Part 38

XVII THE TRUE POSITION

To be—to re-be—and to be better, none can deny this order of duties; and the last is the highest.

To become better as individuals has long been preached to us; to become better as a race is no unnatural proposition. Heretofore, the Ego concept ruling, we have supposed that this was only to be done by improving as many individuals as possible. And as individual conduct, ego-guided, consisted in each doing things for his own benefit, here and hereafter; our improvement has been somewhat hesitant and tortuous, both in person and in race. It is really singular to see how the Ego concept has held us from understanding what was best in our religion. The one great advantage of Christianity over Buddhism, or Mohammedanism, is in its radical collectivity. As far as a pure monotheism goes—the constant worship and service of God, the Mohammedan is beyond us. As far as a pure morality goes—an exalted sinlessness, the Buddhist is beyond us.

But none of them prays: “Give us each day our daily bread.” Now is it not, truly, a strange thing that we should have been taught that prayer for two thousand years, and yet every man Jack of us goes forth stoutly, to get his own private and personal daily bread as rapidly as possible?

The strongly enthroned Ego concept of more ancient times; buttressed hugely by the dark savagery and sordid barter of as ancient religions, has successfully evaded the recognition of Christianity’s great central truth, that man is one. Not only that God is one—Jew and Mohammedan know that; but that man is one—that we are inextricably interconnected, and cannot be considered separately. “No man liveth to himself, nor dieth to himself.” “He that seeketh his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake [man’s] shall find it.” “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

Resting on the firm basis of natural law, and affirmed insistently by our prevailing religion, is the fact of human solidarity.

The improvement of human life does not consist in withdrawing as many individual souls as possible for a “reward” (that everlasting payment theory!) in Heaven; but in a diligent bringing about of what that same principal prayer of ours sets clearly before us—the Kingdom come, and the will done, right here. This, too, we have intellectually admitted to be desirable; but have united in transferring the occasion to a remote and uncertain period, known as the millennium.

Now, what, in the light of truth as at present open to us, is the best way to improve the human race, and therefore our highest duty? Recognising the organic relation of Society; that our very life, to say nothing of our improvement, rests on our becoming properly related to each other in the specialised service which constitutes a human life; and to perform that service ever better—the first duty of a human being stands prominently forth. It is this:

To assume right functional relation to Society, to one another. Not charity, not philanthropy, not benevolence, not self-immolation or self-sacrifice or self anything; but simply to find and hold our proper place in the Work in which and by which we all live.

To do one’s right work involves all the virtues.

Our virtues are always matters of interrelation; they concern our attitude toward each other, our treatment of each other. An individual man, alone, can manifest no virtues beyond those of a clean beast. Human life is interrelative, and all its virtues, i. e., distinctive qualities, are interrelative. Once accept this basic duty in fulfilment of specialised service, and all those virtues, we, as individuals, have been so fatuously striving for, appear in us, as natural corollary of that right relation. Conversely our “sins,” namely, our various forms of social disease, manifest in the bewildered individual, will of themselves go out as naturally as the virtues come in.

Classify our sins. One enormous mass we call sins against property; all forms of theft, robbery, and the larger and subtler kind of dishonest appropriation. This class is the natural result of our perverted distribution of social products. It is one of the many weak spots of the Want theory that an absence of the essentials of life, instead of promoting industry, often produces more direct and injurious methods of transfer. Quite the larger part of our legal machinery is devoted to the maintenance of the local congestion of wealth on the one hand, and to the prevention of the breaking-down of the social tissues under pressure of that congestion on the other. Given a surplus of wealth in some places and a deficit in others, and the fabric of human nature breaks down in a given proportion.

Want makes men steal quite as naturally as it makes them work, indeed more so, as being the earlier custom. Our political economics founded on the Want theory should give half their pages to a study of the proportionate relation between Want, Theft, and Wealth, after the learned discussion of Want, Work, and Wealth. One is as legitimate a fact in economics as the other.

That normal distribution of social products which would provide the growing individual with all that he needed to bring out his best powers, and which would teach him clearly where and how to use those powers in return, would drop out of the world completely this class of sins. The supply coming first, the child growing up to measure his conduct as a return for what has been given him; taught from infancy to see in the world, behind and around him, the endless Giver, and himself as the product of it all and owing his output to those now alive, and more especially those to come—that child, that man, will have no comprehension of theft, major or minor. In a word: All illegitimate acquisition of property rests on the illegitimate retention of property. Remove the cause, and you remove the effect.

