Social Structure

( Originally Published 1919 )

MEN are rather like beavers building dams which the flood of life continually washes away, and one dam is very like another. Possibly beavers, like men, believe that every dam will be permanent, for no other reason than that they, wonderful creatures that they are, have built it. Men also, like beavers, are amphibious, but in different elements. There may have been a time when men also were aware only of earth and water, but slowly they have learned to live both in life and in certain intimations of immortality, though too often with a pathetic confusion between the two. How-ever, the amphibious capacity is there, and has to be acknowledged in any philosophical speculation. In the individual the dual element is accepted as a necessary condition of being, but in combination for social purposes the intimations of immortality are generally ignored as providing an undue complication. Unfortunately for society, it is a fact that only through his intimations of immortality an a man use his senses effectively, and if e at-tempts as a social being to dispense with them he is as maimed as if he had lopped off his legs. This power rightly to use the senses comes from the memory of humanity, of which every man according to his constitution has a greater or less share. It is commonly called genius, and is honoured in those who, contrary to the prevailing habit, have the courage of it, and, as shown in the last chapter, have alone the capacity for constructing an enduring society simply because they retain their strongest social instinct. Nearly every individual retains enough to keep himself sane, but not enough to preserve the sanity of society. It is selfishness, if you will, inability to learn that the self is best served by being disinterested, but men are not disinterested chiefly because they find that no one is expected to be so. The most remarkable quality of human nature is its capacity for doing and being what is expected of it.

If, therefore, we desire to construct a sane society, the first step in that direction is to raise the world's expectations of human na ture. Indeed, that is what has been gradually happening, through history. The more things change the more they are the same, but the more they change the more we recognise the wonderful possibilities latent in them. In-creasing recognition is progress.

No one expects miracles, but every one now expects the social instinct of the race to make hay of human theories. By identifying the social instinct of the race with genius in the individual, a glimmering of order begins to show through the chaos, and the amphibious character of humanity becomes socially a strength instead of a weakness. It is possible then to reconcile human nature with Nature, and to see that a great deal of the social insanity of the past has been due to human insensibility and lack of power really to assume superiority. Nature retains earthquakes, thunderstorms, violent seas, poisonous insects, putrefaction and other agencies with which to disturb human organisation, which, however, has given the individual power to emancipate him-self. It remains to be seen whether or no he has won that emancipation at the cost of being enslaved by organisation, but even if that has happened a few generations should bring liberation from that also.

Organisation is all very well for physical needs, but to satisfy the social instinct structure is needed. Organisation has dug out and built admirable cellars, but the edifice itself has not yet begun to appear, and no one ' ants to go on indefinitely living in cellars, however comfortable they may be. A man, especially a woman, must have pride in the dwelling-place, and the stronger the social instinct the greater the pride.

The factory system is the cellar in which human beings of the twentieth century are called on to live, and no one takes any pride in it, though men do undoubtedly take pride in the machines, the huge dynamos, the vast printing machines, the marine turbines, the twelve-cylinder aero-engines, with which they work, but they desire also an equal pride in their own lives. Why should more and more energy go into machines and less and less into the lives of men and women? Why should the available amount of happiness so alarmingly shrink, and the dwindling thoughts of men move in an increasing chaos? It is small wonder that the social instinct has taken alarm and begins to insist that some noble edifice shall be raised on so formidable a ground plan.

The Russians, who enjoyed the doubtful privilege of living in a dilapidated mediaeval structure, have razed it to the ground, and start level with the rest of us. There are only two Emperors left in the world, the Emperor of India and the Emperor of Japan. The workers of the world have their grand opportunity to unite, but they do not, because, though the will is there, they have no plan, no scheme, not even a rough draft committing their dream to paper. Their dream, like the society in which they have suffered so long, is formless, and they know not what to build. They are hand-workers and they have to build a house not made with hands. Fortunately, they have the habit of work, and are humble enough to be willing to learn as they go along, letting their past sufferings be the instructors of their future hopes. Their care, as always, will be for their children, and in building for them they should create the model that future generations must follow.

