relation we have peacefully maintained our original animal theory of
individualism—the Ego concept. If bees had brains like ours, and the
exquisitely organised modern bee could consciously maintain the state of
mind of her remote prototype, the solitary bee, we might have some
parallel to comfort our lonely height of foolishness. Well did the
Greeks call an “idiot” the man who behaved as a separate individual and
considered his personal advantage first. Consider the ruin and disorder
of the hive if bees were “idiots.” That type of industry, of harmony, of
peaceful wealth, could never have arisen under such misconception.
We have many more root concepts, some basic, some collateral and
derivative; all working, discordantly enough, against social progress.
Several will be touched upon here; those most patently connected with
the subject of the book, our Human Work. In pursuance of which subject
it is necessary to lay down some of the facts as to the nature of
society, its structure and functions; and to show how perverse, how
inadequate, how deadly mischievous are the ancient theories which still
stand in our minds in place of those facts.
IV: SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
_Summary_
_The ego concept, based on pre-human status. Our separate consciousness
not human. Human consciousness collective. “We” human, “I” animal.
Absurdity of individualism in organism. Pleasure-in-impression theory.
Animal basis. Pleasure through motory nerves as well as sensory, and in
us far greater. Pay Concept, animal basis, logical extremes in Heaven
and Hell. Other forces also operative. Woman labour. Slave labour. Shame
and agony resultant in concepts of eternal torture. Wage labour. Want
theory. Self-interest theory. Self-preservation not nature’s first law.
Race-preservation. Pain concept: “Sweet uses of adversity.” Action and
reaction equal. “Good to be born poor.” Pain only a message, always
indicative of wrong. Defensive torture. Hazing. Evils of poverty.
Abraham Lincoln. Illegitimate wealth. Dumbbells not dinner. Contempt for
work, how derived. Veblen. Paradox of “independence.” Law of demand and
supply._
IV
SOME FALSE CONCEPTS
As we shall frequently have to refer to certain major errors in popular
thought, it will be as well to clearly enumerate and describe those
selected. The field is wide,—each of those mentioned connects with many
others,—and there may be serious question as to which antedates which;
but difference on that point will not invalidate the actuality of their
influence on conduct. The group mentioned in this chapter will be
further described and elaborated later; this is merely to introduce them
in some order for reference.
The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in the human mind, the
parent of almost all the others, is the Ego concept. This is the
universal assumption, based on a pre-human status when it was true, that
human beings are separate entities, like the lower animals.
As animals we are separate, and, when we first began to think, the
animal life was so enormously preponderant, and the human life so weak,
so vague, so intermittently realised, that it was quite natural we
should carry over the sense of personal entity into the social entity.
That we have a separate personal consciousness is not denied, but it is
not humanity. The human consciousness is collective, as we shall see
later.
Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego concept, which is as
necessary in its place as the concept of a leg or a liver, but in
failing to grasp the larger inclusive Social concept. All the complex
organic phenomena of social life we have continually tried to construe
in terms of the individual. The distinctive features of human life are
invariably social. No one trait or power of our great race but what must
be accounted for in its development and understood in its use as a
social factor.
“We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “I,” being part of Society,
embody and represent it. The discord and mischief which would be wrought
in a physical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life and
interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the discord and misery
wrought in our social organism by the persistence of this archaic idea.
Another error, most deeply basic in its logical relation, though perhaps
not so early recognised by the conscious mind, is our general belief
that pleasure lies wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first,
it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing theory of personal
animal life, and has not been removed and replaced by truer views as
social life is developed.
The individual animal having no functions but those of maintenance,
reproduction, and improvement, and accomplishing his improvement only
along lines of personal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and
remained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure led and pain
drove him to the attainment of the means to these ends of this
fulfilment, so he early learned to associate pleasure with getting what
he wanted,—pain with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as
it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are promptly
reactionary, and not matters of conscious judgment and volition, he
never took into account the pleasure inherent in action, in the
discharge of energy, and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of
such discharge.
The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel
good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure;
increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture.
The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the
consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves
no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as
those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not
“feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income,
not in his output.
But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of
activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging
fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to
discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal
affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many
others.
