to the world is that he do the best work for the most people, not that
he be “employed” to make clothes for dogs, or to wear an ostentatious
livery behind a mutilated horse. Every human being is to be measured by
his value to society, and the value is in his work, not in his being
“employed”—or paid.
Our non-productive consumer, therefore, is unable to return to a healthy
place in the world. He cannot work because he “does not have to,” and
his efforts to re-distribute the wealth for his own gratification form
merely a “vicious circle” of futile and injurious activity.
Now see the pitiful results. Cut off from normal connection with the
living world by failure to produce, and only generating disease in his
efforts to consume, the unfortunate ex-human begins to die. He may, if
sufficiently wise and self-restrained, keep his body alive; members of
the leisure class frequently live to a great age; but this
well-preserved animal existence only allows more time to suffer from the
unnatural exile. He is not part of the living world, and so falls victim
to various hideous abnormalities. He dwindles and shrivels in social
usefulness till, instead of a vigorous, valuable man or woman, you have
the futile, inadequate creature which cannot even wait upon its own
wants; or, keeping up animal health by caring for the body, he shows the
deformity of his position in furious and senseless activities.
The most conspicuous feature of our leisure class is the elaborate round
of purely arbitrary and unnatural activities in which they ceaselessly
whirl. The only natural activities open to them, the physical, become
abused and perverted in vicious excesses, and their other activities are
a series of arduous games and sports, changing from age to age and year
to year, the purposeless and hopeless spasms of social energy misused.
The working class, on the other hand, suffer differently. That they are
underpaid is plain, that they are overworked is plain; we hear much of
this of late years; what we do not hear so much of is that they suffer
most from the same misunderstanding of what work is. Looking always at
the Pay as the end, the Work only as a means, they labour drearily on
like a blind horse in a treadmill, never seeing their real position in
Society, their real duties, nor their real power. That the unproductive
consumer should believe the absurdities on which his absurd position
rests is comprehensible; but that the producer, not properly supplied
with social nourishment, and overtaxed in the production of the very
supplies he does not get enough of, should accept the basic fallacies
which hold him in his even more absurd position,—this is not so
comprehensible.
Perhaps what does account for it is this: that with all his labour and
suffering the worker after all _is_ Society; he is in the main
performing great service; he has a right to be more contented than the
ex-man who does not work. He is in the more normal position, though he
does not know it; and the sociological laws are always stronger in their
action than our notions. As a matter of fact the working class, which
does not mean merely the “labouring class” of our present terminology,
but which includes all workers with hand and brain, is the world. They
are the acting factors in those processes which constitute social life.
Through all these centuries of unbelief and misbelief they have done the
things which kept the world alive. They have clothed the world, fed the
world, housed the world, taught the world, beautified and improved the
world; yes, and have lifted it from savagery to its present level.
To-day in our democracy they need only enlightenment to see a further
duty to the world in a better organisation of its economic processes.
Thrilled as they are by the swiftly growing current of social
consciousness, conscious as they are that things are wrong, anxious as
they are to set things right, they are still hindered by these economic
errors of us all.
Under the Ego concept they speak of “every man’s right to the product of
his own labour,” a sociological absurdity. In the first place no member
of Society has any “own” labour, our labour is all collective and
co-ordinate. In the second place it is not the product of his fraction
of our labour that a man wants, but the product of the labour of many
other persons, of all times and places. In the third place it is not
even “the equivalent” of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, it
is a previous supply of the social product bearing no relation to his
subsequent output except that of nourishment and stimulus.
In short, there is no true class-distinction in acceptance of those
deep-seated errors which together modify the conduct of mankind so
injuriously. The false classification we are treating is _the product of
those errors_. With right economic belief and action there would be no
division of Producer and Consumer, no Leisure Class, no Working Class,
no serried ranks of Capital and Labour. All would produce, all would
consume; all would work and all would have leisure; all would share in
the social capital and the social labour,—both elements of social
advantage.
The economic relation of the sexes is of enormous importance in our
present-day problems, as I have endeavored to point out in my previous
book, “Women and Economics.” The economic dependence of the female on
the male, her food being obtained, not in industrial relation with
society, but in the sex relation with the individual male, affects the
race not only through the ensuing overdevelopment of sex, but through an
artificial maintenance of primitive ideas and feelings in economics. The
woman’s artless attitude of taking all that is given her and frequently
asking for more, without ever entertaining the idea of return in kind,
of paying for her keep, maintains in the race, as we have previously
shown, the tendency to inordinate consumption, the quenchless appetite
of a parasite. This parasitic appetite is the invariable result of
economic dependence. We need not wonder at the evolution of a parasitic
class when we maintain, or seek to maintain, a parasitic sex.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, another effect of this condition
is, by its resultant exaggeration of the sex nature of the male, to
maintain in him the belligerent and destructive tendencies which belong
to a remote period of race improvement through sex competition, a period
of animal individualism, and which work much evil in a period of
constructive and co-ordinate industry. Where wealth and progress depend
on the cordial intelligent interdependence of the group, it is most
deteriorating to have maintained this primitive attitude of sex combat.
