The Human Element By Dr. LUTHER H. GULICK Director of the Russell Sage Foundation Department of Child Hygiene THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN EFFICIENCY The object of social work is to induce a greater number of people to live more fully. The object of efficiency in business is to get more and better returns from investments. These two objects, I believe, if pursued far enough, are identical. In endeavoring to secure the maximum of life, the greatest variety and intensity of experiences, it is not our aim to act as social doctors, primarily curing or preventing social disease. We are not primarily engaged in the business of stopping evil, but in the business of bringing about more interesting communications and wholesome relations between people. A brick building is not the sum of the bricks which compose the whole; it is the relationship which exists between those component parts. It is our function to bring about such relations between individuals that compose society, that a convenient and wholesome social structure may be erected in which we may more fully live. You see that this conception is a wholly different one from that which aims to make as many individuals as possible good. The individual is the perfectly shaped brick. That is of importance, although its production is not the function of the social engineer. Your literature with reference to efficiency is full of what^has rightly been termed "the human element.,, Your discussions of fatigue, with proper period of rests, are brilliant examples of how the human element has been studied and standardized, and viewed as a part of a machine. Your results have been splendid, but the prevention of fatigue or of evil is not our highest endeavor. THE NEED OF VARIETY AND PROGRESS IN LIFE It is my function to-day to present the constructive side. I may say, by way of illustration, that there are different elements to the standardization of human life. Read at the first meeting of the Efficiency Society, held in New York City, March 18 and 19, 1912. 14 I
It was advanced some years ago that there was such a thing as a best human food. It was claimed that certain food elements entered into the circulation with less energy contribution from the nerves; a knowledge was assumed of just what food elements should be combined to get them in their most perfectly digested protoplasm, form, and quantity, fitted to the individual. But one of the extraordinary things about human life is that the very best foods we are able to select, prepare, and combine, after being eaten repeatedly become no longer the best quite often the worst food for that individual. We are dealing here, evidently, with something not capable of being standardized. During the last few years I have been interested in the air we breathe and the air in which our bodies are immersed. The thing which has become clearest to me, and which is now appearing in the form of a report, is that there is no such thing as best air, any more than there is such a thing as best food. The thermostat which we owe to you engineers is as deep a crime against human nature as could well be devised, because it assumes, without discussion or evidence, that there is such a thing as a best temperature, and that if we only get our bodies into the environments of that temperature, with as slight a fluctuation as possible, we will have the best conditions. Knowing anything about human temperature and environments we know that this is not true. The strongest races come from those places where it is cool by night and warm by day, where it is dark by night and light by day, where the relative humidity is lower by day than by night, and where the air moves more than three miles. If in our rooms the air moves more than half a mile we say the draft is terrible. Some of our largest hospitals, now under construction, are seriously debating the question of installing no system of ventilation, because it appears that under certain conditions the very perfection of regulating devices have produced conditions more deleterious to life than non-regulation of ventilation. I cannot but believe the trouble is not with the heating and ventilating engineers, but is in the standards produced by the physicians. A fundamental factor in human life is the need of variation. Nowhere does protoplasm reach perfection except where there are varying stimuli varying in intensity, in time, and in duration. These appear to be the three kinds of change needed. Under this fundamental changing, and I cannot name anything that changes more than protoplasm, under the environmental conditions, and without environmental conditions there is very little life, how can we produce stan- 14 2
