Part 13

Human beings are not webbed together like frogs’ eggs, but they are held together in definite relation by laws of attraction and repulsion, like the constituents of any other material body. The stuff that Society is made of is thickest in great cities, and as it develops these dense and throbbing social ganglia grow and grow. In wide, rural areas the stuff is thin—very thin. But watch the lines of connection form and grow, ever thicker and faster as the Society progresses. The trail, the path, the road, the railroad, the telegraph wire, the trolley car; from monthly journeys to remote post-offices to the daily rural delivery; thus Society is held together. Save for the wilful hermit losing himself in the wilderness, every man has his lines of connection with the others; the psychic connection, such as “family ties,” “the bonds of affection,” and physical connection in the path from his doorstep to the Capital city.

The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social stimulus and impulse.

Before Society grew at all we were but human animals, maintaining and reproducing ourselves like any other animals, but with no connection, no common life. They were of no faintest use to one another, but quite the contrary, being legitimate competitors for a free supply, and so naturally hating and destroying one another. As Society grows the connection between its members grows and thickens and differentiates. Men are of increasing use to one another, no longer competitors in any legitimate sense, but combiners in common production and distribution, and so naturally helping and loving one another. Those who still compete and destroy are but survivals from the earlier period, mischievous relics and back-numbers. All Social evolution is the story of the development and improvement of the connective tissues of Society, from language, the great psychic medium, to steel rail and wire, the infinitely multiplying physical medium. This connection and interaction of the human animals is the most conspicuous fact about them, and that connection is by every test organic.

Another and similar reason for our denial of the social organism is the fact of the temporary detachableness of the individual human being. Men visibly walk about on their own feet, going apparently where they will, and no examination discloses a Siamese band between one man and his brother man. So when the sociologist says there is no such thing as a separate human creature,—that a solitary human creature is a contradiction in terms,—the average individualist replies, “See Robinson Crusoe!” This answer shows great lack of biological knowledge. The splendid growth of education in our day, which is beginning to teach our children dynamics as well as statics, laws as well as facts, will soon remove this ignorance.

If I say, “There is no such thing as a tree without roots,” it might be replied, “But there is! See my Christmas tree?” Yes, it is there for a little, but it is not really a tree, it is timber; it cannot last, nor grow, nor reproduce its kind.

I may say, “There is no such thing as a man without a head,” and someone reply, “But there is! See this gentleman on the dissecting table and his head on the tray yonder.” That is not a man, it is a corpse. I may say, “There is no such thing as a finger without a hand,” and it be replied, “See this one here in alcohol!” That again is not a finger, it is but a corpse. If you join a severed finger quickly enough, it will grow on again. If you return a severed man to his society soon enough, he will grow on again. So in this perfectly true statement, “There is no such thing as a solitary human creature; it is a contradiction in terms”; the presentation of a man on an island or in a prison cell is no answer.

Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly deliquesce and disappear. His connection with the society which evolved him being severed, he may continue to live as an animal, but is in process of decay as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection is so subtle, so fluent, each human brain being so large a storage battery of social energy, that we can separate for a time with no loss. But make the separation complete and the humanness dies.

We have been deterred also from seeing the larger and more vital human relation by the smaller and more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State.

Now the family is not a distinctively human relation at all; many varieties of animals, especially among the higher carnivora, have families, with monogamic union, too, where devoted parents strive and suffer to provide for and protect their young. A perfectly normal and necessary group is the family, and one proved best for successful reproduction of the species, but not a social unit at all. The individual is the social unit, combining to develop the structure and functions of Society.

Families never combine, they can’t. Families take no part in social relation. Each family has its own structure and functions, its own interests, its own purposes, and these are frequently in direct opposition to the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer, higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible that inordinate egoism which is so serious a danger; so it gives the same opportunity to the family and allows of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than is possible among sub-social animals.

It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of the true social relation to establish and extend itself against these natural obstacles, as in the successive overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the State. The City as a social group has much easier recognition with us than larger entities. Civic consciousness began early and found its splendid flower and fruit, as well as its iron limitations, in Greece. National consciousness is now quite well established, having the same advantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger scale. To-day we are beginning to feel the largest consciousness of all, the truly Human, in whose unbounded growth and beautifully progressive development the petty limitations of all earlier forms are slowly disappearing. “What are your national distinctions?” an inquiring Englishman asked me. “The time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. “The time is coming for the people of the world, and Americans are the first of them.”

Then, too, we have been so occupied in the specific local function of Society as to miss that general grouping and balancing which made them all possible. Take that vast and varying social function the Church,—organised religion,—appearing very early in the dominance of savage priestcraft, finding its height in the resistless Hierarchies of Egypt and Palestine, and struggling ever since to hold its failing sway.

Take the Army, another very early, very strong, and very hard-dying social form. It is still with us, brilliant and loud, an increasing evil in the fast-growing industrial life of to-day. See the Soldier scorning the Merchant in the Middle Ages. See the Merchant directing the Soldier to-day. His time of pre-eminence is past.

