as a factor in social evolution, is of such
doubtful value.
A consciousness that works backwards, a personal modification of conduct
based on the forced retention of more primitive conditions and ideals,
this has been, and still is, one of the heaviest drawbacks to human
progress. Fortunately for us the general mass of our conduct is
resultant from natural causes, rather than personal. We are forced
upward from century to century by changing conditions, whether we will
or not. The tempting island and sheltered waterway evolved from us the
boat, and the boat grew and spread mightily and changed the fate of
nations. Under its influence man widened and thickened in social
intercourse, and became wise and friendly in practice, long before his
conscious ideals of conduct were anything but ignorant and savage.
Steam communication has united modern peoples faster than all religions,
joining land to land in bands of iron, and the biting edges of the
nations must wear smooth under the wheels. A Russian railroad track
comes to the edge of Germany, with a different gauge from the German
road which continues it, but the railroad is stronger than Czar or
Emperor, and makes ultimately for peace.
Our constantly increasing facilities for communication are social
functions, evolved in the human race on natural lines, and they bring
different character and conduct long before the popular mind has
understood their meaning and consciously adopted their results. As an
effect of changed conditions our conduct to-day is at the grade required
by steam and electric communication; but as far as that conduct springs
from personal judgment and will we are still in the sailing-vessel
period, some even in that of the slave-rowed galley.
Every line of social evolution makes for peace to-day, for smooth and
rapid growth of international agreement; but our personally modified
conduct, resting as it does on very ancient ideals and traditions, still
drives us into war. Man’s personal conduct has never, as a whole, been
up to the level of his socially evolved conduct. Note how the
development of industry and commerce lifted and lightened Europe,
leading on to peace, to education, to freedom; and how all the while the
dominant ideals and conscious efforts of the same people were all for
war, its highly prized glories and its supposed gains. See, when
learning began to lift its head as a great social factor in those dark
ages, how the proud knight still boasted that he could not read or
write—mere priestcraft, much beneath him. Quite late in English history
it was held derogatory for the nobility to spell well, these baser arts
were for their inferiors. In more recent times we can see as plainly how
the advance of women, their fuller education and general development, a
most important step in social evolution, has been as earnestly opposed
by the great majority of persons, acting under the dominance of
long-held lines of hereditary ideas and superstitions.
It would seem here as if man were a most undesirable factor in social
evolution; as if he acted solely as a brake on the wheels of progress,
always seeking to maintain previous conditions, and to modify conduct
retroactively. We can easily see how this deterrent position is taken by
us. Our range of perception depends on our brain. The brain is an organ,
transmitted with hereditary modification like any other organ, and that
hereditary modification is of course resultant from earlier conditions.
The older the modifying conditions the deeper the modification; racial
habits of unbroken centuries are not to be offset by one lifetime’s
change. So we look out upon the world through an ancestral brain which
is far more responsive to simple primitive stimuli than to the more
subtle combinations of the present; witness the absurd delight of modern
man in hunting.
By this inheritance we find it easier to enjoy, approve of, understand,
and uphold that which has been than that which is; to say nothing of
that which is to be. Nevertheless the brain is of most easily modifiable
structure, and, of itself, shares in the uplifting pressure toward
higher development. Each child should bring to the race a little more
brain capacity, a little more inclination to progress, and no doubt he
does. But this tendency to new power of thought and breadth of vision,
which is ours in every child by virtue of social evolution, is heavily
offset by the parental action, by our conscious contribution to our own
conduct.
Nothing is firmer in our minds than the concept of parental duty; an
instinct of primitive force and cumulative development. Parental duty
involves education, and education, as previously grasped by man’s
consciousness, has been one of the most retroactive of social forces as
well as one of the most beneficial.
It is a simple physiological law that the impressions first received are
keener and deeper than those of later years. Thus each old person
carries a memory of better things in his youth; not that they were
better in any way, but that his machinery was fresher and took stronger
impression. Owing to this the teaching of the aged has always harked
back to the superiority of the past—their youth, and deprecated the
decadence of the present—their age. It is the measure of personal life
erroneously applied to racial life. Under its pressure has sprung one of
the most universal of our folk-myths, the legend of a Heroic Past.
The diminutive size and narrow experiences of a child make the events of
youth seem larger than those of maturity. The aging brain, as it weakens
in recent memories of what a large experience makes small events, recurs
vividly to those important records of its youth, and thus naturally
cherishes this conviction of the real superiority of those early days.
The long life and wide range of impression of the human being give a
broad field for this natural assumption, and the power of speech makes
the assumption transmissible.
An ancient bear may fondly imagine that in his youth he did more
glorious deeds than the enfeebled descendants he sees around him; but if
he does think so, he cannot discourage them with his delusions. An
ancient man could and did!
The education of the young is necessarily in the hands of their elders;
and youth, with no knowledge or experience of its own, cannot
conclusively deny, or even ably criticise, the statements made by the
aged. This pride of the past, so manifest in the old, is not so
injurious to-day. Recognised as a physical phenomenon, offset by wider
knowledge of the facts, and with accessible records to give immutable
proof that our environment has not shrunk in the least since we were
young, this natural tendency of waning brain power does small harm. In
our racial babyhood it did enormous harm. There was no record then to
dispute with grandpa as to the number of wolves he had slain, or just
how big were the nuts on the towering trees of his infancy.
