Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The value of that proper relation of ideas we call consistency is this: A brain with all its concepts in natural sequence and order transmits energy in a smooth, continuous stream. The brain with inconsistent concepts, lodged in thought-tight compartments, loses energy in cross-currents, contradictions, culs-de-sac; and the resultant conduct is weak and uncertain. Each root idea tends to modify conduct its way; and if the root ideas do not agree neither does the conduct. Often it results in mere inhibition—we see this act to contradict that—cannot reconcile them—and so do nothing. The basic concepts of early man were wrong. His observation was necessarily narrow, his deductions most partial, his whole position one of repeated errors, as is so generally true of all extreme youth. These errors of the undeveloped brain would have given way in course of normal development to better thinking, as the child’s missteps lead on to better walking, but for the ill-founded Grandpa theory.

The traditional superiority of the past, on the authority of statements open to no examination and no criticism, rapidly developed into ancestor worship and that whole great retroactive tendency of thought which is still so heavily dominant among us. In it we have deified inertia, as best instanced in China. Assuming that the crude theories of humanity’s youth were true, the brain tried to correlate them; to form some connected scheme of life based on such premisses. This was functionally impossible. No healthy brain could “make sense” of such postulates as these. As a consequence, normal brain action on such lines ceased. Abnormal brain action developed freely, its extreme being what we call fanaticism. Those who attended to the maintenance of ancient concepts soon found that any increase of mental activity led to the unsettling of their supposed truth; and so, with the best of intentions, used every possible means to discourage such activity.

And as the average mind found itself forbidden to think on certain of the most important lines in life, and unable to think logically on such bases as were allowed, it simply accepted them as “unthinkable” and so admitted in the common stock of ideas these disconnected heaps of arbitrary statement. Our natural tendency to relate and connect our percepts and concepts in logical sequence, so as to form a rational collection agreeing with itself and with our behaviour, has been not only neglected but prevented; and this arbitrary disconnection of mental processes has been so thorough and universal that we have grown to expect what we call “inconsistency” in human action.

Yet consistency is one of the brain’s most essential laws. We expect things to be consistent, we demand it. Talk disconnectedly to the most ordinary person and he soon cries, “What on earth are you talking about? I don’t see what that has to do with it!” And we all know how busy our brains are, trying to make out to ourselves that our own conduct is consistent. We are naturally consistent, but the unbroken centuries of violent insertion and compulsory retention of irreconcilable statements in the young brain have perverted natural action and trained us in an artificial inconsistency.

This enforced maintenance of older concepts has for its result this: At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth. And as our conscious acts are modified by those ancient concepts, our acts are necessarily behind the times. Changing conditions constantly demand revision of the conduct of society, but if that conduct—so far as it is consciously ours—is based on unchanging ideas, there must be conflict. There has been, always. Take some well-known historic instance, as the French Revolution.

Here was a long-established social relation, that of feudalism, lineal descendant of still remoter patriarchal grouping, producing in the conscious mind a highly developed concept or group of concepts, described in the phrase, “l’ancien régime.” Meanwhile the conditions which made feudalism an advantageous form of social relation changed intrinsically. The natural basis in fact was gone, but the idea remained firmly intrenched in the mind. Acting under the idea, feudalism was maintained, but the change in conditions proceeded irresistibly.

Some few there were whose minds consciously perceived the change in conditions, formed new concepts, and sought to transmit those concepts. But this effort was on the one hand too limited in range, and on the other too vague and varied in form, to really bring about the change, or wisely guide it. The action of the cruel facts on a no longer normal social relation, resulted in a vast reaction, quite uncontrollable by the newer ideals.

The endeavour to reconstruct society on the theory of the “social contract,” or any other then advanced, naturally failed, as the endeavour to maintain an outworn system failed, and the carnage and confusion, the partial reaction to the old basis, the slow, irregular, fumbling progress toward a better state were the results, as we have seen. That conduct which led to the improvement of the social system in France was resultant from conditions and not from concepts.

In our own recent experience with the system of human slavery we have another marked instance, both in the irresistible trend of progressive conditions which brought the change and in the splendid effort to alter those governing concepts on which the system rested in the minds of men. In the abolition movement we have the conscious human effort to alter conscious conduct. The physical extension of our national boundaries and the mechanical extension of economic processes was the unconscious pressure of conditions which also modified conduct. And against both stood the vast weight of brain inertia, and the unending array of false concepts, dating back to the historic period when slavery was a useful relation, and buttressing itself with the crudest quotations from ancient religions.

The power of the freely developing brain to keep pace with new social relations and proclaim newly perceived truth is offset by the tremendous undertow of the undeveloped brain and its power to compel acceptance of ancient errors.