So in course of social evolution one and another organic group has been developed, each tending to excess by the law of inertia (and social inertia is the most long-winded we know), yet all inevitably sinking into place in the smooth, complex interaction toward which we are moving. Men, specialised to the social service, in their several lines, yet knowing not what they served, have limited their enthusiasm to their specialty, and striven to make the Church, the Army, the Law, Art, or what they call Business, their supreme end.

The real social organism includes them all, and relates them all in order of importance. This order of importance may as well be laid down here, as quite essential to an understanding of the nature of Society. The standard of measurement used is that of evolution, “lower” or “higher” being marked in that line of progress which leads always from the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex. Relative importance may perhaps be measured downwards: a stomach is more important than an eye, because you cannot live without it. But the eye is “higher” than the stomach, a later developed and more specialised organ.

So in social evolution agriculture is more important than literature, because we cannot live without it; but literature is higher than agriculture as being later developed and more highly specialised. The social organism has followed in its evolution the same path as earlier life-forms, developing first the simpler and more immediately vital processes, and later those more delicate and finer organs which are needed to fulfil the uses of its progressive life. And as, in physical evolution, we find now one and now another function of dominant importance to the creature, so in social evolution we can trace the varying value of social functions, the military and religious processes of early societies gradually giving way in importance to the industrial and educational processes of our own times.

Most valuable of all, to our so long religiously moulded minds, is the effect of this recognition of the nature of society upon Ethics. Vague indeed, complicated, mystical, difficult to understand, have been our gropings after this great science. Ethics is the Science of Social Relation; it could never be understood by individualists.

There is no ethics for an individual except to maintain, improve, and reproduce himself. A consistent and remorseless egoism is right for the individual animal; through it he fulfils the law of his being; through it he improves his race. So we, wishing to improve a breed of cattle, consistently and remorselessly select and train and breed from preferred individuals, neglecting or destroying the inferior ones. So do mistaken men, not appreciating the nature of society, urge a similar stern stirpiculture upon us, and would have us neglect or destroy our defective members and breed only from the best.

But when we have a social animal to deal with, as the bee, different laws operate, or, rather, the same laws on a larger scale, a higher plane. It is the best swarm now to be selected; and the value of the swarm depends not so much upon the size and vigour of its individual constituents as on how they work together. There is ethics in a hive, laws of collective behaviour. There is ethics in Society, because it is a collective unit.

Ethics, to Society, is what physics is to matter; ethics is the physics of social relation. Physical law holds material constituents together in those combinations and relations which make the material bodies we know. Ethical law holds social constituents together in those relations which make the social bodies we know.

But we, not knowing the social body, could not know its laws. We have striven in vain to predicate ethics of individuals. You “ought” to do so? Why “ought” I? Because it is “right.” What is “right”? Whatever God said. And what did God say? What these ancient gentlemen have written in their ancient times. And if I do not believe what the ancient gentlemen wrote? There is no answer to this except the somewhat fatuous one of “so much the worse for you!”

The writings of the ancient gentlemen were not susceptible of proof.

Then came Christ, talking sense. He grasped the nature of Society and preached its laws. Ye are all members of one body and of one another. You shall love your neighbour as yourself; that is, recognise him as really part of what you are part of—all one self; and the love of self becomes mutual love as we see what Self is to a Human Creature—Our Self. Christ saw and said all this, and did it, which is more; lived,—as far as one individual could,—true to his social relation, faithfully fulfilling his function to that great living thing, though its immediately surrounding constituents very naturally killed him.

That great Christian concept of mutual love and service is good ethics; it is scientific; its truth and value can be proved; it works. Had we grasped and applied it a good many painful centuries might have been saved us.

But we, our minds still darkened by the beast-concept of Egoism, trying to personally own the human soul and save our piece to all eternity without caring what became of the rest of it; we, with our personal God and his personal Son, and our personal damnation or salvation to consider, have very generally ignored the theory and practice of Christ, and made of him merely an article of faith by which to maintain our precious Egos forever and ever. And this in the face of his “Whoso saveth his life shall lose it; but whoso loseth his life for my sake [man’s sake, the sake of the whole] shall find it!”

When we realise the nature of society we shall come nearer to understanding the teachings of Christ than we have done in twenty centuries of sublimated self-seeking. In recognising it we rise at one step from the dark and narrow limits of the personal life, that poor animal existence, with its common animal wants and their fulfilment; with its animal loves and hates, hoped and fears, pains and pleasures; with its brief period of animal life, cut up into changeful patches of infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, and age, and take our true place in social life, which is immortal. Whether it dies off the earth in a million years or so we do not know yet; since it was born it has not died, but grown and grown continually. This wide, rich, glowing field of consciousness includes the animal life and maintains it in a higher and better condition than ever before, but its real distinctive range of feeling is far beyond that.

All noble and beautiful emotions we call “Human” are social and immortal. All the distinguishing abilities, the power and skill and ingenuity that we call “Human,” are social and immortal. “I” am born, grow up, and die. “I” am a transient piece of meat, enjoying food and sleep and mating, hunting and fighting.

But “We” are more than that. We together constitute another “I,” which is Human Life. That was born gradually, many long ages back, and is now slowly growing up. In that human life, that common, mutual, social life, are all things that make us human. When we enter consciously into that great life we are indeed immortal, “saved,” indeed, from primeval limitations of the animal ego.