Part 6
Alone he might hunt, and “support himself” as a separate animal; as if, conceivably, the eye could return to a protoplasmic condition and soak up a living somehow; but as an eye it would cease to exist; and he would cease to exist as a teacher. The teacher, teaching, cannot support himself. His time, his strength, his enormously specialised skill, are spent in teaching, and the society which made him and which needs him, necessarily supports him. Teaching as an activity is not predicable of individuals. It is a power to transmit the social gain in intelligence and knowledge among the social constituents. No solitary individual could have attained this knowledge and experience; and, if he had it, he could _not teach it to himself_. Teaching is a social function; a very elaborate and long-developed social function. The teacher is an extreme instance of the social functionary. Other than as a social functionary he does not exist.
This test may be applied far and wide, in every trade, art, science, or business; no human occupation escapes it. Whatever a man can do separately for himself, an ape can imitate. Whatever a man does which is worth falling human is done collectively and for others, it is a social function. He may work alone at his business, but the tools he works with are the fruit of slow social evolution, and the work he does is done for others. He may retire to the forest and think alone, but he thinks on the problems of human life; no personal affairs can occupy the energies of a human brain; and the brain he thinks with is a slow social product too.
The evolution of the interdependence of social function is as clear as that of the interdependent physical functions of our separate bodies. As early animal forms have few and simple functions, gradually evolving those more delicate and complicated, so do early societies have few and simple arts or trades, and similarly evolve them. As society progresses the trades flow wider, dividing and subdividing as they go, until we have the exquisitely sublimated special skill of the modern worker; and at each step of the process the organic relation tightens as well as widens; the specialist is less able to “take care of himself,” and the others are less able to do without the specialist.
“Every man to his trade” voices our popular recognition of this law, and “Jack-of-all-trades and master of none” shows the true merit of the “all-around-man.”
We now come to a third, and in itself a fully sufficient proof of the organic nature of society—not of the social organism as a useful figure, an illustration, an analogy, but as a literal biological fact. Here are a number of separate animal bodies. Each is a group of interactive organs, each does business for itself with no need of combination with another, save in the temporary union of sex with sex, and of mother with child. These creatures are individuals. Here again is a number of apparently separate animal bodies. But each has in his head an organ _which cannot perform its functions alone_; an organ which for its healthful use requires contact and exchange with similar organs lodged in other bodies.
This organ is the brain. That degree of brain development which we call “human” is only found in creatures socially related; it is not individual brain power, but social. The human brain, for health and usefulness, for its normal life, requires a number of human beings with whom to feel, think, and act. We can, it is true, physically isolate a human animal, and maintain his animal life; but his human life—_i. e._, social life; his “feelings” and “thoughts,” the whole field of brain activity—is injured.
The human brain is _the_ social organ; it is our medium of contact and exchange. Set a man in absolute solitude and his brain is affected at once. Cut off from the contact which enables it to freely receive and discharge its supply of social energy, its action becomes increasingly morbid. In proportion to the completeness and duration of the isolation the brain is injured, and ultimately ruined.
We know the effect of solitary imprisonment, or of being cast away alone on some remote island. Short of this we know the progressive effect of degrees of isolation. The lighthouse keeper knows—they put two men in lighthouses most removed from social touch; and even that is a dangerously “short circuit” for the social organ to act in. The solitary shepherd knows, on the wide waste plains of Australia or Texas. The hermit or recluse of any age, the separate dwellers in old houses in the country, any human creature who lives alone, is injuriously affected in brain action.
This is not saying that mere privacy is harmful—that is a necessity for the social brain; such temporary solitude as shall enable it to work out its special contribution to our common thought, and to rest from the forceful social currents. But however solitary the student or author, the product of his labour is for others, and must reach them; his brain must connect with the others, though at long range.
In this is another side of the proof of our mental collectivity. The poet feels for humanity, the student studies for humanity; the discoverer, inventor, all work for humanity. (This does not refer to the pay they expect, and their attitude toward it, but to the work itself.) All through our history we see the great-brained men who thought for the world, moved by a quenchless impulse to transmit this thought to the others, to pour out into the common stock the product of their brains. This they did because they _must_—even when loss and injury, ostracism or martyrdom followed. It is the compelling functional necessity of the brain to discharge into other brains, as well as to seek from them its vast and varied stimulus.