To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity requires consciousness,
and consciousness involves pleasure and pain. The whole field of
distinctively human activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of
energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly increasing
consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the income of man, as a
separate animal, remains the same. He has, as before, the pleasure of
the intake, the attainment of the means to his separate welfare. He has,
beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger collective intake also,
the gratification of his social desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the
pleasure of action; of the conscious expression of energy.
This is the largest field of human delight, but has not been so
recognised. We still commonly associate pleasure with impression, with
things we are to get, to have. Whereas, in fact, our pleasure depends
far more largely upon what we do.
Closely derived from this basic assumption is our general theory of
return as an incentive; what we may call the Pay concept. This was one
of man’s earliest generalisations. He observed the excito-motory action
of the individual beast; under the influence of hunger or fear he acts;
not influenced, he does not act, sleeps in the sun, and accumulates
energy for the next jump.
The beast, seeing his dinner running before him, ran after it; having
caught his dinner, he ceased to run. Seeing his enemy running behind
him, he ran away from it; having escaped from his enemy, he ceased to
run.
“Aha!” cries that astute observer, Early Man, “Exertion depends on
pleasure before you or pain behind you!” and he forthwith produced his
grand primeval generalisation of Reward and Punishment.
This is still exclusively held by almost all of us. We have used it to
account for all human actions, with the bitter conclusion that “every
man has his price.” We have spread and lengthened and deepened it to
cover our waxing field of action, till out of its logical extremes we
have built both Heaven and Hell.
It was a tremendous concept for the early brain to achieve, and it was
true—as far as it went. These two forces do modify action. They were
very strong upon individual animals, and they act upon us yet—to a
degree. That is, there are still some of us so near the plane of
individualism as to be readily and strongly influenced by these agents.
The error of early man lay in not observing other forces even then
operative; and the error of modern man lies in not observing that these
others have grown continually, and the primal ones have dwindled in
proportion.
Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor laboured the primeval
squaw, working patiently, working eagerly, working most efficiently, out
of the overflowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power of
recreative love. Not because of anything to gain or anything to fear,
but because energy must have expression; and the expression is in
proportion to the energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in the
fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our dramatic androcentric
period, the woman was made a slave and her labour became slave labour,
not to its improvement. Later again men were made slaves; their activity
was coerced by these two primitive stimuli, the fear of punishment, the
hope of reward; mainly the former.
In that first period of co-ordinate activity among men, the
irreconcilable male energy was forced into service by the immediate
pressure of pain and fear. Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as
such accepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion to
labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour in being free of
it—was superimposed upon humanity at this period, and has never been
fully outgrown. This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony,
its hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of man, and, as
this period was of great duration, it made possible to our minds the
prodigious concepts of eternal torture.
Later, in the second stage of coerced action, that of wage labour, we
have the reward used instead of the penalty. We will not whip the man if
he does not work, but we will not feed him unless he does.
Our governing concept being that action is produced only by these means,
we must needs use one or the other. Since we believe that if the slave
were not in fear of punishment he would not work, or that if the
employee were not in hope of pay he would not work, we act upon our
belief consistently enough. We have outgrown the period where we
believed we had a right to enforce labour by inflicting punishment; but
we have not outgrown the only less primitive belief that we have a right
to enforce it by withholding the reward. We do not yet, to any extent,
recognise the other forces under which human beings act.
Closely allied to the Pay concept and following it, a more concrete
expression of the same general thought as applied to industrial
activity, comes our universal economic fallacy, the Want Theory.
This is repeatedly defined and opposed in later chapters, and here need
only be stated as that basic proposition in Political Economy in which
it is assumed that man works to gratify wants, and that if his wants are
otherwise gratified he will not work. This fundamental theory of
economics rests, as will be readily seen, on the foregoing, on the Ego
concept and the Pay concept. Part of it, more generally applied, is our
general Self-interest theory, usually expressed in solemn tones:
“Self-preservation is the first law of Nature.” Men say this as if it
were so, and other people believe it simply because it is said to them
so solemnly. Our brains, trained for all time to bow to authority, have
a treacherous trick of believing whatever is advanced by those in
authority or even by the scribes. The present scribe asks no such gulp,
but that the reader use his own active thinking power on the
propositions here advanced. Now, this self-preservation theory is
contradicted on its own doorstep by the fact of the race-preservation
instinct, the individual counting for nothing, absolutely nothing, in
the unbroken stream of racial life of which he forms so small a part.
