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.