dard conditions not subject to change? It is like the thermostat. One is applied to temperature, the other to human hopes, desires, and yearnings. No scheme is perfect which does not apply to hope and aspiration. Human life, savage or civilized man, is not satisfied with mere attainment. The first splendid thing about our kind is that we are unsatisfied and remain unsatisfied as long as we live. The goal of human endeavor is progress, not attainment. When the goal ever before us is achievement the attainment is forgotten. It vanishes the moment we approach it. I remember an ambition as a younger man to be able to earn five thousand dollars a year. I thought I would be satisfied. But had I earned that, I do not think it would have given the expected satisfaction. Attainment is satisfaction's death. Desire rather than fear is the great driver of human energy and power. Any scheme which omits the consideration of the fact that man must continually make progress, in reputation, in finances, in the opinion of his friends, will fall of its own weight. You will agree in your own lives that when you have reached your attainment it is time to drop out. We demand the possibility of going on and doing more. All human kind has a fundamental right to this. Man will strike, work inefficiently, and lose interest, unless desire has opportunities of achieving more and more. Our scheme must permit of progress to a different degree, and to a different extent, from any of those I have heard advocated by your speakers. This fundamental, variable element, and the danger of man specializing too long, have not been recognized. Every educational institution recognizes "intellectual staleness," and the need for a man getting away from all connections for a rest. Sundays and holidays are observed in all parts of the world. It makes little difference how the holidays originated, or how observed, it is a response of the social organism to this demand for change and variation. THE MEANS OF SUPPLYING THE NECESSARY ELEMENTS How can a balance be maintained between those operations of life which can, should, and must be machinized, and those demands of the soul, which make for beauty, romance, which preserve the brilliant impressions of youth, without which life is dull and dead throughout? This is a fundamental question for those of us who are concerned with social organization, and for all those affairs and institutions of society depending on the efficiency of human beings. We have shortened the working day most unprecedentedly, to eight hours 14 3
in the greatest fraction of cases. Gan the balance of one's life be so adjusted as to give romance, adventure, achievement? I think somehow it can, and that this is a part of the solution. I spoke in the beginning of the social structure. We must build our communities so that there shall be a center for social integration. Taking our school buildings, which belong to the community, and we, as parents, go there, and have community relations with each other, and vivid life of that nature in acknowledging each other, something will be gained. There is a great movement in the country which is looking to the use of school property for the purpose of integrating high interests in the community about it. That is one of the things which make for happiness, and happiness is as essential as bread. It appears that our communities are not mainly built up from the individuals who make the community. We voters fancy ourselves as the source of power in our own community, but when we stop and look about us we realize we are no more managers of affairs than is one of a thousand unorganized men kicking a football about on a great field, with three men banded together against them to get possession of the ball. The individual vote is lost, as compared to an organization, even of three men, whether commercial or political. There is a reaction against welfare work, as carried on by owners and managers of industrial concerns, owing to a feeling that this is done in lieu of proper wages. We have granted corporate rights to great business interests, and have given them protection. They are recognized as individuals, in every center, but as individuals they have not yet recognized their responsibility to the body which created them. When such business organizations, merely for their own purposes, endeavor to promote welfare work among their own employees, there are many to say they are doing that which they have no right to do. Their true relation to education and recreation would be supporting what the community erects rather than solely among their own employees. There are institutions which are criticized severely because many hundred thousand dollars are invested in lands for golf links and for other recreation purposes, thereby keeping the percentage below a certain necessary mark. It is said that this is one form of preventing legitimate returns to the workers for their labor. I have spoken of this because it is so frequently stated that the answer to this need of human individuals for variation and excitement of a rational sort can be supplied by a fraternal administration of the business in which they are engaged. Possibly the criticism is not true, but it demands an investigation, of a kind, as to how human 14 4
life can be arranged to be more Vivid, and along lines not heretofore given. If we can make the social structure so adequate that young people can see in the activities of daily life the chance to get the kind of romance young men find in daring, the excitement to be gained in the creating of things; when we can make our social organization have these features, so that exploring will be possible in the social world as it once was in the physical before we mastered it; then young people, men and women alike, will not get so far away from the things that are wholesome to find excitement. Excitement is a fundamental need, which explains the tremendous appeal of the dance hall, the moving picture show, and the saloon. Haven't you worked, worked for six weeks, so steadily in the same monotonous thing, for so long that you felt the only thing to do was to get drunk? This latter doubtless never happens, but it illustrates my point. 14 5