The difference between our real position in social development, and that maintained in our minds, is very great. It is as if a strong, capable, rich man suffered from mania, had a delusion that he was a puny, feeble, evil-minded wretch, and acted like one. Could the delusion be removed, he would act like what he really was and be happy.
Taking our own country as a type of social progress, what do we find to be its real conditions? In the first place, it has every material requisite for health and growth. It occupies a piece of the earth’s surface big enough and varied enough to supply all the physical elements of triumphant advance. It has, second, not only a base of the best human stock, but a large and steady influx of all human stocks; it represents the blended blood of all races, a world-people truly, prototype of that cosmopolitan race which will ultimately cover the globe. This gives a chance for all possible development in stock and manifests it. It allows also all religions to contribute their best, all arts, all sciences; every line of special usefulness known to man is known to us.
There is already sufficient intelligence to administer world-interests competently, as shown in clear-headed captains of industry. There is already sufficient “social instinct”—i. e., human love—to make elaborate and costly provision for our defectives and degenerates, to push earnestly for reforms and improvements in every direction. Yes, there are quite enough ardent “homophiles,” warm lovers of the kind, already in the field to do all of that sort of work we really need. The reason they do not accomplish it all is partly the lack of intelligent recognition on the part of the rest of us, and partly limitations and errors of their own minds. They care enough, but do not know enough. So here we are, in plain fact, rich, strong, intelligent, loving, quite able to live in magnificent wealth, peace, and happiness.
In equally plain fact we are living quite otherwise.
We should manifest perfect physical health and beauty. We are, on the contrary, nearly all sub-well, very many sick, and very few beautiful. When we look at the possibilities of the human body, as shown in ancient Greece, and then at the kind of cattle we are content to be now, it does no credit to our intelligence. We should manifest a common grade of education which would give to each mind an area of thought including the earth and sky, plants, animals, and minerals, the wonders of science, the powers of manufacture, the whole history of the human race. This would be possible to practically all of us with right use of our educational advantages. We do manifest, on the contrary, a universal ignorance, even in this comparatively well-educated country, a feeble, purblind, sticky little brain stiff with prejudice, shackled with habits, blinded with superstitions, and narrow, narrow to the paltry limits of one human animal’s own family!
Of course most of us know in a vague way that there are other peoples, that there were other times; but these knowledges hang in the background of our minds like faded wall-paper, lie far from us, disused and unfamiliar. The occupied area of the brain, the part we think in and feel in all the time, is the tiny spot of ego-consciousness. It is as though a man owned the Waldorf-Astoria and was content to live in a bushel-basket. It is quite possible for the average mind, properly educated, to waken each morning to a consciousness as wide as the world, full of light and air, with the facts of life seen in true distance and proportion. This does not necessitate accurate, special knowledge of all branches of human achievement, but a general knowledge that there are branches, and how they branch. A rightly spent youth should easily give this to every normal child.
But we, on the contrary, waken each morning to the cramped, overtrodden field of our immediate personal consciousness only. The affairs of the world, our world, loom vague and distorted about us, while our own, forced upon us by night and day, are so absurdly magnified by being held too near that they easily shut out the world. Our press, which should give to each mind each day its world-view of current progress, is so perverted in its function by the cramped minds of its egoistic functionaries, that it gives instead a weird kinetoscope of what it thinks will interest us! As if a general, waiting for dispatches from the field, should be entertained by competing orderlies with funny anecdotes! As if those anxiously waiting for bulletins from the sick room should be provided with impressionist pictures of the patient’s relatives!
We do not occupy a hundredth part of our mind-space, no, nor a thousandth. And in this darkness, this cramping limitation, with but a partial and restricted education and the false world-views of our misguided press to relieve it, we blunderingly creep about in the great world-functions we must serve, each of us imagining that he is taking care of himself. The difference between our real position and our false and artificially maintained one is like this: If, for instance, certain marked improvements in telegraphy have been invented, raising our social efficiency in that line of distribution to grade G, that is our legitimate condition; but if these improvements are destroyed by misguided workmen, bought up and suppressed by misguided property-owners, keeping our telegraphic efficiency back in grade A, that is an illegitimate social condition. We are really in grade G, but artificially in grade A.
If, again, the machinery of democratic government is open to all, our legitimate condition is that of full democracy; if a large proportion of persons fail to exercise their political functions, preferring to remain in a lower grade, or if an entire sex is forcibly prevented from exercising them, that is an illegitimate condition.
The economic conditions of society to-day are confessedly paradoxical. The gain in facility and speed of execution is million-fold, and yet men are required to work almost as many hours as before their improvement. The expressed wealth of the world is enormous, and the power to multiply it not nearly used, yet a vast proportion of our members are not fully supplied with the necessaries of life. In ways too commonly known to need enumeration here we may observe this strange difference between our real period of social evolution, with its beneficent results, and the existing state of Society.