What remains? Sins against the person. Part of these are based on property also,—all murder and violence done “with interested motives,” or in revenge for previous injury to property, or denial of property. A large majority of the sins against the person would go, too, when we establish right distribution.

There remain the sins based on the sex relation. The right economic position for women will remove the greater part of these. When women no longer make their living out of their loving, the prostitute, and that more successful specialist, the mercenary wife, will leave the world. The reduction of sex-attraction from its present fever-height to a normal level, and the perfect freedom for true marriage resultant upon right distribution of property, will take away the cruder and more violent forms of sexual sin, and gives us pure monogamy at last.

I do not say that all sin would leave the world upon our assuming right economic relations; nor even that this great mass would disappear in a night; but the cause of the disease being removed, the healthy social currents would flow calmly on and we should soon outgrow these evils too long endured. Social disease will eliminate itself by right living as does physical disease.

“Sins” are always phenomena of defective social relation—they are not individual matters at all, an individual can no more do wrong than he can do right. The beasts have no morals because they have no Society. Human conduct is all interrelative; and right or wrong as it affects the others. Given any wrong relation in Society, and a certain proportion of sin works out among its members, now here, now there, according to the nature of the diseased relation.

The despot breeds the sycophant, the liar, the assassin; the rich man breeds the thief; the woman who makes her living by marriage, the prostitute. And these sins cannot be checked in the point of expression, the individual, any more than you can cure scarlet fever with salve.

We are good, or We are bad,—with remarkable disconnection of personal circumstance. The thieving produced by the clot of wealth may not break out in the immediately surrounding tissue if that is pretty healthy, but creeps along the line of least resistance, and appears through the brain least able to resist it.

No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself, again.

If, then, this great field of evil, and a thousand as evil concomitants, may be cleared off the world by the adoption of more healthy social processes; if those healthy social processes consist in each person’s being in his right place, and doing his right work in Society; if, too, it clearly appears that to the individual consciousness this right place and right work represent Happiness,—Happiness such as we have never been able to conceive in our little ego-stunted brains; then human duty looms up large and clear.

To find your right place, to do your right work, here is the basis of all virtue, joy, and growth. Here is a steady improvement of every human product, things better and more beautiful, things made more easily and more plentifully; and every human being, better nourished physically and socially, pouring forth the ever-rising tide in harmonious social growth through work. It means a lifting from the heart of man, first, of Care. All that life-long terror of the Wolf, the dragging weight that follows from the young father’s anxiety over his first-born—can he provide for it?—to the dying man’s anxiety over his growing children and wife left behind—can he provide for them? This crippling terror—(which we have solemnly affirmed was an incentive to labour!)—being removed for ever by the mutual insurance of a civilised society; man can lift his head and work with a light heart and a free hand.

It means lifting from the heart of man, second, Sin. Just to see that Sin is Ours, not mine and thine, means instant relief and illumination. Then to see where it comes from, to remove its causes, to watch its shadow recede slowly from the glad, bright face of man, like the passing of an eclipse; that will leave us free to work indeed.

It means lifting from the body of man nearly all his load of disease; his diseases being as clearly traceable to social disorder as his sins. There is no difference, save that one is manifested in physical relations, and the other in social. That the human animal should not be as clean and healthy as other animals is due to his false social relations. When they are right, he maintains all the animal’s physical purity and vigour, and adds to it the yet unsounded depths of social vigour.

With a prospect like this before us, what prevents a sweeping and instant change? Nothing prevents a sweeping and instant change in the minds of some of us; a recognition of the nature of human life and human work which sees it all natural, all healthful, all good, in itself; and the bad only an evanescent mistake, easily to be avoided in future; but to spread that recognition in the minds of all of us means time and effort, and cannot become general at once.

Meanwhile, it is open to us, without waiting for all to see alike these patent truths, to go to work on such changes in economic condition as shall soonest check the decay in social tissues so dangerously apparent at both ends of our present “Society,” and to bring up, as soon as may be, those whose growth has been arrested for ages.

The world is full of aborted people, aborted by the crushing pressure of these old lies in economics; people crippled in mind, people crippled in body, people swollen and distorted from being oversupplied and underworked; people shrunken and distorted from being overworked and undersupplied. These can be helped at once by those of us who see the wisdom of improving the race without waiting for them to understand and accept the principles on which the change in condition rests. We did not wait for all the citizens of America to believe in the principles involved, before giving them the public school and public library. Many do not, when questioned, even now believe in those principles. But they are not reluctant to avail themselves of the provision made; and the advantageous results of that provision are apparent in our citizens, whether they understand why or not.