IF the meaning of the word employment may be stretched to cover not only the amount and distribution of work and leisure but also the spirit in which the work is done and the use to which the leisure is put, it would be true to say that the impact of an unprecedentedly potent Western technique on a world-wide Westernizing society that was still articulated into a number of separate classes with widely different standards of living had confronted the heirs of the Western civilization with a problem of employment comparable to the problem of government discussed in the preceding chapter.
Like the problem of government, the problem of employment was nothing new in itself; for, if the primary cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of other civilizations had been a failure to get rid of war by a voluntary and timely expansion of the scope of government from a parochial to an œcumenical range, a secondary cause had been a failure to get rid of class-conflict by voluntary and timely changes in the pressure and product of work and in the enjoyment and use of leisure. In this field, however, as in that, the difference in degree between a latter-day Western and any previous human mastery over non-human Nature was tantamount to a difference in kind. By putting an unprecedentedly powerful new drive into economic production, modern technology had made a customary social injustice seem remediable and therefore feel intolerable. When the newfangled cornucopia of mechanized industry had churned out fabulous wealth for those Western entrepreneurs who had sown the seed and reaped the harvest of the Industrial Revolution, why should wealth and leisure still be monopolized by a privileged minority? Why should not this newfound abundance be shared between the Western capitalists and the Western industrial workers, and between the Western industrial workers and an Asian, African, and Indian-American peasantry that had been herded en masse into a world-embracing Western society’s internal proletariat?
This new dream of the possibility of abundance for all Mankind had generated unprecedentedly insistent and impatient demands for ‘freedom from want’; the ubiquity of these demands raised the question whether the productivity of the cornucopia was really as inexhaustible as it was assumed to be; and this question could only be answered by solving an equation in which there were at least three unknown quantities.
The first of these unknown quantities was the extent of technology’s potential capacity to satisfy the rising demands of a Human Race which was continuing to multiply and beginning to demand leisure. What were the planet’s reserves of irreplaceable material resources in the shape of minerals, and of replaceable material resources in the shape of water-power and crops and livestock and manpower and human skill? How far could the resources so far tapped be made to increase their yield, and how far could Mankind’s wasting assets be offset by the tapping of alternative resources hitherto unexploited?
The current findings of Western science seemed to suggest that the capacity of technology was enormous; but at the same time the contemporary reactions of human nature made it evident that there might prove to be practical limitations, on the human plane, to a productivity which might be virtually infinite in abstract terms of technological potentiality. A production that might be technically possible could not be translated into reality unless and until human hands could be found to pull the levers; but the price of this immense potential enhancement of the power over non-human Nature was a proportionate number of turns of the screw in the regimentation of the workers; and their inevitable resistance to such encroachments on their personal freedom was bound to militate against the realization of what was technologically feasible.
What was the extent of the sacrifices of personal freedom that the workers would be prepared to make for the sake of increasing the size of the cake of which they were each demanding a larger slice? How far would the urban industrial workers go in submitting to ‘scientific management’? And how far would the primitive peasant majority of Mankind go in adopting Western scientific methods of agriculture and in accepting limitations on a traditionally sacrosanct right and duty of procreation? At this stage the most that could be said was that the potential capacity of technology to increase production was running a race with the natural human refractoriness of the industrial workers and of the peasants. The World’s teeming peasantry was threatening to cancel the benefits of technological progress by continuing to raise the numbers of the World’s population pari passu with each successive increase in the means of subsistence. At the same time the industrial workers were threatening to cancel the benefits of technological progress by limiting production through trades-union restrictive practices pari passu with each successive increase in the potentialities of productivity.
The outstanding feature on the economic-social plane was the tug-of-war between a regimentation imposed by mechanized industry and an obstinate human reluctance to be regimented. The crux of the situation was the fact that mechanization and police were unfortunately inseparable. An observer might find his impressions affected by the light in which he happened to view the scene. From a technician’s angle of vision the recalcitrant industrial workers’ attitude might appear childishly unreasonable. Were these people really unaware that every desirable object had its price? Did they think that they could have ‘freedom from want’ without submitting to the conditions which must be fulfilled before their wants could be satisfied? But an historian might see the spectacle with different eyes. He would recall that the Industrial Revolution had started in an eighteenth-century Britain, at a time and in a place where an exceptionally high degree of freedom from regimentation had been enjoyed by a minority, and that members of this minority had been the creators of the system of mechanized production. The pre-industrial freedom of enterprise which these pioneers of industrialism had inherited from a previous social dispensation had been the inspiration and life-blood of the new dispensation that their initiative had conjured into existence.
