highly entertaining contortion of popular thought is seen in our local
and temporary idea that women ought not to work! We have bred in certain
classes a sort of parasitic female, most painfully aborted. It is more
agonising and more ridiculous for a woman not to work than for a man,
because of her initial sex-tendency and her historic habits; but we have
bred this pitiful enormity and admire it as a Chinaman admires the
“golden lilies” on his wife’s shrunk shanks. But this absurdity is
already passing.
One of the effects of sex-distinction, falsely and needlessly associated
with work, is seen in the general fighting attitude of the male towards
labour. In current literature and current life we continually hear man’s
economic activities described as a struggle—a battle—with some vague
opponent called “the world.” He is described as “going out” (“out”
meaning elsewhere than at home, the assumption being that he would
prefer to be “in” all the time!) “to battle with the world for his wife
and little ones.”
Katherine, the reformed shrew, makes an eloquent description of this
prowess of the husband. This is held to be a noble effort on his part,
and quite his place as a man, while if she, owing to loss of male
provider, is obliged to go “out” to “battle” similarly, that is held to
be unfeminine and a real misfortune.
The word “out” in this connection we should dismiss completely from our
foggy minds. We are _in_ the world once and for all. We are not planted
in a lot of private holes, with the rest of the broad earth for a mere
battlefield, a place to sally forth into and grab something. Can you
conceive of a world of human beings contentedly staying at home all the
time if their supposititious booty could be handed in at the door
without “battle”? We don’t go “out,” we go “in” to the world for our
natural and necessary activities, without which we should cease to be
human.
What we do in the world is not, or should not be, fighting. Those who
insist on fighting instead of working should be promptly locked up and
taught better; they disturb the peace, interfere with legitimate
industry, and dishonestly run off with the products of other people’s
labour.
An oversexed male, full of belligerence, actuated by his primitive
masculine tendency to scatter and destroy instead of the
later-developed, feminine-based race-tendency to construct, goes forth
like a savage to hunt and fight. He finds what he wants, someone else
has made it, and he seeks to get it away from that person by exercising
the same traits as those used by any hunting animal, force or fraud. We
have an immense number of predatory individual animals, both male and
female, all included and maintained by the social organism, yet merely
feeding on its tissues; we have a still greater number, indeed the vast
majority of our workers, who, though in reality engaged in productive
labour, imagine that their business is to get something from other
people, and so strive to restrict their output and enlarge their intake
as far as possible.
The plain thief and pauper we recognise as social parasites, active and
passive, and seek to remove; but our frank, general attitude of
parasitism and predacity we do not recognise as an evil, the evil which
necessarily tends to these ultimate forms. An individual animal has no
productive power and skill, he simply takes what he wants when he finds
it, if he can, and cheats, fights, or kills to get it. The collective
animal produces wealth by co-ordinate labour. There is no faintest
element of combat involved in the economic processes of society. The
only “competition” legitimate in social life is the beneficent
competition between constantly improving methods of service. For any
collective animal to take advantage of his safe place in the broad-based
social life, and from that vantage-point to take what he can from the
social product without himself producing anything, is a treason so
colossal as quite to paralyse our moral judgment.
Our little egoistic scheme of ethics, while it is big enough to grasp
and blame an interpersonal fraud or theft, is incapable of comprehending
this great field of social injury; and, if the social traitor keeps up
the personal ethical standards we are acquainted with, we do not condemn
his larger sin,—we don’t know how.
Here it is simply indicated that the initial error lies in looking at
the world as a place to go out to and get things from by any necessary
means, whereas in plain fact it is a place to go into and give things
to—to labour in, to create in, to produce and distribute in, to exercise
those social faculties which constitute our human life.
To work is to make something or distribute something; it has nothing to
do with taking or fighting. The fighting and grabbing attitude comes
from primitive animal egoism, a low rudimentary condition, and the
morbid overplus of sex-energy in the male. The association of shame with
work on account of the slave will pass when we see the orderly
progression of human association and the place held in it by that early
social functionary.
The Social organism requires a close and permanent connection between
its myriad constituents. These constituents first began to combine
sporadically, on lines of natural attraction, as in the family, and
through the woman’s industry. For men to be drawn into the social
relation,—men, whose whole nature was individual and combative, whose
whole idea of exertion was to fight something,—required force. Only on
pain of death, as the unkilled captive, did the slave learn to work, to
apply his energy to the service of others. Most of the conscious
associations of slavery were unpleasant, slavery and work were held as
identical, and the slave hates work as he hates slavery. But they are
not identical. Slavery is a transient, superficial relation, one of our
telic processes, useful in its place, but soon outgrown. Work is a
permanent, essential relation, a genetic social process increasing with
our growth.