If we were solemnly taught “Race-preservation is the first law of
Nature,” we should be nearer the truth. Even in the purely individual
animals the good of the race is paramount to that of the member, and in
the collective animals the social instinct is so highly developed that
self-preservation is not even thought of. Break an ant-heap, and watch
“the first law of Nature”! Immediate, instinctive, unquestioning, they
rush to save the eggs and young, to guard the queen, to preserve the
group—not the individual.
“Nature” develops whatever faculties are required in a given form of
life, and if the life-form is collective the collective instincts appear
in force. Now “Self-interest” as a motive does act upon the human being,
but it does not compare in weight and value with the larger later
motives of social interest. We assume that the visibly social processes
we see going on about us are best governed by self-interest in the
parties concerned; that efficient service is best commanded under this
pressure. We are wrong.
Social processes were initiated primarily along lines of self-interest,
in orderly development, from existing instincts to higher ones, but the
further developed are these processes the less useful is the early
motive, the more needed is the later motive of social interest.
Self-interest, preserved too long in social growth, becomes a deterrent
force. The more wide and complex the process, the greater the distance
between producer and consumer, the more injurious is the action of that
essentially limited force. This is why in small, early societies there
is more honest and efficient service under this motive; and in large,
modern societies, unless the social instincts of duty, honour, and the
like are operative, we find such infinitely ramified dishonesty and
inefficiency.
Another stumbling-block of progress is an extremely ancient belief of
ours, not derived from the preceding five, but in flat contradiction to
some of them, which the popular and poetic saying calls “the sweet uses
of adversity.” We very generally believe that pain and difficulty are
good for us, and the logical consequence of this belief—so far as
practical life allows such an absurdity to have any consequence—is of
course that we do nothing to remove pain and difficulty. The further
logical consequence, that we should deliberately add pain and difficulty
to our lives in order to improve them, is seldom allowed; it is too
ridiculous even for our brains.
Now what is the fraction of truth in this peculiar piece of idiocy? At
its very base lies the law of physics: “action and reaction are equal.”
As hard as you push against a wall does the wall push against you.
Following this comes the early observation of the effect of environment.
Where the channel is narrowest the stream is deepest; where it is widest
the stream is shallowest; and if you dam the stream the water rises to
the height of the dam.
So in the action of the human forces we observe that, if you hinder and
obstruct a man, he resists your pressure and rises against it—sometimes!
Sometimes he does no such thing, but is crushed instead. However, we
perceived numbers of cases where opposition called forth resisting
energy where action and reaction were equal, and we made our easy
generalisation as to the beneficent effects of difficulties.
Applied to human life, in the concrete environment which we call good
and bad according to our lights, we observed further that this law
seemed to work backward; that where a person had no difficulties, where
all was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy. Then we felt sure
we were right. We produced a lot of popular expressions of this general
thought, a religious phase of it being “whom the Lord loveth he
chasteneth”; its application in education leading us to believe that it
is good to make the child labour and struggle in learning—bad to “make
it too easy for him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad comments
on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful assertion that “it is good
for a man to be born poor.”
Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because of its benefits; no
one foregoes being rich, or trying to be rich because convinced of its
evils; above all, we do not seek to work out this theory on our
children. Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to remove
the obstacles to human progress in general. So long as we even partially
believe that obstacles promote to progress, that the hurdles add to the
speed of the racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to aid
the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to clear the track.
Now where does the essential error lie in this loosely hung together
bunch of foolishness? In the first place separate “pain” from
difficulty. Pain is merely a message; it is a telegram to headquarters
to say that something is wrong. It always means that. Normal action does
not hurt. It may be “good,” as the sentinel is good who gives the alarm
so that you may save yourself; but his alarm is a warning of evil. It
may accompany a “good” process, like that of resuscitating the drowning;
but that is not a normal process, the pain is conditioned upon water in
the lungs.
If a person is so situated that he must bear pain, then it is good to
get used to it, if possible. On this basis the early savage used
self-torture to help him bear the incidental miseries of life, and from
that practice dated our views on the subject.
The most unblushing survival of this gross savagery is seen in our
practice of hazing, calmly defended by its perpetrators as “it makes
boys manly,” “it develops character.” The savage had at least the grace
_to do it to himself_, and it was not practised upon children. Our
imperfectly educated children maintain in this the customs of the lowest
savages, in a rudimentary form. There are times in life when pain has to
be borne for a greater good, but that does not make the pain good.