Moreover, the industrial entrepreneur’s pre-industrial spirit of freedom, which had been the mainspring of the Industrial Revolution, had continued to be its driving-force in the next chapter of the story. While, however, the captains of industry had thus continued, for a season, to elude the fate of being crushed by a steamroller of their own manufacture, this fate was the birthmark of the new urban industrial working class, who had felt from the outset the crushing effects upon human life of a triumphal technology’s success in mastering non-human Nature. In a previous context we have watched technology liberating Man from the tyrannies of the day-and-night cycle and the cycle of the seasons; but, in the act of setting him free from these ancient servitudes, it had enslaved him to a new one.
The trades-union organizations that were the new industrial working class’s characteristic contributions to the new structure of Society were, indeed, legacies from the same pre-industrial paradise of private enterprise that had bred the captains of industry. Looked at as instruments for enabling the workers to hold their own in their struggle with their employers, they were, in fact, creatures of the self-same social dispensation as their capitalist antagonists. Evidence of this community of ethos may be found in the fact that in a Communist Russia the liquidation of the private employers had been followed by the regimentation of the trades-unions, while in National-Socialist Germany the liquidation of the trades-unions had been followed by the regimentation of the private employers. In Great Britain, on the other hand, after the general election of A.D. 1945, under a Labour Government whose programme was to take the ownership of industrial enterprises out of private hands without interfering with personal freedom, the workers in the nationalized industries had never thought of dissolving their trades-unions or of renouncing their right to promote their members’ interests by means of all the devices which they had employed against the dispossessed private ‘profiteers’; and this course of action could not be disposed of by being declared illogical; for the purpose of trades-unions was to resist regimentation, whether imposed by a private capitalist or by a National Board.
Unfortunately the workers’ resistance to regimentation at the hands of an employer had driven them into regimenting themselves. In fighting against the fate of being turned into robots in the factory they had imposed upon themselves the fate of serving as robots in the trades-union, and from this fate there seemed to be no escape. Nor was there any consolation in the fact that their old-time and familiar enemy, the private entrepreneur , was himself now being regimented and robotized out of existence. The adversary was no longer a comprehensible human tyrant whose eyes could be damned and whose windows could be broken when tempers were roused. The workers’ ultimate adversary was an impersonal collective power that was both more potent and more elusive than any execrable and consequently identifiable human being.
If this abinding self-regimentation of the industrial workers was a gloomy portent, it was also an awe-inspiring spectacle to see the Western middle class beginning to take the road which the Western industrial working class had long been following. The century ending in A.D. 1914 had been the Western middle class’s golden age; but the new era had seen this class fall, in their turn, into the adversity to which the Industrial Revolution had condemned the industrial workers. The liquidation of the bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia had been a sensational portent; but a more accurate index of what was coming was to be found in the contemporary social histories of Great Britain and other English-speaking countries which had suffered no political revolutions.
During the period between the Industrial Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War the distinguishing psychological characteristic of the Western middle class, in contrast with the ‘working’ class, both manual and clerical, had been its appetite for work. In the citadel of Capitalism on Manhattan Island there had been a trivial yet significant illustration of this difference of attitude as recently as A.D. 1949. In that year the financial houses on Wall Street were trying, without success, to induce their shorthand-typists, by offers of special remuneration at high overtime rates, to reconsider a collective decision to refuse henceforth to attend at their offices on Saturday mornings. The shorthand-typists’ employers were eager to devote their own Saturday mornings to work for the sake of retaining the profits that they would forfeit if they were to submit to this shortening of their own working week; but they had ceased to be able to do their own work without having shorthand-typists in attendance to assist them, and they found themselves unable to persuade these indispensable collaborators in their business of money-making that the game of working on Saturdays was worth the candle. The shorthand-typists took the stand that one day’s, or even one half-day’s, additional leisure was worth more to them than any monetary inducement for withdrawing their demand for this amenity. Additional money in their pockets was of no use to them if they had to earn it at the price of foregoing the additional leisure without which they would have no time for spending it. In this choice between money and life, they opted for life at the cost of letting the money go, and their employers did not succeed in persuading them to change their minds. By a.d. 1956 it had begun to look as if, so far from the Wall Street shorthand-typists ever being brought round by a monetary inducement to the Wall Street financiers’ point of view, the financiers might eventually be converted by economic adversity to the standpoint of the typists; for by this date even Wall Street was beginning to feel a breeze that had already chilled once-sanguine hearts in Lombard Street.
