Humanity

( Originally Published 1919 )

WHATEVER happens men and women must eat, drink and breed like other animals. Their other activities depend upon whether they perform these functions well or ill. That is so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, were it not that it is so obvious as most often to es-cape the notice of eminent persons, bent, as eating, drinking and breeding are made easy and pleasurable for them, upon preserving their eminence. High ideals are a luxury as unintelligible as caviare or champagne to the man or woman who has to meet a three-pound expenditure on Saturday with twenty-nine shillings. Even when the newspapers ask him or her to think in millions (in other words, to think Imperially), the difference between five shillings and half-a-crown remains. That is one great cause of the disastrous split in humanity. Domestic economy is inexorable, whereas in the economy of Finance the difference between five shillings and half-a-crown disappears. Persons above a certain standard in the scale of income adopt the outlook of Finance, leaving the rest to drudge along with the dreary outlook dictated by the domestic budget. The breach, then, is not so much between poverty and wealth that might be bridged as between care and carelessness, two states of mind which cannot find a common language, and therefore use the same ideas and words in different senses. That this has always been the case is no reason why it should always be so, and, indeed, organisation and education have made it impossible for it to continue. The present tendency is to in-duce everybody to forget the difference between five shillings and half-a-crown, but that difference remains and will have to be faced. There comes a point at which old creditors cannot be met by making new ones. Humanity has to face its creditors. That is the dramatic moment at which we have arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century. Men have tried to avoid it by killing each other, but the fact remains that we have spent our moral capital before it was realised, and are too heavily in debt to the human intellect and the human spirit. If it were only a matter of digging more wealth out of the earth we could set to and dig cheerfully enough, but we have been made aware that the earth is a very small part of the universe, and that the universe is governed by certain principles which appear' in human affairs as moral. Roughly, it may be said that every advantage won by humanity over the other elements of creation has to be paid for by work. Now, drudgery is not work. It is a base currency, and we have for too long paid for our advantages in drudgery shuffled over on to the shoulders of the poor and the helpless.

As an example of work let us take, as an extreme instance, the ease of a man and a woman who are what is called in love. Nature supplies them in the first instance with trermendous energy, electric and vivifying, for her own purposes of reproduction. That energy will carry them to a certain point of union, but no farther. Nature's energy ebbs; its freshness is dulled by habit, and without effort that is, work, on the part of the lovers that energy cannot be humanised in a really fruitful relationship, because elements of mind, character and sympathy must be introduced for which Nature cares not a dew drop. To other animals the ebbing of Nature's energy is a matter of no importance, but to human beings, who survive by the aid of combination, it is tragically essential that they should defend themselves against it, anticipate it, and raise their relationship from the natural to the human level. In no other way can what is most precious to them love continue to exist. That is the supreme human advantage, and, like all the rest, it has to be paid for by work. If it is not paid for, then Nature destroys it exactly as she destroys civilisations that cannot meet their creditors.

This struggle exists in every human activity. It is the prime condition of the existence of humanity, and because it is not admitted such order as we achieve is continually being reduced to chaos. Work avoided, in however small a degree, means drudgery somewhere for some one.

Now, the development and the abuse of machinery have given rise to a general organised conspiracy to avoid work. That conspiracy we call European civilisation, and to preserve it millions of men have been condemned to four years' drudgery in the trenches. No loud-sounding words can make that right.

No one expects a perfect world in which drudgery shall everywhere have been replaced by work. The process of elevation there is as slow as any other stage of evolution, but every man and woman has the right to expect a world in which such disastrous collapses into drudgery shall be avoided. Every man and woman expects it and must work for it. As to the means by which that can be made possible, we shall discover them as we pursue our examination.

