made. A collection of human bodies pure and simple would tell you little
of their social stage. But a collection of the tools and weapons of the
man would tell you what he was and where.
With the detachability comes the great characteristic of
exchangeability, the “our-ness” of human things; the social body is
necessarily usable by all. There is no vexed question of possession with
the beast. His teeth and claws are his indeed; he cannot lend or give,
and none can rob him. His “dogness” is a little bundle all his own, but
our “man-ness” lies in these wide-flung tools of ours, made by one, used
by another, profited in by all.
This is again our infinite advantage. If the protean change of
characteristics made possible to us by tool-chest and armory were
possible to any other creature we should not hold our easy supremacy.
The dying leader of the wolf-pack cannot hand his superior teeth to the
next one, or produce sudden wings and lend them to his followers. The
distributability of our tools gives us the limitless flux of power which
is human. One man makes swords for a thousand, and each sword spreads
the sword-power far and wide. The needle, the pen, all individual tools,
may be used by many in turn, to the advantage of all.
Even more do we see this advantage in anything which may be used by many
at once. Here indeed is humanness made manifest. Men, separate men, may
swim as well as some animals, or ride a log, perhaps a hollowed one. But
man, the human creature, man socialised, make for _themself_ the ship, a
swimming body for the social soul, and in that one material product of
humanity lies unmeasured share of our real growth and greatness.
Only men together can make it, with ages of gradual evolution and
relentless elimination of the unfit, with elaborate specialisation and
co-ordination of effort; only man together and in similar complex
relation can use it. And because of this larger range of usability is
its larger value. More persons can use it, and for a longer time; it is
a large and lasting piece of the social structure. So of the road, the
bridge, the hall,—whatever is open to the largest use by the most people
for the longest time, this is of the largest value to society; as
statue, picture, music, book. In direct practical result these common
products for our common use minimise effort and maximise gain, and in
the living miracle of their use they steadily react upon the user and
make him something nearer to the power that made them. The shiny-bladed
knife in the hand of the eager boy cries to him to cut, to carve, to do
a thousand things; and as he uses it, skill, the human skill bred by
long ages of knife-using, is born anew in him. Ward has shown
this—achievement embodied in object.
The pillared temple, visible product of the human soul in purest,
proudest aspiration, reacts always on those who come within, lifting
their spirits to its plane, to each according to his power of receiving.
In our made things lies that much of our humanness, and as we use them
we grow by that much more human; in this reactive power lies the
desirability of the Thing, and its importance. The power of “mind over
matter” is commonly observed, but the effect of matter upon mind, the
reaction of the body upon the spirit, is not so clear to us. We see the
human spirit laying violent hands on clay and wood and iron, and
building for itself a visible, tangible form. We do not see so well this
visible form steadily and inexorably reacting upon the imprisoned
spirit.
The made thing is the vehicle, record, and monument of human progress.
The things we make are nearer to the human soul than is the physical
body. That body is but a machine in which our nerve currents have run so
long and intimately that the act is unconscious, and we say “I did
this,” not “my hand did it.”
If a baby could express his relation to his body in plain words, we
should find him getting acquainted with it, “learning it” as one learns
a bicycle or a sewing-machine. He can make it work, but he has to learn
how, as he would have to learn how to row or shoot.
Moreover, It has its tendencies and habits with which he has to
respectfully acquaint himself that he may promote or check or change
them; the tendencies and habits of a long-established animal mechanism,
in which the human soul is quartered. The tools and implements in the
use of which lies our humanness are scarcely more foreign to us than his
hands and feet were to the baby, or than some new combination of
muscular action is to the adult. We have to learn to act through sword
and spear, spade and plough, knife and axe, as we had to learn to act
through muscle, cord, and bone, and they become as automatically natural
to us in due time.
The physical body is not an end but a means. Life is the end, action;
the body is what you do it with. So these material forms we make are not
ends, but means. Human life is the end, and these things are what we do
it with. The expression of force through higher forms, that is life’s
line of progress.
Our creations are all to do something in, or with, or from. Even the
most perfect form of art stands as an inspiration to other human beings,
is a means to better action, better living for us all. Every human
product is an instrument, in using which we can more fully express the
divine spirit. A house is not a final end. We do not build a house as a
crowning achievement and then sit and wait upon it for the rest of
life—or at least we should not! We build a house to live in, that we may
work. Human life is not a means of promoting house-building;
house-building is a means of promoting human life.
Book, picture, statue, these are our fruit, our product, evolved through
us as a means of further growth. Our “civilised” life to-day, the
consciousness of an “educated,” “cultivated” person, is developed by
contact with the things in which previous human beings expressed their
measure of life and passed it on to us.