In the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western middle class’s opportunities for doing profitable business were being progressively reduced in one Western centre of capitalist activity after another; and these economic reverses were having depressing effects on the middle-class ethos. This class’s traditional zest for work was being sapped by a progressive restriction of the field for private enterprise. Inflation and taxation were making nonsense of its traditional virtues of strenuous earning and thrifty saving. The rising cost of living was conspiring with a simultaneously rising standard of living to reduce the size of its families. The loss of personal domestic service was threatening to undermine its professional efficiency. The loss of leisure was threatening to undermine its culture. Moreover, the middle-class woman—the mother on whom, as scores of biographies showed, the maintenance of high middle-class standards chiefly depended—was being harder hit than the middle-class man.
The progressive exodus of the middle class out of private enterprise into public service or into its psychological equivalent in the service of great non-governmental corporations had been bringing with it gains as well as losses for the Western society. The principal gain was the subordination of the egoistic profit-motive to the altruistic motive of public service, and the social value of this change could be measured by the effects of corresponding changes in the histories of other civilizations. In the histories of the Hellenic, Sinic, and Hindu civilizations, for example, the social rallies inaugurated by the establishment of universal states had been signalized and achieved in large part by the redirection of a hitherto predatory class’s abilities to public service. Augustus and his successors had made good civil servants out of predatory Roman business men; Han Liu Pang and his successors had made them out of predatory feudal gentry; Cornwallis and his successors had made them out of predatory commercial agents of the British East India Company. Yet, in each case, though in different ways, the results had revealed characteristic weaknesses, and the ultimate failure was to be explained by the ambivalence of a civil-service êthos, in which the sovereign virtue of integrity was counterbalanced by a lack of zest and by a disinclination to take the initiative or to incur risks. These characteristics were now being displayed by the general run of twentieth-century Western middle-class civil servants, and this did not augur well for their prospects in grappling successfully with the enormous task that would sooner or later confront them, the task of organizing and maintaining a world government.
When we look into the causes of this civil-service ethos, we find that it was the response to the challenge of pressure exerted by a machine which bore no less hardly upon human souls for being constructed out of psychic instead of metallic materials. To tend the machinery of a highly organized state, administering many millions of subjects, was as soul-destroying a task as the performance of any typical set of scientifically managed physical movements in a factory. Red tape, in fact, could prove more constrictive than iron; and red tape had now entered into the civil servant’s soul, while the part played by formalities and routine in an overworked civil service was being played by an increasingly rigid and disciplinary party-system in overworked elected legislatures.
The significance of all these tendencies for the prospects of the current ’capitalist’ system was not difficult to gauge. The Western middle class’s fund of pre-industrial psychic energy had been Capitalism’s driving-force. If this energy was now being depotentiated, and was at the same time being diverted from private enterprise into public service, this process spelled Capitalism’s doom.
‘Capitalism is essentially a process of economic change. … Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions—of “progress”—is the only one in which Capitalism can survive. … Stabilised Capitalism is a contradiction in terms.’ 1
It looked as if the regimentation imposed by industrial technology might be taking the life out of the pre-industrial spirit of private enterprise; and this prospect opened up a further question. Would the technical system of mechanized industry be able to survive the social system of private enterprise? And, if not, would the Western civilization itself be able to survive the death of a mechanized industry, to which it had given hostages by allowing its population to increase in the Machine Age far beyond the numbers that any non-industrial economy could support?
