But the organic concept, when liberally interpreted and applied, carries no such restrictive implication, and its distinctively biological association should not rule it out from the work of wider valuation here required.
As a provisional statement of our standard of valuation, 'organic welfare'
has two advantages.In the first place, it supplies an admittedly sound method of estimating those physical costs and utilities with which the major part of industry and of its product is associated.Even in the most advanced civilisation of to-day, economic processes are primarily physical in the efforts they evoke and in the needs they satisfy; the expenditure and recoupment of physical energy constitute the first and most prominent aspect of industry.In tracing the origins of human industry, we shall find this rooted in what appear as half-instinctive animal functions for the satisfaction of 'organic' needs, individual or racial.The primitive direction of productive effort is evidently 'organic.'
Again, the 'organic' point of view avoids two grave errors common to the more mechanical treatment of an economic science which has subordinated man to commercial wealth.It insists upon regarding the productive effort which goes into any work of production and the satisfaction which proceeds from the consumption of any product, not as a separate cost and a separate utility, but in their total bearing upon the life of the producer or consumer.
The mechanical separatism of the ordinary economic view follows from a treatment in which the labour bestowed on a product is only a 'cost' in the same sense as the raw materials and tools employed in making it, all alike purchased as separate commodities at a market in which they figure as fractions of a Supply.Similarly with the ordinary economic treatment of consumption.Each consumable is regarded as yielding a quality of utility or satisfaction valued on its own account, whereas in reality its consumable value depends upon the ways in which it affects the entire organic process of consumption.Every speeding-up of a machine-process, or every reduction of the hours of labour, affects for good or evil both the economic and the human efficiency of the whole man: every rise or fall of remuneration for his labour similarly reacts upon the standard of life.Nor is this all.Current economic science has not only treated each cost and each utility as a separate item or unit of economic power, it has treated each man as two men, producer and consumer.The acquiescence in the economic tendency towards a constantly increasing specialisation of man as producer, a constantly increasing generalisation of man as consumer, is only intelligible upon the supposition that the arts of production and consumption have no relation to one another.5 The standpoint of organic welfare reduces to its natural limits this useful distinction of producer and consumer, and enables us to trace the true interactions of the two processes.In a word, it obliges us to value every act of production or consumption with regard to its aggregate effect upon the life and character of the agent.
§8.Finally, a 'social' interpretation of industry is not possible except by treating society as an organic structure.Whether society be regarded as an 'organism' with a life conceived as comprising and regulating the life of its individuals, in the same manner as a biological organism that of its cells, or as an 'organisation' contrived by individuals entirely for the furtherance of their private ends, it must be treated as a vital structure capable of working well or working ill.I say vital structure, not spiritual structure, for I hold the tendency to interpret social organisation exclusively in terms of ethical ends, and as existing simply for 'the realisation of an ethical order,' to be unwarranted.The men who form or constitute a Society, or who enter any sort of social organisation, enter body and soul, they carry into it the inseparable character of the organic life, with all the physical and spiritual activities and purposes it contains.
Particular modes of social organisation, as, for example, a Church, may be treated as directed primarily to spiritual ends, though even there the separation is not finally valid.But society in the broader sense, even though conceived not as an 'organism' but merely as an organisation, must be regarded as existing for various sorts of human purposes.For the impulses to form societies are rooted in broad instincts of gregariousness and of sexual and racial feeling, which are best described as organic, and, though these instincts become spiritualised and rationalised with the progress of the human mind, they never cease to carry a biological import.
Even though one takes, therefore, the extremely individualistic view of Society, regarding it as nothing more than a set of arrangements for furthering the life of individual men and women, entirely a means or instrument for achieving the ends of 'personality,' our human valuation of industry will require consideration of its reactions upon the structure and working of these social arrangements.
