founded,—an “institution” in that limited and unlovely sense,—in the
“inmates,” both officials and beneficiaries, speedily appears the spirit
of that body, and a very disagreeable one it is. Wherever interdependent
functions are established appears organic life; a common body to perform
these functions, a common spirit to co-relate them.
The social spirit is a common consciousness developed by common
activities, and appearing in us in proportion to the extent and
interrelation of those activities. To share in it demands of the
individual, male or female, a share in the collective activities which
constitute human life.
Activities performed by one’s self alone, for one’s self alone, or one’s
immediate physical relatives, are not distinctively human, and do not
develop the human spirit.
An agricultural population manifests certain traits in common the world
over. Distinctions of blood and of religion are in abeyance before the
unifying force of a common industry as a modifier of character.
Fishermen, or sailors, or miners, or traders invariably show marked
traits in common, however otherwise differentiated.
If all men followed one industry we should have one principal character;
but fortunately our social processes are increasingly varied. There does
arise, however, a steadily widening field of common character as the
traits demanded by all industries alike increase among us. All
industries require peace and self-control; a regard for law and for
organisation; and these tendencies steadily improve the social spirit as
we leave savagery farther and farther behind.
Commerce requires honesty and accuracy, and steadily develops them,
though commerce is more open to certain retroactive influences than the
directly productive processes. Productive industry, being the economic
necessity which brings us together, is the source of our social spirit,
and that spirit is constantly modified by changes in the forms of
industry.
Our social consciousness is of slow and partial development, as is
easily explicable. The highly developed personal consciousness which the
most primitive savage brought with him into social relation, and which
occupies the same field of sensation as the wider social consciousness,
has operated to prevent easy recognition of the latter. The social
pleasures and the social pains we took to be personal and sought or
avoided them as such. Even the most sublimated and morbidly acute social
consciousness, as shown in a passionate philanthropy, is still diagnosed
by some as a form of self-gratification, so persistent is the dominance
of the egoistic concept.
Another reason is that as our external activities, requiring conscious
cerebration, are more perceptible than our internal ones, so we were far
more easily impressed by the external activities of Society than by its
deep-seated organic processes; these external ones were more telic,
partook more of the nature of personal actions, and were readily thought
to be such.
A third and very strong force operating against our recognition of
social consciousness is that it so generally hurts. So long as our
organic social processes went on normally they were unconscious.
Individual man, well fed, well guarded, reproducing the race in peace
and comfort, sported in the sea of social well-being and failed to
observe that there was such a thing. But let any industry become
inflamed, or paralysed, or arrested, and the pain is felt far and wide.
No one likes to be hurt. The more socially we felt our pain the more it
hurt, of course, being bigger. To be hungry one’s self is one thing—to
_feel a famine_ is another. People with the most social consciousness
suffered most, so long as social processes were not healthy; and,
therefore, our effort has been to resist the increase of social
consciousness.
We say “mind your own business”—“don’t concern yourself about other
people,” “let the other man walk.” We try _not_ to feel the famine in
India, the flood in China, the ignorance in Russia, the cruelty in
Armenia, the crimes and casualties, the deformities and diseases of our
own great cities. But in spite of our natural reluctance to a widening
of the sensorium that thrills most to pain, it is widening in spite of
us.
More and more every year we are feeling common evils, and seeking to
remove them. It is not that “I” am seeking to relieve “my” distress and
improve “my” conditions, but that “we,” in institute and association,
club, congress, and convention, are rousing more and more to a
consciousness of “our” distress, and seeking methods by which “we” may
improve “our” conditions. This marks the growth of social consciousness.
A pleasant thought here is that as fast as social conditions improve so
fast does social consciousness become an avenue of pleasure instead of
pain, and so we shall encourage instead of oppose it; thus the
improvement will widen more and more rapidly.
Something we see already of the larger joy obtainable in social
consciousness, in our pleasure in one another’s work. I do not mean in
personal consumption of it, so to speak, but in our satisfaction in the
achievements of “our” business men, “our” “scientific men,” “our”
inventors, mechanics, artists, discoverers, teachers, and the like. “We”
take pleasure and pride in what “we” do—requiring social consciousness.
Children’s games show the natural development of this feeling in the
human being. A child likes to play alone if he has to; but children like
far better to play together—the excitement and joy of co-ordinate
activity being far greater than in individual activity. This delight in
collective expression increases from age to age. As measured merely by
popular sports and amusements, the game involving a contest of team with
team is more enjoyed than the older sport of individual race and
contest, both by spectator and player.
