The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Leisure and Mechanism
LEISURE AND MECHANISM
TO any one who reflects upon industrialism it is clear that it requires, for its successful practice, somewhat different virtues from those that were required in a pre-industrial community. But there is, to my mind, wide-spread misapprehension as to the nature of those virtues, owing to the fact that moralists confine their survey to a short period of time, and are more interested in the success of the individual than in that of the race. There is also, in all conventional moralists, a gross ignorance of psychology, making them unable to realize that certain virtues imply certain correlated vices, so that in recommending a virtue the consideration which ought to weigh is: Does this virtue, with its correlative vice, outweigh the opposite virtue with its correlative vice? The fact that a virtue is good in itself is not enough; it is necessary to take account of the vices that it entails and the virtues that it excludes.
I shall define as virtues those mental and physical habits which tend to produce a good community, and as vices those that tend to produce a bad one. Different people have different conceptions of what makes a community good or bad, and it is difficult to find arguments by which to establish the preferability of one's own conception. I cannot hope, therefore, to appeal to those whose tastes are very different from my own, but I hope and believe that there is nothing very singular in my own tastes.
For my part, I should judge a community to be in a good state if I found a great deal of instinctive happiness, a prevalence of feelings of friendship and affection rather than hatred and envy, a capacity for creating and enjoying beauty, and the intellectual curiosity which leads to the advancement and diffusion of knowledge. I should judge a community to be in a bad state if I found much unhappiness from thwarted instinct, much hatred and envy, little sense of beauty, and little intellectual curiosity. As between these different elements of excellence or the reverse, I do not pretend to judge. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that intellectual curiosity and artistic capacity were found to be in some degree incompatible, I should find it difficult to say which ought to be preferred. But I should certainly think better of a community which contained something of both than of one which contained more of the one and none of the other. I do not, however, believe that there is any incompatibility among the four ingredients I have mentioned as constituting a good community, namely: happiness, friendship, enjoyment of beauty, and love of knowledge.
It is to be observed that we do not define as a virtue merely what leads to these good things for its possessor, but what leads to them for the community to which he belongs. For different purposes, the community that has to be considered is different. In the case of acts which have little effect outside the family, the family will be the community concerned. In the official actions of a mayor, the community concerned will be the municipality; in internal politics it will be the nation, and in foreign politics the world. Theoretically, it is always the whole world that is concerned; practically, the effects outside some limited circle are often negligible.
However moralists may recommend altruism, all the moral exhortations that have had wide-spread effects have appealed to purely selfish desires. Buddhism urged virtue on the ground that it led to nirvana; Christianity, on the ground that it led to heaven. In each of these great religions, virtue was that line of conduct which would be pursued by a prudent egoist. Neither of these, however, has much influence on the practical morality of our own time. For energetic people, the moral code of our time is that of "success"—the code which my generation learnt in childhood from Smiles' Self-help and which modern young men learn from efficiency experts. In this code, "success" is defined as the acquisition of a large income. According to this code, it is wicked for a young man to be late at the office, even if what has delayed him is fetching the doctor for a sudden illness of his child; but it is not wicked to oust a competitor by well-timed tale-bearing. Competition, hard work, and rigid self-control are demanded by this code; its rewards are dyspepsia and unutterable boredom, in all who have not a quite exceptional physique. By comparison with its votaries, St Simeon Stylites was a voluptuary; nevertheless they, like him, are pure egoists.
In sociology, we are concerned with men in the mass, not with rare and exceptional individuals. It is possible for a few saints to live a life which is in part unselfish, but it does not appear to be possible for the vast majority of mankind. The study of psychology, and more particularly of psychoanalysis, has torn aside the cloaks that our egoism wears, and has shown that when we think we are being unselfish, this is hardly ever in fact the case. It would therefore be useless to preach a morality which required unselfishness on the part of any large number of men. I do not think myself that there is any need to do so. Our natural impulses, properly directed and trained, are, I believe, capable of producing a good community, provided praise and blame are wisely apportioned.
