Part 24

The advantage of organic life is in its specialisation. Specialisation to one thing involves lack of power to do others. We do not ask a tooth to see, or an eye to grind corn. So the whole majestic advantage of human life lies in its organic relation, in its specialised, interdependent service, each for all and all for each. This is attained by means of a subtle differentiation of individuals, developing from generation to generation a rising fund of power, of skill, of joy in execution. In this differentiation comes at once the most benefit to society through the product and the most benefit to the individual through the process of making it—the work. Without it, in any arbitrary forcing of individuals to do this or that for which they are not fitted, which, therefore, they do not like, we find the main condition of social waste and individual suffering.

The laws of social evolution, acting unconsciously through us, tend to evolve a highly specialised, intricate, organic life-form, rich, powerful, boundlessly happy. Our conscious external laws and customs, our government by “the dead hand,” our insane reverence for mummies, tend to check, thwart, and pervert this orderly growth. We try to preserve the “all-around man,” which is as if we tried to preserve active monads in our bodily structure.

We try to force people to do what they do not like, we boast of our palæozoic educational system that it trains the child to do what he does not like, as if to like one’s work were criminal! Blinded and confused by inherited falsehoods; kept back in specialisation by our mistaken education; arbitrarily misplaced by superficial conditions; and driven, on pain of death, by our system of artificially distributed nutrition (not merely “no work, no pay,” but “This kind of work whether you like it or not, or no pay!”), the majority of human beings are not doing normal work. What they do hurts them; they do it under pressure of necessity; and they are quite right in assuming that without that pressure they would not work—that way! But this theory falls to the ground when the false conditions are removed. A free discharge of energy—the limitless energy of the universe through our intricate machine—is pleasure, not pain. It does not overdraw on our little store, but rather augments it. We are stronger instead of weaker for right exercise of power.

Every healthy child delights in work, to watch it, imitate it, take part in it. Every healthily placed man delights in his work, the man who is doing what he is particularly built to do—what we call a “born doctor” or a “born engineer.” “Poeta nascitur, non fit”—yes, and operator as well as poeta.

Social evolution is natural, and natural organic processes are easy and agreeable, unconscious if they require no cerebral attention, and, if they do, attended with sensations of pleasure. Granting, as we have done, that waste of energy is an evil, and any overdraught on our reserve fund of cerebral energy is naturally resented by the organism, it is still maintained that normal human work does not involve any waste of energy or any draught on the cerebral reserve more than is pleasant to expend, and results in increase rather than diminishing of that store.

The conditions of normal work are these: First, the individual should be well stocked. A sick man cannot enjoy work, a crippled, deformed person is not fitted to work, and a congenital pauper, one born without that inheritance of nervous energy which should increase with each generation, is unable to work with pleasure. But given, first, a normal individual, he should, second, work at what he likes best. This means social specialisation, and requires for its right development such education and opportunity as shall bring out all possible differentiation of faculty. So widely lacking are these conditions, so hampered is our choice of work, and so undeveloped our power of choosing, that we look with honest envy at the man who does love his work and can do the work he loves, like Agassiz or Lord Kelvin.

In normal social conditions every man would do the work he loved and love the work he did, so life and happiness would become synonymous.

XI: SPECIALISATION Summary

Organisation means specialisation. Military organisation, trades-unions, and trusts. Guerilla bands in industrial organisation. Unspecialised primitive life, the higher the life-form the more specialisation. The “all-around” savage. Injury of our present specialisation under false conditions. Waste of energy. Man of thirty who died of old age. Canoe and steamer. Effect of errors. Normal conditions of specialisation: shorter hours, variety of work, wide education. Ownership in collective production. Specialisation should increase product and decrease effort; it does, but the advantage is misplaced. Hours of labour in proportion to interest. Especial cruelty in our conditions of specialisation. Specialisation proves collectivity. Absurdity of “self-support” idea. Our progress due to such social distribution as we have, not to “self-support.” Society feeding on itself. The Social sacrifice. “Unskilled labour” a product of high social development. Our mistaken attitude toward it. The real nature of it. Serf and noble. Savage’s exciting monologue. Unskilled labour does not require inferior men. Line of social growth. Highly specialised work involves extremely simple details. Our misuse of above fact owing to false concepts. Unskilled labour is high social service. We punish instead of paying, or promoting. Height of ingratitude.

XI SPECIALISATION

Human work being an organic process, it must of course specialise. Those who cry out against specialisation and seek to uphold a mythical “all-around man” are ignorant of the nature of social functions. The very first condition of organic life is division of labour, and as the organism develops the complexity of that division develops with it. The strength and efficiency of any organism depends not so much on its bulk and weight as on the prompt and perfect co-ordination of its parts.

This is a truism in military organisation, which is an old game with us, but we do not seem to understand it in industrial organisation, which is a new one. In the military body we have long ago learned to consider the whole before the part and the purpose of that whole as a measure of action for each part, but in the economic body we are yet a mob of savages. The ego concept is perforce set aside in military life; in economic life it still rules. In military ethics one never hears that “self-preservation is the first law of nature”; no soldier thinks of justifying rank cowardice and insubordination with the plea that “a man must live!” Neither is there any objection to the widest specialisation, to careful grading of officers, to the complete separation of surgeon and chaplain, engineer and commissary. No one seeks to maintain the “all-around man” in the army.