Some brain is born with new cellular development which enables it to
receive impressions from mountain scenery, which scenery had hitherto
failed to impress the less developed brain. The brain impressed must
express the force received, must transmit it in a material form.
According to its capacity it works to do this, producing picture or poem
or prose description. That material form continues to transmit the
impression received to those whose brains are developed in comparative
similarity, and the race is gradually opened to the stimulus of this
aspect of nature, and by so much is greater, wiser, able to do more.
Human work, all of it, is a means to further expression. If we ask “to
what end,” we can only reply that as far as our lit circle of perception
goes life has no end. But its direction is plain, and its method; to
receive more and more of the forces of life as the brain becomes more
widely and delicately susceptible, to express more and more of the
forces of life in our work, and so further to develop that brain,—that
is the process. The savage has not brain development enough to “see God”
with even as much as we, or as little; he is but dimly and narrowly
affected by the currents of divine force. But such energy as he does
receive prompts him to work, and as he works he develops further brain
power. In working is human growth, and in its visible forms is the
permanence and transmissibility of each advance.
Take cloth, for instance, as an illustration of the value of the thing
made. Imagine it out of human life. See its relation to the human skin,
both in clothing and cleanliness—fancy man with neither shirt, towel,
nor handkerchief! We revert at once to leather and foul habits. No
carpets, no hangings, no banners and flags, no sheeted beds, no
daintiness in eating, no subtle play of feeling in our dress—down would
go human history backward, ravelling out to first principles. Cloth is a
social tissue which enables us to come close and slip smoothly in our
complex interaction. Leather means solitude and living out of doors.
Civilisation is inwoven with the twisted threads; textile manufacture is
a social function.
These material forms which humanity makes are not gross and ignoble, as
the blind asceticism of the past supposed; they are humanity’s living
body, and should be lovingly and reverently regarded, most honourably
and gladly constructed, as the intimate avenues of spiritual growth for
us all. Human production is marked plainly higher than that of lower
animals because it is in common. One makes alone for many to use; or, as
we progress still further, many make together for still more to use.
Beyond even that, we construct the complex implements of further
construction, and make machines. Man’s first step up was in the
detachable tool, though but a stick or stone. From the hand-thrown stone
to the far-flung lyddite shell is a clear line of mechanical evolution,
in which each thing made held the thought which made it and suggested
further possibility. From the twirling spindle to the many-loomed mill;
from the stylus to the press,—this is familiar ground in fact, but all
untrodden in its rich significance.
Nowhere have we more misused, misunderstood, and blasphemed the laws of
human life than in our attitude toward machinery. Measured by any
standard you will, as low as that of individual physical comfort, as
high as that of the widest social service, human progress, lying in the
same line as all evolution, involves the constant adaptation of means to
ends with conservation of energy. Most energy is spent with smallest
result at the level where the mole digs, each for himself, with his
tools growing on him. The spade is higher than the claw, and the modern
earth-devouring excavator is higher than the spade. Some digging is
necessary for the maintenance of our physical lives. The more human
energy we spend in digging the less remains for further development. To
dig is not our purpose here, but to grow. Therefore social evolution
quietly relegates digging to the lower automatic functions, making the
mechanical organs by which the most digging can be done by the least
men, that more and more of us may leave the level of the mole.
Of all things made, the things we make things with are most vitally and
distinctively human. Something of the truth of this may be seen in the
larger and deeper pleasure given by the use of the higher tool, and,
even more clearly, in the higher kind of man developed by the higher
tool. The digger with the attached claws is but a mole. The digger with
the detachable spade is but an “unskilled labourer,” and even the maker
of that spade but a simple smith. The digger with the great excavator is
an engineer, and its maker a skilled machinist and inventor. The
ox-driver is not to be compared with the engine-driver or the bargeman
with the admiral.
Now the mole, or the unskilled labourer, may be as “happy,” as an
individual, as the skilled machinist. But the measure of their value is
in this. The mole is incapable of further combinations. The unskilled
labourer is capable only of a low order of combinations. The more
specialised brain of the inventor is capable of higher combinations. Of
such as he a democracy can be built; he is raised far along the line of
social evolution. The childish, primitive pride in a “hand-made”
individual product is most ignoble compared to the modern pride in a
common product through complex means.
The brain to make and to use a complex machine is the brain to make and
to use a complex social order; and in that growing social order lies our
line of duty as a human race. In the inexorable working of our own
machines we learn law newly; as in our works of art we learn beauty
newly. Kipling has treated of this in “MacAndrews’ Hymn.”