It is through the operation of praise and blame that the positive morality of a community becomes socially effective. We all like praise and dislike blame; moreover, rewards and punishments often accompany them. "Positive morality"—i. e. the habit of attaching praise to certain types of behaviour and blame to certain other types—has enormous influence on conduct. In Somaliland, and formerly among the aborigines of Formosa, a man was not thought sufficiently manly to deserve a wife until he had killed someone: in fact, he was expected to bring the head of his victim to the wedding ceremony. The result was that even the mildest and gentlest of men, in obedience to the moral sense of the community, felt obliged to practise homicide. This custom is rapidly dying out among savages, but among the white races the same feeling persists as regards military service in wartime. Thus in spite of the egoism of human nature, the positive morality of neighbours forces men into conduct quite different from that which they would pursue if positive morality were different; they even often sacrifice their lives for fear of being blamed. Positive morality is therefore a very tremendous power. I believe that at present it is quite unadapted to industrialism, and that it will have to be radically changed if industrialism is to survive.
There is one point in which the definition of virtue and vice given above departs from tradition and from common practice, We defined a virtue as a habit which tends to produce a good community, and a vice as one which tends to produce a bad community. In thus judging by results, we agreed in one important respect with the utilitarian school of moralists, among whom Bentham and the two Mills were the most eminent. The traditional view is different; it holds that certain specified classes of actions are vicious, and that abstinence from all these is virtue. It is wicked to murder or steal (except on a large scale); it is wicked to speak ill of those in power, from the Deity to the policeman; above all, it is wicked to have sexual intercourse-outside marriage. These prohibitions may, in our degenerate age, be defended by utilitarian arguments, but in some cases—e. g. refusal of divorce for insanity—the utilitarian arguments are very far-fetched, and are obviously not what is really influencing the minds of those who use them. What is influencing their minds is the view that certain classes of acts are "wicked," quite independently of their consequences. I regard this view as superstitious, but it would take us too far from our theme to argue the question here. I shall therefore assume, without more ado, that actions are to be judged by the results to be expected from actions of that kind, and not by some supposed a priors moral code. I do not mean—what would be obviously impracticable—that we should habitually calculate the effects of our actions. What I mean is that, in deciding what sort of moral instruction should be given to the young, or what sort of actions should be punished by the criminal law, we should do our best to consider what sort of actions will promote or hinder the general well-being. It might also seem as if this were a platitude. Yet a tremendous change would be effected if this platitude were acted upon. Our education, our criminal law, and our standards of praise and blame, would become completely different from what they are at present. How they would be altered, I shall now try to show.
Let us consider one by one the four kinds of excellence which we mentioned, beginning with instinctive happiness.
Instinctive Happiness. I mean by this the sort of thing that is diminished by ill-health and destroyed by a bad liver, the kind of delight in life which one finds always more strongly developed in the young of any mammalian species than in the old. I doubt whether there is anything else that makes as much difference to the value of life from the point of view of the person who has to live it. Those who have instinctive delight in life are happy except when they have positive causes of unhappiness; those who do not have it are unhappy except when they have positive causes of happiness. Moreover outward causes of happiness have more effect upon those who delight in life, while those who do not are more affected by outward causes of unhappiness. Of all personal goods, delight in life is therefore the greatest; and it is a condition for many others. I do not deny that it can be too dearly purchased, if it is obtained at the cost of injustice and stupidity. In the advanced industrial nations, apart from the agricultural population, I can think of only one small class that lives so as to preserve it, namely, the male portion of the British upper class. The public schools develop a boy's physique at the expense of his intelligence and sympathy; in this way, by the help of a good income, he often succeeds in preserving instinctive happiness. But the system is essentially aristocratic, so that it cannot be regarded as in any degree a contribution to the solution of our problem. Our problem is to preserve instinctive happiness for the many, not only for a privileged few.
