Part 22

Work is human life.

Thus, as health, happiness, and beauty are found in lower forms in perfect performance of their simpler life processes, so in Society we find health, happiness, and beauty in proportion to our performance of these our life processes; a greater, far greater health, happiness, and beauty in the magnificent spread and range of these processes; a far more terrible record of disease, misery, and horrid ugliness as we fail of fulfilment.

A defective, sick, or dead plant is an unpleasant sight. A defective, sick, or dead animal is a more unpleasant sight. But the depth and ramifications of misery and horror in a defective, sick, or dead society,—this is what has made us call this fair world “a vale of tears.”

Such a pity, too! When it could be just as healthy as a plant or animal! It is far more fun to be an animal than a plant, more exertion and so more pleasure. And it is far more fun to be a human being than a mere individual animal, far more complicated exertion and so more pleasure. With our vastly increased capacity for happiness our misery must be accounted for by “failure to connect” with the universal energy in one or both ways. We are denied our share of stimulus, we lack social nourishment, or, worse, we are denied our right discharge, are not rightly placed in the field of social action, are not doing the work which belongs to us.

It should be noted here that the happiness of social action as beyond that of individual action increases in proportion to its collectivity. There is a larger joy in perfect “team-work” than in the best individual play. Connected as we are, the sensation that thrills through the whole audience is stronger far than what is felt by one man alone, like King Ludwig of Bavaria in the empty auditorium.

If a man is rightly placed in the world’s work, doing what he is best fitted for to the height of his best powers, and if he clearly sees that by so doing he fills his place in the universal economy perfectly, then, granting of course that he is properly nourished physically and socially, he is happy. But if he is ill-nourished he is unhappy, not power enough flowing in; if he is ill-placed in social service he is unhappy, lacking right lines of discharge, his energy banking up and pushing against right doors that don’t open, and moving very slack through wrong doors that do. Moreover, though well-nourished and well-placed, if he is hag-ridden by some ancient lie about work being a curse, a disgrace, or some such idiocy, then he is unhappy because his own mind, clogged and twisted, turns on cross-currents of pressure that spoil the smooth flow of energy.

To recapitulate:

Life is action.

Action is conscious discharge of energy.

Discharge of energy is pleasure in proportion to amount, complexity, and freedom of delivery.

Social action involves greatest amount and complexity, and so, with free delivery, greatest pleasure. Our free delivery is checked by wrong conditions and wrong concepts.

By altering the concepts we can alter conditions and so make social action normal.

Work is social action.

It is the expression of social energy for social use.

It is essentially collective, and we find work most highly developed among most collective creatures, as the ant, the bee, the man.

It involves a higher degree of intelligence than the preceding processes. All the efforts of animals to take food are excito-motory, and either egoistic or, at most, familistic. They are hungry, they desire something, and they go to get it, performing whatever actions have become necessary in the pursuit. But work is the process of making, not of taking. It is not excito-motory, but the result of cerebral action.

The humble squaw who drops corn in her stick-ploughed field is actuated by a concept, a knowledge of how in time there will be fruit for her children. There is no present stimulus, she pushes herself, urged by the accumulating nerve force of the larger brain. Her lord, the noble Red-man, gallantly pursuing the buffalo, is acting merely as an animal, under direct stimulus of hunger and the visible beast before him. Being hungry, he hunts. Being fed, he does nothing. He can only act in the lower circuit of excito-motory nerves. But she, not hungry, makes the corn grow. She makes the tent. She makes the moccasins and leggings and beaded belt. She makes the dish and basket. She, first on earth, works, and she works for others.

First, it was only this mother energy, producing for its young; the same power which finds its apotheosis in the sublime matriarchate of the bee. Work was primarily an extension of the maternal function; and, carried to excess, results in that ultra-perfection of specialised maternity, the ever-bearing queen-mother, the ever-toiling worker-mother, and the contemptible, well-nigh useless, barely tolerated, and soon slaughtered drone-father. But human work was saved this hopeless limitation of maternity by being forced upon the male, and by him specialised and distributed. To work and save is feminine, tending to the swollen hive, the sacrificed male. We still see this tendency among us in that long-aborted social rudiment, the home. But man, assuming the industrial function, applied to it his disseminating energy, spread, scattered, specialised, and so made possible our social life. If the bees had been led to our great economic manœuvre, the motherising of the male, they might be more than hymenoptera to-day.

