XIV CONSUMPTION (I)

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We have laid down certain propositions in the preceding chapters, namely, that men are part of a great Social Organism; that as parts of it they are continually supplied with its stimulus and nourishment; that as parts of it so nourished and so stimulated, they must discharge the swelling current of social energy in social action, which is Work; and that the business of a conscious and intelligent Society is so to produce and distribute social wealth as to maintain and increase this flood of energy, the discharge of which in our highly specialised industries is supreme delight. Against these propositions will be at once erected that common bulwark of ancient superstition, man’s selfishness. We generally believe, and as generally act on the belief, that the individual selfishness of man is such that nothing would induce him to act for the good of society, even though that good plainly included himself.

This theory of our selfishness is not borne out either by the scientific facts of our sociological position or the everyday facts of life about us.

The theory dates from a time when men were still mainly individual animals, when it was true. Being imbedded in that heavy, slow-going, ancient brain, and hammered in by each subsequent generation, it has remained with us until to-day. What we need to realise is that social development has brought with it other feelings, quite the opposite of selfishness, but equally natural, which are found in us all in varying degree; which we see at work about us, and yet which we refuse to admit into our “minds” as facts. On the contrary, we sturdily maintain in our minds the false ideas and act upon them, working much evil thereby.

The organic connection of human beings develops among them those social instincts which are necessary to promote their common good, a class which we, seeing their pre-eminent value, have classed as “virtues,” calling the disproportionate action of more primitive individual instincts “vices.” Neither term is true. Egoism was a virtue in the individual status; altruism, or rather, omniism, is a virtue in the social status; both are natural. Our misinterpretation and false naming have prevented our easy assumption of the new qualities, that is all, the past concept being more potent to our minds than the present fact.

Among the group of root errors still retarding our development, none is more mischievous than that wherein we assume pleasure to lie mainly in impression rather than expression. We believe that what we get makes us happy rather than what we do, and therefore consider our doing as a means of getting. Perhaps this idea antedates even the Want theory; but it is needless to grope too critically among the errors of the remote past, they are all old enough.

The utmost extreme of this early error of ours is found in our general scheme of Heaven or even of an earthly Utopia. When we give free rein to fancy in seeking to portray happiness we arrange that an individual may have everything he wants, and be provided with some eternal miracle in the way of appetite, it is to be hoped, that he may keep on wanting it!

The Happy Hunting Grounds of our American savages and the old Norse Walhalla had some action in them, probably because the savage believers knew of no other way to procure food save by hunting for it. With the red man and the brawny slayer of Scandinavia, action was so intimately connected with gratification and with honour that their future state had something doing as well as eternal banqueting. But observe the more sophisticated Mohammedan Paradise, with its ecstatic debauchery, and our own Hebrew Heaven, with its music and jewelry and the chorused adoration of an oriental court,—no action is predicated of these, save that necessary to get there. We postulate rest, peace, plenty, rich and beautiful surroundings, things to have for eternal joy, not things to do.

Some of our seers and philosophers have often perceived the fallacy of this belief, and have preached in various voices to the effect that man should “Act well his part—there all the honour lies.”

Moreover, most of us practically find that there is more pleasure in doing what we are best fitted for than in having anything whatever; but still the dominant governing theory of humanity holds that a man’s real business is to get such and such good and that “he won’t be happy till he gets it”! I heard this theory well expressed in passing by two men in the street recently; well-dressed, important-looking, elderly men:

“Yes,” said one of them, shaking a handsome cane, “they get their money all over the world and come here to spend it, to live!”

A better expression of this dominant belief it would be hard to find. The immense world-wide activities of the business men alluded to were defined merely as “getting money,” and the spending of that money, the obtaining all manner of materials for consumption, was defined as “living.” Acting under this belief we see the majority of mankind using continual effort to get things for themselves and their families, and, when the things they desired are attained, yet no resultant satisfaction follows, they merely transfer the ideal and seek to get more, other, and different things. Against this tendency a minor line of philosophy has been levelled, preaching contentment, but this philosophy is still on the wrong basis, for it is still the things we are told to be contented with—those we have instead of those we have not, that’s all.

In practical truth the happiness of man in what he gets is limited, extremely limited, but the happiness of man in what he does is unlimited. The receiving capacity of our nervous system is soon exhausted, but the discharging capacity has no limit but that of natural periods of rest. The pleasure in expression increases with use, the pleasure in impression decreases with use.