The causes of instinctive happiness could best be set forth by a medical man, but without medical knowledge observation makes it easy to see broadly what they are. Physical health and vigour come first, but are obviously not alone sufficient. It is necessary to have scope for instinctive desires, and also for instinctive needs which often exist without corresponding explicit desires. Very few adults, whether men or women, can preserve instinctive happiness in a state of celibacy; this applies even to those women who have no conscious desire for sexual satisfaction. On this point, the evidence of psychoanalysis may be taken as conclusive. Many women and some men need also to have children sooner or later. To most men, some kind of progressive career is important; both to men and women, a certain amount of occupation imposed by necessity, not chosen for its pleasurable quality, is necessary for the avoidance of boredom. But too much work and too little leisure are more destructive of instinctive happiness than too little work and too much leisure. Another essential is the right amount of human companionship, neither too much nor too little; but as to what is the right amount, people vary greatly. Our instinctive nature seems to be fairly adapted to the hunting stage, as may be seen from the passion of rich men for shooting big game, killing birds, and careering after foxes. In the hunting stage, men had periods of violent exertion alternating with complete quiescence, while women had activities which were more continuous, but less strenuous and less exciting. This probably accounts for the fact that men are more prone to gambling than women. One result of adaptation to the hunting stage is that most people like loud noise at times of excitement, alternating with silence at other times. In modern industrial life the noise is continuous, and this certainly has a debilitating nervous effect. T believe that almost everyone has a need (though often not a desire) for the sights and smells of the country. The delight of slum children on a country holiday is of a kind that points to the satisfaction of an instinctive need which urban life cannot supply. In recovering from a dangerous illness, the pleasure of being still alive consists mainly in joy in sunshine and the smell of rain and other such sensations familiar to primitive man.
The difference between needs and desires is important in the consideration of instinctive happiness. Our desires are mainly for things which primitive man did not get without difficulty: food and drink (especially the latter) leadership of the tribe, improvements in the methods of hunting and fighting. But we have many needs which are not associated with desires, because under primitive conditions these needs were always satisfied. Such are the needs of country sensations, of occasional silence and occasional solitude, of alternations of excitement and quiescence. To some extent, sex and maternity in women come under this head, because in a primitive community men see to the satisfaction of these feminine needs without any necessity for female co-operation. Per contra, there are desires which do not correspond to instinctive needs. The most important of these are the desires for drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. The fact that these desires are so readily stimulated by habit is an example of natural maladjustment from a Darwinian point of view. They differ from instinctive needs in two ways. First, from the point of view of survival, their satisfaction is not biologically useful; drugs do not help a man either to survive, himself, or to have a numerous progeny. Secondly, from the psychological point of view, the craving that they satisfy depends upon the habit of taking them, not upon a pre-existent need. The instinctive dissatisfaction which leads a man to take to drink is usually something wholly unconnected with alcohol, such as business worries or disappointment in love. Drugs are a substitute for the thing instinctively needed, but an unsatisfactory substitute, because they never bring full instinctive satisfaction.[1]
With the advance of what is called civilization, our social and material environment has changed faster than our instincts, so that there has been an increasing discrepancy between the acts to which we are impelled by instinct and those to which we are constrained by prudence. Up to a point, this is quite unavoidable. Murder, robbery, and rape are actions which may be prompted by instinct, but an orderly society must repress them. Work, especially when many are employed in one undertaking, requires regularity, which is utterly contrary to our untrained nature. And although a man who followed his impulses in a state of nature would (at least in a cold climate) do a good deal of work in the course of an average day, yet it is very rare indeed that a man has any spontaneous impulse to the work which he has to do in a modern industrial community. He works for the sake of the pay, not because he likes the work. There are of course exceptions: artists, inventors, men of learning, healthy mothers who have few children and strong maternal instincts, people in positions of authority, a small percentage of sailors and peasants. But the exceptions are not sufficiently numerous to be an important section of the whole. The irksomeness of work has no doubt always existed since men took to agriculture; it is mentioned in Genesis as a curse, and heaven has always been imagined as a place where no one does any work. But industrial methods have certainly made work more remote from instinct, and have destroyed the joy in craftsmanship which gave handicraftsmen something of the satisfaction of the artist. I do not think that, if industrial methods survive, we can hope to make the bulk of necessary work pleasant. The best we can hope is to diminish its amount, but there is no doubt that its amount could be diminished very greatly. It is chiefly in this direction that we must look for a lessening of the instinctive dissatisfaction involved in work.