The relation of our complex mechanical products with our minds and
hearts is as clear as the relation between any animal’s spirit and body.
The increasing pleasure is as clear as the increasing use. “Man loves
power.” Of course. He loves to transmit energy, to feel it pouring
through. He loves it well in his own physical exertions: to swim is a
pleasure, to row alone is a pleasure, but to row in a racing eight is a
greater pleasure. To sail a catboat is a pleasure, to command the
flagship a greater pleasure. The captain loves his ship, and loves to
work her, to feel the complex mechanism move in answer to his thought
and will, and the prompt co-ordination of all the men whose combined
efforts move the great machine. And the kind of man who can be a good
captain or a good sailor is a higher social constituent than a South Sea
Islander, though the latter could outswim him.
Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery is a kind of social
asceticism, a reaction from our misuse of the social body, just as the
personal asceticism of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of
the personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real social life and
its laws, in our persistent maintenance of a rudimentary egoism, we have
claimed private ownership in these exquisitely social products, and have
striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth to private
consumption. Such sublime treason has roused instinctive reaction in the
public consciousness, and we blindly include the machine in our hatred
of its vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemnation of the
body. Partly owing to this, and partly owing to our cruel form of
specialisation, we associate evil with machinery, and, with our usual
helpless reversionary tendency, look back fondly to the time when each
man or woman worked alone “by hand.”
These theorists should be set down in some wilderness for a while with
only their hands to help them, as a lesson in social chronology. The
hand is at its best in the early Palæolithic period, or even back of
that, when it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand made and
mastered the tool, society has grown. As the tool became the machine,
society has grown better. In the vast machine, moved by tireless natural
forces, and guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the
highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to minimise effort and
maximise results.
When we appreciate the true use and nature of all this machinery,
realising that by means of its measureless service we can now apply
almost all our power to the conscious development of society, we shall
find it to be an unmixed blessing, of value beyond our dreams. Seeing
that the social soul needs such and such a body, and is developed with
it, and that we have at last the means of evolving that body at a speed
hitherto impossible, we can now utilise these unlimited forces to
facilitate our growth with results that will make previous historic
progress seem stationary. It is not as if we were required to force long
cycles of evolution, to hasten the steps of nature, and hurry mankind
over slow steps of necessary ascent,—we are there now!
Society being an organic whole, social progress being ours in common and
exquisitely transmissible, the material forms of that progress and
vehicles of transmission being ready to hand, we can, by our present
means of rapid production and distribution of these material forms, open
the way to such swift advance of civilisation as the world has never
seen. The spirit of modern society is capable of a plane of life far
beyond the present conditions wherein we find that spirit gagged and
blinded by the fossil Ego concept, that body inconceivably dwarfed and
twisted by the efforts of each ego to occupy it all himself.
The right relation of spirit and body in the animal gives health and
beauty and power, and in our human life the right relation of the social
spirit and body is as important. A healthy, growing, social life
constantly re-creates its body as does the physical life, and our
American civilisation shows this beyond all others in its rapid adoption
of new material forms and processes. The constant demand for easier and
swifter mechanism is as natural and healthful in society as it is in a
physical body, and physical evolution has moved on that line
continually.
The passing over of individual effort to the automatic action of
machinery is analogous to the constant passing over of conscious
cerebral action to the less expensive automatic management of lower
brain centres—the development of “habit.” The body is not the man, and
brick and mortar are not Society; but their connection is as intimate
and vital. And as the soul of a man is grievously injured or equally
benefited by the condition and use of his body, so is Society affected
for good or ill by the mechanical forms in which it lives, their
condition and their use.
Recognising as the first quality distinguishing the social body from the
physical, that it is made by common action and open to common use, and
recognising that the proper use of the body has a reactive effect in
developing the soul, we have here a means of promoting social growth so
prodigious in its scope and speed as to be fairly dizzying. We have, as
usual, felt this great social truth, even though not understanding it,
and our groping efforts in its pursuance are seen in two main lines:
that which urges to “truth in art” in our common crafts; to making
things beautiful, true, good, that all may be improved by them, and in
our blind but earnest effort to provide “better housing for the poor,”
with all that that implies.
We have seen that the slum tends to make the criminal, and that the
school, bath, playground, museum, library, art gallery, free access to
the best products of society, tend to make the better citizen; but we
have not seen the large and simple principle involved.
Each thing made is an embodiment of social energy, and transmits it to
the user, be it a fork or a fiddle. A noble and beautiful work ennobles
and beautifies the beholder, listener, reader, occupant,—the user. All
especially general social structures, or those glorious deposits of
energy known as works of art, as well as all the materials of knowledge,
are valuable in proportion to their free and public use.