It is interesting, pathetic, and absurd, to see the spasmodic contortion of nature under the effort to enjoy having things. We enjoy food, naturally. The use of food is, plainly, to enable us to do things, and if we do enough we always enjoy food. But the foolish person ignores doing things and seeks to enjoy food as an end in itself. The enjoyment soon palling, and even decreasing as the natural appetite decreases, the foolish person then pushes on in a line of artificial enhancements of this natural function, bringing in an elaborate convocation of other senses, with various luxuries and arts, so as to prolong and increase his enjoyment. The enjoyment receding vaguely before him, he adds eccentricities to his luxuries, runs the gamut of elaborate changes, and plays Hob with his internal organs, all in the persistent endeavour to hold on to the enjoyment of eating.

In this particular field of enjoyment no animal alive has attained such subtle, exquisite, and long-drawn pain as we have achieved withal. Our array of alimentary diseases is really instructive, yet does not seem really to instruct us. We still persist in putting the cart before the horse and looking for pleasure in what we get. In the field of economic action, this fallacy exerts a constant evil influence not only by checking the output, but by degrading and distorting that output to suit the growing vitiation of taste which always results from this belief.

The governing concepts of any society at any period tend inevitably to such and such results, but their effect is modified by interaction and by many external circumstances. As the society grows and circumstances change we may see one and another root-thought working to its special result; checked by this, modified by that, but always tending to its own end. So this one thought, acting with all our others, right and wrong, may be followed in the ever-present social tendency to luxury and excess.

If you believe that happiness lies in the impressions you receive, you naturally modify your action to the purpose of securing the desired impression. Seeing the impressions fail to produce the expected happiness, but still believing in the theory, you simply strive to secure further impressions. Finding, as jaded emperors have found, that to have everything in the world you want does not make you happy, you still hold on to the theory and merely sigh for new worlds to conquer; or, if your religion is also built on this theory, look forward to an eternity of having things to make you happy.

The demand for happiness is perfectly healthy and right, but we are mistaken as to the means. Every possible impression receivable by the human sensorium is merely an incentive to expression. We are transmitters of energy, not vats for storage. Our capacity for storage is merely to give us wider and longer range in our discharge. The living force of the Universe is pushing through man, and as that force is greater than he, so is the joy of doing greater than the joy of having. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Of course!

Let us study some of the practical results of this false concept of ours. One of the most exquisitely sublimated extremes of its action is seen in our distinctively human practice of what is called “collecting.” It is bewildering at first. That a squirrel should collect nuts, and, on the same line, that Pharaoh should collect wheat, or that the housewife should collect food in advance, is all “natural.” That anyone should collect that “greatest common denominator,” money, is the same tendency as above. But that a human creature should collect a vast supply of objects which he does not use, never intends to use, and could not use if he wanted to, is truly remarkable.

The objects may be of use to other people—if they had them—as in innumerable pieces of china, but of no use to him; or they may be of no use to anybody, like defaced postage-stamps—but that does not affect the collecting instinct. This depraved appetite, seeking to acquire for personal “ownership” without even the excuse of consumption, frankly waiving the pleasure of using the things and affixing that pleasure solely to the getting and having of them, is as morbid a process as could well be imagined. It is “the mania for owning things” in full delirium.

What is the normal law of ownership? It is simple, like all natural laws.

Social processes are served through the social body, through a great number of detached mechanical structures. The social functionaries, in order to carry on their functions, must have a certain extra-physical environment. The family and the individuals therein must have homes, the body must have its clothes, the worker of all sorts must have his tools, his shop, all that is necessary for his work. Society requires of the individual the performance of certain functions. That performance requires the continuous use of certain mechanical adjuncts. Society must guarantee to the individual the continuous possession of those adjuncts, of the things necessary for him to do his work. That is the social “right of property.”

All property is a social product, evolved in the course of social development, needed by society for the social service. Any social factor, a carpenter, for instance, is a working agent consisting of a human animal specially skilled and specially tooled. Without the skill and the tools he is not a carpenter. Society having evolved the skill and the tools, certain members of Society then become carpenters. Since their skill is essential to the social service, Society must educate them; since their tools are essential to the social service, Society must secure the tools to the man. This is ownership, a social right, quite just, and perfectly natural.

