Specialisation perfects and multiplies production, and reduces effort. This inevitably increases wealth and leisure. If the wealth and leisure are monopolised in one quarter and the contributory specialist is sacrificed in the process, it does not prove the specialisation to be wrong, but the distribution of result; and that we will take up in the chapter on Distribution. Meanwhile the law of specialisation goes on and gives us social servants more and more exquisitely adapted to some one function. With normal economic conditions they would take full share in the resultant social gain, and be quite free to combat the possible ill effects of their position.
The shortening of hours allows of another quite simple and natural effect. Where work is so broad and general as to require a whole man’s whole working time, as of the teacher, artist, or large manager in any industry, it is thereby so interesting that a man can give his whole time to it without belittling effects. (“Whole working time” need not be more than four to six hours, even at our stage of mechanical evolution.)
Where work is so narrow and fractional as not to interest a man for his whole time, it is therefore so specialised that he need not give his whole time to it.
The simple turning of a crank for an hour wearies the brain equal to larger effort, but does not forbid that brain some other labour. If the specialty is one of exquisite subtlety of particular skill, as with those girls in the Treasury who test banknotes by touch, no other labour should be entered upon which would tend to blur or weaken that skill, only rest and recreation.
A properly educated human creature, in full touch with the whole great working world, can support his or her own concentrated effort by virtue of conscious connection with the whole, can see the ship in the rivet. Well nourished socially, keenly alive to our gain, our progress, and to the relative value of his own department of service and his own share in it, not looking at the work as his, done for his pay, but as ours and done for our benefit, the normal human being can not only sustain extreme specialisation, but glory in it.
Our especial cruelty in this regard is that we condemn to exhausting hours of extreme specialisation the very people least fitted to bear it, the ill-nourished physically and socially, the uneducated, the dull and dark of mind. Or, conversely, we deprive our extremely specialised social servants of exactly those things by which alone they can sustain the demands of that service.
A man with widespread, active social consciousness, in full contact and exchange with all parts of the great body to which he belongs, will not suffer from its concentrated and exclusive service, but will take glad part in forming an “all-round” Society.
One would think that specialisation in labour ought to have forced upon every observer long ages since the fact that human work is something done for others. The shepherd and fisherman, first stage above savagery, may live upon the fruit of their labours; and so, in part, may the farmer, first stage of really civilised growth. They exchange the surplus, but they do directly consume part of what passes through their hands.
But the specialised workman, whether he carry a spade or a hod, swing an axe or hold a lever, is so obviously doing it for thousands of unknown other people that his position under the ego concept becomes miraculously difficult. He holds it, though, and, what is perhaps even more miraculous, so do we! So does the general consumer, whose life is maintained by the service of thousands of fellow beings,—who is housed by them, clothed by them, carried by them, guarded by them, taught by them,—still have the incredible face to maintain that these people who keep him alive are working for themselves!
Harder than steel must be the cell walls of the brain that can live in such complex social relation as ours to-day and maintain that he or anyone else “takes care of himself.” The error dates back in essence to the ego concept; but it becomes a thousand-fold more erroneous when first the machine, and then the use of “natural forces” applied to machinery, made possible our vast increase in specialisation.