Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
Are men so happy now, each trying to take care of himself and his
family, that they should dread the peace and ease given by society’s
vast resources in full circulation? Are women so happy now, either the
squaw or the parasite, that they should dread becoming full human
beings, active, conscious members of society? What this change will mean
to us no one can fully measure, but those who know anything of the real
heart of humanity, those who can interpret the gleams of light that
break through all religions, those who ever felt the soul lift and light
and swell with power and joy, under the influence of music, or painting,
or speech, or any form of human work, can tell us something of it.
We have been taught, in tattered remnants of worn-out faiths, to despise
human nature. We, forsooth, mere worms and weaklings, “as prone to evil
as the sparks are to fly upward,” we were born in iniquity, conceived in
sin, doomed to suffer here, and likely to suffer forever, important
worms that we were!
We have been taught in later days, by half-seeing students of science,
that we were but beasts, and must fight it out as they did, our progress
lying in the slow and painful process of survival.
What a change in thought, in feeling, in action, when we see that we are
the crowning form of created life, we, collectively, though never so
much “worms” taken personally. That Humanity is the one fact we should
realise, and that in it we find free scope and full satisfaction for all
the vague aspirations which have haunted the individual. That in that
organic social life we are all held together by our mutual service, by
our work, and that in our work and only in our work lies growth, lies
peace, lies the highest human duty, lies happiness.
Happiness, for a human being, is in full, true, conscious, social
relation:
To feel the world’s life, unbroken in its steady pour, from the inchoate
nebulæ, through age on age of changing orders, into the spreading growth
of an organised democracy. To feel our own historic family, the immense
racial pride of the long ascent, the conquest of elements, of plants, of
animals, the unquenchable fire of progress, the vast and rapid increase
of the race: To feel the extending light of common consciousness as
Society comes alive!—the tingling “I” that reaches wider and wider in
every age, that is sweeping through the world to-day like an electric
current, that lifts and lights and enlarges the human soul in kindling
majesty: To feel the power! the endless power! Not only the ceaseless
stream of the universal Godness, but our interminable array of
batteries, full charged; the stored energy of all time embodied in poem
and story, in picture and statue, in music and architecture, in every
tool, utensil, and giant machine wherein the human brain and the human
hand have made force incarnate:
And, so feeling, to Do:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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