Social relations are psychic. Property rights are psychic relations. We agree that such men shall own such things, and they do. We deny that such men own such things, and they don’t! Men once owned slaves—everywhere. This “right” was gradually withdrawn by the givers, until it now only exists in certain localities of low social development. Parents once “owned” their children, could kill or sell them. This right has been withdrawn.

There is no ultimate basis for human rights but the best interests of Society, and our conscious recognition of human right depends on our knowledge of those interests. Thus our rights change from age to age, as Society changes, and our laws and customs slowly follow the new developments in social consciousness. In our time we are in the active throes of change on two great subjects, the rights of women and the rights of property.

On the latter head this formula is advanced as a safe one: The individual has a right to those things necessary for him to best serve Society. That is, the carpenter has a right to his tools, and the musician to his instrument, both to their special education, and they and all men to the food, shelter, clothing, and other things necessary to their best social service.

Not a return equivalent to, as we try to arrange our system of payment, but a supply necessary to, in advance. If a man is to write books for humanity he has a right to his pen, ink, and paper; and to such other conditions as are essential to his best productivity; but because one man’s books are worth ten times as much as another’s, is no reason why he should have ten times as much pen, ink, and paper.

Consumption is a means to production—impression is of value as it conduces to expression. The pleasure and the duty are in Doing. Having is merely contributory.

Our mistake about consumption is what our payment system rests on; we work merely to obtain something; and that something is rigorously measured according to our previous labour. In changing the ground of our thought, we shall recognise that production is the main issue of life; that consumption is essential to it; that each social factor has a right to such supplies as shall best promote his productivity, and that they shall be provided him in advance.

“The mill will never grind with the water that”—hasn’t come!

If this position be reluctantly admitted, there follows the alarmed demand: “But if the consumption of the individual is not measured by his previous output, how shall we measure it—how shall we prevent him from an inordinate, a disproportionate, socially wasteful consumption?”

How do you measure the dinner for your family and friends? What prevents them from eating a bushel apiece? The natural limit of consumption is capacity, the natural measure is necessity and appetite. A constant and sufficient supply of anything does not provoke inordinate consumption—quite the contrary. A refined and moderate selection is the result of full and adequate provision. Inordinate consumption is the result of a deranged supply. People who customarily do not have certain things cannot develop taste and judgment in selecting them.

People who generally have too little, are quite apt to take too much when occasion offers. Knowing that the supply is uncertain leads to taking more than is wanted, so as to store for future use; and the “pecuniary canons of taste,” so ably described by Veblen (“Theory of the Leisure Class”), lead to that meretricious display and cultivated wastefulness which form another phase of our abnormal consumption.

Natural production tends to fill the world with constantly improving supplies. Natural distribution tends to place those supplies where they will do the most good. Natural consumption tends to appropriate all that is good and beneficial, and thereby promotes production—a spiral of social progress.

We have seen how production and distribution are injuriously affected by our misbeliefs, notably by the attitude of the obsequious caterer to the desires of the purchaser. The reason these desires are so deteriorating to the world’s production is in our false attitude toward consumption. The combined effect of our popular economic superstitions reaches a considerable height of injury to society.

Here is the producer limiting his output, as far as possible, to something well within his income, each man striving to get out of the world more than he puts in: whereas all our wealth and progress is conditioned upon our putting in more than we take out—and thanks to the marvellous productivity of the race, we do, we must, so put in, in spite of our ego-centric struggles. Here is the producer, again, guiding the kind and quality of his output, not by real human needs, or by the laws of improvement inherent in the product, but by the weaknesses and artificially fomented tastes, as well as by the purchasing power of “the market.”

If “the market” has a small purchasing power, that means, under our economic system, that the human beings composing it are low-grade stock, cannot produce much themselves. Under sociological law it would follow that they be supplied with the best things, in order to improve their productive power, in order, again, so to add to the social wealth. But in our method, measuring what a man shall have by what he can do, we give the least to those who need the most! Surely anyone can see how stupid this is—to limit consumption to the value of previous output, and so steadily to maintain a low output. Conversely, by seeking to increase consumption in proportion to output, we again do evil; for consumption has its own inexorable limits, bearing no relation whatever to output, after the needs of the producer are really supplied.

