The peculiar combination of functions which we are studying has not only
an immediate effect on individuals through sex-action, and through the
sex-affected individuals upon society, but also an effect upon society
through economic action, and through the economically affected society
upon the individual.
The economic aspect of the question brings it prominently forward to-day
as influencing not only our private health and happiness and the
processes of reproduction, but our public health and happiness and the
processes of social economics as well. Society is confronted in this age
with most pressing problems in economics, and we need the fullest
understanding of the factors involved. These problems are almost wholly
social rather than physical, and concern not the capacity of a given
society to produce and distribute enough wealth for its maintenance, but
some maladjustment of internal processes which checks that production
and distribution, and developes such irregular and morbid processes of
innutrition, malnutrition, and over-nutrition as continually to injure
the health and activity of the social organism. Our difficulty about
wealth is not in getting it out of the earth, but in getting it away
from one another. We have phenomena before us in the development of
social economic relations analogous to those accompanying our
development in sex-relation.
In the original constituents of society, the human animal in its
primitive state, economic processes were purely individual. The amount
of food obtained by a given man bore direct relation to his own personal
exertions. Other men were to him merely undesirable competitors for the
same goods; and, the fewer these competitors were, the more goods
remained for him. Therefore, he killed as many of his rivals as
possible. Given a certain supply of needed food, as the edible beasts or
fruits in a forest, and a certain number of individuals to get this
food, each by his own exertions, it follows that, the more numerous the
individuals, the less food to be obtained by each; and, conversely, the
fewer the individuals, the more food to be obtained by each. Wherefore,
the primitive savage slew his fellow-man at sight, on good economic
grounds. This is the extreme of individual competition, perfectly
logical, and, in its time, economically right. That time is forever
past. The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social
relation, the interchange of functional service, wherein the individual
is most advantaged, not by his own exertions for his own goods, but by
the exchange of his exertions with the exertions of others for goods
produced by them together. We are not treating here of any communistic
theory as to the equitable division of the wealth produced, but of a
clear truth in social economics,—that wealth is a social product.
Whatever one may believe as to what should be done with the wealth of
the world, no one can deny that the production of this wealth requires
the combined action of many individuals. From the simplest combination
of strength that enables many men to overcome the mammoth or to lift the
stone—an achievement impossible to one alone—to the subtle and complex
interchange of highly specialized skilled labor which makes possible our
modern house; the progress of society rests upon the increasing
collectivity of human labor.
The evolution of organic life goes on in geometrical progression: cells
combine, and form organs; organs combine, and form organisms; organisms
combine, and form organizations. Society is an organization. Society is
the fourth power of the cell. It is composed of individual animals of
genus homo, living in organic relation. The course of social evolution
is the gradual establishment of organic relation between individuals,
and this organic relation rests on purely economic grounds. In the
simplest combination of primordial cells the force that drew and held
them together was that of economic necessity. It profited them to live
in combination. Those that did so survived, and those that did not
perished. So with the appearance of the most elaborate organisms: it
profited them to become a complex bundle of members and organs in
indivisible relation. A creature so constructed survived, where the same
amount of living matter unorganized would have perished. And so it is,
literally and exactly, in a complex society, with all its elaborate
specialization of individuals in arts and crafts, trades and
professions. A society so constructed survives, where the same number of
living beings, unorganized, would perish. The specialization of labor
and exchange of product in a social body is identical in its nature with
the specialization and exchange of function in an individual body. This
process, on orderly lines of evolution, involves the gradual
subordination of individual effort for individual good to the collective
effort for the collective good,—not from any so-called “altruism,” but
from the economic necessities of the case. It is as natural, as
“selfish,” for society so to live, the individual citizens working
together for the social good, as for one’s own body to live by the hands
and feet, teeth and eyes, heart and lungs, working together for the
individual good. Social evolution tends to an increasing specialization
in structure and function, and to an increasing interdependence of the
component parts, with a correlative decrease through disuse of the once
valuable process of individual struggle for success; and this is based
absolutely on the advantage to the individual as well as to the social
body.