In more immediate and commonplace instances we see the same law. The difficulty of “keeping a secret,” _i. e._, of voluntarily retaining stimulus; the necessity of “relieving one’s mind”—a perfectly fit phrase, as much so as its familiar physiological analogue; the value of the confessional; and, commonest of all, the vivid interest of each human brain in the affairs of the others; all these show the collective nature of that organ.
The most ordinary woman, gossiping with her neighbours, manifests this social necessity for contact and exchange, however low. “Mind your own business!” we cry, and cry in vain. No brain advanced enough to be called human can possibly find full use and exercise in contemplation of one person’s business. It must concern itself in the business of the others, their common business.
The human brain is a social organ. Human thought is a social function.
Approach this fact along lines of evolution. The brain, like all other organs, is called for by conditions and developed by exercise. Simple conditions, simple exertions—low brain. Enlarge and elaborate the conditions—increase the exercises—and the brain develops. Observe here, within human history, how we have developed the brain of the dog by such change of condition and action.
In every form of animal life you find an exact relation between the range of activities of the creature and his degree of brain development. This is necessarily so, as the increase of activities is what produced that degree of development. The simple activities of the clam need no brain, and have none. The complex activities of the fox need a complex brain, and have it. Everywhere this exact proportion is found until you reach the human animal.
_There is no relation whatever between the individual human being’s brain and his individual activities_. But there is the same inexorable law of development by which alone to account for this highest of all brains, and the same relation is plainly to be seen between the social brain and its social activities. No conceivable activities of one biped, through however many generations, could have developed the brain of the architect, for instance. He has the power to think a church. He cannot build a church—never could—never could have even wanted one!
The growth of many men, for many ages, brought their common needs, their power of common action, and their brain power to co-ordinate it. You need no power of co-ordination to run one individual animal; the need for social activities developed the social brain. The single human animal could have only needed a single shelter; could have so only built a single shelter, and so have only thought a single shelter. The power of one man to think for many men to do, is a distinctly human power, and evolvable only by the common doing.
In our collective relation we have developed a capacity to think, focussed perforce in some individual brain, for the working point of Society is the individual; to think, to the advantage of thousands of people for thousands of years. This organic capacity cannot be accounted for on an individual basis.
The laws of natural evolution work to develop in each organism the powers which it most needs; steadily raising the efficient type. The human animal manifests powers of no earthly use to himself, relatable in no way to his personal needs, inexplicable on any individual hypothesis, but plainly useful to Society, relatable to the Social needs, perfectly explicable by the Social hypothesis.
VI: THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II) _Summary_
_Social organism a natural life-form. Confusion from arbitrary and superficial distinctions. Social functions not physically hereditary. Village type. Earth-limits. Social life in Individual. Natural law under “imperialism.” Mistakes of social functionaries. Why society was developed. Tendency to revert. Wider consciousness and activity of Society. Social Soul. Race memory. Joy a social quality. Size of social feelings and actions. Early decoration. Fund of power. Social consciousness in young persons. Happiness of right social relation. Social nourishment, rest, exercise. What are limits of social organism. No material really solid. Human connections. Detachment of human individual only temporary. Apparent paradoxes. Ex-man. Smaller human relations. Family, Church, Army, City, Nation. Appearance of world-consciousness. Order of importance of function. Change in relative value. Ethics the physics of social relation. Egoism right for individual. No basis for ethics in individualism. Collectivism of Christianity. Social life immortal._
VI THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II)
The Social Organism is as natural a life-form as fish, flesh, or fowl. It has been naturally evolved, its processes and appearances are as natural as those of any other part of creation. We do not recognise it because of the interference of that ancestral brain; and we are further confused in looking at it by our arbitrary classification, resting on old and false ideas.
As physical geography is confused to a child’s mind by the demarcations and contrasted colours of the map of political geography; so is the natural organic relation of Society confused in our minds by our superficial and artificial “social distinctions.” We have established social distinctions and relations on lines of physical connection, such as birth; whereas physical relationship has no similitude with social relationship; or of political connection, as nation or party; whereas, again, there is no resemblance; or on even more fantastic lines of sex, of caste, of creed, or of the amount of money possessed.