Imagine a school that should satisfy the love of a mother for her child, instead of a place to which a child is torn to satisfy a grudgingly made law, The difference is one of spirit, but the question here is all of such difference, between the new and the old. Such a school in any village, any parish, should have out it the communal pride that has fallen way from the Church. It would be a place of simplicity, health and beauty, with playgrounds, gymnasium, laboratory, workshop, a clinic, a garden with allotments and a play room, with a properly equipped stage for the regular production and performance of plays, so that the children should learn the right use of their hands, brains and imaginations ; and the teachers should be given a status equivalent to the authority vested in their sacred calling. No smaller word will serve: their calling is sacred, because it gives its practitioner access t the human mind at its most delicate and susceptible, when if it be not approached tenderly and with reverence it will surely sustain injury. The reverence of the teacher for his calling should inspire respect for his craft and all that it implies of good or ill for humanity.

In such a school should be the beginnings of democracy, the children being responsible for its organisation, with reference, if need be, to their parents, whose work, after all, pays for it. With such a training in practical democracy they could as they grew proceed to the factory with some equipment for its application there, and from that their capacity could work in their union, their parish, or municipality, and so up through the larger units of social organisation. They would very quickly learn to apply democracy to the home where it is most needed, and in this way the new spirit would find its way through the whole of human society. Without the release of that spirit, nothing can be done and nothing will be achieved, but a dreary levelling out in which the duality of human nature will be denied more bluntly than ever. Equality and fraternity are fine ideals for the one element of human nature, but the other, brooding on its immortality, insists upon the aristocratic privilege of privacy, or, in one word, Liberty. It is the lack of privacy that makes poverty so devastating a thing, more deadening and stultifying even than the fear of actual want. A man becomes a healthy social being by dint of the continual gymnastic of sacrifice, and if he has nothing to sacrifice he cannot enjoy or profit by the exercise. Rob a man of his privacy and you strip him of his power to develop the social instinct that is native to him. He becomes, whatever his prosperity, a burden to himself and, whatever his wealth, a drudge who cannot become a worker. Which a man an is to be, drudge or worker, is settled very early in life; and it is very largely to escape th material penalties of drudgery that social cunning has been developed to so fine a pitch, and that has meant the condemnation to drudgery of numbers that increase alarmingly from generation to generation, and with that a weakening of the impulse to give form and structure to society and a barricading of the indolence which takes and gives nothing, and corrupts the only structure that we have, Finance.

There is no valid objection to the 'me of money as a symbol for work, except that' it is not regarded or respected as a symbol, but is treated as a commodity like any other of which any man is entitled to as much as he can lay hands on without infringing the law. But money is different from other commodities in that it exists by social agreement as a means of maintaining the currency of work in which commodities are included as the result of work and therefore part and parcel of it. Breach of that agreement is a breach of honour, and any shuffling of money which does not transfer work from individual to individual, or from group to group, is an injury to society of the same kind as that which accrues from the hoarding of money for its own sake. Both these offences will always exist, but the time is passing when they could be regarded as virtues, for the time has arrived when the financial structure of society must be drastically altered, so that all accumulations of work or money can be democratically used and democratically controlled.

