Part 7

But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many others.

To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity requires consciousness, and consciousness involves pleasure and pain. The whole field of distinctively human activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly increasing consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the income of man, as a separate animal, remains the same. He has, as before, the pleasure of the intake, the attainment of the means to his separate welfare. He has, beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger collective intake also, the gratification of his social desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the pleasure of action; of the conscious expression of energy.

This is the largest field of human delight, but has not been so recognised. We still commonly associate pleasure with impression, with things we are to get, to have. Whereas, in fact, our pleasure depends far more largely upon what we do.

Closely derived from this basic assumption is our general theory of return as an incentive; what we may call the Pay concept. This was one of man’s earliest generalisations. He observed the excito-motory action of the individual beast; under the influence of hunger or fear he acts; not influenced, he does not act, sleeps in the sun, and accumulates energy for the next jump.

The beast, seeing his dinner running before him, ran after it; having caught his dinner, he ceased to run. Seeing his enemy running behind him, he ran away from it; having escaped from his enemy, he ceased to run.

“Aha!” cries that astute observer, Early Man, “Exertion depends on pleasure before you or pain behind you!” and he forthwith produced his grand primeval generalisation of Reward and Punishment.

This is still exclusively held by almost all of us. We have used it to account for all human actions, with the bitter conclusion that “every man has his price.” We have spread and lengthened and deepened it to cover our waxing field of action, till out of its logical extremes we have built both Heaven and Hell.

It was a tremendous concept for the early brain to achieve, and it was true—as far as it went. These two forces do modify action. They were very strong upon individual animals, and they act upon us yet—to a degree. That is, there are still some of us so near the plane of individualism as to be readily and strongly influenced by these agents.

The error of early man lay in not observing other forces even then operative; and the error of modern man lies in not observing that these others have grown continually, and the primal ones have dwindled in proportion.

Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor laboured the primeval squaw, working patiently, working eagerly, working most efficiently, out of the overflowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power of recreative love. Not because of anything to gain or anything to fear, but because energy must have expression; and the expression is in proportion to the energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in the fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our dramatic androcentric period, the woman was made a slave and her labour became slave labour, not to its improvement. Later again men were made slaves; their activity was coerced by these two primitive stimuli, the fear of punishment, the hope of reward; mainly the former.

In that first period of co-ordinate activity among men, the irreconcilable male energy was forced into service by the immediate pressure of pain and fear. Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as such accepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion to labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour in being free of it—was superimposed upon humanity at this period, and has never been fully outgrown. This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony, its hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of man, and, as this period was of great duration, it made possible to our minds the prodigious concepts of eternal torture.

Later, in the second stage of coerced action, that of wage labour, we have the reward used instead of the penalty. We will not whip the man if he does not work, but we will not feed him unless he does.

Our governing concept being that action is produced only by these means, we must needs use one or the other. Since we believe that if the slave were not in fear of punishment he would not work, or that if the employee were not in hope of pay he would not work, we act upon our belief consistently enough. We have outgrown the period where we believed we had a right to enforce labour by inflicting punishment; but we have not outgrown the only less primitive belief that we have a right to enforce it by withholding the reward. We do not yet, to any extent, recognise the other forces under which human beings act.

Closely allied to the Pay concept and following it, a more concrete expression of the same general thought as applied to industrial activity, comes our universal economic fallacy, the Want Theory.

This is repeatedly defined and opposed in later chapters, and here need only be stated as that basic proposition in Political Economy in which it is assumed that man works to gratify wants, and that if his wants are otherwise gratified he will not work. This fundamental theory of economics rests, as will be readily seen, on the foregoing, on the Ego concept and the Pay concept. Part of it, more generally applied, is our general Self-interest theory, usually expressed in solemn tones: “Self-preservation is the first law of Nature.” Men say this as if it were so, and other people believe it simply because it is said to them so solemnly. Our brains, trained for all time to bow to authority, have a treacherous trick of believing whatever is advanced by those in authority or even by the scribes. The present scribe asks no such gulp, but that the reader use his own active thinking power on the propositions here advanced. Now, this self-preservation theory is contradicted on its own doorstep by the fact of the race-preservation instinct, the individual counting for nothing, absolutely nothing, in the unbroken stream of racial life of which he forms so small a part.

If we were solemnly taught “Race-preservation is the first law of Nature,” we should be nearer the truth. Even in the purely individual animals the good of the race is paramount to that of the member, and in the collective animals the social instinct is so highly developed that self-preservation is not even thought of. Break an ant-heap, and watch “the first law of Nature”! Immediate, instinctive, unquestioning, they rush to save the eggs and young, to guard the queen, to preserve the group—not the individual.

