because his feelings are more prominent, and more often handled, than
those of the workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may make
tremendous engines or run them; and never “feel himself work” so much as
the maker of very inconsiderable poems. This is because the poet is so
highly socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a social power.
What he feels is the heart of his people, and he, poor man! thinks it is
his own. He thinks his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than
theirs, whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity for pain
and for pleasure is their capacity; it is greater because he is _more
people_, or at least is the specialised point of sensation and
expression for more people.
“Let me write the songs of a people and let who will make their laws.”
The songs _of a people_—not his songs forced down upon them, but their
songs forced up through him. “The proof of a poet shall be sternly
deferred until his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has
absorbed it.”
Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised to the social
service. Their work, of all men’s, is least valuable to themselves,
most valuable to others. They are absolutely _for_ other people to so
extreme a degree as nearly always to warp and injure their personal
relations, even under the fairest conditions. They must do the work for
which they are built, cost what it may, and this compelling power, this
insistent force from within which will out through whatever medium is at
hand, this they call “self-expression”! An artist, they say, must not
consider social service in the least; he must express himself.
It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must do; he must indeed
express that which is good in him quite regardless of whether the people
around him want it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for
it or not. But that unfaltering expression _is_ his social service, his
true function, what he was built for. And it is not “himself” that he is
expressing, it is “themself.” He is, of that people and that time, a
voice, an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch painters,
not they Holland. They in return in their accomplished work made Holland
Hollander, so to speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen
and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.
There is no necessary conflict between the two conceptions of the
artist’s duty—to express himself, or to serve society—as far as the
special performance goes: but the misconception carries wide error and
evil with it none the less. It makes the artist morbid in what he
fancies a vast self-consciousness, whereas he might remain as free and
unassuming personally as any child, once he recognised that it was not
_he_ who was doing all this, but they. It would save him too from the
common mistake of applying his splendid range of social sensitiveness to
his own personal affairs as he too commonly does. Had Carlyle, for
instance, seen truly what was the nature of his place and power, he
would have been less haughty and less irritable—also less lonely.
The individual must needs suffer under the isolation of his strange
overdevelopment, unless he is able to detach himself from it, and be a
person among other persons freely. The power to separate the man from
the office, to come down from the throne and play ball, is a healthy
one. On the other hand, much true artistic service is lost to the world
through this misconception about “self-expression” when the power is not
overwhelmingly great, and the individuals are strong in their sense of
duty as they see it. This is especially true among women. To such, the
inner impulse demanding expression is considered “selfish,” and a thing
to resist; and their energies are forced into other lines because
thereby they imagine they are best serving. If they recognised this
inward propulsion as the call for social expression—not self’s—it would
stand differently in their scale of duty.
A question rises here of large importance, and not easy of answer.
Suppose the social expression actuating the individual be a bad
one—visibly a bad one—resultant from wrong conditions and tending to
promote others as wrong—should such a tendency be followed? Is that the
social service? How far may the individual judgment give check to such
social tendency?
As, for instance, certain wrong economic conditions, say in France,
before the Revolution, tended to produce many social phenomena,
including a tendency to debased literature and art. Should the artist,
in such case, say to himself, “Why, dear me! This is a vicious and
reactionary social impulse. I am out-Heroding Herod—this stuff shows how
bad we have been, and doesn’t help us to be any better. Now I will not
indulge my inclination to paint these torture-chamber scenes, or these
subtle indecencies. I like to—but what of that? It is a social tendency,
but society is not always right, she goes backward and sideways by
spells; it will not do her any good to let out this stuff. No, I’ll
choke it off, and, if I can’t paint better things, I’ll take to pottery
or weaving.”
Whether this is best, or whether it is the artist’s duty humbly to voice
that which is in him—saying, “Well, this is the way you feel, is it?
Better let it out then. Perhaps you’ll change quicker if you _see_ your
badness,” this is a very large question.
Perhaps the truly morbid and vicious tendencies, thus recognised by the
artist, would cause him as much shame as if he had unfortunately
inherited some scrofulous disease, and he would be unable to proceed.
This, at least, should be held steadily in mind, that human work is not
mere _expression_, of self or of society, but is _transmission_, and
therefore to be watched.