It was indisputable that the industrial system could only work so long as there was some fund of creative psychic energy to drive it, and that hitherto this driving-power had been supplied by the middle class. The ultimate question therefore seemed to be whether there was some alternative source of psychic energy, employable for the same economic purposes, on which a Westernizing world could draw, if the middle-class’s energy were to be depotentiated or diverted. If a practical alternative was within reach, the World could afford to look forward with equanimity to the demise of the capitalist system. But, if there was no such alternative, then the outlook was disconcerting. If mechanization spelled regimentation, and if this regimentation had taken the spirit out of an industrial working class and out of a middle class in succession, was it possible for any human hands to handle the almighty machine with impunity?
The social problem confronting Mankind was being approached from different angles in different countries. One approach was being made in North America, another in the Soviet Union, and a third in Western Europe.
The North American approach was inspired by the ideal of creating an Earthly Paradise in a New World, and this Earthly Paradise was to be based on a system of private enterprise which the North Americans (including within this term the English-speaking Canadians, as well as the people of the United States) believed that they could maintain in perfect health, whatever its fate elsewhere, by raising the economic and social standards of the wage-earning classes to a middle-class level, and thus counteracting what we have described in the previous section as the natural psychological effects of industrial mechanization. It was an inspiring but perhaps a too simple faith, based, as it was, on a number of illusions, all of which could be reduced to the fundamental illusion of isolationism. The New World was not as ‘New’ as its admirers could have wished. Human nature, which included Original Sin, had crossed the Atlantic with the first immigrants and with all their successors. Even in the nineteenth century, when isolationism seemed feasible on the political plane, this Earthly Paradise contained an abundance of snakes, and, as the twentieth century advanced and darkened, it became more and more apparent that the duality of worlds, New and Old, was a theory which did not fit the facts. The Human Race was now ‘all in the same boat’; and a philosophy of life which was not applicable to the whole of it might not be applicable to any part of it in the long run.
The Russian approach to the problem of class-conflict was inspired, like the American, by the ideal of creating an Earthly Paradise, and had taken shape, like the American, in a policy of getting rid of class-conflict by eliminating class divisions; but here the likeness ended. While the Americans were trying to assimilate the industrial working class to the middle class, the Russians had liquidated the middle class and had banned all freedom of private enterprise, not only for capitalists but also for trades-unions.
In the Communist Russian policy there were strong points which the Soviet Union’s Western rivals could not afford to underrate; and the first and greatest of these assets was the ethos of Communism itself. In the long run this ideology might prove an unsatisfying substitute for Religion, but in the short run it offered to any soul whose house was empty, swept, and garnished an immediate satisfaction for one of the deepest of Man’s religious needs, by offering him a purpose transcending his petty personal aims. The mission of converting the World to Communism was more exhilarating than the mission of keeping the World safe for the right to take profits or for the right to strike. ‘Holy Russia’ was a more rousing war-cry than ‘Happy America’.
Another strong point in the Russian approach was that Russia’s geographical position made it impossible for Russians to entertain the delusion of isolationism. Russia had no ‘natural frontiers’. Moreover Marxism, as preached from the Kremlin, made a potent appeal to the World’s peasantry from China to Peru, and from Mexico to Tropical Africa. In her social and economic situation, Russia had a much closer affinity than had the United States with the depressed three-quarters of the Human Race for whose allegiance the two Powers were competing. Russia could claim, with a specious appearance of veracity, that she had saved herself by her exertions and would save the rest of the world-proletariat by her example. A part of this proletariat was resident within the United States itself; and the anxiety of certain sections of anti-Communist Americans about the potency of this Marxian appeal was unconcealed and, in some of its manifestations, hysterical.