There remains one more strong cause for our slow-born recognition of
social consciousness, and that is the position of women. Their
activities being confined to an excessive development of sex functions,
and industry on the low stage of solitary disconnected performance, or
at most the first step of group labour, personal service; and this
industry, too, confined to self or family interest altogether; it is not
to be expected that any high degree of social spirit could be attained
by this inchoate mass of individuals in society, but not of it, taking
no part in its processes economic or politic, and no share in its
growing responsibilities; nor is it to be expected that men, though
increasingly socialised by themselves, could avoid the influence of this
unsocialised half of humanity, both through its daily companionship and
the tremendous effect of maternity.
We are still further affected by the result of the position of women in
maintaining an abnormal degree of sex-tendency, and we have seen how
anti-social an influence is the natural belligerence and destructiveness
of masculine energy in excess; therefore, it is no wonder at all that
our social development has been slow, erratic, and liable to extremely
morbid forms and processes. Nothing will conduce so much to the right
growth of society in body and spirit as the progress of women from their
position of prehistoric sex-bound egoism and familism, to their
rightful share and place in the vital processes of Society. They, as
half the component individuals of Society, will then contribute their
share of modern social feeling and action; they, becoming more human and
less disproportionately sexual, will reduce the influence of morbid
sex-tendency in both male and female; and they, as mothers, will rapidly
fill the world with full-blood human beings, instead of the present
half-bloods,—half socialised through the father, but held in prehistoric
individualism through the mother.
The social spirit is as “natural” as the individual spirit. It is
conspicuously visible in action among us, but we have hidden it under
false names.
“Altruism” is one of these. This in its very assumption of “others”
preserves the ego intact, and that ego has never yet been convinced of
any rational cause for surrendering to those other egos. We have only
been able to urge it under our equally mistaken Pay concept, trying to
show that we should meet reward either from the other egos, or from God.
And as our nobler instincts have always revolted from the Pay concept,
the progress of Altruism has been retarded.
We need merely to understand it to withdraw all this opposition. What we
call altruism should be called—has been called[1]—“omniism”; it is a
feeling for all of us, and _includes_ the ego. It is, if you please, an
extension of self-consciousness, a recognition that my self is society,
and my “ego” only a minute fraction of the real me.
Footnote 1:
By Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes. Article in _Wilshire’s Magazine_, March,
1903.
This omniism is as normal a growth as egoism. The preservation of the
individual by individual action required egoism, and developed it. The
preservation of society, by collective action, requires omniism and
develops it. That it is not more generally developed is due to the
resistance and confusion of our brains.
The superiority of omniism to egoism is in its being a later and more
complex development, an organic superiority. As the single cell is lower
than the organism, so cell-consciousness, if there be such, is lower
than self-consciousness, and as the single organism is lower than the
social organism so self-consciousness is lower than social
consciousness. Egoism is common to all beasts, is perfectly natural,
useful, right; but omniism is a human distinction, progressively
developed as we become socialised.
My “self” is my conscious area of working machinery, wherewith I receive
impressions and produce expressions, and if I were a tenfold Siamese
twin—if I felt, and thought, and worked with the bodies of twenty
men—those twenty men would be my “self,” and to care for them would be
as “selfish” as it is for a solitary animal to care for itself, and as
perfectly right. Not to care for them, to be only actively conscious of
my twentieth part “self,” would be a condition of arrested development,
pitiable rather than blameworthy. In a social condition of existence,
the life and prosperity of each member is absolutely interwoven with
that of the others, of the whole, and not to recognise this, and act
accordingly, is to manifest an inferior plane of development.
Organic relation of any sort is mutual, involving mutual obligation,
duty, and, if necessary, sacrifice. When a physical body is starving to
death, it is impressive to note the gradual surrender of its constituent
parts in the order of their importance. First, he calls in all his
savings,—the fat. Then the muscles slowly feed in their store. Lastly
the “vital organs.” And all this is unconscious, managed by the
long-established mechanism inside, without any dictation from the
cerebral consciousness the man calls “self.”
Our internal social functions, the immediately necessary economic
processes, may proceed unconsciously to quite a degree of development
under the direction of egoism, because, as the social life is the main
protection of the individual, so the interests of the individual and of
society are in many ways identical, and the individual may serve society
very fully and never dream that he is doing anything more than to “take
care of himself.” But Society cannot proceed far in development before
the interests of the whole may involve a temporary subversion of the
interests of the past, and here a beneficial social conduct requires
social consciousness.
Our carefully preserved ego concept acts mischievously in proportion to
the progress of society. The more complex the social process, the larger
the social interests involved, the more injurious is this primitive
spirit of egoism. The selfishness of a peasant is far less harmful than
the selfishness of a railroad-owner. In the orderly development of
social economics this would have been taken care of by the natural
extension of feeling accompanying the extension of action, but that has
been checked, as usual, by our mental heirlooms. Nevertheless we can
observe this natural relation of action and feeling in spite of our
opposition.