But, as we study this process of development, noting with admiration the
progressive changes in human relation, the new functions, the extended
structure, the increase of sensation in the socialized individuals with
its enormous possibilities of joy and healthful sensitiveness to pain,
we are struck by the visible presence of some counter-force, acting
against the normal development and producing most disadvantageous
effects. As in our orderly progress in social sex-development we are
checked by the tenacious hold of rudimentary impulses artificially
maintained by false conditions, so in our orderly progress in social
economic development we see the same peculiar survival of rudimentary
impulses, which should have been long since easily outgrown. It is no
longer of advantage to the individual to struggle for his own gain at
the expense of others: his gain now requires the co-ordinate efforts of
these others; yet he continues so to struggle.
In this lack of adjustment between the individual and the social
interest lies our economic trouble. An illustration of this may be seen
in the manufacture of prepared foods. This is a process impossible to
the individual singly, and of great advantage to the individual in
collective relation,—a perfectly natural economic process, advantageous
in proportion to the amount and quality of the food manufactured. This
we constantly find accompanied by a morbid process of dilution and
adulteration, by which society is injured, in order that the individual
concerned in the manufacture may be benefited. This is as though one of
the organs of the body—the liver, for instance—should deliberately
weaken or poison its quota of secretion, in order that by giving less it
might retain more, and become large and fat individually. An organ can
do so, does do so; but such action is morbid action, and constitutes
disease. The body is injured, weakened, destroyed, and so ultimately the
organ perishes also. It is a false conception of gain, and the falsehood
lies in not recognizing the true relation between individual and social
interests. This failure to recognize or, at least, to act up to a
recognition of social interests, owing to the disproportionate pressure
of individual interests, is the underlying cause of our economic
distress. As society is composed of individuals, we must look to them
for the action causing these morbid social processes; and, as
individuals act under the pressure of conditions, we must look to the
conditions affecting the individuals for the causes of their action.
In general, under social law, men develope right action; but some hidden
spring seems to force them continually into wrong action. We have our
hand upon this hidden spring in the sexuo-economic relation. If we had
remained on an individual economic basis, the evil influence would have
had far less ill effect; but, as we grow into the social economic
relation, it increases with our civilization. The sex-relation is
primarily and finally individual. It is a physical relation between
individual bodies; and, while it may also extend to a psychical relation
between individual souls, it does not become a social relation, though
it does change its personal development to suit social needs.
In all its processes, to all its results, the sex-relation is personal,
working through individuals upon individuals, and developing individual
traits and characteristics, to the great advantage of society. The
qualities developed by social relation are built into the race through
the sex-relation, but the sex-relation itself is wholly personal. Our
economic relation, on the contrary, though originally individual,
becomes through social evolution increasingly collective. By combining
the human sex-relation with the human economic relation, we have
combined a permanently individual process with a progressively
collective one. This involves a strain on both, which increases in
direct proportion to our socialization, and, so far, has resulted in the
ultimate destruction of the social organism acted upon by such
irreconcilable forces.
As has been shown, this combination has affected the sex-relation of
individuals by bringing into it a tendency to collectivism with economic
advantage, best exhibited in our distinctive racial phenomenon of
prostitution. On the other hand, it has affected the economic relation
of society by bringing into it a tendency to individualism with
sex-advantage, best exhibited in the frequent practice of sacrificing
public good to personal gain, that the individual may thereby “support
his family.” We are so used to considering it the first duty of a man to
support his family that it takes a very glaring instance of bribery and
corruption in their interests to shake our conviction; but, as a
sociological law, every phase of the prostitution of public service to
private gain, from the degradation of the artist to the exploitation of
the helpless unskilled laborer, marks a diseased social action. Our
social status rests upon our common consent, common action, common
submission to the common will. No individual interests can stand for a
moment against the interests of the common weal, either when war demands
the last sacrifice of individual property and life or when peace
requires the absolute submission of individual property and life to
common law,—the fixed expression of the people’s will. The maintenance
of “law and order” involves the very spirit of socialism,—the sinking of
personal interest in common interest. All this rests upon the evolution
of the social spirit, the keen sense of social duty, the conscientious
fulfilment of social service; and it is here that the excessive
individualism maintained by our sexuo-economic relation enters as a
strong and increasingly disadvantageous social factor. We have dimly
recognized the irreconcilability of the sex-relation with economic
relations on both sides,—in our sharp condemnation of making the
sex-functions openly commercial, and in the drift toward celibacy in
collective institutions. Bodies of men or women, actuated by the highest
religious impulses, desiring to live nobly and to serve society, have
always recognized something antagonistic in the sex-relation. They have
thought it inherent in the relation itself, not seeing that it was the
economic side which made it reactionary. Yet this action was practically
admitted by the continued existence of communal societies where the
sex-relation did exist, in an unacknowledged form, and without the
element of economic exchange. It is admitted also by the noble and
self-sacrificing devotion of married missionaries of the Protestant
Church, who are supported by contributions. If the missionary were
obliged to earn his wife’s living and his own, he could do little
mission work.