Words by reiteration lose their meaning, but very often differences of meaning can be composed after the passage of time. For three generations now the words Capital and Labour have been used in such sharp opposition to each other that they are generally accepted as being irreconcilable, and in ordinary intercourse words replace the facts they should mean in the minds of speaker and hearer. Capital is Labour, or work, kept in storage. It has been cruelly abused by the custom of treating labour as a purchasable commodity. The labourer contracts to give his work in ex-change for its equivalent in money, which represents work in storage. The bargain should be between equal men on equal terms, but it is hard for the labourer to forget that his forefathers were serfs, and for the capitalist to shake off the idea that the men in whose place he stands were noble lords, and by divine right owners of men as they were owners of cattle. But for the refusal of the capitalist to do his share of the fundamental brain work of the world the labourer might even now agree not to remember that he is a free man, at any rate in theory. But the betrayal remains, and with it the sore suspicion that it has created. More than material discontent is at work, and the hand-worker seeks in the brain-worker not a master, but a colleague. There the artist, whose master is the human spirit, joins hands with him; the two workers, who have always sought each other, come together to their mutual relief, and together they can proceed on their healthy task of simplification. The artist's whole being cries: Simplify, simplify, because without simplicity there is no art: the artisan from his experience knows shrewdly that without simplicity there is no life. If emotions are complicated it means that they have come to the surface before they are ripe. If the problems of every day become hopelessly complex it means that some one somewhere has been in a hurry. Every worker knows that if he gets too far away from his work he loses his touchstone, and makes blunders impossible in his normal existence; and every worker knows that if by ill-luck he finds himself among people to whom work is as foreign as the poles, he suffers from such a twisting and torturing of life into uncognisable shapes as out of Bedlam he could never have imagined —a noise, a nervous tremor, a shattering of social intercourse into fragments and a maddening syncopation of the rhythm of life. In a state of society in which it is a legitimate ambition to avoid work, that oppression hangs everywhere like a damp mist, making a rust upon the machinery of society and an ague in the bones of the men who live in it, and the energy to remove these impediments can only come from the release of the inward light of the soul. Those who are content to live in a dead and decaying society must themselves be dead and decaying, morally lost; and people in that condition will only respond to economic pressure, which by a just dispensation always follows on the disasters they induce by their indifference. There is a limit to the extent to which one generation can live on the efforts of its predecessors and on mortgaging t ose of its successors. An actuary might estimate it, but long before it is reached the conscience of honest men begins to protest, and if the r pro-tests are not heeded the result is, as rule, either war or revolution, or both.

It is doubtful whether war or revolution can be avoided, but it should be possible to build a social structure which is proof against them. First, the foundation must be solid. Th foundation is the rough work of the world and that can only be made solid if it is done honourable conditions: that is, if it is organised upon an equitable contract between the brain workers and the hand-workers, with a properly appointed authority to act as trustee between the two. The Japanese build houses which are proof against earthquake by transmitting the shock of the disturbance to a pendulum. In the social structure the pendulum is public opinion, which, when the authority of the democracy of the artists and scientists is established as it can be by education should swing so freely and with such momentum as to defy manipulation. The pint is that public opinion, to be of service instead of disservice, must depend upon such honesty as human nature has achieved. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. Rascality cannot be obliterated, but it can be curbed; no longer by the threat of punishment in Hell, but by a swifter painful reaction than is possible in the present scheme of things, under which men live in such enormous units that the consequences of their doings take too long to reach them, and by the time the effect of one rascality reaches the doer, another can be accomplished as a defence against it. The consequence is that the effects of rascality accumulate and break into disaster involving the innocent and the guilty alike, and the unsuspecting innocent more deeply. That is why contemplation of the present order of society inspires such disgust. It may feed and clothe the people more efficiently than any previous system owing to its vastly improved transport, but it huddles them together, deprives them of privacy, and, therefore, of liberty, and passes on to the most helpless the consequences of all ill-doing.

We are not looking for a Utopia in which all men shall enjoy a perfect happiness. It is not happiness that makes a society healthy so much as the striving for it; and the complaint here brought against a world of communities which deny the existence of a single human community is that it cramps striving. and without that the work of the world suffers. When that happens rascality thrives, which is what Dr. Johnson meant when he said that patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels. There are, however, honest patriots t whom the idea of a single community is repellent, for it corresponds in their minds to a dream of an anonymous and amorphous mass of h an beings without colour or character in their lives. But a man loses character in proporti n as he transfers his pride in being a man to a y lesser element of his being. When men re men first, and Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans afterwards, there can be some hope Of their acknowledging the most characteristic product of their nationality, its art. Men cannot detach themselves from their own racial experience, but they can, with a very little knowledge, learn to respect that of other men, and with the community of art before them, they can begin to admit its truth into their daily activities. With that the growth of the social structure can be seen, and some element of design can be introduced into it, for design is born out of the consciousness of the human mind of the rhythm and impulse of humanity, most easily felt in love, most purely apprehended through work.

