Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Then, too, we have been so occupied in the specific local function of Society as to miss that general grouping and balancing which made them all possible. Take that vast and varying social function the Church,—organised religion,—appearing very early in the dominance of savage priestcraft, finding its height in the resistless Hierarchies of Egypt and Palestine, and struggling ever since to hold its failing sway.

Take the Army, another very early, very strong, and very hard-dying social form. It is still with us, brilliant and loud, an increasing evil in the fast-growing industrial life of to-day. See the Soldier scorning the Merchant in the Middle Ages. See the Merchant directing the Soldier to-day. His time of pre-eminence is past.

So in course of social evolution one and another organic group has been developed, each tending to excess by the law of inertia (and social inertia is the most long-winded we know), yet all inevitably sinking into place in the smooth, complex interaction toward which we are moving. Men, specialised to the social service, in their several lines, yet knowing not what they served, have limited their enthusiasm to their specialty, and striven to make the Church, the Army, the Law, Art, or what they call Business, their supreme end.

The real social organism includes them all, and relates them all in order of importance. This order of importance may as well be laid down here, as quite essential to an understanding of the nature of Society. The standard of measurement used is that of evolution, “lower” or “higher” being marked in that line of progress which leads always from the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex. Relative importance may perhaps be measured downwards: a stomach is more important than an eye, because you cannot live without it. But the eye is “higher” than the stomach, a later developed and more specialised organ.

So in social evolution agriculture is more important than literature, because we cannot live without it; but literature is higher than agriculture as being later developed and more highly specialised. The social organism has followed in its evolution the same path as earlier life-forms, developing first the simpler and more immediately vital processes, and later those more delicate and finer organs which are needed to fulfil the uses of its progressive life. And as, in physical evolution, we find now one and now another function of dominant importance to the creature, so in social evolution we can trace the varying value of social functions, the military and religious processes of early societies gradually giving way in importance to the industrial and educational processes of our own times.

Most valuable of all, to our so long religiously moulded minds, is the effect of this recognition of the nature of society upon Ethics. Vague indeed, complicated, mystical, difficult to understand, have been our gropings after this great science. Ethics is the Science of Social Relation; it could never be understood by individualists.

There is no ethics for an individual except to maintain, improve, and reproduce himself. A consistent and remorseless egoism is right for the individual animal; through it he fulfils the law of his being; through it he improves his race. So we, wishing to improve a breed of cattle, consistently and remorselessly select and train and breed from preferred individuals, neglecting or destroying the inferior ones. So do mistaken men, not appreciating the nature of society, urge a similar stern stirpiculture upon us, and would have us neglect or destroy our defective members and breed only from the best.

But when we have a social animal to deal with, as the bee, different laws operate, or, rather, the same laws on a larger scale, a higher plane. It is the best swarm now to be selected; and the value of the swarm depends not so much upon the size and vigour of its individual constituents as on how they work together. There is ethics in a hive, laws of collective behaviour. There is ethics in Society, because it is a collective unit.

Ethics, to Society, is what physics is to matter; ethics is the physics of social relation. Physical law holds material constituents together in those combinations and relations which make the material bodies we know. Ethical law holds social constituents together in those relations which make the social bodies we know.

But we, not knowing the social body, could not know its laws. We have striven in vain to predicate ethics of individuals. You “ought” to do so? Why “ought” I? Because it is “right.” What is “right”? Whatever God said. And what did God say? What these ancient gentlemen have written in their ancient times. And if I do not believe what the ancient gentlemen wrote? There is no answer to this except the somewhat fatuous one of “so much the worse for you!”