If speech were merely a relief to one’s own feelings, poured forth into
empty air and earless waste places, then foulness and profanity would be
merely indications of how the speaker felt, and hurt no one. But where
speech goes to other ears, it must be measured, not merely by the
speaker’s emotions, but by theirs. So the artist is not merely an
unconscious spring bubbling over with fair water, or foul, according to
its hidden sources, but is a conduit, taking the water _to_ something as
well as from something. And as a conscious intelligence bound to act “up
to his lights,” if he judges the water to be bad in its effects, he has
no right to convey it to others. This would leave an easy alternative to
the artist. Let him, if he _must_, write his decadent literature, paint
his decadent pictures; and then, having so relieved himself of these
foul secretions, let him decently destroy the product, lest it prove
contagious. Some friend, having seen, would say compassionately—“Poor
Jones! He has to write about so much of it in a year—he cannot help it,
it is better to come out, I suppose. But don’t look as if you knew—he is
very sensitive about it.”
In a more advanced civilisation we may have Public Health ordinances as
to these expressions, like the signs in our street cars. The assumption
of the artist that his form of production is beyond all social
responsibility or control, that “there is no ethics in art,” is a very
interesting instance of the ego concept at its most insane height.
If ever there was a “social function,” it is art. As a civilisation
advances, there is more and more development of art; as we look back
along the path of social progress, there is less and less of it. In its
inception it was more or less common to all workers, a little of it; as
it grew, it demanded more wholly the work of a whole life. No
ultra-specialised social servant is more removed from self-support than
the artist, whose work is of no faintest possible use to him as an
individual. He must absolutely depend on the advanced society which made
him, which feeds, clothes, shelters, and defends him, and whose highest
needs it is his duty to serve.
Higher than kings or captains, higher even than the giant producers and
distributers of wealth, comes this delicate, sensitive, exquisitely
specialised organ of society. For true service he deserves all the love
and honour society can give, as well as the support due all of
us—nothing can overestimate his value. For true service,—but what
service does he give?
The more highly developed the organ, the more open to disease. No
feature in human production is marked with worse depravity than is found
in art. Because of the extreme pleasure found in the transmission of his
peculiar power, because of the special sensitiveness involved in his
form of service, we too often find the artist sunken in a sublimated
selfishness and arrogant to a degree beyond comparison. It is as though
an eye should plume itself loftily on its power of sight. “You poor,
blind body! You cannot see, but I can! I only can see, and I like to
see. It gives me pleasure. I will see only what gives me pleasure. It is
my pleasure to see things pink—all things pink. And round—all things are
round.” The poor blind body cannot deny that things are pink—if the eyes
say so; but it has hands at least, to tell it that some things are flat
and others sharp; so it works on, sadly misled by its servant.
And if we reason with the servant, saying: “Are you so sure that things
are pink? It does not seem reasonable—it does not seem right,”—the
servant loftily and unapproachably replies: “The Eye does not reason!
There is no right or wrong to the Eye! I am an Eye, and I see as I like.
If you differ with me, go blind!”
When we recognise production as a social process, for the social good,
all work will change its standard of measurement. The worker, artist or
scientist, inventor or teacher, must often differ with the purchasing
public; must modify his work by his own reason and conscience, not by
that of the other people; but the purpose to which he modifies it is
social service. It may cost him his life at the time; he may have to set
himself and his views against those of the past and present; but he
should do so with unfaltering devotion to what he believes the social
good; not in this lunatic position that he and his work are unique in
the universe—that he owes no responsibility to anything—that “art is for
art’s sake.”
When we are alive to the nature of our social processes, when we see
that production is both duty and pleasure, personal good and social
advantage, we shall bend our tremendous powers to develop and educate
the productive energy in all our children, and provide the best
conditions for its free exercise.
XIII: DISTRIBUTION
_Summary_
_Distribution the field of most social disorders. Advantages of
Distribution. Physical Avenues of Distribution. Mechanical means of
Distribution. Social nourishment flowing around the world. Evils of
local production and consumption. Social instincts developed by common
interests. Love rests on service. International dependence means
international peace. Long circuit, wide base, gives room for larger
development. Present system of Distribution does not properly supply the
world. Mysterious coagulations. False concepts again. Ego concept. Want
theory. Working and eating, which comes first? Parent not competent to
provide for child in society. Social parentage. Public education. Making
and taking. How to supply social energy. Pay concept. Patent failure in
application. Selling kerosene as a social service. No true relation
between work and pay. Pay idea wrong. Nourishment first, work after.
Heirlooms in our heads. The Bear. Competition and survival not useful
among our vital organs. Our improvement mutual, collective, organic. How
to raise the productive value of society. No ratio between want and
work. Reductio ad absurdum of Want theory. Not “pay,” but investment. A
man’s work is his payment to society for value received. Slave labour
could not conceive of wage labour; wage labour fails to conceive of free
labour. The normal “incentive” is pressure of social energy. See effect
of false concepts on distribution of wheat. How it should be. Real
“business sense” for society._
XIII
DISTRIBUTION
When we come to the subject of Distribution, we are facing what may be
called the main field of our social disorders. Under this head, and that
of the next chapter, Consumption, come all questions of property rights,
with the vast structures of the civil law ensuing; the whole money
question—laboriously complex; the demands of the labour movement; the
protests of the “leisure class”—we are on the great battlefield of
modern thought.