A "return to nature," such as Rousseau's disciples dreamt of, is not possible without a complete break-up of our civilization. Regimentation, especially, is of the very essence of industrialism, which would necessarily perish without it. If this is an evil, and is unavoidable, our aim must be to have as little of it as is possible. This aim will be realized by making the hours of industrial labour as short as is compatible with the production of necessaries, and leaving the remaining hours of the day entirely untrammelled. Four hours' boredom a day is a thing which most people could endure; and this is probably about what would be required.
In many other respects, the restraints upon instinct which now exist could be greatly diminished. Production at present has two correlative defects: that it is competitive, and that it is thought important to produce as much as possible. A great deal less work is required now to produce a given amount of goods than was required before the industrial revolution, and yet people live at higher pressure than they did then. This is chiefly due to competition. An immense amount of labour is wasted in getting orders and securing markets. At times when there is a great deal of unemployment, those who are not unemployed are overworked, because otherwise employers could not make a profit. The competitive management of industry for profit is the source of the trouble. For the same reason there is a desire to maximize production, because, with industrial methods, the production of immense quantities of a commodity is more capable of yielding a profit than the production of moderate quantities.[2] The whole urgency of the modern business world is towards speeding up, greater efficiency, more intense international competition, when it ought to be towards more ease, less hurry, and combination to produce goods for use rather than profit. Competition, since the industrial revolution, is an anachronism, leading inevitably to all the evils of the modern world.
The sense of strain, which is characteristic of all grades in an industrial community from the highest to the lowest, is due to instinctive maladjustment. Every kind of failure to satisfy deep instinctive needs produces strain, but the manifestations are somewhat different according to the instinct which is thwarted. The chief needs thwarted by industrialism, as at present conducted, are: the need of spontaneous and variable activities, the need of occasional quiet and solitude, and the need of contact with the earth. This applies to the working classes, but in the middle classes the thwarting of instinct is much more serious. A man who has any ambition cannot marry young, must be very careful how he has children, must if possible marry a girl whose father will help him professionally rather than a girl he likes, and when married must avoid infidelity, except so furtively as not to be found out. Our society is so imbued with the belief that happiness consists in financial success that men do not realize how much they are losing, and how much richer their lives might be if they cared less for money. But the results of their instinctive dissatisfaction are all the worse for being unconscious. Middle-class men, when they are no longer quite young, are generally filled with envy: envy of their more successful colleagues, envy of the young, and (strange as it may seem) envy of working-men. The result of the first kind of envy is to make them hostile to all intellectual or artistic eminence until it is so well-established that they dare not challenge it; of the second, to make them rejoice in war because it gives them a chance to thwart the young who have to do the fighting; of the third, to make them politically opposed to everything calculated to benefit wage-earners, such as education, sanitation, maintenance during unemployment, knowledge of birth control (which the middle class practise as a matter of course) housing reform, and so on. They believe that their opposition to these measures is based on economy and a desire to keep down the taxes, but in this they deceive themselves, because they do not object to the spending of vastly greater sums on armaments and wars. The same man, often, will object to the education rate on the ground that the poor have larger families than the well-to-do, and to birth control on the ground that it is immoral and unnatural except for those whose income is fairly comfortable. Men are strangely unconscious of their passions, and the envy which dominates most middle-aged professional men is a thing of which they know nothing, though the methods of psychoanalysis reveal it unerringly.
The failure of instinctive satisfaction in the wage-earning classes is less profound than in the professional classes, because, whatever Marxians may say, they have more freedom in the really important matters, such as marriage. Of course this greater freedom is being rapidly diminished by improvement in police methods, and by the continual tightening up of the "moral" standard through the activities of thwarted middle-class busy-bodies. This has gone so far that at present, in English law, the penalty for deserting a vindictive wife, if you are a wage-earner, is imprisonment for life.[3] In spite of this tendency, wage-earners, as yet, in good times, suffer less instinctive repression than professionals, because they are less dominated by respectability and snobbery. Nevertheless, the failure to satisfy instinctive needs is serious, particularly as regards spontaneity., The effect shows itself in love of excitement, thoughtless sentimentalism, and (in the more intelligent) hatred of richer people or of foreign nations.
