personal influence. The force of example, especially at second and third hand, usually moves only those whose position of need and desire already predisposes them in its direction. ••••• With the exceptions indicated, let us for the moment grant the claims made by the protagonist of heroic determinism in the fields of culture already considered. We may even leave uncontested far more exaggerated claims. The truth is that all the evidence is grandly irrelevant to the theory we are examining save on one extreme assumption which has never been seriously defended. This assumption is that the towering figures of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and science have also been the decisive figures in world history—political, social, and economic. Or, in modified form, this assumption holds that the consequences of the work of a Shakespeare, a Bach, a Raphael, a Newton, a Kant, or a Balzac have been among the major influences shaping the development of society, particularly in the spheres of politics, economics, and social organization.
To attribute such causal significance to the geniuses of the class listed borders on fantasy, except for the men of science, where the suggestion is further from fantasy but hardly closer to fact. Although it is indisputably true that the world of technology has been profoundly affected by the discoveries of “the heroes of science,” it must first be established that the major political, social, and historical changes are functions of technological development. Without denying in the least the pervasive influence of first steam and then power on our everyday life and its problems, it still remains true that new tools and techniques implement social policy rather than determine it. The tank and the plane revolutionized modern warfare just as they could have revolutionized our agriculture and transportation system had they been applied with comparable energy in these fields. But it would be foolish to say that they caused Fascism or the Second World War. To be sure, a technological advance may be followed overnight by widespread unemployment and want, but the more relevant, if less immediate, cause of that unemployment is a system of social production which makes the continued labour of these men, even if it would be serviceable to the community, unprofitable to those who employ them. Modern workers know better than their forebears, who tried to destroy the machines instead of subjecting them to social control.