The West European approach towards the solution of the problem of class conflict—an approach which was most in evidence in Great Britain and in the Scandinavian countries—differed from the American and the Russian in being less doctrinaire than either of them. In countries that were in process of losing power and wealth to the rising giants on the fringes of the Western world at the very time when their local industrial workers were demanding a ‘new deal’, it was manifestly impracticable for the West European middle class to follow the North American middle class in offering to the working class, with both hands, the two amenities of a middle-class standard of living and an abundance of opportunities for the gratification of personal ambitions. It would have been still more impracticable to offer to the West European working class the strait-waistcoat of a totalitarian regime. Accordingly, the current Anglo-Scandinavian approach was an attempt to find a middle way by experimenting in a combination of private enterprise with governmental regimentation in the interests of social justice. It was a policy that was often identified with ‘socialism’, a term which was laudatory in the mouths of its British admirers, whereas it was depreciatory in the mouths of its American critics. So far as the British ‘welfare state’ system was concerned, it had been built up piecemeal and undogmatically by legislative contributions from all political parties.
Social life is impossible for Man without some measure of both personal liberty and social justice. Personal liberty is an indispensable condition for any human achievement, good or evil, while social justice is the sovereign rule of the game of human intercourse. An uncurbed personal liberty drives the weakest to the wall, and social justice cannot be enforced up to the hilt without the suppression of the liberty without which human nature cannot be creative. All known social constitutions had been pitched somewhere between these two theoretical extremes. In the working constitutions of both the Soviet Union and the United States, for example, elements of personal liberty and of social justice were combined in diverse ratios; and in the mid-twentieth-century Westernizing world the mixture, whatever it might be, was invariably labelled ‘Democracy’, because this term, disinterred from the Hellenic political vocabulary—where it had often been used in a pejorative sense—had now come to be an obligatory shibboleth for every self-respecting political alchemist.
Thus used, the term ‘Democracy’ was simply a smoke-screen to conceal the real conflict between the ideals of Liberty and Equality. The only genuine reconciliation between these conflicting ideals was to be found in the mediating ideal of Fraternity; and, if Man’s social salvation depended on his prospects of translating this higher ideal into reality, he would find that the politicians’ ingenuity did not carry him far, since the achievement of Fraternity was beyond the reach of human beings so long as they trusted exclusively to their own powers. The Brotherhood of Man stemmed from the Fatherhood of God.
In the trembling balance in which personal liberty and social justice were being weighed against one another, the spanner of technology had been thrown into the anti-libertarian scale. This finding could be illustrated and supported by taking an observation of a coming state of society which was already within sight, though it might not yet be within reach. Let it be assumed, for the sake of the argument, that an almighty technology has already accomplished the next major tasks on its agenda. By thrusting an atomic bomb into Man’s hands it will have forced him to abolish war, and at the same time it will have enabled him to reduce the death-rate to an unprecedentedly low minimum by bestowing impartially on all classes and on all races the benefits of preventive medicine. Let it also be assumed—as was, indeed, probable—that these prodigious improvements in the material conditions of life have been carried out at a speed with which cultural changes have failed to keep pace. These assumptions require us to imagine that the peasant three-quarters of Mankind will not yet have lost their habit of reproducing their kind up to the limits of their means of subsistence; and this assumption in turn requires us to imagine them still to be expending on increases in their head of population all the additional means of subsistence that will have been placed in their hands by the establishment of a World Order that will have brought in its train the benefits of peace, police, hygiene, and the application of science to the production of food.
Such prognostications would not be fantastic; they would merely be projections, into the future, of tendencies long current. In China, for example, increases in population had swallowed up increases in the means of subsistence which had been bestowed by the introduction of previously unknown food crops from the Americas in the sixteenth century and by the establishment, in the seventeenth century, of the Pax Manchuana . Thanks to the naturalization of maize in China circa A.D. 1550, of sweet potatoes circa A.D. 1590, and of pea-nuts a few years later, the population had risen from 63,599,541 indicated by the census returns of A.D. 1578 to an estimated figure of 108,300,000 in A.D. 1661. Thereafter it had risen further, to 143,411,559 in A.D. 1741, to a figure of the order of 300,000,000 in the middle of the nineteenth century, and to one of the order of 600,000,000 in the middle of the twentieth century. These figures show not only an increase but an increase in an accelerating geometrical progression—and this in spite of recurrent bouts of plague, pestilence, and famine, battle, murder, and sudden death. The figures of the contemporary movement of population in India, Indonesia, and elsewhere told the same tale.