It is evident that the first steps towards a cure for these evils are being taken by the trade unions, in those parts of their policy which are most criticized, such as restriction of output, refusal to believe that the only necessity is more production, shortening of hours, and so on. It is only by these methods that industrialism can be humanized and can realize the possibilities of good which are latent in it. It could be used to lighten physical labour, and to set men free for more agreeable activities. Hitherto, the competitive system has prevented its being so used. It should have made life more leisurely, but it has made it more hustling. Increase of leisure, diminution of hustle, are the ends to be sought, not mere quantitative increase of production. The trade unions have clearly perceived this, and have persisted in spite of lectures from every kind of middle- or upper-class pundit. This is one reason why there is more hope from self-government in industry than from State Socialism. The Bolsheviks, when they had established State Socialism, ranged themselves on the side of the worst capitalists on all the matters we have been considering. It is obvious that this must always be the case when conditions of work are determined bureaucratically by officials, instead of by the workers themselves.
Friendly Feeling. It is impossible to find any single phrase to describe adequately the whole of what I wish to include under this head. I can, I think, best explain by avoiding hackneyed words which seem to convey the correct meaning, but in fact fail to do so. An average human being is indifferent to the good or evil fortune: of most other human beings, but has an emotional interest in a certain number of his fellow-creatures. This interest may involve pleasure in their good fortune and pain in their evil fortune; or it may involve pain in their good fortune and pleasure in their evil fortune; or it may involve one of these attitudes in certain respects and the other in certain other respects. I shall call these three attitudes, friendly, hostile, and mixed, respectively. Broadly speaking, the second of the four goods which we wished to see realized in a community is the friendly attitude combined with as little as possible of the hostile attitude. But this is only a rough preliminary characterization of what I mean.
Biologically speaking, the purpose of life is to leave a large number of descendants. Our instincts, in the main, are such as would be likely to achieve this result in a rather uncivilized community. Biological success, in such a community, is achieved partly by co-operation, partly by competition. The former is promoted by friendly feeling, the latter by hostile feeling. Thus on the whole, we feel friendly towards those with whom it would be biologically advantageous to co-operate if we lived in uncivilized conditions, and hostile towards those with whom, in like conditions, it would pay us to compete. In all genuine friendship and hostility there is an instinctive basis connected with biological egoism (which includes the survival of descendants). Some religious teachers and moralists preach friendly feeling as a duty, but this only leads to hypocrisy. A great deal of morality is a cloak for hostility posing as "true kindness," and enabling the virtuous to think that in persecuting others out of their "vices" they are conferring a benefit. When I speak of friendly feeling I do not mean the sort that can be produced by preaching; I mean the sort which is instinctive and spontaneous. There are two methods of increasing the amount of this kind of feeling. One is physiological, by regulating the action of the glands and the liver; everyone knows that regular exercise makes one think better of other people. The other is economic and political, by producing a community in which the interests of different people harmonize as much as possible and as obviously as possible. Moral and religious teaching is supposed to be a third method, but this view seems to rest on a faulty psychology.
The stock instance of the friendly attitude is the feeling of a maternal mother for a young child. As the most obvious example of the unfriendly attitude we may take jealousy. Sex-love is, of course, a good example of instinctive co-operation, since no one can have descendants without another person's help. But in practice it is so hedged about by jealousy that, as a rule, it affords a less adequate example of friendly feeling than maternal affection. Paternal affection involves, as a rule, a mixed attitude. There is usually some genuine affection, but also much love of power, and much desire that children should reflect credit on their parents. A man will be pleased if his boy wins a prize at school, but displeased if he inherits money from his grandfather, so as to become independent of the paternal authority as soon as he is twenty-one. There is a melancholy satisfaction when one's boy dies for his country, of a sort not calculated to increase filial affection in those young men who witness it:
"Snug at the club two fathers sat,
Cross, goggle-eyed, and full of chat.
One of them said: 'My eldest lad
Writes cheery letters from Bagdad.
But Arthur's getting all the fun
At Arras with his nine-inch gun.'
'Yes,' wheezed the other, 'that's the luck!
My boy's quite broken-hearted, stuck
In England training all this year.