So the Superior Past tradition was hammered hard into the unprotected
infant brain, and took fast hold of it, wore deep furrows in it, set
that habit of thought so rigidly in the mind of the race that it has
taken all these unnumbered ages for a shouting universe to convince us
that life is Growth! Only a few of us can see it even now. Deep down
below our modern learning still may be found this basic assumption that
things were better once—this recurring wish to go “back to nature,” or
back to handicrafts, or back to something or another—so sure are we in
our sub-soil minds that Heaven is behind us!
All this reversionary habit of old brains would have been offset by the
“tendency to vary” in young ones; by the steady uplift of each new
generation; but for the cumulative weight of our conscious efforts at
education. Education, necessarily traditional at first, and instilling
tremendous veneration for the ever-receding past,—especially in those
earliest years when memory was the only record of events,—has steadily
met the expansive tendencies of each new brain by the repressive weight
of all foregoing centuries. The development of new brain tissue, and its
expanding cellular arrangement, urges constantly to new discovery, and
to a rearrangement of earlier impressions, but education has diligently
endeavoured to enforce upon each brain precisely that mass and order of
impression considered as beneficial in the past. To re-impress forever
the same facts in the same relation, and to severely discourage and
prohibit any reconsideration of this supply, has been for ages our
method of education.
How seriously this has interfered with our progress it is impossible to
say. We know that in spite of it the brain has developed in more normal
lines under the beneficent action of genetic social forces. A growing
industry preached peace to us while church, and state, and school were
yet preaching war. Social unity and organic relation are forced upon our
consciousness by the facts, while education still hands down the
individualistic concepts of far earlier times.
Even in the most rigidly repressed of all lines of growth, the moral
perceptions, we can see how social evolution has developed the soul of
man in direct opposition to religious traditions. A given stage of brain
development is capable of formulating only such and such moral
concepts—of postulating only such and such a perception of God.
The current apprehension of God in a given age is accepted as final and
forced upon the consciousness of each succeeding age, thus tending to
preserve a necessarily inferior standard, and, in preserving it, to
check any brain growth tending to its contradiction. This is one of the
most conspicuous and persistent of man’s efforts to modify conduct.
Faithfully and conscientiously he had striven to maintain the innocent
errors of his racial youth as guides to succeeding ages. With every
gathered force of established religion, with the growing pressure of
education, with the tremendous sanction of parental government, man has
always striven to preserve the religious limits of his remote ancestors.
And yet, in spite of all the allied forces of conscious humanity, the
evolution of brain tissue went on; the new brains saw larger glimpses of
truth and transmitted what they saw to others; those who had ears to
hear heard, and the world’s religions have grown and spread under
genetic forces, in the face of opposition, persecution, and execution
based on telic forces. A clearer and sadder illustration of the attitude
of man as a factor in social evolution need not be asked. All that he
could do he has done to throttle progress and stop the growth of his own
soul; and this under a sublime conviction of virtue.
In scientific progress, in artistic development, along all the lines of
human growth, we find the majority acting as obstructionists; always
valiantly upholding that which has been, and maintaining, as respectable
pterodactyls, that mud of a proper consistency is far superior as a
vehicle of life to the untried vicissitudes of air. Is it then to be
supposed that social evolution would have got along faster without our
conscious cerebration? That we might have slid peacefully up the ladder
with our eyes shut, instead of struggling on in our toad-in-the-well
fashion—up three steps and down two? Surely not. The very fact that this
power to alter conduct marks the highest stage of animal evolution
proves its value. Nature does not make such huge mistakes as to
introduce and maintain an injurious function.
We must remember, too, as against the deterrent drag of the majority,
the grand uplift of the few; the power never yet measured by which the
conscious life of one man can inspire and lift and stimulate the others.
Again and again we see the whole race seized and pushed on by some
dominant individual life, the currents of whose action vibrate
unceasingly through the mass, and stir it to better growth.
When man does by some blessed chance go with the forces of evolution,
and uses his conscious power to resist the downpull of old habit, and
the opposition of his past-ridden fellows, he becomes an immense
accelerating power. By the aid of his racial memory he can see where a
new age brings us to the same danger-signals that we ignored in the
past, and learn to avoid them. Man’s vast stretch of consciousness, made
permanent and accessible to all by the arts, especially the art of
literature, gives him the advantage of well-nigh limitless experience.
Our irrevocable past, exposed before us all in the increasing light of
knowledge, is not a thing to worship and to follow, but a record of
splendour and of warning, of deep humility, of patience, and of hope.
Our power to postulate a future, to erect hypotheses on which to work,
gives us another advantage over the unconscious products of evolution.
We have yesterday to learn from, and to-morrow to plan for, and these
two give a far broader basis of action than the passing experience of
to-day. Our ability to modify conduct, so painfully proven by our
successful repressive measures, will have even greater effect when we
work with the upward tendencies, instead of against them.