Let us approach it simply and naturally along the lines laid down in
preceding chapters.
Distribution is a natural corollary of production. Society produces
through its individual members in ever-growing surplus, and must
distribute that surplus among its members to the best social advantage.
What that advantage is needs no abstruse exposition; it is simply to
have all the members of society supplied with what they need in order
that they may so continue to serve society.
As social functions develop, the rate of production increases, as well
as the relative distance of the consumers; and with them increases the
necessity for an ever wider, swifter, and easier distribution of
product. The circulation of our social supplies is as essential to
social growth as the circulation of blood is to the growth of the body.
This is seen plainly in the course of history. In the earliest times the
young civilisations depend on great waterways for their life and
prosperity as the easiest means of transportation; and water
transportation remains one of our most important avenues of
distribution. But seacoast and river bank were not enough for us, land
transportation must develop too, and it has done so, wonderfully.
At first the mother-of-all-industries, the savage woman, was the only
beast of burden. Then stronger animals were pressed into the service,
and reached their height of usefulness in the age of caravan traffic.
The drag, the sled, and final triumph—the wheel, were invented, and the
world rolled on more and more swiftly. With the wheel grew the road, and
civilisation leaped forward. The road became a railroad, tireless
mechanical forces superseded the quadruped, and the distribution of
social products to-day is truly marvellous.
The goods of the round world are gathered into local distributing
centres, carried across continent and ocean, and scattered in tiny
parcels to the millions upon millions of remote consumers. Each section
contributes its particular wealth. The ice goes south, the oranges go
north, the coffee goes west, the tobacco goes east, the manufactures go
everywhere.
If we could watch a little globe in action and see the coal pouring
slowly up out of little holes, and flowing off in black streaks across
land and sea; the oil going with it, but farther and faster; the wheat
yellowing whole provinces, heaped up in golden mountains, carried off in
thick yellow streams in train-loads and shiploads; the gloves of France
on the hands of Americans, the tools of Americans in the hands of
Russians; the whole flux and swing of our social circulation wherein one
man’s life is fed and strengthened by the fruit of thousands of far-born
foreigners,—if we could get this clearly in mind, the organic relation
of society would be plainer.
On what line of race-advantage has this tremendous evolution come to
pass? Why distribute so widely? Why is it not better to produce and
consume locally, each man for himself, as Tolstoi would have us?
The advantage is easily demonstrated if we accept the working plan of
organic evolution. If the development of Society is in the universal
line of march; if it is, if not an “object,” at least an observed
tendency, for the loose scarce-human proto-social stuff to move on
steadily toward an always-increasing degree of common intelligence,
common activity, common enjoyment, common peace, and power, and
love,—then every process which promotes this movement is advantageous.
Since the development of a society requires common service, and that
common service requires for its wise direction a common consciousness,
therefore every modification of human activity which develops common
consciousness is advantageous. Since the line of advance in
socialisation is from a state of self-supporting individualism toward a
state of collectively supporting socialism, therefore every extension of
our economic processes along that line is advantageous. Self-support
develops only egoism. Mutual support develops mutualism. The more
general the base of our maintenance, the more general our advance toward
omniism—toward that degree of common consciousness which shall best
protect, supply, and develop everyone.
When each man took care of himself, he had no interest in, or love for
his neighbour; when their small “spheres of influence” touched, there
was a combat. In such conditions no Society was possible. When small
communities or large are self-supporting, they have no interest in, or
love for each other; this stage of development is the stage of war.
Their “spheres of influence” touch, and there is combat. When the
economic processes of the world are in common—and they are already
beginning to be so—we have the sure basis for common consciousness, for
international peace, and all high development; only hindered by the
preserved ghosts of previous national, local, and personal “states of
mind.”
That mutual love which Tolstoi and his kind would see established
depends primarily on the widest extension of our common interest, the
widest distribution of our specialised production. The law of organic
advantage in such relation is clear. Self-support is a very short range
of life. Any trifling accident may break the circuit, and the individual
is lost. The wider the circuit of distribution the safer the component
individual. With the universal insurance of Society’s whole working
base, there is the largest wealth possible; the largest safety, the
smallest risk from any source. There is also, still more importantly, a
gain in development.