As to the other and a little more legitimate branch—difficulty. Here we
feel more assurance. We do see the poor boy making tremendous struggles,
and rising above his difficulties hardened, bruised, belated, but
triumphant. We do see the rich boy making no struggle at all, and rising
above nothing. Hence—but wait a bit. Do _all_ poor boys thus struggle
and rise?
Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-bred, well-fed,
well-educated boy so hopelessly handicapped in life by those advantages?
Is our ceaseless attempt to provide for our children the best advantages
all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense enough to know
better than that.
We know that poverty coarsens, weakens, stunts, degrades; that under its
evil influence “the dregs of society” are steadily and inevitably
produced. We know that where one person of phenomenal capacity can rise
_in spite of it_, thousands of ordinary capacity are ruined _because of
it_.
Abraham Lincoln was a rail-splitter. Yes. Were there no others? There
were and are many poor boys splitting rails, and yet the crop of Abraham
Lincolns remains limited to one.
Our error is a very simple one. We confuse a coincidence with a cause.
Most people are poor. Therefore most great people have risen from
poverty. How many more great people we might have had under better
conditions we shall never know.
As for the effect of wealth, great wealth in private hands is not an
advantage; it, too, is a morbid condition, and under its evil influence
the scum of society is steadily and increasingly produced. It is perhaps
as hard for a great nature to overcome the difficulties of our
illegitimate wealth as those of our illegitimate poverty. Still some do
it. We have but to study the biographical dictionary to find that the
proportion of great men to rich and poor is about the same as the
proportion of those two classes, that is all.
Meanwhile the healthy truth under this is the physiological law that
exercise develops function. Whatever power you have is increased by
exercise to a certain extent. But you must first have your power. A
punching bag helps develop your muscles if rightly used, but it does not
make them. Your daily food is the prime factor.
To get the best results from people they must first be born in good
condition—starved mothers and exhausted fathers are not advantageous;
then kept in good condition;—good air, good food, good clothing. Does
anyone wish to claim that poor air or poor food or poor clothing is
advantageous? When you have good stock, and give it all the advantages
of true education, bringing out and correlating all its powers, then the
strong and active creature can maintain and develop those powers by
exercise. But dumbbells in place of dinner do not strengthen.
One more very common attitude of mind with regard to work, not as
fundamental as the foregoing, and not founded on any law whatever, but
on arbitrary and evil conditions, is our general contempt for it.
Regarding it, as we must under the Want theory, as done only to gratify
a want; regarding it, as we must under the Ego concept, as done by the
individual for the individual, it does seem a poor thing enough. Why
should we honour and approve the never-so-ingenious efforts of a person
to keep himself alive, so scornfully described in a poem of Robert
Buchanan:
“Struggle, speculate, dig, and bleed,
Reap the whirlwind of Venus’ seed,
O senseless, impotent human breed!”
But beyond the legitimate scorn of a social creature for what he
estimates as an individual activity, comes our illegitimate scorn based
on lamentable, evil conditions.
The work of the free mother in the matriarchal period was never
despised; when men enslaved women their work became contemptible. So
when the despised captive was made to labour, his work also was held
contemptible. And then, as Veblen shows so irrefutably, this primitive
attitude was retained through all the centuries in the stagnant pool of
leisure-class life, that singular medium wherein the active modern world
may find preserved a sedimentary deposit of most ancient times. This
class and its customs and habits of mind, being revered by us, we have
made permanent and constantly reinforced the scorn of work which else
would have been contradicted long since by every fact of progressing
civilisation.
With this mixed foundation the feeling remains in full force. It serves
to check the normal activities of those who “do not have to work,” and
to belittle the importance of those who do. It shows, for one result,
this pretty paradox: a human creature absolutely helpless, doing nothing
whatever to maintain himself or anyone else, depending for the meanest
service as for the greatest, on the assistance of others; and then
calling himself “independent,” and believing that he “supports” those
who keep him alive, by “furnishing them employment”! And—still more
paradoxical—the active and valuable persons who so laboriously maintain
this ornament believe it, too.
A minor fallacy in our popular economics, but one doing much mischief,
is that familiar phrase “the law of demand and supply.” It is in part a
logical derivative of the want theory; in part based on a true natural
law, and for the rest weakened and confounded by the conditions of our
own artificial “market.”