Accept, first of all, that work is right and that drudgery is wrong. The reward of work is leisure: the consequence of drudgery is sloth. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and work and drudgery can be defined by their results. A human being who is really working gains energy by it, up to a point defined by his natural limitations ; he gains eagerness, pride in his skill, a fine perception of the nature of his doing. A human being who is enrgaged in drudgery loses perception, keenness, and is stultified until he becomes the mechanical creature of habit. All human activity can be either work or drudgery, and until that is understood there can be no understanding of humanity whose condition depends upon the degree to which the world's drudgery is dominated by the world's work. At present it is obvious that the world is dominated by human drudgery, which, except in a very few men, has destroyed the capacity for work. The real problem, then, is how to increase that capacity, for it is the lack of it that engenders the appalling waste from which humanity has too long suffered. Human life depends upon human energy, for which that extracted from the earth is not an efficient substitute, though it is a necessary complement, just as tools are the necessary complement of hands. Machines are tools driven by the energy extracted from the earth, but as they are too expensive to be owned and maintained by individuals they are, as a rule, maintained and owned collectively, and the labour necessary to run them is hired as cheaply as possible. Hence has arisen tyranny through the ownership of machines which has replaced tyranny through the ownership of the land. It was a sound but misguided instinct that made the operatives of the early nineteenth century resist every new installation of machinery, because they knew that ownership of machinery, added to ownership of land, meant an intolerable increase to their burden. And so it has proved. The production of wealth has been so enormous that the material status of the physical worker has been improved, but his moral status has been de-graded to such an extent that he cannot be passionate even in revolt. If we compare the spirit of the French Revolution with that of the Russian we cannot but be struck with a weakening of fibre, of the degree of force exrpressed in the later convulsion, and it seems likely that the old order was really destroyed by the first assault, but that those who knew how to profit by that order succeeded in maintaining the semblance of it, even while the new order slowly took shape, as it has been doing ever since in France., Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau gave expression to the new spirit, or, not to fight shy of the inevitable word, the new religion. Humanity follows very slowly in the wake of its leaders of thought, who are never in a hurry, knowing perfectly well that great changes only come when the increase in the population of the world makes existing economic and political systems embarrassing and uncomfortable. The men of action unfortunately are generally in a hurry and anxious to produce results for which they can be rewarded. They produce such results, but they are nearly always disastrous, preventing and stultifying the ideas which should guide humanity through its crises, and even deriding the thinkers and visionaries whose will they are forced to carry out.

Humanity has a will backed by the creative will which animates the universe. When the will of humanity is thwarted over long stretches of time by the setting up of false authorities there are violent reactions and readjustments, and false authorities are swept away. These violent reactions and readjustments are a waste of energy which in time will have to be obviated in order to meet both the economic necessities of the world and that other moral bill which is now due. The will of humanity, like that of a tree or a flower or a human being, is creative and destroys only to create. When it is unhealthy and exasperated it destroys only for the sake of destruction, and that neither materially nor spiritually can provide any lasting satisfaction, though there is something to be said for an outburst of temper as clearing the air; but it is precisely to control the temper of humanity that authority is needed, for sudden reversions to a primitive and childish state of mind can do an amount of damage which it takes a generation to restore, and a generation requires to do more with its energy than repairing the mischief done by its predecessors.

As the prime condition of human existence is work, so the authority governing that existence emanates from work, and that authority is living or sterile, according as work is kept current or is impeded, continually ennobled or degraded to drudgery. Those who maintain great state or power or mere wealth do so by obtaining doles from the work of millions. As a rule they obtain these doles so indirectly that they regard them as coming from some mysterious source as a reward for their extraordinary merits, or, in many cases, they do not think about it at all, but accept their fortune as in the natural order of things. Kings and priests consider their ease and magnificence as given to them by God, while financiers and manufacturers, who have succeeded those functionaries in the modern organisation of society, accept their enormous incomes as evidence of their capacity for "getting things done," and as proof that the things done needed doing. The structure of society remains the same: doles from the work of millions are gathered together into a source of power which is directed by persons not so much appointed as agreed to, because of their success in attaining a certain position, to maintain which they use the power at their disposal to create more power. Blind to the fact that this power emanates from work, they seek to fortify it with force and divert it from constructive to destructive purposes. Kings and priests had some excuse for such a mistake because they believed themselves to be appointed by God, and that any one who questioned their operations was committing a kind of blasphemy. But financiers and manufacturers have no such excuse, though it may be said for them that they have inherited powers which they have had neither the training nor the opportunity to understand. Henry V could awaken a thrill of loyalty with the cry, "God for Harry, England and St. George!" But a modern soapboiler or newspaper proprietor, who has probably more power than King Henry ever dreamed, can arouse no such enthusiasm, and without enthusiasm the greatest power must dwindle. You may pile up gold, foodstuffs, housing material, all the good and comfortable things of the earth for generations, but there comes a point at which human nature can endure no more, and will sacrifice everything for a thrill, a breath freely drawn, a generous gesture. In such a moment the mightiest power will be shaken to its foundations and the eternal question is asked once more: "By what authority?"

When that question is asked it has been the practice of governors to set one section of humanity against another. Divide and rule. In old times all men were as simple as the ex-Emperor Wilhelm II, and believed that when they fought they fought for God and that God fought with them. Now and henceforth that superstition has lost its validity. Human pugnacity is without its old sanction, and if there are to be wars in future they will be a matter of frank greed, blood-lust and craving for excitement, of which a large proportion of humanity will be ashamed: and not only of war, but of preparations for war. They will ask why the doles extracted from the work of humanity should be put to such a wasteful use, and when they are told that it is to maintain right against wrong they will ask in season and out for definition as the only safeguard against the easily roused passions of the crowd.