Men were first held together in exchange of labour by the force of the
slave system as they are now held together in exchange of labour by the
force of the contract system, an equally transient and superficial
device. The real economic process going on is the gradual evolution of
highly specialised and smoothly interrelated workers, with an abundant,
easy circulation of their products, and the more arbitrary methods of
developing this condition came first as more arbitrary political methods
came first. The Owner was a primitive despot, the Employer is a
constitutional monarch, and democracy is now working out a higher,
subtler, freer relation—that of the true Co-operator—in economics as in
politics.
The shame feeling, based on woman and slave, grew, rather than relaxed,
in the period of serfdom. In fatuous ignorance of the source of their
wealth and power, the fighting and governing class despised the hand
that fed them, and the ancestral accumulation of this ungrateful idiocy
gives us our ingrained contempt for “labour,” “trade,” “the working
classes.”
The workers themselves, equally ignorant, though more excusably,
accepted this feeling as correct, and strove to escape singly from the
only honourable position on earth, that of Maker, Doer, Giver, to the
supposed dignity of a Social Parasite. “The Theory of the Leisure Class”
has been most luminously expounded by Veblen, but there is room for much
more study in “the theory of the working class,” the glorious,
irresistible, upward pressure of which, by its accumulating superfluity
of rich product, has, besides all its good effects, made possible the
morbid secretions and deleterious growths of society, the indolent ulcer
of idle wealth, the waste of tissue in extreme poverty, the wide range
of diseases, disgusting and terrible, with which Society is hampered in
its economic processes.
This feeling of contempt for work, shame in work, once recognised as one
of our evil inheritances from the black past, we should set ourselves to
check and dismiss it as rapidly as possible. In the individual by
consciously rebutting the old feeling and cultivating its opposite one
of honour and pride, and in the race by an instant and thorough change
in the education of children, through home, school, and church, book,
picture, and story. It is gratifying to note that America is already far
ahead of any other nation in its honour of work, and that even the
woman-parasite, as well as the leisure-class parasite, is feeling it in
this liveliest of societies.
Our aversion to work as being an expense of energy is quite right. Human
work, as we have seen in the last chapter, should not constitute a
draught on individual energy. When it does so there is something wrong.
As in our constant analogy, the physical organism, we may be sure that
when it is an effort to breathe something is wrong with one’s lungs.
Our personal fund of energy is strictly limited, and nature’s processes
tend to save it—the law of conservation of energy. Very slowly and
gradually has been accumulated in us our private storage battery of
nerve force, with its stock of arrested energy and its power to turn it
on when necessary to modify action. This supply of energy is limited.
This we must not waste; it is the hoarded wealth of all organic time.
This is the precious capital which nature subtly saves by rapidly making
each action into a function, passing it over from the class requiring
cerebral force, volition, to the class of unconscious, habitual action,
where the energy of the universe flows through the smoothly attuned
organism and costs it nothing. Any new conscious action costs us an
expense of our own personal and private supply of energy, and that
expense is what we instinctively recognise as wrong. The organism feels
that it is being robbed of its most precious store, and resents it with
every conscious atom. This is what makes us hate to work, at the same
time defining work as “what you don’t like to do.”
Against this we clearly see the passive pleasure of a long-accustomed
activity, the well-nigh unconscious discharge of energy along well-worn
lines; and the active pleasure, the delight of doing what one likes to
do.
Detach from work the false ideas which make it distasteful to us and
there remains but one thing to blind us to its joy and glory: the waste
of cerebral energy with which it is but too generally accompanied.
We have already seen that the accumulation and discharge of energy is
precisely what an organism is for; it is an elaborate instrument slowly
developed for that purpose, as a steam engine is made to “get up” and
“let off” steam. A steam engine fired up and superheated, but doing
nothing, must let off steam or burst. So a human engine, fired with all
our splendid fund of social energy, must either work it off, let it off
in mere fizz and whistle, or burst. Our leisure class—most copiously
fired and fed and stoutly refusing to work—fill all the air about them
with futile sizzlings and noises. They have to, or burst.
Normal work, _i. e._, that special social function for which the
individual is specially fitted, requires but little energy to learn to
do, because he likes to do it, and, once learned, runs easily for life,
the pleasure steadily increasing with the power and skill. Abnormal
work, for which the individual is not fitted, is a suicidal waste of
energy, and we are right to hate it. It costs immense draughts on one’s
vitality to learn to do what one does not like, an unremitting pressure
of cerebral energy, a veritable hemorrhage of what is as much life as
blood is; and even when the relief of habit is attained it does not grow
into joy, for the creature is crippled in the dreadful process. A man
may learn to walk on his hands and feed himself with his toes, but he
will not enjoy it much.
