Economic development -- Social aspects; Social evolution; Social problems; Work
The Teacher is an exquisitely developed social functionary, wholly a
transmitter, using various arts and sciences to help him, but his own
art involving the subtlest psychological skill. When this temperament is
charged with most radical truths, when the teaching is a religion,—then
we have the great souls who have appeared again and again in history, so
charged with social energy that nothing, not difficulty, danger, death
itself, could stop them. They would teach and they did teach, to the
immense benefit of the society whose unconscious laws evolved them,
whose conscious laws destroyed them. The scientific discoverer has too
frequently shared the same fate; the inventor, the pioneer in any
change, has a hard time. “The Push” in Society is a place of honour, but
not an easy one.
Even in the more ordinary kinds of work we occasionally see the strong,
clear urgency of a specialised worker toward his special work, and his
pleasure in it; an urgency and a pleasure not related to honour or
payment, but to the work itself. The reason we see less of the natural
impulse to work in the main fields of labour is partly because we have
piled our ignorant contempt most particularly on the kind of work we
most needed, and partly because we have added to our contempt the
heaviest practical difficulties by careful cutting off the general
worker from his full share of social nutrition. The rank and file of
humanity, as a result of our misconceptions about work, are so drained
of nervous energy from generation to generation by being overtaxed in
labour, and so defrauded of social nourishment by our system of
“payment” based on those misconceptions, that it is marvellous indeed to
see the work they do under these conditions, and not marvellous at all
to see their steady tendency toward pauperism, criminalism, and all
disease.
Of London it is stated that when the labourer from the country comes
into the city to work, the second generation of his line is inferior in
health, strength, and ability, the third generation much crippled and
diseased, and _there is no fourth_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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