The attempt to build the social structure after the designs laid down by theology from the roof downwards has failed. A roof is well for the body, but the soul needs no other than the sky. The social structure, then, must be builded to the heavens, as science is built, and poetry and the work of all the arts. Then what is made with hands after all, so small a part of life will have for model what is created and continually recreated, and the social being of a man will be able to move freely in humanity, going from strength to strength as it finds its way from the home to the school, from the school to the factory, from the factory to the various councils of men, sharing in communal pleasures and arts, and learning from them the skill to guard and preserve its private joys. Confronted with union for good the powers of evil would then be dissipated and distracted, for separation is evil's opportunity, unity its despair. The kingdom of God that is within men would then find this earth a place in which it could give forth its authority , and men would be able to communicate with each other fully : no longer in the bastard tongue of the market place, but with the fully uttered thought that needs sanction before it an appear upon the lips or in the eyes to ill mate the countenance. Who that has ever loved, or has found himself saluted by book, song painting, or sculpture, or almost intolerably moved by dramatic speech, does not know the joy of seeing faces become countenances? There is no greater source of misery than seeing day by day faces that cannot kindle, faces that neither give nor reflect any light and re but masks to cover suffering. So prevale is this misery that it would seem that society also is but a mask to cover the wretchedness of humanity, a screen set up between the human conscience and the doings of men; an. it is to maintain this that the work of the world is perverted. Yet men work to defend themselves against the ills of life. Why, then, do they so aggravate them?

The answer to that question provides some illumination.

The world on which we live is round, and every community in it is a segment of a circle.

The work of every community moves towards the centre, but, with the exception of the work of the artists, is never suffered to pass through the centre into the other segments. Instead, it is carried laboriously round the circumference, because work is confused with the commodities produced by it. But the most important result of work is credit, and that is as easily transferable as any other mental or spiritual thing. Credit is held up at the centre of the circle, with the result that the vast majority of human beings in every segment, every community, are deprived of credit and the release it should give from anxiety. No one segment can exist without the other, no community can live apart from the whole, and yet each uses its credit against the other and deprives its members of the credit of the whole. The divorce of man from humanity is repeated in the financial system of the world. Each community regards its credit as something distinct from the credit created by the individuals composing it; that is to say, the community, which should be the conduit of credit from man to humanity and from humanity to man, usurps and abuses it, and until that is remedied there cannot be the liberty or the leisure or the enthusiasm necessary for social architecture, because the great mass of men ave to work for an inadequate return and are cheated of their just share in the life of the co unity which can only be imparted to them first of all in credit. That granted, the rest f follows. For a man to be able to contribute more than his bare labour to the community he must be given his due share of credit, and no longer asked to consent in its being wasted in the luxury of bellicose patriotism and the vain at-tempt to make commercial competition do the work of co-operation. All that has been aggravated by the rapid improvement of trans-port, but the mania for speed that blinds the Europeans of this century is a joke to those who know the speed of the spirit and the in-comparable flight of the imagination. The speeding-up of production so dear to Americans can only aggravate the present congestion of credit, unless means are taken to see to it that the credit accorded to a nation benefits the individuals in it; and this can only be done by the removal of a class whose function is the manipulation of credit, which they do irresponsibly and the more ineffectively as the enormous accumulations of credit in a great modern community are apt to intoxicate the minds of those who are in a position uncontrolled to dispose of them. Every man for a week's work should be in a position to guarantee his livelihood for the following week, and with every week's work to increase his guarantee, the risk of his dying being borne by the community as part of his credit, the community in the first place having accepted the risk of his being born. To arrange this it must be-come as impossible for a man to set his nation above humanity as for him to set his family above his nation, but with the release of credit this would come about in the nature of things, for the incentive to set a smaller loyalty above the greater would disappear. Equality of rights would then only be tempered by a grading of duties, and that would automatically ad-just itself, for the higher a duty and the more noble its performance the less does a man seek to be rewarded for it.

Credit is already centralised, but it is disposed of at the caprice of men whose sole idea of serving humanity is to show a profit, even at the cost of human suffering. Establish control of credit and the necessity for maintaining it by nefarious means disappears. The science of accountancy can replace the blundering methods of Finance, which at present only allow accountancy to disclose a profit, and not to provide a means by which credit can be transferred from the community to the working individual.

