Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In a long-range view of social progress it would seem that in early times the conscious mind had a very small share in our development, and that conditions did almost all, even while man fondly thought that he did; but as society grows and the brain grows in spite of itself, the balance of power swings steadily toward conscious conduct. A broader religion and a fuller education make the formation and transmission of ideas continually easier; and personal freedom so accustoms us to handle our own conduct that the power of humanity to consciously improve its world is now a large and growing factor in social evolution.

This carries its visible proof in the increasing activity of our interest in social phenomena, and of our efforts to alleviate the distress of humanity and better those conditions within our reach. We have the power and the desire to help, and the main obstacle to a swift and orderly improvement is in the brain; both in its passive ignorance and prejudice and its active maintenance of mistaken or long-outgrown ideas.

The position here taken, that the human brain has not kept pace with the development of society, and has acted as a deterrent rather than an assistant to our growth, may be questioned from the point of view of the evolutionist. Natural selection, he will assert, develops in each animal a brain capacity suited to his needs, and speedily removes him from the field of contest if he does not manifest it; man in the struggle for existence must similarly develop the kind and amount of brain that is necessary to him, and if he does not he will perish. Therefore the human brain to-day is all that can be expected, and it is useless to talk of any wholesale and sudden improvement in social conditions from that source.

This would be true if man were a creature whose existence was conditioned upon his own individual activities. While the human animal remained at that stage of development where he was directly reached by the consequences of his own personal conduct, his brain power was cultivated in this simple way; if he was not smart enough to live, he died, and was well out of the procession.

But so soon as any social relation was established, when our gains and losses were fused in collective action, this method of brain culture was no longer reliable. Once firmly established as a living species through the process of agriculture, the degree of intelligence necessary to the maintenance of this process was sufficient to sustain life, while the further development of intelligence rested on other activities less instantly important to the life process, and not so sharply brought home in personal consequences.

The individual hunter, if he failed to show the grade of ability necessary to supply his wants, promptly died of his own inferiority, but man, in social relation, is maintained by the collective effort, prospering or suffering with his society, and his pooling of abilities is so far-reaching and hopelessly intermixed that it is impossible to pick out the consequences of one man’s action and pile them neatly on his own head. Naturally, selection acts on the society rather than the man, and must needs act slowly and with an appearance of injustice. Incipient errors are not met by the sharp reproof of individual consequence, and wide ranges of eccentricity are possible, so that they do not touch those basic economic processes of society on which all our lives rest.

Gross mistakes in agriculture would be soon punished by the extinction of the mistaken society, or errors in mechanics, in navigation, in any part of our work which deals with the primal necessities of life, but errors in astronomy, in religion, or education do not result in such immediate destruction.

Thus the human intellect on the lower stages shows a certain solid average ability, built up by natural selection acting on societies as it acts on individuals, but the human intellect in its higher grades is painfully irregular and defective, making our higher social manifestations as questionable, uncertain, and often mischievous as our lower ones are clearly good.

Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to plough and sow, to kill wolves and steer a ship, but in later social development he has been as open to destruction as any poor beast below him. In the long lesson of history we may see him again and again killed down to the level of his intelligence. Nations have been conquered, civilisations destroyed, kings decapitated, but the peasant survived.

The problems we have really solved do not have to be done over again; the downfall of past societies is but the wiping off the slate of a mass of elaborate failures. “Rule it all out down to that first line and begin again!” says the teacher.