Part 23
For Society to bestow the same care and provision on all its children that the wisest parent now seeks to bestow on his would develop the race faster than anything conceivable. That this method would at once improve the individual, the race, and the productivity of both, is clear. That it would “pauperise” has been shown to be an erroneous deduction from the Want theory; under which we are indeed all potential, and some actual, paupers. The further claim that it would tend to a too rapid increase of population, especially among the least fit, should be carefully examined.
The Malthusian error is in assuming that a given rate of reproduction is fixed and final. If Malthus had studied the subject more deeply, he would have found that the rate of reproduction varies widely, not only in the “animal kingdom” but the man. This variation is relative to other conditions; and has been thus formulated by Spencer, “Reproduction is in inverse proportion to individuation.” The lower the efficiency of the individual, the more young ones it has.
Progressive specialisation, bringing a higher degree of individual efficiency, carries with it a decrease in the rate of reproduction. The myriad eggs of the fish or insect are followed as species develop by the lesser litters of high-grade quadrupeds, till we reach one at a birth. A fish that only laid one egg at a time would not have a very tall family tree. In man we have the general rule of one at a time; but we have it more times in some cases than in others. The human birth rate varies widely, too; and the action of the same law, a higher development of the individual, higher specialisation, leads to a lower birth rate.
There are also artificial variants, as so painfully shown in the dwindling of France’s population; but quite apart from any morbid processes of stirpiculture lies this broad and beautiful law,—the higher specialisation of the individual tends to reduce the birth rate. This is shown with clearness through all the turbid cross-currents of our mistaken behaviour; the most developed kind of people have the least children, and the least developed kind of people have the most children. Even in folk lore we see it indicated—“there was once a King and a Queen who were perfectly happy, except that they had no children,” and on the other hand, “The poor man hath his quiver full.”
The capacity of the world to support humanity in health and comfort has a limit; it is not near enough to frighten us, but it is there. If human beings are left to struggle on alone in unnatural individualism, their arrested development fills up the world, too, with numerous, but inefficient people. But as a conscious and intelligent society hastens to spread its gains among all its parts; to make the progress of the race the rich possession of all its members; so fully to educate and develop every child as to promote the higher specialisation of the individual, at a rate unconscious natural processes never dreamed of, then we see a steady diminution of this threatening birth rate. By this means we work steadily toward a far higher average of social efficiency, with a permanent balance of birth and death, involving no arbitrary personal tampering with natural processes, but a recognition of the working of natural law.
It would seem needless to say that the individuation of woman is the most prominent necessity here, as her rate of fecundity is the determining factor in the case, not the man’s; yet there are still some who ignore even so patent a fact as this.
See, then, how swiftly and surely an awakened society can right its wrongs, cure and outgrow its diseases, understand, pity, and leave far behind its sins. The highest human duty for the individual is to enter upon his or her special work in the world—that is vital, that is first, that underlies all. There is no right life for any human creature who is not taking part in the organic processes of Society. And if, in our present blurred and jumbled condition, we have not the sure guide of a “calling,” a special inborn preference and power; why, that only leaves us freer to take hold anywhere of the thousand things that need doing; paid, or unpaid—that is immaterial. The point is _to do the work_ and to do it for the service of Society. No matter for the past account, for arrears of social pampering or social neglect; we are all responsible for both. No malicious crowd of despots, masters, owners, and employers has conspired to injuriously deprive the angelic workingman of his rights. We have _all_ believed in these economic falsehoods, the inevitable action of which was to produce the conditions we now suffer from. We must all lay them aside; wasting no time or energy on remorse, and simply set to work to make things right.
From that class of people who “do not have to work”—that is, who have been paid and overpaid in advance—there is an overwhelming debt of honour due the world. In that great field of action where there is no pay, nor even thanks as yet; in the efforts necessary to teach the right things, and to provide the right things for the world’s little children, there is ample room for the most helplessly rich. Also in the work of spreading the social supplies where they belong—among the whole people—there is work there, much work, not only unpaid and unthanked, but heartily resisted.
There was never a time in history when more splendid opportunities were open to those who would serve society. Thousands of us are at it already, organised and unorganised; a rising flood of love and service, toiling manfully, and womanfully, at the mighty task. But the economic darkness makes it blind work at best.