Again, the male, being obliged to provide goods for several persons
besides himself, and yet being limited in goods to the amount he can
himself produce, the natural desires of the individual are augmented by
the accumulated desires of the whole family, yet gratified only through
him; and each man faces the world, with the output of one, yet requiring
the income to support six—or whatever number he represents! According to
the Want theory this is a beautiful provision of nature for augmenting
the man’s output. In the light of fact it does nothing of the kind. It
simply augments his desire to get—in no way adding to his power to give.
That moving mirror of life, our literature, is one long picture of the
effects of this incarnate appetite at home, dragging ever at the man’s
purse strings, and pushing hard against social honour, social duty, all
the high traits of citizenship.
The child, most important of all, reared in this atmosphere of continual
demand, seeing his father looking on the world as a place to hunt for
prey for his mate and young, seeing his mother do nothing whatever but
minister to the family needs, inevitably grows up to look at life in the
same way. To his growing soul, the world appears to be a number of
houses with families in them. The business of life appears to be to keep
house for these families. The mother does this in a life of personal
service. The father does it in mulcting “the world” as far as he is
able.
If, on the contrary, a young human being grew up to see his father
regarding his work for humanity as the chief duty in life, his mother
with the same attitude, both regarding the consumption of goods as but a
means to further and better work, and those goods always explained to
him to come, not from the individual exertions of his father “wrestling
with the world,” but from the combined exertions of that world—that
great, rich, kind, ever-fruitful, and generous world of willing workers
which feeds all its children so well,—but I stray into consideration of
future conditions instead of present.
At present we have for the common lot of humanity that painful
exhibition known as “the round man in the square hole.” Of all human
troubles, none is so universal as this—a man’s work does not fit him.
His income is insufficient, his output is insufficient, and he does not
healthfully enjoy the process of living. A general condition of
misadaptation, with necessary results of mal-nutrition and
mal-production,—that is the prominent and visible symptom of our
deep-lying psychological errors.
Consider the life of a typical average man.
He is misborn, misfed, mistaught, mis-clothed, misgoverned, to a varying
degree. Instead of having a clear view of the social life and his place
in it, he has a false and distorted view of his personal life, and only
sees the social action as it infringes on him. He is surrounded from
infancy with poor workmanship, the grudging product of those unhappy,
misplaced men in square holes. The education which should be his
introduction to the great and beautiful facts and laws of life, is too
often a “bread-winning” process, practised by celibate women, as being
more respectable than other work, and introducing him merely to a mass
of unrelated facts and old ideas. The higher the field of social
service, the less does “whip-dodging” or “bread-winning” help, and none
is higher than teaching.
Thus mishandled, the boy grows up without the aid of that subtle
discernment and delicately applied special training which would have
brought out his best faculties. He is a blurred, indeterminate,
self-contradicting group of faculties, he has no unerring organic
preference to lead him to his work. He is the nearest approach we can
make to that “all-round man” we hear so much of; but the intricate
duties of social service do not furnish us with one-sized cylindrical
holes for our machine-made pegs. Into some hole he must go, we will not
feed him else; so in he pops, and “settles down for life.”
That is our common phrase for a permanent establishment in the active
service of Society, otherwise known as “self-support,” “earning one’s
living,” “maintaining a family.” Our average man is not expected to love
his work, to enjoy it, to grow continually through it. He does all this
sometimes, but too rarely. Our methods of education have been specially
esteemed, not because they taught the child to like what he did, but
taught him to do what he did not like. We take it for granted that he
will not like his life work, and so seek to fit him for continued
application to distasteful service.
In such work as this, there is a continuous waste of nerve force.
Compelled attention, and action that is not led by interest and fed by
the natural discharge of energy along preferred lines, are suicidally
wasteful. In Nature’s effort to reduce this steady leakage of life
force, she transfers the action to the domain of habit as rapidly as
possible; and the sufferer experiences that much relief. Dislike, the
exhausting effort of enforced attention and the plunging and kicking of
more normal impulses toward other activities, give way at length to a
dull contentment, a patient submission to monotonous routine, and some
pale pleasure in its monotony.
