Part 15

The social spirit is as “natural” as the individual spirit. It is conspicuously visible in action among us, but we have hidden it under false names.

“Altruism” is one of these. This in its very assumption of “others” preserves the ego intact, and that ego has never yet been convinced of any rational cause for surrendering to those other egos. We have only been able to urge it under our equally mistaken Pay concept, trying to show that we should meet reward either from the other egos, or from God. And as our nobler instincts have always revolted from the Pay concept, the progress of Altruism has been retarded.

We need merely to understand it to withdraw all this opposition. What we call altruism should be called—has been called—“omniism”; it is a feeling for all of us, and includes the ego. It is, if you please, an extension of self-consciousness, a recognition that my self is society, and my “ego” only a minute fraction of the real me.

Footnote 1:

By Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes. Article in Wilshire’s Magazine, March, 1903.

This omniism is as normal a growth as egoism. The preservation of the individual by individual action required egoism, and developed it. The preservation of society, by collective action, requires omniism and develops it. That it is not more generally developed is due to the resistance and confusion of our brains.

The superiority of omniism to egoism is in its being a later and more complex development, an organic superiority. As the single cell is lower than the organism, so cell-consciousness, if there be such, is lower than self-consciousness, and as the single organism is lower than the social organism so self-consciousness is lower than social consciousness. Egoism is common to all beasts, is perfectly natural, useful, right; but omniism is a human distinction, progressively developed as we become socialised.

My “self” is my conscious area of working machinery, wherewith I receive impressions and produce expressions, and if I were a tenfold Siamese twin—if I felt, and thought, and worked with the bodies of twenty men—those twenty men would be my “self,” and to care for them would be as “selfish” as it is for a solitary animal to care for itself, and as perfectly right. Not to care for them, to be only actively conscious of my twentieth part “self,” would be a condition of arrested development, pitiable rather than blameworthy. In a social condition of existence, the life and prosperity of each member is absolutely interwoven with that of the others, of the whole, and not to recognise this, and act accordingly, is to manifest an inferior plane of development.

Organic relation of any sort is mutual, involving mutual obligation, duty, and, if necessary, sacrifice. When a physical body is starving to death, it is impressive to note the gradual surrender of its constituent parts in the order of their importance. First, he calls in all his savings,—the fat. Then the muscles slowly feed in their store. Lastly the “vital organs.” And all this is unconscious, managed by the long-established mechanism inside, without any dictation from the cerebral consciousness the man calls “self.”

Our internal social functions, the immediately necessary economic processes, may proceed unconsciously to quite a degree of development under the direction of egoism, because, as the social life is the main protection of the individual, so the interests of the individual and of society are in many ways identical, and the individual may serve society very fully and never dream that he is doing anything more than to “take care of himself.” But Society cannot proceed far in development before the interests of the whole may involve a temporary subversion of the interests of the past, and here a beneficial social conduct requires social consciousness.

Our carefully preserved ego concept acts mischievously in proportion to the progress of society. The more complex the social process, the larger the social interests involved, the more injurious is this primitive spirit of egoism. The selfishness of a peasant is far less harmful than the selfishness of a railroad-owner. In the orderly development of social economics this would have been taken care of by the natural extension of feeling accompanying the extension of action, but that has been checked, as usual, by our mental heirlooms. Nevertheless we can observe this natural relation of action and feeling in spite of our opposition.

The growth of altruism in certain special industries is most instructive to study, as showing precisely what conditions most regularly and rapidly develop it. Look, for instance, at the distinctive characteristics educed by the industries of agriculture and navigation.

Sailors, as a class, are generous, quick in heroism, licentious, intemperate, and profane.

Farmers, as a class, are by no means generous—frequently stingy; you never heard of a sailor who was a miser, but often of farmers who are such. The farmer is not quick to heroism, but, on the contrary, is slow to recognise his class-needs, hard to organise, prone to the most primitive individualism. On the other hand the farmer is comparatively chaste, and temperate, and guarded in speech.

Why these obvious distinctions, in men of the same race, class, and time, often of the same families? As obviously from the difference in their industries.

The farmer is engaged in our most remote and ancient industry, the one nearest the bottom, in fact it is the bottom of real social growth; only the cattle-keeper stands between the farmer and the savage. The farmer is more nearly self-supporting than any other member of society. He is still in the short-circuit activities of the self-feeder; while his surplus product does in truth feed the world and give us all a chance to grow, he sees nothing of the world he feeds, and, blinded by our customs of exchange, thinks that in selling corn he is but feeding his family. Therefore the farmer is naturally egoistic—inevitably so unless he recognises the social nature of his function.

But as the farmer marries early and easily; woman, too, on that plane of economic activity being a valued co-agent in living, like the squaw; so the farmer is under no strong temptation to unchastity. His life of out-of-door muscular exertion is another help here. Lacking other forms of association, the church is a welcome social ground for the farmer and his wife; so he conforms easily to the current standard of morality. And with this moral tendency and lack of startling events, we find the reason for his temperance in speech and other habits.