Work, as an ever-elaborating discharge of energy, tends to develop under laws of inertia, like all natural processes. The “tendency to vary” in action is checked in the short circuit of individual animal activities by the immediate consequence of his own variation to the individual. This wonderful new step of ours, the production of food, gave us a new base for variation. A low grade of effort, by a few persons, kept us fed, alive. Our early specialisation in social defence kept us protected, alive. Being thus assured of life, though not on the basis of individual exertion, we acquired time to manifest new activities.

Here is one of the great keys to “the mystery of human life,” no more a mystery than any of nature’s laws, when you know it. A social life is assured by the basic industry, agriculture, and some degree of trade and commerce. Then the energy no longer required by each man for each day’s living can be given to invention, discovery, experiment. So follows all the immensity of our growth.

The social base being absolutely firm, and requiring less and less social energy as our agricultural and commercial processes improve, we grow in arithmetical progression—or in geometrical rather—as our increase in production and distribution multiplies our ability and our increase in ability multiplies our production and distribution. This assured base and wide room for variation is necessary to society in developing its higher functions. We can afford to feed and guard for several generations the slow-maturing genius, which, when it reaches the productive point, will richly benefit us all. We can give more rest and freedom to our members than any self-fed and self-guarded beast could dream of.

A thousand delicate and beautiful specialties are allowed to grow by our broad sure social base of supplies. So far we have seen this in conscious action only where a government has encouraged certain arts or sciences, or where an established church or endowed university has bred its kind of specialty, or again where some individual has contrived to enlarge his own “social base” enormously, and “varies” as he will, but we see its converse commonly enough where the individual is not allowed any hold on the social base, but kept at the self-feeding stage in development, thus effectually checking his “tendency to vary.”

Every advantage has its possible attendant evils, and Society offers a wide field for such. In the point we are treating, the evils are painfully prominent. As soon as we left the self-supplying stage, a man’s sins were no longer visited immediately on his own head. An animal gains or loses by his own behaviour. A man gains or loses by his society’s behaviour. In his assured position as a member of society a man can be wickeder and more foolish than is possible in any self-supported life, and he has taken advantage of his opportunities with great facility and zeal.

The peculiar treason involved in a social being’s offences we have not yet grown to recognise. It is as if your own teeth turned and gnawed you. Only a beneficent society could allow the growth of these powerful beings, and with that social power they sin against society.

As conspicuous an instance as can be given of this kind of sin is in the action of our misguided common carriers. Here is a function so glaringly social that one marvels at the power of the human brain in forcibly regarding it as a private business. On public land granted by the public, with rights and franchises granted by the public, with money subscribed by the public, and with elaborately co-ordinated labour performed by the public, this form of public service is established. Then one man, or group of men, is allowed to “own” this great piece of social machinery, and proceeds to administer it, not with regard to the public advantage, but with regard to the advantage of this managing group and of that small minority of the public who furnished the money for the enterprise.

Of course this could not be done if the social body as a whole recognised the organic character of its own processes, but, owing to the prevalence of our ancient ego concept and its derivatives, the poor social body says, “Of course; why should the arteries carry blood except to feed themselves, it is their business!” Against this evil comes the growing altruism of work, founded in mother love, in the anti-selfish instinct of reproduction; work, which, as it develops, carries with it an ever-developing good will.

Watch this in history. See the two forces as they affect society. See the primitive labour of the squaw holding the village together, the village which is the tiny seed of the state, while against it push the belligerent rivalries of the male. See the instinct to fight and to take, finding larger expression in organised warfare, constantly destroying the young societies which industry was building up, both in warring with one another and in the internal effects of the same misplaced instincts.

Here is productive industry steadily adding to the wealth of the world and developing distributive industry as inevitably as an overflowing spring makes a stream. And here are these destructive tendencies, with the primitive desire to get for one’s self, to get away from someone else, not only refusing to assist in industry, not only dishonourably living on its products, but so scorning and maltreating the real agents of social growth as to repeatedly destroy the societies that harboured them.