The growth of altruism in certain special industries is most instructive
to study, as showing precisely what conditions most regularly and
rapidly develop it. Look, for instance, at the distinctive
characteristics educed by the industries of agriculture and navigation.
Sailors, as a class, are generous, quick in heroism, licentious,
intemperate, and profane.
Farmers, as a class, are by no means generous—frequently stingy; you
never heard of a sailor who was a miser, but often of farmers who are
such. The farmer is not quick to heroism, but, on the contrary, is slow
to recognise his class-needs, hard to organise, prone to the most
primitive individualism. On the other hand the farmer is comparatively
chaste, and temperate, and guarded in speech.
Why these obvious distinctions, in men of the same race, class, and
time, often of the same families? As obviously from the difference in
their industries.
The farmer is engaged in our most remote and ancient industry, the one
nearest the bottom, in fact it is the bottom of real social growth; only
the cattle-keeper stands between the farmer and the savage. The farmer
is more nearly self-supporting than any other member of society. He is
still in the short-circuit activities of the self-feeder; while his
surplus product does in truth feed the world and give us all a chance to
grow, he sees nothing of the world he feeds, and, blinded by our customs
of exchange, thinks that in selling corn he is but feeding his family.
Therefore the farmer is naturally egoistic—inevitably so unless he
recognises the social nature of his function.
But as the farmer marries early and easily; woman, too, on that plane of
economic activity being a valued co-agent in living, like the squaw; so
the farmer is under no strong temptation to unchastity. His life of
out-of-door muscular exertion is another help here. Lacking other forms
of association, the church is a welcome social ground for the farmer and
his wife; so he conforms easily to the current standard of morality. And
with this moral tendency and lack of startling events, we find the
reason for his temperance in speech and other habits.
In the sailor’s life, the opposite conditions obtain. His is a late and
highly socialised industry. He combines with other men in elaborately
specialised labour for the benefit of innumerable widely scattered
people. His combination is absolute for considerable periods of time,
and physically isolated from all other social forms. The dangers of the
profession are great, requiring constant watchfulness and the most
prompt and perfect interdependence. From the seamen singing and hauling
together to the quick co-ordination between the captain on the bridge
and the uttermost sailor on the yards, there is this constant interplay
and conspicuous interdependence. Of course, they develop a high degree
of comradeship—of course, they stand by one another to the last degree
of danger. It indicates no greater nobility in Jack Jones, who went to
sea, over Jedediah Jones, who stayed on the farm; it is a quality of his
industry, that is all.
So with the other traits. The sailor is communally fed while engaged in
these common activities. The ego is not called out in any way. Then, his
private share of wealth being given him at the same time when he is
turned loose to provide for himself, he naturally pours forth the money
freely; a trait well known by all the barnacles and borers who infest
the sailor ashore, as others do the ships at sea.
The sailor has no wife; he cannot marry as early as the farmer, because
Jack has to support his wife at long range out of his earnings; she
being of no service in maintaining the family. Or, if married, he must
be away from his wife for long periods. Thus denied the natural
relations of the sexes and exposed when ashore to the instant swooping
down of the parasitic female animal in her frankest form, he is,
inevitably, “immoral.” Let Jedediah go to sea and Jack stay at home, and
you reverse the characteristics of each.
The intemperance comes under the action of these last conditions,
long-enforced abstinence and sudden profusion; and the profanity is
coincident with the sudden shocks of excitement in his work, with all
the jars, difficulties, and dangers involved. For similar reasons
ox-drovers are less given to profanity than mule-drivers. Thus we see
the vices and virtues of a given profession inhere in its conditions.
Individual character may fight against it, and there is a difference
always in the personal expression, but as industrial classes the farmer
and the sailor manifest certain distinctive characteristics involved in
their form of industry.
Miners furnish another conspicuous instance of this force. In no class
of men—not even in sailors—is altruism, even to heroism, more prominent.
Given death and danger well-nigh certain, but comrades to be saved, and
the miners always volunteer at once. If valour and self-sacrifice among
miners were rewarded as they are in some sporadic rescue of the
drowning, we should need to run a factory of decorations. The miner,
like the sailor, is engaged in a highly socialised industry. He works at
great personal sacrifices to promote the social welfare.
The farmer, in his corn, sees tangible immediate food for himself and
family. The miner sees no such prompt advantage in his coal. The farmer,
safely and alone, pursues his individual labours. The miner, in danger
and in company, pursues his group labour. They are cut off from the rest
of the world, the mining group, and easily develop a common
consciousness. Their danger is a common danger, only to be met and
overcome by common action. Hence they act in common and for each other.