These arbitrary distinctions are no more social and legitimately organic than Indiana is yellow and Ohio blue. Legitimate social relationship is functional. It is that relation in which we serve each other. Its classification is on lines of industrial evolution, together with the gradual development of those later functions of government, education, art, and science which follow the industrial. In the evolution of government the king was a normal functionary; his kingship being his power to act as general chairman of his assemblage of people, and, in very early days, as leader in battle. To make kingship hereditary was an arbitrary classification; social functions not developing in lines of physical heredity. You can no more make “a line of kings” than a line of poets or surgeons. If you do it, arbitrarily, you injure society by inferior service. That was the conspicuous result in the king line.
In pre-social times there was merely the protoplasmic mass of undifferentiated human stock. Arising from this we have first the sporadic growth of villages, resting on their common food activities, and then the appearance of larger groups, and more and more diverse functions, elaborating in mutual dependence.
The natural limits of an organic social relation are the limits of its essential functions. These were once quite narrow—each little community being self-supporting. To-day we are rapidly approaching a social organism limited only by the earth. Our interdependent functions are now international; and natural development on those lines is only prevented by our false classification on unnatural lines, with the resultant endeavour to maintain the self-supporting independence of the smaller unit.
The more highly organised a society, the more range and force have its component individuals. America is in the American. Athens was in the Athenian. Where else? A member of some tiny social unit on a remote island does not carry the same amount of social efficiency as a member of a larger unit. This is the underlying natural law which makes for general human unity, but which finds its misguided and injurious expression in our doctrine of “imperialism.”
The normal line of enlargement is simply _an extension of functional exchange_, a sharing of the highly specialised activities and advantages of the larger society by the smaller. Every step of this really beneficent process has been accompanied throughout history with the utmost injury to all parties, by conquest and carnage, by insane pride and cruelty; because we did not understand the process in which we were the actors, but governed our conduct from ideals of egoism, localism, and rapacity. This is especially plain in our time, because of the enormous growth of industrial functions, and their inevitable spread around the world.
The process is natural and in itself means increasing benefit to all society; but, being grossly misunderstood by the highly specialised individuals who carry out these processes, the beneficent results are mingled with terrible evils. The social functionary who is evolved to distribute some food, oil, or other necessity to a larger radius of consumers than ever before, takes advantage of his position to sequestrate a larger share for himself than was ever before possible. The “master minds” who are able to manage these giant industries are social products, called for and produced to meet the larger social needs of our times, but they are still governed by economic theories suitable to a South Sea Islander, and so we have that “malfeasance in office,” in social office, which so shamefully blackens the face of nations to-day.
It is a fair inquiry to demand of the organic theory of Society a reason for its development. Why should independent individuals have been led into a combination which inevitably involves some personal loss and injury, and has been made to involve such an enormous amount?
How are we to account for this higher life-form, in the iron economy of nature? Many have seen the visible benefit to individuals which comes of the Social relation. The fact that we help one another is plain enough; but even that sum of benefit does not seem sufficient to justify the social sacrifice; the loss of individual liberty, the life-long labour at one thing; the growing distance between social man and the free, simple, contented individual animal.
“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
“I stand and look at them long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
“They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
“They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
“Not one is dissatisfied; not one is demented with the mania for owning things.
“Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived a thousand years ago.
“Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
—WHITMAN.
This reversionary tendency is strong in us all, the easy backsliding to the physical freedom and independence of the hunter and fisher. The immediate stimulus, the immediate action, the supply of one’s own needs by one’s own efforts,—this is a delight to almost all of us; and some are constantly straggling and dropping behind the procession, to revert to the wood life of primitive man and his pre-primitive forbears, to “turn and live with the animals.” Current literature is full of this social reversion to-day, this “call of the wild,” this tempting invitation to give it all up and go back to the beginning.
It is so much harder to pour your life’s energies a life long into the Social pool, and perhaps get very little out—and then not what you want. What deep inevitable gain has been at work for which relentless nature has slowly driven us up the path of Social Evolution—a steeper, bloodier, more agonising road than any other creature has had to tread?
The gain is this (and observe that it is precisely of the same nature as that which has driven the contented annelid up to all the excitement, difficulties, and perils of the higher mammalian): the Social Organism manifests a wider range of consciousness and activity than any other life-form. The human animal, alone, is but a beast; and has but the narrow egoistic range of consciousness and activity. As part of Society the human animal becomes the organ of a consciousness and an activity so vast that in its limitless expansion we have been able to conceive of Life, Death, and Immortality, of Time and Eternity, of Humanity, of Liberty, Justice, and Love. What we call the human soul is developed in the social relation. It is Human indeed, _i. e._, Social. It is Ours.