Surely, this too, is plain.

So much fertiliser to the acre will increase the crop—but not indefinitely. So much fuel to the fire will increase the steam pressure—but not indefinitely. So much oats to the horse will increase his speed—but not indefinitely. And so much of our great stock of social goods will increase a man’s social value, his health, happiness, and working power—but not indefinitely. Because I am the better worker for a house suited to my needs, I am not therefore ten times the better worker for ten houses suited to my needs.

Food, clothing, education, painting, literature, music, entertainment,—a certain amount is good for a man, improves a man, belongs to a man; but the indefinite multiplication of that amount merely injures the man.

Now suppose we change our minds about consumption. Suppose we do fairly recognise these plain, natural facts:

(a) Man lives by virtue of social relation.

(b) Social relation consists in specialised interservice.

(c) That interservice consists in the production and distribution of all our human goods—from potatoes to poetry.

(d) The advantage to Society lies in the constant development of its processes, a better and easier production and distribution.

(e) The duty of the individual lies in his best service to Society in these vital processes; and the duty of Society lies in supplying to the child the best conditions for full growth and genuine education, and in continuing to provide to the adult those conditions essential to his full, free, and most efficient service.

(f) All that we produce is intended for the maintenance and development of Society.

(g) All that we consume is intended to promote our productivity and general social value.

(h) The advantage of the individual lying absolutely in the hands of Society, it is the obvious business of the individual to see to it that Society performs its duty to him—to all of him—and, as obviously, to perform his full duty to it—which is merely all of him.

With this economic creed we should see each individual doing his best work, and Society eagerly hastening to supply to each individual all that he needed to do his best work. As against this consummation devoutly to be wished stand our existing economic concepts:

(a) Men live by virtue of their own work.

(b) Men have to work in order to satisfy wants.

(c) The satisfaction of wants is the purpose of life.

(d) The advantage to the individual lies in his getting as much as he can, and doing as little as he can—in “buying cheap and selling dear.”

(e) The improvement of the individual lies in Society’s not giving him anything till he has shown that he has it already—or its equivalent in labour. Thus the less ability he has, the less of anything he gets—which improves him.

(f) All that a man produces is his own, and he has a right to consume it all himself, or destroy it—in any case, to withhold it from those who want it till they give him as much as he can get for it.

(g) All that a man consumes is pure advantage—the advantage of life. To have everything we want, to accumulate more than we want, to invent new wants with infinite pains and supply and oversupply them—this is happiness. And since we find practically that the few who do it are not happy, and that the many who cannot do it are not happy either, we assume an eternal appetite, and an eternal gratification in another world!

(Singular thing—the unsatisfied desires of Man! Trying to put a quart measure in a pint cup through an india-rubber eternity!)

(h) The advantage of the individual lying absolutely in his own hands, it is his obvious business to take care of himself; and since the pressure of social relation cannot be ignored, we assume that the business of society is simply to preserve “a fair field and no favour” for individuals to struggle in!

“That government is best which governs least.”

“Give us natural opportunities and freedom.”

“A man has a right to do anything he pleases that does not interfere with the rights of others.”

Fortunately for us the working of natural law is that of the first creed; and our personally misguided conduct of affairs cannot wholly crush back the social growth belonging to our time.

In this connection it is important to note the influence of women, in their artificially restricted position, upon the world’s consumption, not only in economic fact, but in our inherited feeling and education on that subject.

Women, as we have repeatedly seen, were the first producers. Creative industry is theirs by the deepest laws of nature. The female is the original reproductive stream of life; and in the higher stages of her development she still manifests the larger range of race-activities. In the human species for by far the longest period of our life, the proto-social, she was the main—almost the sole—producer, men being mostly destroyers. But for the most of our historic period, all the time that is best known to us, women have been prevented from taking part in progressive human production and restricted to the duties of a house servant.

What tendency to specialised social service they might manifest was promptly banned as “unwomanly,” belonging only to men. The man elected himself to be sole producer, in the large social sense; and the woman was to be only a consumer, to depend on him for her maintenance and take what he gave her.

The position is acutely abnormal—quite opposite to the inherent nature of the female. It is her instinct to give—not to take; ably to do, not feebly to be done for.

This unnatural attitude was forced upon her, however, with two results, inevitable results, as regards consumption.