Most of our conscious “social service” to-day is directed, naturally enough, to ministering to the social diseases. Now, if a man is sick, there are two ways to re-establish his health—both necessary. One is to restore normal conditions to his body, trusting that a normal body will urge to normal action, and so keep him well. The other is to induce normal action, trusting to that to restore right conditions in the body. Each is a good thing, each tends to produce the desired result; but both are incomparably better than either. Our sick Society needs this double treatment. The first condition of normal action we have here reviewed at length; consciously to assume true place in the organic industries of human life. If all of us do that, the currents of right action will assuredly build us a healthy social body. But we can greatly hasten that good end by rearranging the social body too. Here the law of interaction between spirit and form comes to our aid, and makes possible an incredible rate of progress.
Take, for instance, an advanced case in social pathology—a city slum. Now there are two ways for a conscious society to focus its forces on the diseased part and regenerate it. One is by dealing with the spirit of the slum, the people themselves; by so educating the children, so stimulating the adult, so providing proper opportunity for right social service for all, that the people will change in character, and, reacting, soon make the slum a fair, clean, healthful part of the city.
The other is to deal with the body of the slum, the houses, streets, and shops; and so to reconstruct them that they shall steadily react on the people and change their character. Both can be done, both are being done, but so feebly and partially, in such tiny spots of change, under such heavy opposition and heavier indifference, that the gain is heart-breakingly slow. While one playground is being made, while one new method of education is being introduced, a thousand babies die, a thousand children become criminals, a thousand wretched men and women sink to the hopeless grade, are lost to society, become diseased tissue, and are miserably sloughed off through asylum, prison, and hospital.
The cause of the delay is this: We are treating social disease by local application. We find, as it were, a tubercle or boil upon the body politic, we apply all manner of treatment-the poultice, the counter-irritant, the excising knife of capital punishment; but we forget, or do not know, that this local trouble, however poignantly conspicuous, is on a living body, and is caused and maintained by diseased conditions in that body, far beyond the material boundaries of that location.
We must, of course, use prompt and strong measures in these most painful spots; but the treatment necessary to prevent the formation of these conspicuously evil places must be applied to all of us. It is as necessary for the right education and stimulus to be applied to the rich and well-to-do as to the poor, to the isolated farmer in the field as well as the crowded sweater in the shop; and not only those methods touching the people’s character, but the other, the prompter ones, touching their physical conditions.
There are certain physical conditions in the social body, brick and mortar conditions, which are affecting us all for evil, and which can be readily changed. There are, also, certain economic relations in that body, affecting us all for evil, that can equally be changed. We need to see these in their true importance; as affecting not only the immediate individuals concerned, but as so affecting the whole structure of Society as to inexorably produce the conspicuous evils with which we are so painfully familiar. Once recognised, our duty is clear—a glad, swift, forward movement bringing joy and gain to all.
What are these general conditions?
One is the economic position of woman, which involves false sex relations, including all forms of prostitution; maintains primitive individual instincts and checks social ones, and is largely responsible for the morbid action of social economics. Another is the maintenance of domestic industry; which, as I have shown in another book, prevents the development of the home, the progress of woman, the right education of the child, and the normal progress of man.
Combined, these two conditions find material form in that hotbed of primitive egoism, the cumbrous, expensive, inadequate dwelling house of our time, or rather, of past time, of the most remote and barbarous time, most injuriously preserved in this. It is true that each human being needs a wholly private and personal room to rest in; that solitude, pure individual solitude, is a social necessity. It is also true that the great primal group, the family, needs its group of rooms, its private home. But the point of divergence is in the Work involved.
Work is social, it does not belong to the person nor, in any advanced degree, to the family. That so much human work is at present performed in and for the separate family is an enormous condition of social evil. It maintains, beyond all the efforts of religion and science to combat, the selfishness of the primeval Pig.
Social consciousness and its great currents of love and enthusiasm, of power and pride, cannot find room in brains continually cramped by application to the most ignominiously personal concerns.
It is not only that the family could have a far simpler, purer, and more private life if they would but take advantage of our immense social facilities, but so could the individual men and women; born and reared in families, to be sure, but born and reared as members of Society, active and responsible factors in social progress.
These men and women, if the families they grew up in were in true social relation, instead of each one keeping up a little down-drawing whirlpool of antediluvian individualism, would be a thousand times more valuable citizens. While the minds of our women are exercised only, or mainly, in impression and expression of a purely personal nature, they and their stunted children and heavily handicapped men cannot properly receive and discharge the vivifying currents of social consciousness.
That consciousness forces itself out here and there through specially sensitive individuals, usually at great personal sacrifice. These special individuals, heavily charged with the social spirit, push and struggle, work and fight, suffer and die, trying to stir to equal life the great ego-bound mass of unawakened Society. Much work has been accomplished, great good has been done, the world is incomparably better off for the presence of these better developed members, but our gain is as nothing to what it would be if the progress was shared by all.