In the organic division of labour of a physical body, the life processes are so developed that more exertion can be made and more sensation received, than in the same amount of living matter in lower forms. A hand, taken separately, would have a certain contractile power; but as connected with the arm it has far more, as connected with the general nervous system more yet.
In that transmission of energy which seems to be the business of the universe an increasing complexity of mechanism is evidently called for because it has been produced and maintained. Society is the most complex mechanism of all. It can receive, store, and discharge more energy than could its constituents in equal number, but unorganised.
The social consciousness is the widest and most sensitive receiver and transmitter so far produced. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not.” This is a social quality. As man grouped and grew together came that development of race memory which gives to family, to nation, to Humanity itself, its dignity and power. It is “Our” past, “Our” present, “Our” future. The life of Humanity is one, and it is that life which we as individuals feel; which makes us able to suffer more, enjoy more, and do more than any other kind of living thing.
In failing to recognise the real nature of society and put ourselves in right relation to it, we have largely checked the flow of social energy and perverted the social instincts and social processes; therefore, to our morbid egos, social relation often seems to bring us more pain than pleasure. We admit that we cannot live out of it—the sufferings of the hermit are greater than those of the misplaced social constituent; but we live in it blindly, in cramped and distorted positions, rendering our social service under the crushing pressure of the egoistic concept, and getting but a faint and occasional sense of the potent joy of true social relation.
The transcendent happiness possible to Humanity, to all humanity, by virtue of its humanness, is a thing of which we practically know nothing. Consider the range of sensation in an individual animal. This is most strictly limited to his physical activities and such psychic impressions and expressions as pertain to his narrow field of being. The female animal has the joy of the maternal function, that great first step beyond the Ego-consciousness; a pleasure and a pride partly physical and partly psychic, but limited forever to the individual young. The male animal sometimes shares a fraction of this parental feeling. In certain creatures which live in groups or herds there seems to be a very vivid common consciousness on some lines, as shown by the instantaneous nervous transmission in a stampede; and in the highly socialised bee and ant there appears as highly developed a collective sensorium. But, though collective, it is on a low plane; the impressions it receives and the expressions resultant all pertain to the physical wants of the individual constituents, however elaborately these wants are met.
With us, in our social relation, there is an enlargement of the sensorium past any measurement we can yet make. The _size_ of our sensations increases as more and more individuals are tuned to respond to the same stimulus. There is room in what we call “the human heart” for a passionate exaltation of feeling that finds no parallel below us. This immense influx of stimulus prompts us, yes, forces us, to a commensurate expression; and if this expression be true, it puts in concrete form the intense feeling and then continually transmits it to as many people as are sensitive to that form of expression.
Take an illustration on a very early and simple plane. A happy, primeval squaw, not hungry, not cold, not afraid, and feeling in her already growing social consciousness both the pleasant memory of these conditions and the pleasant assurance of more, has more stimulus coming in than her body can sit quiet under. No human being can ever be as stationarily contented as a ruminating cow, his income of sensation is too great. That small, perfect circle of life of the individual beast,—hunger, effort, gratification, rest,—is changed to an endless upreaching spiral in our social relation.
It is not only that our hunger is greater because one can hunger for all; because no human being can be really satisfied till all are satisfied; but that our stimulus is greater, and calls for endless discharge. So our happy squaw is moved to transmit her press of feeling; she must discharge it in action; and she does so in some decoration of her jar or basket. This decoration is an embodied joy, and, being fixed in visible form, it then transmits that joy to as many as behold it. It is a little fountain of social energy.
A society, from its inception, multiplies the range and depth of sensation, and commensurately, the working expression of its members. From age to age, as this great common fund increases, is the power to feel and the power to do increased. More and more people thrill to a common impression; the rising wave of force prompts to ever greater expression, reaching more and more people.
Thus, in a normal society, the individual life increases in sensation, in power, and in joy in an ascending line that as yet suggests no limit. In pain and degradation also, the pessimist will protest. Of course, as an accompanying possibility. _But not as an essential condition._ Such as exists is merely owing to our wholly unnecessary and mistaken action. The pain is a transient and needless thing; the immense joy is in the real nature of society.