More and more every year we are feeling common evils, and seeking to remove them. It is not that “I” am seeking to relieve “my” distress and improve “my” conditions, but that “we,” in institute and association, club, congress, and convention, are rousing more and more to a consciousness of “our” distress, and seeking methods by which “we” may improve “our” conditions. This marks the growth of social consciousness. A pleasant thought here is that as fast as social conditions improve so fast does social consciousness become an avenue of pleasure instead of pain, and so we shall encourage instead of oppose it; thus the improvement will widen more and more rapidly.
Something we see already of the larger joy obtainable in social consciousness, in our pleasure in one another’s work. I do not mean in personal consumption of it, so to speak, but in our satisfaction in the achievements of “our” business men, “our” “scientific men,” “our” inventors, mechanics, artists, discoverers, teachers, and the like. “We” take pleasure and pride in what “we” do—requiring social consciousness.
Children’s games show the natural development of this feeling in the human being. A child likes to play alone if he has to; but children like far better to play together—the excitement and joy of co-ordinate activity being far greater than in individual activity. This delight in collective expression increases from age to age. As measured merely by popular sports and amusements, the game involving a contest of team with team is more enjoyed than the older sport of individual race and contest, both by spectator and player.
There remains one more strong cause for our slow-born recognition of social consciousness, and that is the position of women. Their activities being confined to an excessive development of sex functions, and industry on the low stage of solitary disconnected performance, or at most the first step of group labour, personal service; and this industry, too, confined to self or family interest altogether; it is not to be expected that any high degree of social spirit could be attained by this inchoate mass of individuals in society, but not of it, taking no part in its processes economic or politic, and no share in its growing responsibilities; nor is it to be expected that men, though increasingly socialised by themselves, could avoid the influence of this unsocialised half of humanity, both through its daily companionship and the tremendous effect of maternity.
We are still further affected by the result of the position of women in maintaining an abnormal degree of sex-tendency, and we have seen how anti-social an influence is the natural belligerence and destructiveness of masculine energy in excess; therefore, it is no wonder at all that our social development has been slow, erratic, and liable to extremely morbid forms and processes. Nothing will conduce so much to the right growth of society in body and spirit as the progress of women from their position of prehistoric sex-bound egoism and familism, to their rightful share and place in the vital processes of Society. They, as half the component individuals of Society, will then contribute their share of modern social feeling and action; they, becoming more human and less disproportionately sexual, will reduce the influence of morbid sex-tendency in both male and female; and they, as mothers, will rapidly fill the world with full-blood human beings, instead of the present half-bloods,—half socialised through the father, but held in prehistoric individualism through the mother.
The social spirit is as “natural” as the individual spirit. It is conspicuously visible in action among us, but we have hidden it under false names.
“Altruism” is one of these. This in its very assumption of “others” preserves the ego intact, and that ego has never yet been convinced of any rational cause for surrendering to those other egos. We have only been able to urge it under our equally mistaken Pay concept, trying to show that we should meet reward either from the other egos, or from God. And as our nobler instincts have always revolted from the Pay concept, the progress of Altruism has been retarded.
We need merely to understand it to withdraw all this opposition. What we call altruism should be called—has been called[[1]]—“omniism”; it is a feeling for all of us, and includes the ego. It is, if you please, an extension of self-consciousness, a recognition that my self is society, and my “ego” only a minute fraction of the real me.
[1]. By Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes. Article in Wilshire’s Magazine, March, 1903.
This omniism is as normal a growth as egoism. The preservation of the individual by individual action required egoism, and developed it. The preservation of society, by collective action, requires omniism and develops it. That it is not more generally developed is due to the resistance and confusion of our brains.