The advantage of organic life is in its specialisation. Specialisation
to one thing involves lack of power to do others. We do not ask a tooth
to see, or an eye to grind corn. So the whole majestic advantage of
human life lies in its organic relation, in its specialised,
interdependent service, each for all and all for each. This is attained
by means of a subtle differentiation of individuals, developing from
generation to generation a rising fund of power, of skill, of joy in
execution. In this differentiation comes at once the most benefit to
society through the product and the most benefit to the individual
through the process of making it—the work. Without it, in any arbitrary
forcing of individuals to do this or that for which they are not fitted,
which, therefore, they do not like, we find the main condition of social
waste and individual suffering.
The laws of social evolution, acting unconsciously through us, tend to
evolve a highly specialised, intricate, organic life-form, rich,
powerful, boundlessly happy. Our conscious external laws and customs,
our government by “the dead hand,” our insane reverence for mummies,
tend to check, thwart, and pervert this orderly growth. We try to
preserve the “all-around man,” which is as if we tried to preserve
active monads in our bodily structure.
We try to force people to do what they do not like, we boast of our
palæozoic educational system that it trains the child to do what he does
not like, as if to like one’s work were criminal! Blinded and confused
by inherited falsehoods; kept back in specialisation by our mistaken
education; arbitrarily misplaced by superficial conditions; and driven,
on pain of death, by our system of artificially distributed nutrition
(not merely “no work, no pay,” but “_This_ kind of work whether you like
it or not, or no pay!”), the majority of human beings are not doing
normal work. What they do hurts them; they do it under pressure of
necessity; and they are quite right in assuming that without that
pressure they would not work—that way! But this theory falls to the
ground when the false conditions are removed. A free discharge of
energy—the limitless energy of the universe through our intricate
machine—is pleasure, not pain. It does not overdraw on our little store,
but rather augments it. We are stronger instead of weaker for right
exercise of power.
Every healthy child delights in work, to watch it, imitate it, take part
in it. Every healthily placed man delights in his work, the man who is
doing what he is particularly built to do—what we call a “born doctor”
or a “born engineer.” “_Poeta nascitur, non fit_”—yes, and operator as
well as _poeta_.
Social evolution is natural, and natural organic processes are easy and
agreeable, unconscious if they require no cerebral attention, and, if
they do, attended with sensations of pleasure. Granting, as we have
done, that waste of energy is an evil, and any overdraught on our
reserve fund of cerebral energy is naturally resented by the organism,
it is still maintained that normal human work does not involve any waste
of energy or any draught on the cerebral reserve more than is pleasant
to expend, and results in increase rather than diminishing of that
store.
The conditions of normal work are these: First, the individual should be
well stocked. A sick man cannot enjoy work, a crippled, deformed person
is not fitted to work, and a congenital pauper, one born without that
inheritance of nervous energy which should increase with each
generation, is unable to work with pleasure. But given, first, a normal
individual, he should, second, work at what he likes best. This means
social specialisation, and requires for its right development such
education and opportunity as shall bring out all possible
differentiation of faculty. So widely lacking are these conditions, so
hampered is our choice of work, and so undeveloped our power of
choosing, that we look with honest envy at the man who does love his
work and can do the work he loves, like Agassiz or Lord Kelvin.
In normal social conditions every man would do the work he loved and
love the work he did, so life and happiness would become synonymous.
XI: SPECIALISATION
_Summary_
_Organisation means specialisation. Military organisation,
trades-unions, and trusts. Guerilla bands in industrial organisation.
Unspecialised primitive life, the higher the life-form the more
specialisation. The “all-around” savage. Injury of our present
specialisation under false conditions. Waste of energy. Man of thirty
who died of old age. Canoe and steamer. Effect of errors. Normal
conditions of specialisation: shorter hours, variety of work, wide
education. Ownership in collective production. Specialisation should
increase product and decrease effort; it does, but the advantage is
misplaced. Hours of labour in proportion to interest. Especial cruelty
in our conditions of specialisation. Specialisation proves collectivity.
Absurdity of “self-support” idea. Our progress due to such social
distribution as we have, not to “self-support.” Society feeding on
itself. The Social sacrifice. “Unskilled labour” a product of high
social development. Our mistaken attitude toward it. The real nature of
it. Serf and noble. Savage’s exciting monologue. Unskilled labour does
not require inferior men. Line of social growth. Highly specialised work
involves extremely simple details. Our misuse of above fact owing to
false concepts. Unskilled labour is high social service. We punish
instead of paying, or promoting. Height of ingratitude._
XI
SPECIALISATION
Human work being an organic process, it must of course specialise. Those
who cry out against specialisation and seek to uphold a mythical
“all-around man” are ignorant of the nature of social functions. The
very first condition of organic life is division of labour, and as the
organism develops the complexity of that division develops with it. The
strength and efficiency of any organism depends not so much on its bulk
and weight as on the prompt and perfect co-ordination of its parts.