Humanity is not, or ought not to be, a crowd, and no section of it should be treated as such, but as a collection of human beings entitled to enjoy the fruits of the earth and of their labour upon it, and the leisure in which to discover in each other those joys without which human life is vastly inferior to that of the beasts, or the bees and ants, or the trees and flowers. Human life is a matter of personal relations. These are the vital necessity, and if they are degraded for the sake of any other element that element is wrong, whatever may be the apparent advantages due to it. Any organisation which degrades those who participate in it is too injurious to be admissible, and human society, at present and for a long time to come, looks like being dependent upon such organisation, creating power with-out authority for the few, work without leisure for the many. Now, power without authority can only be maintained by trickery and cunning, which, as the dodges are revealed and they are few and time honoured become more barefaced.

European civilisation is at present dominant in the affairs of humanity, and its power over other civilisations increases. It has lost its old sanctions and its old spirit: humanism is dead, Christianity is threadbare: this civilisation persists by its rapacity and its mechanical power. Its engines, constructive and destructive, blast their way through the other civilisations in the quest of the precious raw materials necessary for the maintenance of urban existence. Everywhere they destroy and do not replace old habits, old religions, ancient forms of society; and they offer nothing in return except a crude arrangement by which the doles extracted from the work of human beings can rapidly be accumulated into a power directed solely to the production of more wealth from the earth. It may be said that these methods do, on the whole, increase the well-being of the disorganised multitudes who were formerly scratching a meagre living from inhospitable tracts of the world, but it is incontestable that the violence with which millions of men and women have been uprooted from their traditional existence has produced a blight which is probably the greatest affliction from which humanity has ever suffered. It has forced upon men and women everywhere a consciousness for which they have no equipment, so that they live in an increasing pain and are isolated as they never were from each other. The result bears a superficial resemblance to decadence, but it is rather a paralysis of stagnation, almost a fear of the new mode of living that has become necessary, combined with a fatalistic fore-knowledge that European civilisation, in attempting to conquer humanity, will be absorbed by it.

What is happening is this: European civilisation is attempting to conquer the earth for the benefit of the Europeans, or rather of the comparative few who possess economic power, and is doing so without the slightest regard for humanity. The better to achieve this purpose it was necessary to dispose of the insurgent elements in the European populations, who were accordingly turned against each other in the war of 1914-18, which effectively disposed of the chances of a proletarian internationalism intruding upon the internationalism of the economically powerful, bent on establishing control of raw materials. The war, then, has been only an element in the long struggle between those whose aim is to control raw materials, and those whose aim is to control labour. In this struggle humanity is not considered at all, because each side is consumed with dread of the other. It is not a conflict between autocracy and democracy in the old political sense, for politics are very remote from facts. The conflict is between autocracy and democacy in the industrial sense, and the battle is in the industrial field. Until it is fought out there will not be much room for the normal healthy activities which make the sum of human happiness, and the race will live an uneasy, distracted and dissatisfied existence. Raw materials are necessary, labour is necessary. Out of these two have grown two conflicting interests whose wrangling day by day destroys human hopes and increases that despair to which the greater part of the men and women of the century have been reduced. It is an old quarrel arising from the denial of the right of him who works to have a voice in the direction of the dole which is taken from his work for social purposes; and until that right is established the quarrel cannot be resolved. To this must be added the denial of social purposes as meaning the purposes of humanity, though that has grown out of, rather than contributed to, the quarrel, the two parties to which are blinded by the diversion of their energies from their work to their feud.

As the struggle grows in intensity old conceptions are destroyed, indolence becomes more and more impossible, and we are slowly forced to take a simple view both of ourselves and of our situation. Millions have died and are dying of violence or neglect, and such death has its inevitable reaction upon life poisonous, stultifying, enervating; and that burden, unlike the material load, cannot be passed on to the poor. Increased production is not a sufficient antidote. to a moral infection, for under the present social system it would simply mean a vaster accumulation of the doles taken from work done to be spent on the purchase of raw materials. It is not enough to cry out against an exploiting class : humanity is exploiting humanity, and until the social system is amended cannot help doing so.

The evil has grown out of the fear of poverty: not merely of the discomfort, but even more of the inertia that poverty brings. If a man must endure squalor, dirt, vermin, lack of privacy, and gnawing anxiety from week to week, he cannot but lose his self-respect, and with that gone, there is no hope of his achieving pride of work without which his existence is savourless. His manhood is dissipated and he becomes the drudge of his family, of his own enfeebled appetites, of those who employ bim for as little as he can be got to accept. Small wonder, then, that from this horror men struggle to escape, but they do not escape if their efforts are directed to thrusting others down into it. For men are more than brothers : they are all parts of one soul, and the suffering of any portion of it affects the whole.

