Part 19

Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery is a kind of social asceticism, a reaction from our misuse of the social body, just as the personal asceticism of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of the personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real social life and its laws, in our persistent maintenance of a rudimentary egoism, we have claimed private ownership in these exquisitely social products, and have striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth to private consumption. Such sublime treason has roused instinctive reaction in the public consciousness, and we blindly include the machine in our hatred of its vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemnation of the body. Partly owing to this, and partly owing to our cruel form of specialisation, we associate evil with machinery, and, with our usual helpless reversionary tendency, look back fondly to the time when each man or woman worked alone “by hand.”

These theorists should be set down in some wilderness for a while with only their hands to help them, as a lesson in social chronology. The hand is at its best in the early Palæolithic period, or even back of that, when it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand made and mastered the tool, society has grown. As the tool became the machine, society has grown better. In the vast machine, moved by tireless natural forces, and guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to minimise effort and maximise results.

When we appreciate the true use and nature of all this machinery, realising that by means of its measureless service we can now apply almost all our power to the conscious development of society, we shall find it to be an unmixed blessing, of value beyond our dreams. Seeing that the social soul needs such and such a body, and is developed with it, and that we have at last the means of evolving that body at a speed hitherto impossible, we can now utilise these unlimited forces to facilitate our growth with results that will make previous historic progress seem stationary. It is not as if we were required to force long cycles of evolution, to hasten the steps of nature, and hurry mankind over slow steps of necessary ascent,—we are there now!

Society being an organic whole, social progress being ours in common and exquisitely transmissible, the material forms of that progress and vehicles of transmission being ready to hand, we can, by our present means of rapid production and distribution of these material forms, open the way to such swift advance of civilisation as the world has never seen. The spirit of modern society is capable of a plane of life far beyond the present conditions wherein we find that spirit gagged and blinded by the fossil Ego concept, that body inconceivably dwarfed and twisted by the efforts of each ego to occupy it all himself.

The right relation of spirit and body in the animal gives health and beauty and power, and in our human life the right relation of the social spirit and body is as important. A healthy, growing, social life constantly re-creates its body as does the physical life, and our American civilisation shows this beyond all others in its rapid adoption of new material forms and processes. The constant demand for easier and swifter mechanism is as natural and healthful in society as it is in a physical body, and physical evolution has moved on that line continually.

The passing over of individual effort to the automatic action of machinery is analogous to the constant passing over of conscious cerebral action to the less expensive automatic management of lower brain centres—the development of “habit.” The body is not the man, and brick and mortar are not Society; but their connection is as intimate and vital. And as the soul of a man is grievously injured or equally benefited by the condition and use of his body, so is Society affected for good or ill by the mechanical forms in which it lives, their condition and their use.

Recognising as the first quality distinguishing the social body from the physical, that it is made by common action and open to common use, and recognising that the proper use of the body has a reactive effect in developing the soul, we have here a means of promoting social growth so prodigious in its scope and speed as to be fairly dizzying. We have, as usual, felt this great social truth, even though not understanding it, and our groping efforts in its pursuance are seen in two main lines: that which urges to “truth in art” in our common crafts; to making things beautiful, true, good, that all may be improved by them, and in our blind but earnest effort to provide “better housing for the poor,” with all that that implies.

We have seen that the slum tends to make the criminal, and that the school, bath, playground, museum, library, art gallery, free access to the best products of society, tend to make the better citizen; but we have not seen the large and simple principle involved.

Each thing made is an embodiment of social energy, and transmits it to the user, be it a fork or a fiddle. A noble and beautiful work ennobles and beautifies the beholder, listener, reader, occupant,—the user. All especially general social structures, or those glorious deposits of energy known as works of art, as well as all the materials of knowledge, are valuable in proportion to their free and public use.

The more people circulate in their great social body the more socialised they become. This we are doing much to promote in our free schools, libraries, museums, etc., but we do not begin to appreciate the possibilities involved, being impeded, as usual, by our prior concepts, Want theory and Pay concept in particular. The increased facilities of travel of our time, for instance, which should be enlarging the mind of the public as well as increasing its wealth, are greatly restricted in application by these errors. The people who administer our railroads are allowed by popular consent to “own” them; and as owners, regarding their property as bound in the first instance to “pay” them, they maintain as high a list of charges as “the traffic will bear.” When we recognise locomotion as a prime social necessity, these ribbons of steel and their rolling-stock as part of the social body, and traffic and travel as social advantages rather than individual,—yes, social necessities,—then we shall encourage the widest possible use of these facilities.

We have but to recognise the vital connection between the growing social body and the growing social soul, and that the soul not only makes the body, but is made by it, to apply our immense material gain to our whole people. The results will be what our discouraged and patient minds are apt to call “too good to be true.”

IX: THE NATURE OF WORK (I) Summary

Familiarity of Work confusing to true thoughts, our general attitude due to false concepts. Veblen’s theory. Theory of Hebrew religion. Occasional dim perception of value of work. Effect of ego concept and pay concept. Effect of organic concept. Effect of Want Theory. Main thesis of author on Work. Physical organic action. Heart, as illustration. Social organic action. Individual consciousness no obstacle. Social circulation. Men not self-supporting. Waste, parasitism, disease. Evolution of Work. Universal transmission of energy. Appearance of consciousness. Feeling and action. Pleasure in sensation and action. Society the greatest life-form, greatest action, greatest pleasure. Social nourishment for worker, and true adjustment. Accumulation of social energy. Limitation of individual animal. Geometrical increase in social efficiency up to the sixth power. Increase of stimulus. Increase of interest. Storage and transmission of society energy. Work of art. Devotion to country. Bee and Ant. Proper human relation and action. Child’s instinct to work. Resistless working instinct of great specialist. Radium. The teacher, scientific discoverer, etc. Our workers not supplied with social energy. Extinction of London labourer. Want Theory again. Our dinner. Social nutrition collective. Discharge of surplus energy not an exertion.

