Social evolution is natural, and natural organic processes are easy and agreeable, unconscious if they require no cerebral attention, and, if they do, attended with sensations of pleasure. Granting, as we have done, that waste of energy is an evil, and any overdraught on our reserve fund of cerebral energy is naturally resented by the organism, it is still maintained that normal human work does not involve any waste of energy or any draught on the cerebral reserve more than is pleasant to expend, and results in increase rather than diminishing of that store.
The conditions of normal work are these: First, the individual should be well stocked. A sick man cannot enjoy work, a crippled, deformed person is not fitted to work, and a congenital pauper, one born without that inheritance of nervous energy which should increase with each generation, is unable to work with pleasure. But given, first, a normal individual, he should, second, work at what he likes best. This means social specialisation, and requires for its right development such education and opportunity as shall bring out all possible differentiation of faculty. So widely lacking are these conditions, so hampered is our choice of work, and so undeveloped our power of choosing, that we look with honest envy at the man who does love his work and can do the work he loves, like Agassiz or Lord Kelvin.
In normal social conditions every man would do the work he loved and love the work he did, so life and happiness would become synonymous.
XI: SPECIALISATION
Summary
Organisation means specialisation. Military organisation, trades-unions, and trusts. Guerilla bands in industrial organisation. Unspecialised primitive life, the higher the life-form the more specialisation. The “all-around” savage. Injury of our present specialisation under false conditions. Waste of energy. Man of thirty who died of old age. Canoe and steamer. Effect of errors. Normal conditions of specialisation: shorter hours, variety of work, wide education. Ownership in collective production. Specialisation should increase product and decrease effort; it does, but the advantage is misplaced. Hours of labour in proportion to interest. Especial cruelty in our conditions of specialisation. Specialisation proves collectivity. Absurdity of “self-support” idea. Our progress due to such social distribution as we have, not to “self-support.” Society feeding on itself. The Social sacrifice. “Unskilled labour” a product of high social development. Our mistaken attitude toward it. The real nature of it. Serf and noble. Savage’s exciting monologue. Unskilled labour does not require inferior men. Line of social growth. Highly specialised work involves extremely simple details. Our misuse of above fact owing to false concepts. Unskilled labour is high social service. We punish instead of paying, or promoting. Height of ingratitude.
XI
SPECIALISATION
Human work being an organic process, it must of course specialise. Those who cry out against specialisation and seek to uphold a mythical “all-around man” are ignorant of the nature of social functions. The very first condition of organic life is division of labour, and as the organism develops the complexity of that division develops with it. The strength and efficiency of any organism depends not so much on its bulk and weight as on the prompt and perfect co-ordination of its parts.
This is a truism in military organisation, which is an old game with us, but we do not seem to understand it in industrial organisation, which is a new one. In the military body we have long ago learned to consider the whole before the part and the purpose of that whole as a measure of action for each part, but in the economic body we are yet a mob of savages. The ego concept is perforce set aside in military life; in economic life it still rules. In military ethics one never hears that “self-preservation is the first law of nature”; no soldier thinks of justifying rank cowardice and insubordination with the plea that “a man must live!” Neither is there any objection to the widest specialisation, to careful grading of officers, to the complete separation of surgeon and chaplain, engineer and commissary. No one seeks to maintain the “all-around man” in the army.
Military organisation is our oldest and so best developed form. Its purpose is crude and easy of perception; its impulses are inherent in the masculine nature; its methods, like those of old-established churches, appeal to the primitive instincts. The gorgeous ritual of military form has much to do with our allegiance to it. But in the now far more important co-ordination of industrial forces no such progress is made. In place of splendid uniforms we have the soiled and soul-depressing garments of our miscellaneous workers. Instead of “esprit du corps” we have the beautiful spirit of “every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.”
Instead of “glory” we have before us only “booty”; instead of “honour” we have the incessant struggle of the civil law to check the ceaseless manœuvring of dishonesty. And in place of one resistless organisation we have at best the progress of the trades-unions and at worst those guerilla bands, the small, fierce hordes of warring trusts, fighting each other and preying on all of us.