If we _were_ still savages, still beasts, still mere individuals, this book and its many brothers might as well wait for weary thousands of years more, but we are not. We are, in patent fact, highly specialised members of a highly advanced Society; but our eyes are holden, our minds are darkened by piously preserved collections of old concepts long found false. We can lay aside these erroneous ideas at a moment’s recognition of the true. We can incorporate the true into the make-up of our minds by acting upon them. We can put ourselves in touch with the heart of the world, sharing its splendid pulses, its tireless energy, its flood of common human love, by simply doing our right work. We can break up forever the old false tendencies of thought and feeling by rearranging our material conditions in line with true social forces.
“Better housing for the poor” is necessary, but so it is for the rich, for all of us. Truer housing; housing suitable to the age we live in; housing proper to the human soul. We build “the house of God,” bringing to it the highest love and power and aspiration; and that house uplifts the soul of the beholder. What prevents our building the houses of Man with that high love and power and aspiration—that splendid beauty, ennobling space, and tender ornament? Only that ancient, shrivelled, artificially preserved mummy, the Ego concept, prevents.
You cannot build right houses for modern humanity on the basis of a kitchen, on the service of the belly of a beast. Rightly to nourish all people makes the feeding of humanity as noble a form of work as any other work broad and beautiful and true, to be devoutly entered upon and grandly fulfilled; to cater only to the bodily desires of one’s own family is proper to the level of meanest savagery.
A rearrangement of ideas and their consequent feelings, from the process false to the process true, is possible to any sane mind, is the duty of every last one of us. A rearrangement of the external conditions follows logically and helps materially. This we can do in the mind at once, in the body not so promptly, but still swiftly in our age of mechanical wonders. And why should we? What will it mean to us? We should, for underlying cause, because it is in the line of social evolution; a race duty. Because in doing it we further the divine purpose, we fulfil ultimate law. But if the so-long-stunted soul demands its pay, there is reason more than enough.
Are men so happy now, each trying to take care of himself and his family, that they should dread the peace and ease given by society’s vast resources in full circulation? Are women so happy now, either the squaw or the parasite, that they should dread becoming full human beings, active, conscious members of society? What this change will mean to us no one can fully measure, but those who know anything of the real heart of humanity, those who can interpret the gleams of light that break through all religions, those who ever felt the soul lift and light and swell with power and joy, under the influence of music, or painting, or speech, or any form of human work, can tell us something of it.
We have been taught, in tattered remnants of worn-out faiths, to despise human nature. We, forsooth, mere worms and weaklings, “as prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward,” we were born in iniquity, conceived in sin, doomed to suffer here, and likely to suffer forever, important worms that we were!
We have been taught in later days, by half-seeing students of science, that we were but beasts, and must fight it out as they did, our progress lying in the slow and painful process of survival.
What a change in thought, in feeling, in action, when we see that we are the crowning form of created life, we, collectively, though never so much “worms” taken personally. That Humanity is the one fact we should realise, and that in it we find free scope and full satisfaction for all the vague aspirations which have haunted the individual. That in that organic social life we are all held together by our mutual service, by our work, and that in our work and only in our work lies growth, lies peace, lies the highest human duty, lies happiness.
Happiness, for a human being, is in full, true, conscious, social relation:
To feel the world’s life, unbroken in its steady pour, from the inchoate nebulæ, through age on age of changing orders, into the spreading growth of an organised democracy. To feel our own historic family, the immense racial pride of the long ascent, the conquest of elements, of plants, of animals, the unquenchable fire of progress, the vast and rapid increase of the race: To feel the extending light of common consciousness as Society comes alive!—the tingling “I” that reaches wider and wider in every age, that is sweeping through the world to-day like an electric current, that lifts and lights and enlarges the human soul in kindling majesty: To feel the power! the endless power! Not only the ceaseless stream of the universal Godness, but our interminable array of batteries, full charged; the stored energy of all time embodied in poem and story, in picture and statue, in music and architecture, in every tool, utensil, and giant machine wherein the human brain and the human hand have made force incarnate:
And, so feeling, to Do:
To Do, as only Human beings can; not in the paltry processes of the individual, mere servant of his stomach, but in the fascinating complexity and rhythmic splendour of the march of social activities; to take part in that huge, thrilling, organic life in which the individual thrives unconscious—of which the soul is lodged in each of us:
And in the ceaseless development of that measureless vitality, this vast, ever-increasing Social Life, to feel, now and again,—always oftener,—the distant music of the universe grow clearer—that is Happiness.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.