Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
In view of even this much of our human efficiency, the exertion
requisite for a human creature to do his share of our human work is so
slight in proportion to our wealth of power that it is exquisitely
absurd for us to speak of it as an expense of energy. Where an
individual animal has to pour out his full stock of strength in hunting
his prey, or, if graminivorous, in wandering over great areas after
grass; man, collective, can produce and distribute food for a thousand
by the specialised services of ten men with machinery. The executive
efficiency of humanity is raised to such an enormous height that the
spectacle of human beings still spending their personal energy at long
hours of exhausting labour is an incredible paradox.
As far as power goes, one human being should be easily able to “pay for
his keep” for life in a year’s work or less. But we are by no means done
with the increase of efficiency. This five-times multiplied enginery of
ours would still be comparatively futile, if the governing agent, man,
had only the stimuli of the beast. The separate animal has his own
supply of cerebral energy. It is something. It enables him to
co-ordinate his forces, such as they are, and to undertake extreme
exertion when he has to, such as it is. He maintains this energy by
breathing, eating, and sleeping. Men can do these things too. Men, as
separate animals, have each his own supply of cerebral energy. But Man
has more.
Social energy is quite a different thing from individual energy. By as
much as the dynamic force of an elephant is greater than that of the
elephant’s bulk in monads, so is the dynamic force of a society greater
than that of the mere sum of its individual constituents,—and more.
Social energy has been accumulating in humanity from its birth. It is
not only that co-ordinate action allows the transmission of wider waves
of force than individual action, but that society in its organic
function continually stores force in material products, and so
establishes an ever enlarging magazine of power. This is where the
social body so aids and furthers the action of the social soul. Each
material object, so that it be a normal product, embodies and
continually transmits the force that made it.
We are supplied, by virtue of our social relation, with a large complex
brain area; the organ of social life. That great life we partake of in
using the social body, in the immediately effective tools, utensils, and
machines, and necessary material conveniences of life; but even more as
we have access to the great social battery, the work of art. A human
brain has not only the existent sum of social energy to draw on, but the
stored energy of all the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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