Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
It does not follow that a dolt must do them! It does not follow that we
should hunt out all our inferior persons to do these unelevating things,
and so remain inferior. It does not follow that we should keep the
inferior person so long at his unelevating task as to further lower his
inferiority; that we should pay him so little as to prevent any
development from outside advantages; or that, worst of all, we should so
condemn his children to their subminimum share of his “minimum wage” as
to make them lower yet.
In our ignorance of the nature of society, and the nature of work; in
our cheerful blindness to the lessons of history; with our poor choked
and twisted brains, so crammed with the follies of our ancestors, and so
weakened by what we have called education that they cannot _think_; we
have taken for granted that society had to have about so much “unskilled
labour” to provide for, and could only provide for it by “furnishing
employment” suited to its powers.
If we can once recognise the facts in the case, we will change our
behaviour fast enough. Observe the line of social growth. Here is a
nascent society of a vague group of savages, feebly held together by the
pressure of a common danger; feebly drawn together by the attraction of
a common need. So held and drawn the same forces which grouped the cells
and started the growth of physical organisms worked upon them, and they
began to differentiate in function.
Follow one line of work, such as the clothing of society. The individual
savage took a skin off another animal and put it on himself; that was
the beginning. It required in him, and in his squaw, the highly exciting
and agreeable exercise of the rudiments of many trades. He hunted,
fought, killed, and skinned the beast. She tanned and dressed, cut and
sewed, with elaborate decoration. All very interesting.
Now comes the evolution of that industry on inevitable lines. First, the
division of trades; one hunted, another tanned, another sewed, and so
on. Then, as society increased, as skill increased, as productivity
increased, as commerce increased, we find these trades increasing in
importance, in bulk, and in complexity; until now we have one garment
going through a thousand hands between the wool or cotton fibre, and the
wearer of the dress.
In this process, a perfectly healthy social process, the fractional
details of the work become extremely small and simple, and our
mechanical ingenuity has made them smaller and simpler yet; till no more
skill or judgment is required than a factory child or poor dull sweated
“garment worker” can apply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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