So far the attitude of the race towards its own vanguard—the young—has
been that of a heavy old gentleman throwing himself solidly down on an
active child, and seeking to smother him and pin him to the earth. Being
larger and heavier than the child, he seriously interfered with his
normal activity. But when this size and weight is turned to account to
help and not hinder, when, instead of piling the dead years on the
quivering young brain of the child, we set ourselves as a bulwark to
keep the past off him—then we shall see surprising progress. We have but
to gain a clear idea of what the natural lines of social evolution are,
and cease our opposition, to make large and healthy increase in our
growth.
Nowhere is this better shown than in the rapid improvement of education
to-day. Instead of a mere transmission of what people used to believe,
the young mind is set to find out what is to be known, helped by a large
array of carefully tested facts, and the best machinery of latest
inventors. The laboratory method, to learn by experiment, to test by
proof—this is the modern system; as against the blind belief in
changeless traditions that held us back so long. The educator of to-day
seeks to develop the brain by exercising all its powers—not to fill and
seal it like a preserve jar.
That superstitious respect for the aged which distinguishes China is
giving way to a respect for wisdom, for knowledge, for judgment, and
ability wherever manifested; and if we swing too far toward honour for
the young, it is a healthy extreme to counterbalance the huge and heavy
back action of the past. The mind of man is now being opened to
perceptions of facts as he finds them, rather than the retention of old
stories, and is exercised more in free, responsible action during its
early years.
We are beginning to learn now something of the true history of our
race—what we rose from, and how we have risen; what forces urged us
most, what conditions helped us most. We are seeing with increasing
clearness the desirable lines of action, and how best to follow them.
Alert, intelligent, and active among the great currents of social
evolution, we can do much to promote their effects. Here we can let them
alone, there we can oppose our allied wills against some eddy of
reversionary tendency, or check the growth of some disadvantageous
excess; we can use our consciousness to choose between the varying
forces, and such individual power as we possess to steer among them.
To see our line of progress, to see the tremendous currents that push us
upward and take advantage of them; to see also the pitfalls and
stumbling-blocks, the reaction and inertia to which mere genetic
progress is exposed; and then to use our telic energy to assist nature
and go farther—that will make man a far more useful factor in social
evolution.
III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
_Summary_
_Human evolution. New faculties and instincts. Egoistic concept useful
to individual animal. Disadvantage of outgrown ideals. Persistence of
social rudiments explained. Need of social scrap-heap. Social relations
psychic. Despot only a concept. Concepts internal environment. Shipwreck
and character. Maternal and sex instinct and concepts. Negro hero, power
of concept on conduct. Man’s efforts to check his growth. Prejudice a
physical brain condition. Healthy brain must be used. Virtue of
“believing.” Natural organic tendency to consistency,—how perverted.
Belief in luck. Charades. Basic concepts wrong. Superior past
traditions. Ancestor worship. Fanaticism. Forced inconsistency. Concepts
antedate facts. French Revolution. Slavery. Undertow of old brain
habits. Increase of social convenience. Brain as developed by natural
selection, by social selection. Apparent injustice. Individual hunter.
On his own head. Mistakes most possible in highest grades. Peasant grade
always preserved. Rub out and do over. Society the best culture for
fools. Present concepts in economics, primitive, false, injurious. Ego
concept. If bees were “idiots.”_
III
CONCEPT AND CONDUCT
Human evolution involves the development of a number of individual
animals into specialised functionaries of organic social life. This
requires the gradual assumption of new faculties, new desires, new
instincts, and new activities; and the gradual disuse and discarding of
older ones. The egoistic mental make-up of a solitary animal, of a low
savage, of any reversionary self-supporting human hermit, is
advantageous to him as a separate creature; but disadvantageous to a
society to which he might become attached, and, if he was so attached,
to himself.
A given society, in any age, possesses certain dominant ideas and
feelings proper to it; and the individuals manifesting most of those
ideas and feelings are most beneficial to that society and so to
themselves. But if members of a given society persist in maintaining and
acting upon social ideals of a previous age, they are injurious to their
society and so to themselves. Social evolution, in any given place and
time, is visibly checked by the number of persons who do not keep up
with it; but insist on feeling and thinking after long-past standards,
and trying to act on that basis.
This peculiar persistence of social rudiments in all stages of our
progress requires some special explanation.
When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then
increasingly injurious, continues to force itself upon a growing
civilisation, there must be some strong agency to account for it.
Naturally, it would have been gradually eliminated by proven
undesirability, as cartwheels of solid wood were eliminated. In our
material development we have moved steadily on, growing into ever newer
and better methods, simplifying, cheapening, quickening, easing,
following nature’s methods exactly—the conservation of energy—the line
of least resistance. Our American industrial supremacy is attributed to
precisely this willingness to grow, to discard the old things, to our
constant resort to the scrap-heap. But in social development we seem to
have no scrap-heap, or never to use one unless compelled to, making
history a sort of sacred junk-shop.
In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept
the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously,
valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.
Why?