The survival of the fittest was a phrase applied to species: humanity as a whole may take pride in its survival, but every part of humanity owes its existence to the evolutionary effort of the whole. A huge effort is now becoming discernible, an attempt to achieve more consciousness, and the war and the class-war, considered in this relation, take shape as per-verse endeavours to resist that effort. Men are reluctant to change their minds, and when, their ideas falling behind the necessity of the time, they suffer they are apt to attribute their suffering to those whom they have learned to regard as their enemies. When a man stumbles over a brick and hurts his toe he will often seek relief in kicking the brick. Men have no enemies other than themselves: they are assured in their mastery of Nature. It is only in self-mastery that they are uneasy and uncomfortably aware of futility. Self-mastery is only to be won through work: drudgery destroys it, and drudgery can only be destroyed by the removal of poverty, dread of which is the prime motive force in the present organisation of society.

Can it be done? It can and it must be done if, as I maintain, humanity is engaged in a tremendous evolutionary effort. This new consciousness, eager to explore the world revealed by mechanical power, most eager to discover the buried treasure of the human heart, will not tolerate the drag upon its activity of a dread akin to that which has been so patiently conquered, namely, the fear of Nature. The only remaining question is as to whether this conquest shall be achieved through disaster or through triumph, through a collapse upon force or through the assertion of mind and will. It is a lamentable fact that hitherto great social changes have only been brought about through hunger, but now it seems to be within the bounds of possibility that the hunger of the spirit may prove to be a swifter and more effective explosive force than the hunger of the belly. Certainly the hunger of the spirit is 'the force with which we have to reckon old illusions, old fables have lost their efficacy to satisfy men and women gathered in such huge masses as they are to-day. Even the lies with which their minds are fed are but perversions of the truth: they have not the charm and the potency of religious and poetical inventions. Gods and kings are in exile : men and women know that their rulers are men and women like themselves, and they are in a mood to force them to acknowledge their responsibility, not to any imagined power or majesty, but to the immediate and real authority of humanity. That is the issue, and nothing can confuse it. Through history it has become more and more urgent, but until the earth was explored and conquered it could be obscured by a thousand and one minor quarrels. Now issue is joined, and there can be no rest until the principle is established that the doles taken from the daily toil of humanity shall be used for humanity to lighten its physical toil that it may be free for spiritual effort. That is the aim of all human endeavour. It can now be clearly seen, and there should be an end of all attempts to disguise it with smaller aims or to perpetuate the diversion to material ends of forces whose purposes are spiritual. The desire of every living thing is to discover the Newfoundland of its own soul. In human beings that desire is conscious, and in them their natural functions are but the means to that end. They have agreed to society in order as little as possible to be impeded by those functions, and perpetually they urge onwards to enrich society with their discovery. Exploration of the earth is but the symbol of that other voyage which is life, and the mystics sunk in contemplation enrich humanity no less than those who reveal far countries and bring back charted the imagined oceans. Humanity, urged on by this quest of the soul, has incidentally discovered the boundless wealth of this planet, but only incidentally. The powers revealed have been so immense as to dazzle and overwhelm the mind so that the art to use those powers has been neglected. Men are, for the lack of such art, simply rich or poor : living one kind of life or another, and in both character is of less immediate value than cunning, because in the fever engendered by lack of organisation material values obscure spiritual, and property dominates life. The suffering so created is barren, and prevents the operation of the fruitful suffering which is the creative element in human life without which joy can-not be released. The joy of humanity is captive, for a space, but joy is indestructible and will be free. Those who would confine it do but postpone the destruction which must come upon them and upon human society. Joy in its freedom destroys that it may create, destroys the old and the outworn, cleanses and purges and gives in abundance : while greed destroys only that it may take, and heaps up dead things that make life take on the semblance of a tomb, the nature of which no magnificence can disguise.

Before humanity lies the most momentous choice of its destiny. It is a choice that has to be made in millions of instances every day, and the inadequate structure of society forces upon the vast majority the wrong choice. With almost every breath we draw we have to choose between life and death, and almost always, so constrained are we by false appearances and promises of ease for the moment, we choose death. Failure to seize and to employ one opportunity means a proportionate weakness in facing the next. As with the individual, so with the mass. The grand opportunity will be upon us in the next generation. Europe has to accept or to deny its responsibility to humanity, to choose between life and death. It is to help, in however small a degree, in seeing that the choice is truly made, and that the human mind shall seek out the human will, its only trustworthy power, that these words are written.