The highest human attributes are perfectly compatible with the
sex-relation, but not with the sexuo-economic relation. We see this
opposition again in the tendency to collectivity in bodies of single
men,—their comradeship, equality, and mutual helpfulness as compared
with the attitude of the same men toward one another, when married. This
is why the quality of “organizability” is stronger in men than in women;
their common economic interests force them into relation, while the
isolated and even antagonistic economic interests of women keep them
from it. The condition of individual economic dependence in which women
live resembles that of the savage in the forest. They obtain their
economic goods by securing a male through their individual exertions,
all competing freely to this end. No combination is possible. The
numerous girls at a summer resort, in their attitude toward the scant
supply of young men, bear an unconscious resemblance to the emulous
savages in a too closely hunted forest. And here may be given an
economic reason for the oft-noted bitterness with which the virtuous
women regard the vicious. The virtuous woman stands in close ranks with
her sisters, refusing to part with herself—her only economic goods—until
she is assured of legal marriage, with its lifelong guarantee of
support. Under equal proportions of birth in the two sexes, every woman
would be tolerably sure of obtaining her demands. But here enters the
vicious woman, and offers the same goods—though of inferior quality, to
be sure—for a far less price. Every one of such illegitimate competitors
lowers the chances of the unmarried women and the income of the married.
No wonder those who hold themselves highly should be moved to bitterness
at being undersold in this way. It is the hatred of the trade-unionist
for “scab labor.”
On the woman’s side we are steadily maintaining the force of primitive
individual competition in the world as against the tendency of social
progress to develope co-operation in its place, and this tendency of
course is inherited by their sons. On the man’s side the same effect is
produced through another feature of the relation. The tendency to
individualism with sex-advantage is developed in man by an opposite
process to that operating on the woman. She gets her living by getting a
husband. He gets his wife by getting a living. It is to her individual
economic advantage to secure a mate. It is to his individual
sex-advantage to secure economic gain. The sex-functions to her have
become economic functions. Economic functions to him have become
sex-functions. This has confounded our natural economic competition,
inevitably growing into economic co-operation, with the element of
sex-competition,—an entirely different force.
Competition among males, with selection by the female of the superior
male, is the process of sexual selection, and works to racial
improvement. So far as the human male competes freely with his peers in
higher and higher activities, and the female chooses the winner, so far
we are directly benefited. But there is a radical distinction between
sex-competition and marriage by purchase. In the first the male succeeds
by virtue of what he can do; in the second, by virtue of what he can
get. The increased power to do, transmitted to the young, is of racial
advantage. But mere possessions, with no question as to the method of
their acquisition, are not necessarily of advantage to the individual as
a father. To make the sexual gain of the male rest on his purchasing
power puts the immense force of sex-competition into the field of social
economics, not only as an incentive to labor and achievement, which is
good, but as an incentive to individual gain, however obtained, which is
bad; thus accounting for our multiplied and intensified desire to
get,—the inordinate greed of our industrial world. The tournament of the
Middle Ages was a brutal sport perhaps, with its human injury, pain, and
death, under the cry of: “Fight on, brave knights! Fair eyes are looking
on you!” but it represents a healthier process than our modern method of
securing the wherewithal to maintain the sex-relation. As so beautifully
phrased by Jean Ingelow:—
“I worked afar that I might rear
A happy home on English soil;
I labored for the gold and gear,
I loved my toil.
“Forever in my spirit spake
The natural whisper, ‘Well ’twill be
When loving wife and children break
Their bread with thee!’”