This is a truism in military organisation, which is an old game with us,
but we do not seem to understand it in industrial organisation, which is
a new one. In the military body we have long ago learned to consider the
whole before the part and the purpose of that whole as a measure of
action for each part, but in the economic body we are yet a mob of
savages. The ego concept is perforce set aside in military life; in
economic life it still rules. In military ethics one never hears that
“self-preservation is the first law of nature”; no soldier thinks of
justifying rank cowardice and insubordination with the plea that “a man
must live!” Neither is there any objection to the widest specialisation,
to careful grading of officers, to the complete separation of surgeon
and chaplain, engineer and commissary. No one seeks to maintain the
“all-around man” in the army.
Military organisation is our oldest and so best developed form. Its
purpose is crude and easy of perception; its impulses are inherent in
the masculine nature; its methods, like those of old-established
churches, appeal to the primitive instincts. The gorgeous ritual of
military form has much to do with our allegiance to it. But in the now
far more important co-ordination of industrial forces no such progress
is made. In place of splendid uniforms we have the soiled and
soul-depressing garments of our miscellaneous workers. Instead of
“_esprit du corps_” we have the beautiful spirit of “every man for
himself, and the devil take the hindmost.”
Instead of “glory” we have before us only “booty”; instead of “honour”
we have the incessant struggle of the civil law to check the ceaseless
manœuvring of dishonesty. And in place of one resistless organisation we
have at best the progress of the trades-unions and at worst those
guerilla bands, the small, fierce hordes of warring trusts, fighting
each other and preying on all of us.
The inevitable increase of specialisation has gone on, but under the
disadvantage of this crude position it has carried with it a wholly
unnecessary burden of evil. Specialisation in labour starts at the very
beginning of our growth, at first being only an arrangement of whole
men, each man making a whole thing.
To this stage of social evolution some are now wishing to revert—a sad
waste of wishing! We might as well wish to be invertebrates again as to
sigh for past periods of social development.
The lower the creature the less its organic specialisation. There are
some so indeterminate and undivided that they do not know their heads
from their tails; cut them in two and they promptly produce a new head
and a new tail and go about their business as before. This beast is a
fine example for the “all-around man.”
The higher the creature the more specialised. The more worthily a part
fulfils one function the less worthily it can fulfil others. When the
paw becomes a hand it ceases to be a paw. The more fit the hand for a
hand’s use the less fit for a foot’s use. It would in no way benefit the
body to have a set of loose, interchangeable organs capable of doing a
little of everything and nothing very well. An “all-around” organ would
not be as valuable as any single-hearted servant that gives its one
regular contribution to the body’s good.
So in the social organism, our line of progress has been from the
“all-around” savage to the absolutely one-sided activity of the
specialised workman who contributes his best efforts to one line of
service. “To learn to do one thing and do it well” is what makes the
great artist, the great scientist, the great preacher, the great
mechanic, the great electrician. Social service requires the steadily
increasing specialisation of its constituents.
When you want a dentist you want to find him in his office, with the
accumulated skill of long study and constant practice; you do not want
to wait for him to come in from the plough and wash his hands. All this
we know well enough, and yet we recognise the injurious effects _to the
individual_ of the kind of specialisation we see about us, and have not
yet been able to reconcile the two.
If the individual is injured there must be evil somewhere, that is quite
true. No society can prosper at the expense of its constituents. If the
individual is reduced in physical strength and health, in personal
happiness, or in the best social usefulness by his work, the process he
is engaged in must be abnormal. Now let us see whether the evils so
conspicuous in the lives of our highly specialised workers to-day are
inherent in their degree of specialisation, or whether they are
coincident rather than consequent and due to quite other causes.
What is it that injures the man who turns a crank all day? It is an evil
both of omission and commission, involving a waste of cerebral energy in
compelling the attention of the human brain to a point of execution so
narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of development involved in
doing nothing else. To forcibly focus the attention on a detail for a
long time is a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which
makes the employment of children in such work so doubly damnable. To
concentrate and hold attention is not natural to childhood; that is why
they fail to do it and are so frequently killed and injured by their
machines. Accidents to working children happen mostly toward the end of
the day’s work, as they grow more unequal to the unnatural strain.
And when the child does prematurely muster all his powers and display as
a child the concentration of a man, he is thereby ruined for life,
prematurely aged, a wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the
work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found where an honest,
industrious man of thirty broke down and died, and the doctor’s verdict
was that _he died of old age_; every part of him was used up by
excessive labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the adult.
The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repetition of some one small
mechanical effort is painfully clear to any observer.
Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue the machine and go
back to the period where “one man makes one thing,” the ideal of our
well-meaning reversionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to make
one canoe than for a thousand men to make an ocean steamer? Must we go
without the ocean steamer and go back to the canoe period of
civilisation because it is better to be an all-around savage than a man
who makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving the individual
life of the rivet-maker without “giving up the ship”?