“Nature” develops whatever faculties are required in a given form of life, and if the life-form is collective the collective instincts appear in force. Now “Self-interest” as a motive does act upon the human being, but it does not compare in weight and value with the larger later motives of social interest. We assume that the visibly social processes we see going on about us are best governed by self-interest in the parties concerned; that efficient service is best commanded under this pressure. We are wrong.

Social processes were initiated primarily along lines of self-interest, in orderly development, from existing instincts to higher ones, but the further developed are these processes the less useful is the early motive, the more needed is the later motive of social interest. Self-interest, preserved too long in social growth, becomes a deterrent force. The more wide and complex the process, the greater the distance between producer and consumer, the more injurious is the action of that essentially limited force. This is why in small, early societies there is more honest and efficient service under this motive; and in large, modern societies, unless the social instincts of duty, honour, and the like are operative, we find such infinitely ramified dishonesty and inefficiency.

Another stumbling-block of progress is an extremely ancient belief of ours, not derived from the preceding five, but in flat contradiction to some of them, which the popular and poetic saying calls “the sweet uses of adversity.” We very generally believe that pain and difficulty are good for us, and the logical consequence of this belief—so far as practical life allows such an absurdity to have any consequence—is of course that we do nothing to remove pain and difficulty. The further logical consequence, that we should deliberately add pain and difficulty to our lives in order to improve them, is seldom allowed; it is too ridiculous even for our brains.

Now what is the fraction of truth in this peculiar piece of idiocy? At its very base lies the law of physics: “action and reaction are equal.” As hard as you push against a wall does the wall push against you. Following this comes the early observation of the effect of environment. Where the channel is narrowest the stream is deepest; where it is widest the stream is shallowest; and if you dam the stream the water rises to the height of the dam.

So in the action of the human forces we observe that, if you hinder and obstruct a man, he resists your pressure and rises against it—sometimes! Sometimes he does no such thing, but is crushed instead. However, we perceived numbers of cases where opposition called forth resisting energy where action and reaction were equal, and we made our easy generalisation as to the beneficent effects of difficulties.

Applied to human life, in the concrete environment which we call good and bad according to our lights, we observed further that this law seemed to work backward; that where a person had no difficulties, where all was made easy for him, he did not manifest energy. Then we felt sure we were right. We produced a lot of popular expressions of this general thought, a religious phase of it being “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth”; its application in education leading us to believe that it is good to make the child labour and struggle in learning—bad to “make it too easy for him”; and in economics we apply it in our sad comments on the disadvantages of wealth, our cheerful assertion that “it is good for a man to be born poor.”

Of course no one ever thinks of staying poor because of its benefits; no one foregoes being rich, or trying to be rich because convinced of its evils; above all, we do not seek to work out this theory on our children. Its main mischief is in preventing us from trying to remove the obstacles to human progress in general. So long as we even partially believe that obstacles promote to progress, that the hurdles add to the speed of the racer—why, if we do not really give extra hurdles to aid the man we want to win, we at least do nothing to clear the track.

Now where does the essential error lie in this loosely hung together bunch of foolishness? In the first place separate “pain” from difficulty. Pain is merely a message; it is a telegram to headquarters to say that something is wrong. It always means that. Normal action does not hurt. It may be “good,” as the sentinel is good who gives the alarm so that you may save yourself; but his alarm is a warning of evil. It may accompany a “good” process, like that of resuscitating the drowning; but that is not a normal process, the pain is conditioned upon water in the lungs.

If a person is so situated that he must bear pain, then it is good to get used to it, if possible. On this basis the early savage used self-torture to help him bear the incidental miseries of life, and from that practice dated our views on the subject.

The most unblushing survival of this gross savagery is seen in our practice of hazing, calmly defended by its perpetrators as “it makes boys manly,” “it develops character.” The savage had at least the grace to do it to himself, and it was not practised upon children. Our imperfectly educated children maintain in this the customs of the lowest savages, in a rudimentary form. There are times in life when pain has to be borne for a greater good, but that does not make the pain good.

As to the other and a little more legitimate branch—difficulty. Here we feel more assurance. We do see the poor boy making tremendous struggles, and rising above his difficulties hardened, bruised, belated, but triumphant. We do see the rich boy making no struggle at all, and rising above nothing. Hence—but wait a bit. Do all poor boys thus struggle and rise?

Do the slums produce the best citizens? Is a well-bred, well-fed, well-educated boy so hopelessly handicapped in life by those advantages? Is our ceaseless attempt to provide for our children the best advantages all folly? We may not be logical, but have horse sense enough to know better than that.