If such things had been happening yesterday, what was to be expected tomorrow? Though the cornucopia of science had produced an abundance that had falsified Malthusian pessimism up to date, the insuperable finiteness of the area of the Earth’s surface must set a ceiling to the progressive increase of Mankind’s food-supply; and it seemed as likely as not that this ceiling would be reached some time before the peasantry’s habit of breeding up to the limit would have been overcome.
In thus forecasting a posthumous fulfilment of Malthus’s expectations, we should also have to forecast that, by the time of ‘the great famine’, some œcumenical authority would have made itself responsible for looking after the elementary material needs of the whole population of the planet. In such a state of affairs the begetting of children would have ceased to be the private affair of wives and husbands and have become the public concern of a ubiquitous impersonal disciplinary power. The nearest that governments had come hitherto towards intruding on this inner sanctum of private life had been to institute negative or positive rewards for the parents of unusually large families if the authorities were anxious to obtain an increase of manpower for ‘labour’ or for ‘cannon-fodder’; but they had no more dreamed of forbidding their subjects to restrict the size of their families than they had dreamed of compelling them to multiply. Indeed, the freedom to beget or not to beget had been so heedlessly taken for granted that, even as late as A.D. 1941, it had not occurred to President Roosevelt to raise the number of axiomatic human freedoms consecrated in his Atlantic Charter from four to five by explicitly putting on record the sacred right of parents to determine the size of their own families. It now looked as if the future might show that there had been an unintentional logic in Roosevelt’s artless silence on this point, since it appeared that, in the last resort, a novel ‘freedom from want’ could not be guaranteed to Mankind unless a familiar ‘freedom to beget’ were taken away from them. The problem of how this was to be done raised some very delicate questions.
If the time were indeed to come when the begetting of children would have to be regulated by an external authority, how was this curtailment of personal liberty likely to be received, on the one hand by the peasant majority of Mankind, and on the other hand by a minority whom an industrial technology had already emancipated from the peasant’s bondage to an unquestioned custom? The controversy between these two sections of the Human Race was likely to be bitter, since each would have a grievance against the other. The industrial workers would resent the assumption that it was morally incumbent on them to provide sustenance for an unrestricted increase in the number of peasant mouths. The peasantry, on their side, would feel aggrieved at being threatened with the loss of their traditional freedom to reproduce their kind on the plea that this was the only alternative to starvation; for this sacrifice would be demanded of them at a time when the gulf between their own pauper standard of living and that of the industrial workers in Western or Westernized countries would probably have become greater than it had ever been before.
A progressive widening of this gulf was, in truth, one of the consequences that must be expected, if we are right in forecasting that, at the time when global food production would be reaching its ceiling, the peasantry would still be expending most of its additional supply of commodities on increasing its numbers, and the industrialized workers expending most of theirs on raising their standard of living. In this situation the peasantry would not see why, before they were called upon to renounce the most sacred of human rights, the affluent minority should not be called upon to part with a larger quota of their provocative superfluities. Such a demand would strike a sophisticated Western elite as preposterously unreasonable. Why should a Western or Westernized élite, which owed its prosperity to its intelligence and foresight, be penalized to pay for the peasantry’s improvident incontinence? This demand would seem the more unreasonable, considering that a sacrifice of Western standards would not exorcize the spectre of world-wide famine but would merely keep it at bay for an inconsiderable period, during which the sacrifice would be reducing the most advanced peoples to the level of the laggards.
So harsh a reaction as this would be of no help towards solving the problem; and, indeed, it could be foreseen that, if such a food crisis as we have forecast were eventually to occur, the predominant reaction of Western Man would not be along these unsympathetic lines. Cool calculations of enlightened self-interest, a humane desire to alleviate suffering, and a sense of moral obligation that would be the surviving spiritual legacy of a dogmatically discarded Christianity—a combination of motives that was already inspiring a number of international efforts to raise standards of living in Asian and African countries—would impel Western Man to play the part of the Good Samaritan rather than that of the Priest or the Levite.