In the sailor’s life, the opposite conditions obtain. His is a late and highly socialised industry. He combines with other men in elaborately specialised labour for the benefit of innumerable widely scattered people. His combination is absolute for considerable periods of time, and physically isolated from all other social forms. The dangers of the profession are great, requiring constant watchfulness and the most prompt and perfect interdependence. From the seamen singing and hauling together to the quick co-ordination between the captain on the bridge and the uttermost sailor on the yards, there is this constant interplay and conspicuous interdependence. Of course, they develop a high degree of comradeship—of course, they stand by one another to the last degree of danger. It indicates no greater nobility in Jack Jones, who went to sea, over Jedediah Jones, who stayed on the farm; it is a quality of his industry, that is all.

So with the other traits. The sailor is communally fed while engaged in these common activities. The ego is not called out in any way. Then, his private share of wealth being given him at the same time when he is turned loose to provide for himself, he naturally pours forth the money freely; a trait well known by all the barnacles and borers who infest the sailor ashore, as others do the ships at sea.

The sailor has no wife; he cannot marry as early as the farmer, because Jack has to support his wife at long range out of his earnings; she being of no service in maintaining the family. Or, if married, he must be away from his wife for long periods. Thus denied the natural relations of the sexes and exposed when ashore to the instant swooping down of the parasitic female animal in her frankest form, he is, inevitably, “immoral.” Let Jedediah go to sea and Jack stay at home, and you reverse the characteristics of each.

The intemperance comes under the action of these last conditions, long-enforced abstinence and sudden profusion; and the profanity is coincident with the sudden shocks of excitement in his work, with all the jars, difficulties, and dangers involved. For similar reasons ox-drovers are less given to profanity than mule-drivers. Thus we see the vices and virtues of a given profession inhere in its conditions. Individual character may fight against it, and there is a difference always in the personal expression, but as industrial classes the farmer and the sailor manifest certain distinctive characteristics involved in their form of industry.

Miners furnish another conspicuous instance of this force. In no class of men—not even in sailors—is altruism, even to heroism, more prominent. Given death and danger well-nigh certain, but comrades to be saved, and the miners always volunteer at once. If valour and self-sacrifice among miners were rewarded as they are in some sporadic rescue of the drowning, we should need to run a factory of decorations. The miner, like the sailor, is engaged in a highly socialised industry. He works at great personal sacrifices to promote the social welfare.

The farmer, in his corn, sees tangible immediate food for himself and family. The miner sees no such prompt advantage in his coal. The farmer, safely and alone, pursues his individual labours. The miner, in danger and in company, pursues his group labour. They are cut off from the rest of the world, the mining group, and easily develop a common consciousness. Their danger is a common danger, only to be met and overcome by common action. Hence they act in common and for each other.

This may be studied in varying degree in all industries. The effect of household labour on the growth of altruism is even worse than that of farm labour. The farmer does in truth connect with the whole world, serve the whole world through his products. The domestic labourer connects with nothing but the family, serves nothing but the family. Absolutely the most primitive form of human labour surviving among us is that of the woman “doing her own work” like the squaw. The only enlargement admitted is that of domestic service, being a survival of the next lowest form, slave labour. This industry, in its shortest of short circuits, develops no social spirit whatever; nothing but egoism and familism grow from it.

Altruism, due to other causes, may be felt and manifested by the domestic worker, but the work does not conduce to it. Conversely, when this stage of labour is at last abandoned; when we have socialised these antiquated industries; an immense increase of altruism will appear. We are so accustomed to think of men as egoists, and women as altruists that it will be a blow to many to advance this position, but seeing that altruism, the social spirit, is but the essential condition and result of our social co-activities; that only men take part in these activities, and that women have been arrested in this natural development and forced to remain as they began, working in solitude and utter disconnection, for their own families solely; it is plain that the world’s growth in altruism comes through men as a class, and that women as a class contribute to the social spirit only an exaggerated familism and egoism. That animal instinct shown in “the maternal sacrifice,” or the devotion to one’s mate of exaggerated sex development, have nothing to do with the larger human love—with omniism.

The two are constantly blended through heredity, but the industrial influence of the sexes is as above stated, and it is through industrial development that our altruism comes. Observe that the nations most “humane” are those most advanced in industry, and those least “humane” are those most primitive in industry, down to the savage who has only the rudiments of either industry or humanity. Altruism is recognised by religion as a virtue and urged upon us, but it appears in us only in proportion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our own principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incarnate—but it is not altruism understood. It preaches altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it does not show altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial relations and urge upon its followers their entering upon those relations as the chief means of developing altruism.

Religion has not showed us the naturalness of altruism. It has taught that it was natural for man to be selfish, and that to be unselfish was a continual struggle, needing the grace of God to attain it. When we learn at last that the social instincts are as natural as the personal, that they are evolved under the same biological laws, that our failure to manifest them in due proportion is due to unnecessary social conditions quite within our power to change—the burden on man’s conscience will be lifted forever.

We shall learn to lay no false stress on altruism as a lofty and difficult virtue, but see it to be the spirit of civilisation; and the lack of it, the uncivilised egoism still so prominent and evilly active, we shall perceive to be merely an anachronism, which needs only to be recognised to be despised, and only to be despised to be outgrown.