There are three large distinct evils to Society in such an artificial
misplacement of its members. First, the work done is not as good nor as
plentiful as if it were done on lines of true organic relation, by the
men specialised in power and preference for that work. In the second
place, the man is weakened and worn out prematurely by the unnatural
effort to do what he does not like, what he is not fitted for, what is
not his own special work; thus further reducing the output. And in the
third place, the overtaxed and unhappy worker requires all manner of
extra inducements and palliations to keep him at his unsuitable task. He
has to have rest, more and more vacations and changes, or breaks down
sooner. He has to have various fictitious excitements in his work—making
it a game, a race, or a fight; to make up for its lack of normal
interest.
And he has to have “amusement” and “recreation” also of an unnatural,
morbid kind—heavy doses of social stimulus coarsened and concentrated to
suit his exhausted nerves. All this beyond the prominent well-known evil
of the resort to physical stimulant and solace, such as alcohol and
tobacco. These last rapidly deteriorate the physical stock of the race;
again injuring Society in the stuff it is made of; but the degraded and
excessive amusements injure the very soul of Society; lowering every
kind of art which caters to them, and so demoralising the highest lines
of advancement.
A thousand minor lines of injury may be traced, such as the increase in
defective children, owing to exhausted parents, and its accompanying tax
upon Society’s resources; but these main lines stand forth clearly: The
limitation and degradation of the social output, and the deterioration
of tissue in the constituent members of Society.
The deterioration of human stock is twofold; partly due to the strained,
unnatural position of the worker; and partly due to the effect of
inferior supplies furnished by his degraded product. In the more
directly useful human products there is less injury than in the higher
forms. In food and clothing and carpenter work it is easier to detect
fault and falsehood, and there is less of it; though even in these
departments our adulterated food, shoddy clothing, and jerry-built
houses do harm enough; but in the more advanced professions, the evil is
enormous. The faults and falsehoods in product, in literature, art,
religion, government, and education, that spring, first, from their
being done by the round man in the square hole, and second, from their
being done for the unhealthy demands of the other round men in square
holes,—these work incalculable harm.
Here is the girl who is trained to be a teacher because it is reputable,
and who accepts her square hole and does her unsatisfying work as
patiently and dutifully as she can. It is excellence we want in work,
not a patient and dutiful inferiority. This inferior quality of teaching
is further lowered by the unwise demands of the misplaced people who pay
the teacher, and so a continuous morbid action is generated. It would be
a hard task to show one human grief, one human sin, that does not find
part of its cause and maintenance in this so general condition of our
life to-day. See the comparative result in our physical organism if we
set fingers to serving as toes, eyes as ears, lungs as livers. If any
such misplacement were conceivable, it would involve so low a degree of
development in the various parts that it was possible to exchange
services, and none of them could do good service.
In the social organism such high specialism and efficiency as we have is
due to the progressive force of our economic development, calling forth
such positive preference in some men that they will do the work they
like best. All the world’s great servants and helpers have been thus
driven from within, by the rising flood of social energy, specialised to
one burning focal point of expression. Such men work without reward, and
regardless of opposition; work their lives long, often live and die poor
and unhonoured, simply because they were true to their fundamental duty
as human beings—to serve Society in the function for which they were
evolved. In spite of their neglect, abuse, and injury, they are not to
be pitied; for, on the one hand, they had the enormous joy of serving
humanity; and on the other—even if they were not aware of that high
pleasure—they had the intense functional satisfaction of doing the work
they were made for.
We are so used to “the dull level of mediocrity,” and the labour whose
noblest height is conscientious effort, that when we do find a strongly
specialised individual so highly fitted to perform one service that he
can do no other—we call him a genius. So great is the power of working
in these “geniuses”—the happy lavish outpour of social energy through a
natural channel—that we have put the cart before the horse as usual, and
defined genius as “the capacity for hard work.” There are a thousand
hard workers for one genius, but a fact like that does not worry our
shallow generalisers. Unfortunately, owing to our lack of true education
and the crushing weight of the false, only the exceptional genius now
and then succeeds in forcing his way to his true place, and he does it
by breaking through the poor, blundering, reward-and-penalty system with
which we obstruct social development, and by letting out what is in him,
producing his natural fruitage of work, quite irrespective of pay or
punishment.
Thanks to this quenchless functional vigour of Society we are never
without some natural work; and thanks to our vast facility of
transmission we all share in the products of genius to a greater or less
extent. Yet it is but a painful and niggard harvest compared to the
universal crop we might enjoy if we would let it grow. Happiness to the
individual is in fulfilment of function, it is as much in farming as in
fiddling, if you like it—“every man to his taste.” And the benefit to
society lies in every man’s working “to his taste”; as beautiful and
desirable a combination as need be imagined.