This may be studied in varying degree in all industries. The effect of
household labour on the growth of altruism is even worse than that of
farm labour. The farmer does in truth connect with the whole world,
serve the whole world through his products. The domestic labourer
connects with nothing but the family, serves nothing but the family.
Absolutely the most primitive form of human labour surviving among us is
that of the woman “doing her own work” like the squaw. The only
enlargement admitted is that of domestic service, being a survival of
the next lowest form, slave labour. This industry, in its shortest of
short circuits, develops no social spirit whatever; nothing but egoism
and familism grow from it.
Altruism, due to other causes, may be felt and manifested by the
domestic worker, but the work does not conduce to it. Conversely, when
this stage of labour is at last abandoned; when we have socialised these
antiquated industries; an immense increase of altruism will appear. We
are so accustomed to think of men as egoists, and women as altruists
that it will be a blow to many to advance this position, but seeing that
altruism, the social spirit, is but the essential condition and result
of our social co-activities; that only men take part in these
activities, and that women have been arrested in this natural
development and forced to remain as they began, working in solitude and
utter disconnection, for their own families solely; it is plain that the
world’s growth in altruism comes through men as a class, and that women
as a class contribute to the social spirit only an exaggerated familism
and egoism. That animal instinct shown in “the maternal sacrifice,” or
the devotion to one’s mate of exaggerated sex development, have nothing
to do with the larger human love—with omniism.
The two are constantly blended through heredity, but the industrial
influence of the sexes is as above stated, and it is through industrial
development that our altruism comes. Observe that the nations most
“humane” are those most advanced in industry, and those least “humane”
are those most primitive in industry, down to the savage who has only
the rudiments of either industry or humanity. Altruism is recognised by
religion as a virtue and urged upon us, but it appears in us only in
proportion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our own
principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incarnate—but it is not
altruism understood. It preaches altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it
does not show altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial
relations and urge upon its followers their entering upon those
relations as the chief means of developing altruism.
Religion has not showed us the _naturalness_ of altruism. It has taught
that it was natural for man to be selfish, and that to be unselfish was
a continual struggle, needing the grace of God to attain it. When we
learn at last that the social instincts are as natural as the personal,
that they are evolved under the same biological laws, that our failure
to manifest them in due proportion is due to unnecessary social
conditions quite within our power to change—the burden on man’s
conscience will be lifted forever.
We shall learn to lay no false stress on altruism as a lofty and
difficult virtue, but see it to be the spirit of civilisation; and the
lack of it, the uncivilised egoism still so prominent and evilly active,
we shall perceive to be merely an anachronism, which needs only to be
recognised to be despised, and only to be despised to be outgrown.
A man still maintaining a visible egoism in a period of dominant
altruism, would feel as uncomfortable as a man with a tail. A tail was
“natural” to us once,—not now.
Another vital error, maintained by our religions, is the confusion of
altruism, the social spirit, with that abnormal action known as
“charity”—“benevolence,” “philanthropy.” We are taught to regard the
expression of this rare and hard-won feeling of altruism as requiring us
to “sell all we have and give to the poor.”
Giving to the poor, from direct alms to the subtle ramifications of
organised charity, bears about the same relation to a healthy working
altruism that the transfusion of blood bears to a mother’s nursing a
child. There are times when a direct transfer of subsistence is called
for in society, as in some great disaster, like the Chicago fire, or
Johnstown flood, or awful submersion of Galveston.
So there are cases when one human being may save another’s life by
giving him his own blood through a syringe. But you would find it
difficult to raise men to a daily level of devotion willing to transfer
blood as a steady diet to their anæmic friends; and it is similarly
difficult to persuade the healthy working mass of society that any such
sacrificial transfer of property is right and reasonable.
They are quite correct in this position. Charity is not right. It may be
necessary at times, but it is not a normal organic process. A healthy
working altruism involves no sacrifice of one to another, but the common
good-will, and common effort for a common good. We err in the very
word—it should not be “other-ism”—but “our-ism.” There is no justice or
benefit in “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” but there is in each giving to
all—for all includes each.
Just as our foolish “business” methods deal and shuffle money among the
rich without adding a cent to our wealth, so does our foolish charity
deal and shuffle it among the poor, with similar uselessness. The fact
that we are, and always have been, so open to the demands of charity,
proves our social spirit, but proves also that we have not understood
its nature and its use.
One more error that hinders our realisation of this great feeling is our
persistent misuse of the word “self.”