Still, if there's truth in what we hear,
The Huns intend to ask for more
Before they bolt across the Rhine.'
I watched them toddle through the door—
These impotent old friends of mine."
Of course war affords the supreme example of instinctive co-operation and hostility. In war, the instinctive prime mover is hostility; the friendly feeling towards our own side is derivative from hatred of the enemy. If we hear that some compatriot with whom we are unacquainted has been captured by the enemy and brutally ill-used, we shall be full of sympathy, whereas if his brother dies a lingering death from cancer we shall take it as a mere statistical fact. If we hear that the enemy underfeed their prisoners, we shall feel genuine indignation, even if we are ourselves large employers paying wages which compel underfeeding. The formula is: sympathy with compatriots in all that they suffer through the common enemy, but indifference to all that they suffer from other causes. This shows that, as we asserted, the friendly feelings arising during war are derivative from the hostile ones, and could not exist in the same form or with the same wide-spread intensity if hatred did not exist to stimulate them. Those who see in national co-operation during war an instinctive mechanism which could be applied to international co-operation during peace have failed to understand the nature of the mechanism which war brings into play, or the fact that without enmity there is no stimulus to set it in motion.
There is, it is true, in addition to sex and parenthood, a form of instinctive co-operation which involves no enemy, and looks at first sight very hopeful as a social incentive. I mean that kind of co-operation in work which, so far as human beings are concerned, one finds most developed among uncivilized peoples, and which is carried to its highest perfection by ants and bees. Rivers, in his book on Instinct and the Unconscious (page 94 ff.) describes how the Melanesians carry out collective work apparently without any need of previous arrangements, by the help of the gregarious instinct. I do not believe, however, that much use can be made of this mechanism by civilized communities. The instinct involved appears to be very much weakened by civilization, and is probably incompatible with even the average degree of intellectual development that exists where school education is common. Moreover, even when it exists most strongly, it is not such as to make complicated large organizations possible. It seems also that with the progress of intelligence the individual grows more self-contained, less receptive to immediate impressions from other personalities, which survive chiefly in fragmentary and sporadic forms such as hypnotism. The primitive instinct for collective work is certainly one to be borne in mind, but I do not think it has any very important contribution to make to the solution of industrial problems.
In order to stimulate friendly feeling and diminish hostile feeling, the things that seem most important are: physical well-being, instinctive satisfaction, and absence of obvious conflict between the interests of different individuals or groups. On the first two heads, we have already said enough in considering instinctive happiness. The last head, however, raises some interesting points. Our present society, under the influence of Liberal ideals, has become one which, while it retains immense social inequalities, leaves it open to any man to rise or sink in the social scale. This has resulted from combining capitalism with a measure of "equality of opportunity." In mediaeval society the inequalities were as great as they are now, but they were stereotyped, and accepted by almost everybody as ordained by God. They did not therefore cause much envy, or much conflict between different classes. In the society that socialists aim at, there will not be inequality in material goods, and therefore economic competition and economic envy will be non-existent. But at present we have the evils of the mediaeval system without its advantages: we have retained the injustices, while destroying the conception of life which made men tolerate them. It is evident that, if the prevalence of competition and envy is to be overcome, an economically stereotyped society is essential. It is also evident that, in the absence of the mediaeval belief that hereditary social grades are of divine ordinance, the only stereotyped society in which people can acquiesce is one which secures economic justice in an obvious form—that is to say, economic equality for all who are willing to work. Until that is secured, our economic system will continue to grind out hatred and ill-will. What is called "equality of opportunity" is of course not real equality, even of opportunity, so long as we retain inheritance of private property and better education for the children of the well-to-do. Inequality must breed strife unless it is supported by a philosophy or religion which even the unfortunate accept. At present, no such doctrine is conceivable. Therefore equality in material goods is an essential condition for the prevalence of friendly feelings between different classes, and even between the more fortunate and the less fortunate members of the same class, or between rivals who hope in time to outdistance each other. A society will not produce much in the way of mental goods unless it is materially stereotyped. This applies to all kinds of mental goods, but for the present it is only friendliness that concerns us.