The more people circulate in their great social body the more socialised
they become. This we are doing much to promote in our free schools,
libraries, museums, etc., but we do not begin to appreciate the
possibilities involved, being impeded, as usual, by our prior concepts,
Want theory and Pay concept in particular. The increased facilities of
travel of our time, for instance, which should be enlarging the mind of
the public as well as increasing its wealth, are greatly restricted in
application by these errors. The people who administer our railroads are
allowed by popular consent to “own” them; and as owners, regarding their
property as bound in the first instance to “pay” them, they maintain as
high a list of charges as “the traffic will bear.” When we recognise
locomotion as a prime social necessity, these ribbons of steel and their
rolling-stock as part of the social body, and traffic and travel as
social advantages rather than individual,—yes, social necessities,—then
we shall encourage the widest possible use of these facilities.
We have but to recognise the vital connection between the growing social
body and the growing social soul, and that the soul not only makes the
body, but is made by it, to apply our immense material gain to our whole
people. The results will be what our discouraged and patient minds are
apt to call “too good to be true.”
IX: THE NATURE OF WORK (I)
_Summary_
_Familiarity of Work confusing to true thoughts, our general attitude
due to false concepts. Veblen’s theory. Theory of Hebrew religion.
Occasional dim perception of value of work. Effect of ego concept and
pay concept. Effect of organic concept. Effect of Want Theory. Main
thesis of author on Work. Physical organic action. Heart, as
illustration. Social organic action. Individual consciousness no
obstacle. Social circulation. Men not self-supporting. Waste,
parasitism, disease. Evolution of Work. Universal transmission of
energy. Appearance of consciousness. Feeling and action. Pleasure in
sensation and action. Society the greatest life-form, greatest action,
greatest pleasure. Social nourishment for worker, and true adjustment.
Accumulation of social energy. Limitation of individual animal.
Geometrical increase in social efficiency up to the sixth power.
Increase of stimulus. Increase of interest. Storage and transmission of
society energy. Work of art. Devotion to country. Bee and Ant. Proper
human relation and action. Child’s instinct to work. Resistless working
instinct of great specialist. Radium. The teacher, scientific
discoverer, etc. Our workers not supplied with social energy. Extinction
of London labourer. Want Theory again. Our dinner. Social nutrition
collective. Discharge of surplus energy not an exertion._
IX
THE NATURE OF WORK (I)
Work is the most prominent feature of human life. So large a majority of
human beings spend most of their lives at work that the few diseased and
defective members of society who do not need scarcely be considered. As
usual, the prominence and constant insistence on the facts about work
have prevented our thinking much about it, and, when we did think, our
mistaken basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general attitude toward
work varies somewhat in accordance with race, place, and time, but is
traceable, easily enough, to certain general root ideas.
One line of racial feeling on this subject has been most fully and ably
treated by Veblen in his “Theory of the Leisure Class.” He shows how
labour, being first performed by women and then by conquered opponents
made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and how, further, the
ability not to work, involving power to make others work for you, soon
became an ingrained principle of pride; further, how the leisure class,
an aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these errors of the
early mind and added heavily to them by the increment of tradition and
long association. This accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share
of the popular feeling about work.
It is perhaps as part of this feeling that the ancient Hebrew religion,
postulated by a people of pastoral ideals and Oriental temperament,
takes the extreme ground that work is a curse, a punishment, visited
upon man for his sins; and that Eden behind us or Heaven before us has
its main attraction in ceaseless idleness.
This mischievous error, incorporated in so important a religion, and
forced upon the human mind for so many centuries, has done incalculable
harm. In vain have later and wiser religionists protested that “labour
is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by any such pretty
phrase as that. It is not enough to receive a new truth, you must
discharge the old lie, if your mind is to work straight.
Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon other errors than
these, the most fundamental of which are the Ego concept and the Pay
concept. Under the first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work
to the individual, in which position no understanding is possible; we
might as well try to understand mastication in relation to a tooth.
Under the second, we think only of the “reward of labour”; and have
carried this absurdity to its logical height in classing the industries
of the world under the phrase of “getting a living,” as if the
maintenance of the worker were the object of the work. This again is as
absurd as if we believed that chewing was done in order to maintain
teeth.
When we accept the organic nature of society, the whole proposition
changes, we then see all varieties of work to be social functions,
performed in the interests of the whole; and that the maintenance of the
individual normally depends, not on a reward for the value or amount of
the work he does, but on the general health of the social body and his
having proper access to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this
perception will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by the pay
theory, still holding that a man or a society only works in order to get
something, and that, in justice, there must be a return for the effort
expended.