Military organisation is our oldest and so best developed form. Its purpose is crude and easy of perception; its impulses are inherent in the masculine nature; its methods, like those of old-established churches, appeal to the primitive instincts. The gorgeous ritual of military form has much to do with our allegiance to it. But in the now far more important co-ordination of industrial forces no such progress is made. In place of splendid uniforms we have the soiled and soul-depressing garments of our miscellaneous workers. Instead of “esprit du corps” we have the beautiful spirit of “every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.”

Instead of “glory” we have before us only “booty”; instead of “honour” we have the incessant struggle of the civil law to check the ceaseless manœuvring of dishonesty. And in place of one resistless organisation we have at best the progress of the trades-unions and at worst those guerilla bands, the small, fierce hordes of warring trusts, fighting each other and preying on all of us.

The inevitable increase of specialisation has gone on, but under the disadvantage of this crude position it has carried with it a wholly unnecessary burden of evil. Specialisation in labour starts at the very beginning of our growth, at first being only an arrangement of whole men, each man making a whole thing.

To this stage of social evolution some are now wishing to revert—a sad waste of wishing! We might as well wish to be invertebrates again as to sigh for past periods of social development.

The lower the creature the less its organic specialisation. There are some so indeterminate and undivided that they do not know their heads from their tails; cut them in two and they promptly produce a new head and a new tail and go about their business as before. This beast is a fine example for the “all-around man.”

The higher the creature the more specialised. The more worthily a part fulfils one function the less worthily it can fulfil others. When the paw becomes a hand it ceases to be a paw. The more fit the hand for a hand’s use the less fit for a foot’s use. It would in no way benefit the body to have a set of loose, interchangeable organs capable of doing a little of everything and nothing very well. An “all-around” organ would not be as valuable as any single-hearted servant that gives its one regular contribution to the body’s good.

So in the social organism, our line of progress has been from the “all-around” savage to the absolutely one-sided activity of the specialised workman who contributes his best efforts to one line of service. “To learn to do one thing and do it well” is what makes the great artist, the great scientist, the great preacher, the great mechanic, the great electrician. Social service requires the steadily increasing specialisation of its constituents.

When you want a dentist you want to find him in his office, with the accumulated skill of long study and constant practice; you do not want to wait for him to come in from the plough and wash his hands. All this we know well enough, and yet we recognise the injurious effects to the individual of the kind of specialisation we see about us, and have not yet been able to reconcile the two.

If the individual is injured there must be evil somewhere, that is quite true. No society can prosper at the expense of its constituents. If the individual is reduced in physical strength and health, in personal happiness, or in the best social usefulness by his work, the process he is engaged in must be abnormal. Now let us see whether the evils so conspicuous in the lives of our highly specialised workers to-day are inherent in their degree of specialisation, or whether they are coincident rather than consequent and due to quite other causes.

What is it that injures the man who turns a crank all day? It is an evil both of omission and commission, involving a waste of cerebral energy in compelling the attention of the human brain to a point of execution so narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of development involved in doing nothing else. To forcibly focus the attention on a detail for a long time is a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which makes the employment of children in such work so doubly damnable. To concentrate and hold attention is not natural to childhood; that is why they fail to do it and are so frequently killed and injured by their machines. Accidents to working children happen mostly toward the end of the day’s work, as they grow more unequal to the unnatural strain.

And when the child does prematurely muster all his powers and display as a child the concentration of a man, he is thereby ruined for life, prematurely aged, a wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found where an honest, industrious man of thirty broke down and died, and the doctor’s verdict was that he died of old age; every part of him was used up by excessive labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the adult. The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repetition of some one small mechanical effort is painfully clear to any observer.

Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue the machine and go back to the period where “one man makes one thing,” the ideal of our well-meaning reversionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to make one canoe than for a thousand men to make an ocean steamer? Must we go without the ocean steamer and go back to the canoe period of civilisation because it is better to be an all-around savage than a man who makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving the individual life of the rivet-maker without “giving up the ship”?

Assuredly there is. The evil effects of this complex, modern work do not lie in its complexity, or its delicate mechanical accuracy, but may be traced straight to the door of our existing economic fallacies and errors; to the overwork and underpay and general evil conditions based on those errors.

Approach the blissful savage making his own canoe and hire him at a minimum wage to make canoes for you all day and every day for the weary years of a short, worn-out life; the fact that he made a whole thing would not suffice to make him happy or develop that so desirable globularity. If the riveter took the same interest in his steamer that the savage did in his canoe, and worked no longer at his riveting than the savage at his cutting and sewing, his fractional production of an enormous common engine for common good would give him more pleasure than the savage’s unitary production of a tiny private engine for private good.

The natural conditions of social specialisation are these: In proportion to the degree of specialisation the time of work should be shortened and the interest of the worker extended.

It does not hurt the human mind—a strong, healthy, well-developed mind—to make rivets for a little while.