Part 6

This carries its visible proof in the increasing activity of our interest in social phenomena, and of our efforts to alleviate the distress of humanity and better those conditions within our reach. We have the power and the desire to help, and the main obstacle to a swift and orderly improvement is in the brain; both in its passive ignorance and prejudice and its active maintenance of mistaken or long-outgrown ideas.

The position here taken, that the human brain has not kept pace with the development of society, and has acted as a deterrent rather than an assistant to our growth, may be questioned from the point of view of the evolutionist. Natural selection, he will assert, develops in each animal a brain capacity suited to his needs, and speedily removes him from the field of contest if he does not manifest it; man in the struggle for existence must similarly develop the kind and amount of brain that is necessary to him, and if he does not he will perish. Therefore the human brain to-day is all that can be expected, and it is useless to talk of any wholesale and sudden improvement in social conditions from that source.

This would be true if man were a creature whose existence was conditioned upon his own individual activities. While the human animal remained at that stage of development where he was directly reached by the consequences of his own personal conduct, his brain power was cultivated in this simple way; if he was not smart enough to live, he died, and was well out of the procession.

But so soon as any social relation was established, when our gains and losses were fused in collective action, this method of brain culture was no longer reliable. Once firmly established as a living species through the process of agriculture, the degree of intelligence necessary to the maintenance of this process was sufficient to sustain life, while the further development of intelligence rested on other activities less instantly important to the life process, and not so sharply brought home in personal consequences.

The individual hunter, if he failed to show the grade of ability necessary to supply his wants, promptly died of his own inferiority, but man, in social relation, is maintained by the collective effort, prospering or suffering with his society, and his pooling of abilities is so far-reaching and hopelessly intermixed that it is impossible to pick out the consequences of one man’s action and pile them neatly on his own head. Naturally, selection acts on the society rather than the man, and must needs act slowly and with an appearance of injustice. Incipient errors are not met by the sharp reproof of individual consequence, and wide ranges of eccentricity are possible, so that they do not touch those basic economic processes of society on which all our lives rest.

Gross mistakes in agriculture would be soon punished by the extinction of the mistaken society, or errors in mechanics, in navigation, in any part of our work which deals with the primal necessities of life, but errors in astronomy, in religion, or education do not result in such immediate destruction.

Thus the human intellect on the lower stages shows a certain solid average ability, built up by natural selection acting on societies as it acts on individuals, but the human intellect in its higher grades is painfully irregular and defective, making our higher social manifestations as questionable, uncertain, and often mischievous as our lower ones are clearly good.

Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to plough and sow, to kill wolves and steer a ship, but in later social development he has been as open to destruction as any poor beast below him. In the long lesson of history we may see him again and again killed down to the level of his intelligence. Nations have been conquered, civilisations destroyed, kings decapitated, but the peasant survived.

The problems we have really solved do not have to be done over again; the downfall of past societies is but the wiping off the slate of a mass of elaborate failures. “Rule it all out down to that first line and begin again!” says the teacher.

We are quite clever at simple examples in units, but very weak on fractions. We could see how one man affected another in the short radius of a limited early group, but the long-range effects of our widening interhuman activities have been beyond us, and we are slowly working out in heavy centuries those problems of liberty and justice, of honesty and love, the mastery of which is as essential to our further progress as was the early mastery of metallurgy and mechanics.

A mistake in short and simple addition is easily seen, but as the examples grow more complex the errors are more difficult to trace.

They spread wider and last longer, and by the time a society begins to meet the punishment due to the behaviour of its misguided constituents, those worthies have long since died in the odour of sanctity and a new generation is piously producing the incipient errors which will destroy its grandchildren. The vigour of our basic life processes sustains us through wide reaches of experiments and mistakes.

A flourishing society can maintain more fools than any savage period could afford.

We have to do in this book with several of the basic errors in our common concepts as to economics. We shall see how different are the facts of our economic life to-day from that inner world of concepts we carry in the brain and always take for facts while they remain there. The world is, to us, the sum of our concepts concerning it; and while the real facts relentlessly affect us, our supposed facts are of deadly importance because they modify our conduct.