When the individual has been given his credit the most direct way of making him feel his oneness with humanity he must be educated to know how to use it, both as producer and as consumer, and as a member of the various groups to which he is attached, the family, the industrial group, the municipality, the nation, the community, each group being in the position of trustee to its subordinate, taking work from it and giving it credit in return. This social structure is already beginning to appear. The spirit with which it shall be animated has been preserved against all usurping authorities by the great democracy of the artists and scientists, between whom and suffering humanity remains only the bankrupt system of finance which is the fatal legacy of feudalism, with its pernicious system of privileges (a rudimentary form of credit) and monopolies. The disappearance of royal dynasties has left in power innumerable dynasties, respectable and propertied families who maintain their ascendancy exactly as royal personages used to do by supporting armed forces and laws which enslave the workers to their property. To protect themselves against the organisation of the workers they have been driven into international combination, in spite of their fervent protests of nationalism; and in this way have created the great pool of the world's credit that has at last brought its heal-thy circulation within the bounds of possibility. As the transport of commodities is facilitated the transference of credit must be made even more expeditious, and the necessary re-adjustment is impeded by the waste of credit upon national defences which for a long time now have in fact been merely an excuse by which the propertied dynasties maintained their control of credit. They were forced to frighten the ignorant masses into acquiescence, but the use of fear as an instrument of government is a boomerang, because it rouses the animal impulses in great herds of men, and these, once roused, will be satisfied. Those who cannot govern except through fear prove their unfitness for it.

Men as individuals have learned that it does not pay to be governed by their appetites. Men in society have yet to learn that the same laws apply to humanity as a whole, and that humanity, like themselves, must be governed by the mind, as, indeed, unconsciously it is. The time is coming when they may be conscious. The appetites of men are unruly. Thwarted in the lives of individual men, they break loose in society, provoking sporadic out-bursts of revolt against the government of the mind. The tyrants and conquerors of the world have ruined themselves by leading that revolt: the Caesars, the Cromwells, the Napoleons; but they and their works are broken on the will of humanity, which does not operate through violence and sudden convulsions, but by the slow, inexorable force of vision seeking expression in form. The true leaders of men are the visionaries, but they lead at a distance of generations. The visible and immediate leaders are, or should be, those who have been kindled by the vision into honesty, so that it is their concern to preserve it from the rebellious appetites of men, and they would no more exploit the appetite for wealth than they would that for food or women or indecency. With some, even a slight element of form introduced into society, men would as naturally follow their true leaders as they have learned to obey the law, and as social beings they would as gladly accept the mind's ordering of the appetites as they do in their individual lives. It is certain that civilised men cannot much longer accept the barbaric dictates of the community, or respond to the base appeals made to their appetites by the dynasties for whom their profoundest needs are sacrificed. If men are granted their due of credit and liberty they can be trusted to abide by the social contract. If, on the other hand, they are forced into a sullen acquiescence it will not be long before their appetites, always in revolt against the mind, will leap to the revolt in their souls, take fire from it and drive them out upon errands of destruction.

The horror of the war of 1914-18 is the measure of the social injustice from which it sprang. The fact that no great tyrant or conqueror has come out of it is the measure of the extent to which the social conscience and the feeling for social structure have been released by it. The appetites seek the leadership of an ambitious man : the mind pursues rather the guidance of the spirit. Out of the tragedy has come no great human figure, but in the hum-blest heart the spirit is felt at work; the desire to make of this earth not a brawling place of the passions, but a most holy abiding place where those passions can be turned to noble uses and to the creation of a life where men and women can live together, not in that peace which is a mere folding of the hands, but in the peace which is a striving after more and more delight, that no moment of joy or suffering, of suffering through joy, and of joy through suffering, may escape unlived. That can only be if men leave their primitive and beaver-like building of dams, and will, on the high ground conquered for them by the visionaries, build and rebuild, even as Nature builds her seasons, a house whose flooring is the human heart and whose roof is the firmament, whence light comes to call into men's eyes the tender and more penetrating light of the soul. For the house is not to be built with hands, and only by that light can the materials for it be chosen.