This does not mean that all would manifest transcendent genius, but that
each, in his place and degree, would have that strong instinctive
tendency, that vivid delight in fulfilment of function which should
accompany human work in every department.
XVII: THE TRUE POSITION
_Summary_
_Duty of improvement for individual and race. Effect of Ego concept.
Collective nature of Christianity—“‘our’ daily bread.” Unity of man.
“Kingdom of Heaven.” First human duty to assume right functional
relation to Society. Right social relation tends to develop all virtues,
to eliminate all sins. Want Theory and theft corollary. Normal
distribution prevents abnormal acquisition. Sins against property and
person. Thieving produced by clot of wealth. Right organic relation. End
of “the wolf,” of “our” sins, of unnecessary diseases. Twofold duty—to
change concepts and conditions. Public school and library. Social debt
to the worker. Malthusian doctrine. True law of increase in population.
Natural selection among individuals. Difference in organic development.
Artificial selection. Stirpiculture. Superior methods of social
improvement. Poverty increases number of births, but decreases quality.
“Individuation is in inverse proportion to reproduction.” Splendid
opportunities. Two roads to health. Right condition—right action.
General cause of local evil. The home, effect on social consciousness.
Better housing. Way to growth. Human nature. Happiness._
XVII
THE TRUE POSITION
To be—to re-be—and to be better, none can deny this order of duties; and
the last is the highest.
To become better as individuals has long been preached to us; to become
better as a race is no unnatural proposition. Heretofore, the Ego
concept ruling, we have supposed that this was only to be done by
improving as many individuals as possible. And as individual conduct,
ego-guided, consisted in each doing things for his own benefit, here and
hereafter; our improvement has been somewhat hesitant and tortuous, both
in person and in race. It is really singular to see how the Ego concept
has held us from understanding what was best in our religion. The one
great advantage of Christianity over Buddhism, or Mohammedanism, is in
its radical _collectivity_. As far as a pure monotheism goes—the
constant worship and service of God, the Mohammedan is beyond us. As far
as a pure morality goes—an exalted sinlessness, the Buddhist is beyond
us.
But none of them prays: “Give us each day our daily bread.” Now is it
not, truly, a strange thing that we should have been taught that prayer
for two thousand years, and yet every man Jack of us goes forth stoutly,
to get his own private and personal daily bread as rapidly as possible?
The strongly enthroned Ego concept of more ancient times; buttressed
hugely by the dark savagery and sordid barter of as ancient religions,
has successfully evaded the recognition of Christianity’s great central
truth, that man is one. Not only that God is one—Jew and Mohammedan know
that; but that _man_ is one—that we are inextricably interconnected, and
cannot be considered separately. “No man liveth to himself, nor dieth to
himself.” “He that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that loseth
his life for my sake [man’s] shall find it.” “Inasmuch as ye have done
it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”
Resting on the firm basis of natural law, and affirmed insistently by
our prevailing religion, is the fact of human solidarity.
The improvement of human life does not consist in withdrawing as many
individual souls as possible for a “reward” (that everlasting payment
theory!) in Heaven; but in a diligent bringing about of what that same
principal prayer of ours sets clearly before us—the Kingdom come, and
the will done, right here. This, too, we have intellectually admitted to
be desirable; but have united in transferring the occasion to a remote
and uncertain period, known as the millennium.
Now, what, in the light of truth as at present open to us, is the best
way to improve the human race, and therefore our highest duty?
Recognising the organic relation of Society; that our very life, to say
nothing of our improvement, rests on our becoming properly related to
each other in the specialised service which constitutes a human life;
and to perform that service ever better—the first duty of a human being
stands prominently forth. It is this:
To assume right functional relation to Society, to one another. Not
charity, not philanthropy, not benevolence, not self-immolation or
self-sacrifice or self anything; but simply to find and hold our proper
place in the Work in which and by which we all live.
To do one’s right work involves all the virtues.
Our virtues are always matters of interrelation; they concern our
attitude toward each other, our treatment of each other. An individual
man, alone, can manifest no virtues beyond those of a clean beast. Human
life is interrelative, and all its virtues, _i. e._, distinctive
qualities, are interrelative. Once accept this basic duty in fulfilment
of specialised service, and all those virtues, we, as individuals, have
been so fatuously striving for, appear in us, as natural corollary of
that right relation. Conversely our “sins,” namely, our various forms of
social disease, manifest in the bewildered individual, will of
themselves go out as naturally as the virtues come in.