In preaching the advantages of a materially stereotyped society, I am conscious of running counter to the real religion of our age—the religion of material progress. We think that it would be a great misfortune if the rate at which new mechanical inventions are made were to slacken, or if people were to grow lazy and easy-going. For my part, since I came to know China, I have come to regard "progress" and "efficiency" as the great misfortunes of the Western world. I do not think it is worth while to preach difficult virtues or extremes of self-denial, because the response is not likely to be great. But I have hopes of 1aziness as a gospel. I think that if our education were strenuously directed to that end, by men with all the fierce energy produced by our present creed and way of life, it might be possible to induce people to be lazy. I do not mean that no one should work at all, but that few people should work more than is necessary for getting a living. At present, the leisure hours of a man’s life are on the whole innocent, but his working hours, those for which he is paid (especially if he is highly paid) are as a rule harmful. If we were all lazy, and only worked under the spur of hunger, our whole society would be much happier. Think of a man like the late Lord Northcliffe, working like a galley-slave to produce bloodshed and misery on a scale hitherto unknown in human history. How admirable it would have been if he could have been persuaded to lie in the sun, or play bridge, or study chess-problems, or even take to drink. But, alas, such men have no vices.
Enjoyment of Beauty. On this subject it is not necessary to say much, as the defects of industrial civilization in this respect are generally recognized. It may, I think, be taken as agreed that industrialism, as it exists now, destroys beauty, creates ugliness, and tends to destroy artistic capacity. None of these are essential characteristics of industrialism. They spring from two sources: first, that industrialism is new and revolutionary; second, that it is competitive and commercial. The result of the first is that people do not aim at permanence in industrial products, and are loath to lavish much care on something that may be superseded by to-morrow. The result of the second is that manufacturers value their wares, not for their intrinsic excellence, but for the profit to be made out of them, which is (roughly) the excess of their apparent value above what they are really worth, so that every defect not evident at first sight is advantageous to the producer. It is obvious that both these causes of ugliness might be expected to be absent from an industrialism which was stereotyped and socialistic, since it would be neither revolutionary nor worked for profit. It therefore remains only to consider the third point, namely, artistic capacity.
It would seem, from the history of art, that nine-tenths of artistic capacity, at least, depends upon tradition, and one-tenth, at most, upon individual merit. All the great flowering periods of art have come at the end of a slowly maturing tradition. There has, of course, been no time for industrialism to generate a tradition, and perhaps, if the absence of tradition were the only thing at fault, we could wait calmly for the operation of time. But I fear that the other element, individual artistic merit, without which no good tradition can be created, can hardly exist in an atmosphere of industrialized commercialism. Commerce which is not industrial is often extraordinarily favourable to art; Athens, Venice, Florence are noteworthy examples. But commerce which is industrial seems to have quite different artistic results. This comes probably from the utilitarian attitude which it generates. An artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve for the business of life. To the ordinary man, grass is always green, but to the artist it is all sorts of different colours according to circumstances. This sort of thing, in anybody who is not already a famous artist, strikes the practical business man as a waste of time—it interferes with standardizing and cataloguing. The result is that, although eminent artists are fêted and paid highly, the artistic attitude of mind is not tolerated in the young. A modern industrial community, when it wants an artist, has to import him from abroad; it then pays him such vast sums that his head is turned and he begins to like money better than art. When the whole world has adopted commercial industrialism, the artistic habit of mind will everywhere be stamped out in youth, by people who cannot see any value in it unless its possessor is already labelled as a celebrity. This points to the same requirements as we found before: a society which is stable as regards the material side of life and the methods of production, where industrialism has ceased to be competitive and is used to make life more leisurely instead of more strenuous. And the first step towards this end is the general diffusion of a less energetic conception of the good life.