In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. They do not fit the facts; they are not provable as true, but very promptly provable as false; they do not agree with such true ideas as we have, nor even with each other; but all this gives no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

In the face of every century’s accumulating facts of organic social relation we have peacefully maintained our original animal theory of individualism—the Ego concept. If bees had brains like ours, and the exquisitely organised modern bee could consciously maintain the state of mind of her remote prototype, the solitary bee, we might have some parallel to comfort our lonely height of foolishness. Well did the Greeks call an “idiot” the man who behaved as a separate individual and considered his personal advantage first. Consider the ruin and disorder of the hive if bees were “idiots.” That type of industry, of harmony, of peaceful wealth, could never have arisen under such misconception.

We have many more root concepts, some basic, some collateral and derivative; all working, discordantly enough, against social progress. Several will be touched upon here; those most patently connected with the subject of the book, our Human Work. In pursuance of which subject it is necessary to lay down some of the facts as to the nature of society, its structure and functions; and to show how perverse, how inadequate, how deadly mischievous are the ancient theories which still stand in our minds in place of those facts.

IV: SOME FALSE CONCEPTS Summary

The ego concept, based on pre-human status. Our separate consciousness not human. Human consciousness collective. “We” human, “I” animal. Absurdity of individualism in organism. Pleasure-in-impression theory. Animal basis. Pleasure through motory nerves as well as sensory, and in us far greater. Pay Concept, animal basis, logical extremes in Heaven and Hell. Other forces also operative. Woman labour. Slave labour. Shame and agony resultant in concepts of eternal torture. Wage labour. Want theory. Self-interest theory. Self-preservation not nature’s first law. Race-preservation. Pain concept: “Sweet uses of adversity.” Action and reaction equal. “Good to be born poor.” Pain only a message, always indicative of wrong. Defensive torture. Hazing. Evils of poverty. Abraham Lincoln. Illegitimate wealth. Dumbbells not dinner. Contempt for work, how derived. Veblen. Paradox of “independence.” Law of demand and supply.

IV SOME FALSE CONCEPTS

As we shall frequently have to refer to certain major errors in popular thought, it will be as well to clearly enumerate and describe those selected. The field is wide,—each of those mentioned connects with many others,—and there may be serious question as to which antedates which; but difference on that point will not invalidate the actuality of their influence on conduct. The group mentioned in this chapter will be further described and elaborated later; this is merely to introduce them in some order for reference.

The first, and here assumed to be the basic error in the human mind, the parent of almost all the others, is the Ego concept. This is the universal assumption, based on a pre-human status when it was true, that human beings are separate entities, like the lower animals.

As animals we are separate, and, when we first began to think, the animal life was so enormously preponderant, and the human life so weak, so vague, so intermittently realised, that it was quite natural we should carry over the sense of personal entity into the social entity. That we have a separate personal consciousness is not denied, but it is not humanity. The human consciousness is collective, as we shall see later.

Our mistake has been, not in retaining the Ego concept, which is as necessary in its place as the concept of a leg or a liver, but in failing to grasp the larger inclusive Social concept. All the complex organic phenomena of social life we have continually tried to construe in terms of the individual. The distinctive features of human life are invariably social. No one trait or power of our great race but what must be accounted for in its development and understood in its use as a social factor.

“We” are human, “I” am an animal, save as “I,” being part of Society, embody and represent it. The discord and mischief which would be wrought in a physical organism by any absurd pretence of individual life and interest on the part of its organs, is precisely the discord and misery wrought in our social organism by the persistence of this archaic idea.

Another error, most deeply basic in its logical relation, though perhaps not so early recognised by the conscious mind, is our general belief that pleasure lies wholly—or even mainly—in impression. Like the first, it dates from a pre-social status, is the governing theory of personal animal life, and has not been removed and replaced by truer views as social life is developed.

The individual animal having no functions but those of maintenance, reproduction, and improvement, and accomplishing his improvement only along lines of personal heredity, acted only toward those ends, and remained at rest when those ends were served. Pleasure led and pain drove him to the attainment of the means to these ends of this fulfilment, so he early learned to associate pleasure with getting what he wanted,—pain with the lack of it,—a perfectly true concept as far as it went. But as the individual animal’s activities are promptly reactionary, and not matters of conscious judgment and volition, he never took into account the pleasure inherent in action, in the discharge of energy, and the pain equally inherent in the prevention of such discharge.

The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure; increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture. The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not “feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income, not in his output.