The Man‐Made World
Industry, as a department of Social Economics, is little understood.
Heretofore we have viewed this field from several wholly erroneous
positions. From the Hebrew (and wholly androcentric) religious teaching, we have regarded labor as a curse.
Nothing could be more absurdly false. Labor is not merely a means
of supporting human life—it is human life. Imagine a race of beings living without labor! They must be the rudest savages.
Human work consists in specialized industry and the exchange of its products; and without it is no civilization. As industry develops, civilization develops; peace expands; wealth increases; science and art help on the splendid total. Productive industry, and its concomitant of distributive industry cover the major field of human life.
If our industry was normal, what should we see?
A world full of healthy, happy people; each busily engaged in what
he or she most enjoys doing. Normal Specialization, like all our voluntary processes, is accompanied by keen pleasure; and any check or interruption to it gives pain and injury. Whosoever works at what he loves is well and happy. Whoso works at what he does not
love is ill and miserable. It is very bad economics to force unwilling industry. That is the weakness of slave labor; and of wage labor also where there is not full industrial education and freedom of choice.
Under normal conditions we should see well developed, well trained
specialists happily engaged in the work they most enjoyed; for reasonable hours (any work, or play either, becomes injurious if done too long); and as a consequence the whole output of the world
would be vastly improved, not only in quantity but in quality.
Plain are the melancholy facts of what we do see. Following that pitiful conception of labor as a curse, comes the very old and androcentric habit of despising it as belonging to women, and then to slaves.
As a matter of fact industry is in its origin feminine; that is, maternal.
It is the overflowing fountain of mother‐love and mother‐power which first prompts the human race to labor; and for long ages men
performed no productive industry at all; being merely hunters and fighters.