Knowledge. The strongest case for commercial industrialism can be made out under the head of scientific knowledge. Since the industrial revolution there has been an enormous increase both in the general level of education and in the number of men devoted to learning and research. The importance of science for industrial progress is very evident, and all industrial States encourage scientific research. But even in this sphere the utilitarian habit of mind inseparable from our present system has deleterious effects, which are only beginning to be evident. Unless some people love knowledge for its own sake, quite independently of its possible uses, the new discoveries will only concern the working out of ideas inherited from disinterested investigators. Mendelism is now studied by hosts of agriculturists and stock-breeders, but Mendel was a monk who spent his leisure enjoying his peas-blossoms. A million years of practical agriculturists would never have discovered Mendelism. Wireless is of great practical importance: it facilitates slaughter in war, the dissemination of journalistic falsehood in time of peace, and the broadcasting of trivialities to relieve the tedium of evening hours not devoted to success. But the men who made it possible—Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz—were none of them the least interested in furthering this remarkable enrichment of human life; they were men solely interested in trying to understand physical processes, and it can hardly be said that the existence of industrialism helped them even indirectly. The modern study of the structure of the atom may have a profound effect upon industrial processes, but those who are engaged upon it are very little interested in this possible future effect of their work. It seems likely that the utilitarianism of commercial industry must ultimately kill the pure desire for knowledge, just as it kills the very analogous artistic impulse. In America, where the more utilitarian aspects of science are keenly appreciated, no great advance in pure theory has been made. None of the fundamental discoveries upon which practical applications depend have been made in America. It seems probable that, as the point of view appropriate to commercial industry spreads, utilitarianism will make such fundamental discoveries more and more rare, until at last those who love knowledge for its own sake come to be classified in youth as "morons" and kept in institutions for harmless lunatics.
This, however, is not one of the main points I wish to make. There are, in fact, two such points: first, that pure science is infinitely more valuable than its applications; second, that its applications, so far, have been in the main harmful, and will only cease to be so when men have a less strenuous outlook on life.
To take the second point first: Science, hitherto, has been used for three purposes: to increase the total production of commodities; to make wars more destructive; and to substitute trivial amusements for those that had some artistic or hygienic value. Increase in total production, though it had its importance a hundred years ago, has now become far less important than increase of leisure and the wise direction of production. On this point it is not necessary to enlarge further. The increasing destructiveness of wars also needs no comment. As for trivial amusements: think of the substitution of the cinema for the theatre; think of the difference between the gramophone and the really beautiful songs of Russian peasants; think of the difference between watching a great football match and playing in a small one. Owing to our belief that work is what matters, we have become unable to make our amusements anything but trivial. This is part of the price we had to pay for Puritanism; it is no accident that the only great industrial countries are Protestant. People whose outlook on life is more leisurely have a higher standard for their amusements: they like good plays, good music, and so on, not merely something that enables them to pass the time vacuously. So far, however, science has only intruded into the world of amusement in ways that have made it more trivial and less artistic. Nor can this be prevented so long as men think that only work is important.
As for the greater value of pure rather than applied science, that is a matter which goes deeper, but which it is difficult to argue. Applied science, while men retain their present ideals, has the sort of effects we have been considering, which I for my part find it very difficult to admire. Pure science—the understanding of natural processes, and the discovery of how the universe is constructed—seems to me the most god-like thing that men do. When I am tempted (as I often am) to wish the human race wiped out by some passing comet, I think of scientific knowledge and of art; these two things seem to make our existence not wholly futile. But the uses of science, even at the best, are on a lower plane. A philosophy which values them more than science itself is gross, and cannot in the long run be otherwise than destructive of science.
On all four heads, therefore, we are led to the conclusion that our social system, our prevailing habits of mind, and our so-called moral ideals, are destructive of what is excellent. If excellence is to survive, we must become more leisurely, more just, less utilitarian, and less "progressive."
- ↑ I do not wish this to be regarded as an argument for prohibition, to which on the whole I am opposed.
- ↑ Cf. R. Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regeneration (Constable 1921) especially pages 10§-127.
- ↑ This fact is not generally known. The mechanism is as follows: The Court makes an order for maintenance, the wife makes a scandal where the man is employed, he is dismissed, cannot pay the maintenance, and is imprisoned for contempt of Court. He is legally liable for maintenance even while in prison; therefore on the very day he comes out his wife can have him put back for not paying maintenance during the period of his first imprisonment. And so0 it goes on until he dies or she is glutted with vengeance. This is not a fancy picture, as any one who knows prisoners can testify.