Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Beyond even that, we construct the complex implements of further construction, and make machines. Man’s first step up was in the detachable tool, though but a stick or stone. From the hand-thrown stone to the far-flung lyddite shell is a clear line of mechanical evolution, in which each thing made held the thought which made it and suggested further possibility. From the twirling spindle to the many-loomed mill; from the stylus to the press,—this is familiar ground in fact, but all untrodden in its rich significance.

Nowhere have we more misused, misunderstood, and blasphemed the laws of human life than in our attitude toward machinery. Measured by any standard you will, as low as that of individual physical comfort, as high as that of the widest social service, human progress, lying in the same line as all evolution, involves the constant adaptation of means to ends with conservation of energy. Most energy is spent with smallest result at the level where the mole digs, each for himself, with his tools growing on him. The spade is higher than the claw, and the modern earth-devouring excavator is higher than the spade. Some digging is necessary for the maintenance of our physical lives. The more human energy we spend in digging the less remains for further development. To dig is not our purpose here, but to grow. Therefore social evolution quietly relegates digging to the lower automatic functions, making the mechanical organs by which the most digging can be done by the least men, that more and more of us may leave the level of the mole.

Of all things made, the things we make things with are most vitally and distinctively human. Something of the truth of this may be seen in the larger and deeper pleasure given by the use of the higher tool, and, even more clearly, in the higher kind of man developed by the higher tool. The digger with the attached claws is but a mole. The digger with the detachable spade is but an “unskilled labourer,” and even the maker of that spade but a simple smith. The digger with the great excavator is an engineer, and its maker a skilled machinist and inventor. The ox-driver is not to be compared with the engine-driver or the bargeman with the admiral.

Now the mole, or the unskilled labourer, may be as “happy,” as an individual, as the skilled machinist. But the measure of their value is in this. The mole is incapable of further combinations. The unskilled labourer is capable only of a low order of combinations. The more specialised brain of the inventor is capable of higher combinations. Of such as he a democracy can be built; he is raised far along the line of social evolution. The childish, primitive pride in a “hand-made” individual product is most ignoble compared to the modern pride in a common product through complex means.

The brain to make and to use a complex machine is the brain to make and to use a complex social order; and in that growing social order lies our line of duty as a human race. In the inexorable working of our own machines we learn law newly; as in our works of art we learn beauty newly. Kipling has treated of this in “MacAndrews’ Hymn.”

The relation of our complex mechanical products with our minds and hearts is as clear as the relation between any animal’s spirit and body. The increasing pleasure is as clear as the increasing use. “Man loves power.” Of course. He loves to transmit energy, to feel it pouring through. He loves it well in his own physical exertions: to swim is a pleasure, to row alone is a pleasure, but to row in a racing eight is a greater pleasure. To sail a catboat is a pleasure, to command the flagship a greater pleasure. The captain loves his ship, and loves to work her, to feel the complex mechanism move in answer to his thought and will, and the prompt co-ordination of all the men whose combined efforts move the great machine. And the kind of man who can be a good captain or a good sailor is a higher social constituent than a South Sea Islander, though the latter could outswim him.

Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery is a kind of social asceticism, a reaction from our misuse of the social body, just as the personal asceticism of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of the personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real social life and its laws, in our persistent maintenance of a rudimentary egoism, we have claimed private ownership in these exquisitely social products, and have striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth to private consumption. Such sublime treason has roused instinctive reaction in the public consciousness, and we blindly include the machine in our hatred of its vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemnation of the body. Partly owing to this, and partly owing to our cruel form of specialisation, we associate evil with machinery, and, with our usual helpless reversionary tendency, look back fondly to the time when each man or woman worked alone “by hand.”

These theorists should be set down in some wilderness for a while with only their hands to help them, as a lesson in social chronology. The hand is at its best in the early Palæolithic period, or even back of that, when it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand made and mastered the tool, society has grown. As the tool became the machine, society has grown better. In the vast machine, moved by tireless natural forces, and guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to minimise effort and maximise results.

When we appreciate the true use and nature of all this machinery, realising that by means of its measureless service we can now apply almost all our power to the conscious development of society, we shall find it to be an unmixed blessing, of value beyond our dreams. Seeing that the social soul needs such and such a body, and is developed with it, and that we have at last the means of evolving that body at a speed hitherto impossible, we can now utilise these unlimited forces to facilitate our growth with results that will make previous historic progress seem stationary. It is not as if we were required to force long cycles of evolution, to hasten the steps of nature, and hurry mankind over slow steps of necessary ascent,—we are there now!

Society being an organic whole, social progress being ours in common and exquisitely transmissible, the material forms of that progress and vehicles of transmission being ready to hand, we can, by our present means of rapid production and distribution of these material forms, open the way to such swift advance of civilisation as the world has never seen. The spirit of modern society is capable of a plane of life far beyond the present conditions wherein we find that spirit gagged and blinded by the fossil Ego concept, that body inconceivably dwarfed and twisted by the efforts of each ego to occupy it all himself.