One is that all her flood of power and patience and infinite service being confined to her one master and their children, she has developed in them inordinate appetites and morbid tastes. The productive force that should flow broad and smooth in Society at large, being bottled up at home, with no consumer but the family, necessarily accustomed the family to receiving more than was good for it; thus maintaining in the world the ancient selfishness of the primitive individual, which real social life tends steadily to reduce. The social instincts, those large and outflowing feelings we call generosity, justice, altruism, are bred in the mutual service of specialised social industry; but the individual instincts, once virtues, now become vices if too prominent, are nursed and fed continually in that hotbed of all personal indulgence, the wife-served home.

Thus the position of woman promotes the tendency to inordinate and morbid consumption in man and child.

But it has also a direct influence on her. She is born and reared in this same atmosphere; she inherits from father as well as mother; the habits of many generations have a gradual effect upon her, and all old civilisations show one monstrous sight, the bottomless greed of the artificially bred women.

As Cleopatra outdid Antony in “conspicuous consumption”—swallowing a dissolved pearl worth more than all his gobbled delicacies; as Nana destroyed expensive furnishings just to amuse herself; so have these horse-leech’s daughters outdone any sons that estimable sucker may have had, in the cry of Give! Give!

Burne-Jones’ picture of “The Vampire” typifies well man’s opinion of this horror which he has so carefully made. Our instinctive dislike of greed in a woman is based on its unnaturalness, it is essentially foreign to her sex. But the fact remains that women, in their false position, have become greedy beyond description. The bountiful producer, aborted, has become a destructive parasite.

The boundless pouring love, compressed to primitive limits, becomes morbid and works evil; and the habit of always taking, and never doing, has produced its unavoidable result, and given us the woman we all know, who takes, greedily, from a childhood of wheedling, through a youth of coquetry, and a lifetime of hired matrimony. When it is not matrimony, language fails to express our horror; but when it is, the commercial basis discolours the relation; and the plump and beautiful creature in the costly surroundings she never thought of giving a return for, is in the same category as a consumer with her less respectable but no less plump and expensively surrounded sister.

To find the pleasure of life in getting and having, to feel no honourable impulse to do, to give, to work, to return to labouring humanity your quota of service,—this is the degraded position into which we have forced our women, and which expresses itself not only in them, but in their children, who are all the world.

Such women play the game we call “Society,” whose trivial performances are celebrated so respectfully in our newspapers in their record of dinners and dresses and dances, as if where these people ate, or what they wore, or how they hopped about, was of any earthly importance. The seriousness with which this class of people who have cut themselves off from human life by refusing to take part in its active processes, who neither produce nor distribute, but consume in ever-increasing ratio, take upon themselves the distinctive name of “Society” is one of the most paralysing jokes of history. They even designate their pitiful amusements as “social functions,” a misnomer as consummately absurd as “Christian Science.”

For a lot of richly caparisoned human animals to get together and eat, or embrace one another and caper about to the sound of music, has no more relation to a social function than St. Vitus’s dance has to chopping wood. A disease is not a function. This fatty degeneration of the social tissues is a sad and important fact, deserving careful study; but its importance lies in its danger to the rest of the body politic, not in any inherent dignity.

If we take our “Society Columns” as medical bulletins, they have some value perhaps; but vulgarly to enlarge on our forms of disease is at least bad taste. What we commonly call “Society” is a morbid growth in the real social structure, developed to meet the artificial needs of these misplaced women; and such a society, influencing as it does, through widening ranks of imitators, the markets of the world, has a most evil effect on our habits of consumption.

If we saw clearly on these lines, recognising production as a law of Human, i. e., Social Nature, then our women, as our men, would take part in the healthy processes of real social life. If we saw that this constantly increasing expression of a constantly increasing fund of social energy was limitless happiness, we should turn our competition another way, cease this painful effort to show who can get the most, and begin to run races to show who shall do the most, with the result that there will be more for everyone to have.

Meanwhile, under the action of this special delusion about consumption, we continue to fill the world with false products, and to spend strenuous lives trying to get them away from one another. Can we not recognise this one thing, that consumption is but a means to an end; that production, Work, is the end to which a legitimate consumption is a necessary means, and that the only natural and practical measure of consumption is the need of the consumer.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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