In a large well-running organism there is room for rest, for the
accumulating of energy to apply to special needs. Too prolonged disuse
will ultimately eliminate the neglected part, to be sure; but for the
time being, a well-organised society can support in idleness those whose
service is no less valuable for being intermittent and irregular. The
basic “vital organs” work all the time. The later “special organs” not
only may but must rest. Our “special senses,” our delicate nervous
system, the dominating brain, are easily injured by use which is
perfectly normal to heart or lung. By wide distribution society is
enabled to support all its parts, whether active or passive, and so
preserve a greater sum of usefulness. We approximate the same idea in
any mutual benefit or insurance society.
It is to broaden the base of supplies and extend the time of payment—a
sort of physical credit system. A society where the widest possible
range of productivity is maintained, with the largest margin for
emergencies, is richer and stronger than one which has “all its eggs in
one basket.” So the underlying laws of social advantage have worked upon
the human race, developing transportation facilities, physical,
mechanical, and psychical (meaning here those purely mental agreements
and hypotheses by which we facilitate commerce), until we have a system
of distribution which would seem, at first sight, quite equal to the
needs of the world.
But well we know that it is not! Bitterly and deeply we know that it is
not. Some malign force is working at cross-purposes to clog and check
and divert this social circulation, and produce the morbid conditions we
know so well—the congestion of supplies in some quarters, with the
ensuing train of social diseases, and the lack of supplies in other
quarters, with another train of diseases consequent.
If there is one conspicuous fact in social economics, it is this
peculiar perversion of our distribution system. Those streams of coal
and wheat and oil are mysteriously checked at various points, they
accumulate where they are not wanted, they filter, slow and scant, in
insufficient driblets where there is most need. They are violently
pumped out in sudden jerks, they sullenly retreat and coagulate for
long, slow periods. What is it that ails our all-important processes of
distribution? Merely the human mind. Only our superstitions. Simply the
action of false concepts upon conduct again, our old enemies, the Ego
concept and the Want theory, gaining headway in these vast currents of
modern industry, and doing in large conspicuous ways the same evil they
always did, less visibly. From the very beginning, the men through whom
these great processes must needs be carried on, have been labouring
under a delusion. They supposed that all this commerce and exchange was
due to their individual exertions, and that the purpose of it all was to
_pay them_. Better proof of the elastic capacity of the human brain
could hardly be asked.
That a man carrying a pack on his back should say, “I do it,” is
natural; that he should still say, “I do it,” when he puts the pack upon
a mule and drives the beast unwillingly along, is still natural. But
that this “I” should swell and swell from mule train to train of cars,
from canoe to _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_, is marvellous. Now that such
a myriad “we” do all this work for such a myriad “us,” it would seem as
if the various component “I’s” might have been lost in the shuffle
before now. Not a bit.
Acting under the Ego concept, with a sense of justice and of ownership
dating from the Ego period, we have arduously bent our minds to the
development of a system of laws more elaborately ramified than the twigs
of a tree; to follow and preserve the individual rights along every
broadening branch of social growth. Governed by the Want theory and its
derivatives, we have planted an arbitrary system of inter-individual
exchange, like a set of interlocking toll-gates, along every inch of
these great roads of progress.
Let us analyse again this group of allied errors, the Want theory. “Work
is an expenditure of energy by an individual man whereby to obtain
something for the gratification of his wants.” This rests on the
assumption that what the man needs to gratify his wants is to be had
only by his working. As we know that he does not himself manufacture the
articles needed to gratify his wants, but that these articles all and
several are made by other people; we assume further that each man owns
what he makes, and will not give it up to another without value
received—“If a man will not work, neither shall he eat.” And as the
supplies of the world are assumed to belong to the existing inhabitants
in private ownership, each newcomer, unless inheriting a share in the
privately owned world, is expected to “work” before he receives
anything.
Confronted by the glaring fact that a new human creature cannot work
before he receives anything, but must be supplied with many social
products for many years before he can produce in return, we then fall
back on the parent and say, “the new human being shall receive nothing
from Society except so much as his father is able to earn,” _i. e._, pay
for in work. That system of supplying the young by the unaided
activities of the parent, which we find among animals, we assume to be
the best for the human race, and so the final distribution of social
products is filtered through, not the consuming capacity, but the
“earning” capacity of individuals.
If the man with ten children is but a low-grade workman, his earning
capacity being but $1.50 a day at our rating, his children receive from
Society less than fifteen cents’ worth of supplies each. Their consuming
capacity is naturally much greater, but under our assumption that the
father represents the family as an economic unit, and that the family
shall be restricted in consumption within his power of production, the
children are thus supplied with the equivalent of one-tenth an
individual’s output.