IX THE NATURE OF WORK (I)

Work is the most prominent feature of human life. So large a majority of human beings spend most of their lives at work that the few diseased and defective members of society who do not need scarcely be considered. As usual, the prominence and constant insistence on the facts about work have prevented our thinking much about it, and, when we did think, our mistaken basic concepts made us think wrong. Our general attitude toward work varies somewhat in accordance with race, place, and time, but is traceable, easily enough, to certain general root ideas.

One line of racial feeling on this subject has been most fully and ably treated by Veblen in his “Theory of the Leisure Class.” He shows how labour, being first performed by women and then by conquered opponents made slaves, was despised by the early mind, and how, further, the ability not to work, involving power to make others work for you, soon became an ingrained principle of pride; further, how the leisure class, an aborted part of the body politic, has preserved these errors of the early mind and added heavily to them by the increment of tradition and long association. This accounts satisfactorily enough for a large share of the popular feeling about work.

It is perhaps as part of this feeling that the ancient Hebrew religion, postulated by a people of pastoral ideals and Oriental temperament, takes the extreme ground that work is a curse, a punishment, visited upon man for his sins; and that Eden behind us or Heaven before us has its main attraction in ceaseless idleness.

This mischievous error, incorporated in so important a religion, and forced upon the human mind for so many centuries, has done incalculable harm. In vain have later and wiser religionists protested that “labour is prayer,” a divine curse is not to be whiffled away by any such pretty phrase as that. It is not enough to receive a new truth, you must discharge the old lie, if your mind is to work straight.

Our attitude toward Work rests also, however, upon other errors than these, the most fundamental of which are the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Under the first we relate our ideas and sentiments about work to the individual, in which position no understanding is possible; we might as well try to understand mastication in relation to a tooth. Under the second, we think only of the “reward of labour”; and have carried this absurdity to its logical height in classing the industries of the world under the phrase of “getting a living,” as if the maintenance of the worker were the object of the work. This again is as absurd as if we believed that chewing was done in order to maintain teeth.

When we accept the organic nature of society, the whole proposition changes, we then see all varieties of work to be social functions, performed in the interests of the whole; and that the maintenance of the individual normally depends, not on a reward for the value or amount of the work he does, but on the general health of the social body and his having proper access to its currents of nutrition. Yet even this perception will not wholly free us while we are still muddled by the pay theory, still holding that a man or a society only works in order to get something, and that, in justice, there must be a return for the effort expended.

This common assumption is accepted as basic by our political economists, and their further theories, systems, and alleged laws all rest on it. It is called the Want Theory. Fully and fairly stated the common definition of work, based on the want theory, is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by the individual in order to obtain the means to gratify a desire. This is almost universally believed. We accept it so fully that one of the steps taken by missionaries to arouse industrial energy in savages is to make them want things. As further manifestation of our belief in it we hold that if people were supplied with anything they did not work for, did not previously expend energy to get, they would, of course, cease to work. On this ground, honestly and logically held, every step toward free public provision for popular need has been opposed.

Before going further in discussion of our common errors, let us lay down the main thesis of this book, advanced as the true theory of work.

It is this: Work is an expenditure of energy by Society in the fulfilment of its organic functions. It is performed by highly specialised individuals under press of social energy, and is to them an end in itself, a condition of their existence and their highest joy and duty.

The difference between the two positions is best seen in studying organic action in lower forms. Consider, for instance, the action of the heart in our bodies. Here is a small muscular machine, which keeps up a violent and continuous activity for some seventy years. Why? and How? Why should this organ work so hard and so incessantly? My stomach gets some rest—my legs get more—but this member is always at work. What want does he gratify by it? Is he any better paid than leg or stomach?

If the heart were an individual, and were pulsating for pay, he might conceivably stop when he got what he wanted. “Why continue to beat?” he might naturally ask. “I have what I was beating for!” And if, further, you supplied this independent creature with all it wanted, free, it would quite naturally cease beating altogether.

But as an Organ, which is quite a different thing from an Individual, the heart does not act on any such basis. It has been slowly developed through long ages of physical evolution, to perform a function of no use to itself, but of primal use to the body to which it belongs, the body which made it, the body without which there would be no such thing as a heart. This function being so absolutely essential, the heart is fitted to beat steadily on from birth to death; when it ceases beating the body goes out of business altogether.

Now a separate animal the size of a heart could not keep up any such long-continued regular exercise, it could not furnish sufficient energy; but the large body which needs a heart can run one, it has a supply of energy on which all its organs draw. The work of a living organ is not at cost of its own energy, but of the energy of the entire organism. Society, as an organism, has a vast, a practically unlimited supply of energy, and the human being, as a member of that society, is supplied with it.

The discharge of this energy is so far from costing the individual anything that, on the contrary, any prevention of his normal work causes him acute suffering. And as in the physical body, each special organ, in order that it may devote its entire life to the physical service, is by the circulation of nutrition saved any necessity for caring for itself; so in the social body, each man, in order that he may devote his entire life to the social service, is similarly provided for by the distribution of economic products; our social nutrition.