If and when this controversy broke out, it seemed likely to be carried from the plane of economics and politics on to the plane of religion, and this on several accounts. In the first place, the peasantry’s persistence in breeding up to the limits of its food supply was the social effect of a religious cause which could not be modified without a change in the peasantry’s religious attitude and outlook. The religious outlook which made the peasantry’s breeding habits so resistant to argument might not have been irrational in origin, for it was a survival from a primitive state of society in which the household had been the optimum social and economic unit of agricultural production. A mechanized technology had now done away with the social and economic environment in which the worship of family fecundity had made economic and social sense; but the persistence of the cult when there was no longer any sense left in it was a consequence of the relative slowness of the Psyche’s pace on the subconscious level in comparison with the pace of the intellect and the will.
Without a religious revolution in the souls of the peasantry, it was hard to see how the World’s Malthusian problem was to be solved; but the peasantry was not the only party to the situation that would have to achieve a change of heart if Mankind was to find a happy issue out of an impending catastrophe. For, if it was true that ‘Man doth not live by bread alone’, then a complacently prosperous Western minority had something to learn from an unworldly vein in the ethos of the peasantry.
Western Man had brought himself into danger of losing his soul through his concentration on a sensationally successful endeavour to increase his material well-being. If he was to find salvation, he would find it only in sharing the results of his material achievement with the less materially successful majority of the Human Race. The birth-controlling agnostic engineer had as much to learn from the incontinent and superstitious peasant as the peasant from the engineer. What part the World’s historic higher religions might be destined to play in enlightening both parties and bringing them to a mutual understanding was a question that could not be answered yet.
If we could imagine a World Society in which Mankind had first rid itself of war and class-conflict and had gone on to solve the population problem, we might surmise that Mankind’s next problem would be the role of leisure in the life of a mechanized society.
Leisure had already played a part of capital importance in history; for, if necessity had been the mother of Civilization, leisure had been its nurse. One of the distinctive features of Civilization had been the pace at which this new way of life had developed its potentialities; and this impetus had been imparted to the civilizations by a minority of a minority—by the purposeful few among a privileged class, whose privilege had been the enjoyment of leisure. All the great achievements of Man in the arts and sciences had been the fruits of the profitably employed leisure of this creative minority. But the Industrial Revolution had upset—and this in several different ways—the previous relation between leisure and life.
The most momentous of these changes had been psychological. Mechanization had set up in the industrial worker’s mind a tension between his feelings towards his work and his feelings towards his leisure to which neither the peasant majority nor the privileged minority had been subject in a pre-industrial age. In an agrarian society a cycle of the seasons that had been the husbandman’s calendar had also settled for a leisured minority the allocation of their time between holding court and going to war or between sitting in parliament and going hunting, shooting, and fishing. The peasantry and their rulers alike had taken both work and leisure for granted as alternating phases in a Yin-and-Yang rhythm beaten out by the perpetually recurring cycles of day and night and summer and winter. Each phase was a relief from the other. But this pre-industrial interdependence and parity of work and leisure had been deranged when the worker had been transformed into a tender of machines which could go on working, day and night, all the year round. The chronic industrial warfare which the worker now found himself impelled to wage in order to prevent the machines and their masters from working him to death had impregnated his mind with a hostility to the life of toil that his peasant forebears had taken as a matter of course; and this new attitude towards work had brought with it a new attitude towards leisure; for, if work was intrinsically evil, then leisure must have an absolute value in itself.
Human nature’s reaction against the routine of the factory and the office had, by the middle of the twentieth century, already gone so far as to make the value of freedom from an excessive pressure of work count for more than the value of the remuneration that the worker could secure by working at full stretch. But at the same time the so far unchecked advance of technology was playing a sardonic practical joke on its human victims. When it was not threatening to work them to death, it was threatening to reduce them to ‘unemployment’. So trades-union restrictive practices which had been devised as a form of organized inefficiency for putting a brake on the killing drive of the machine had come to serve the workers’ further purpose of spinning out the residue of an employment that was apparently being snatched out of human hands altogether. 1 It was possible to foresee an Earthly Paradise Regained in which a regime of ‘full employment’ would also be one in which the ration of work that could be doled out to each individual would occupy so small a fraction of his day that he would have almost as much leisure as the long-extinct ‘idle rich’ privileged class of which his ancestors had been taught to disapprove. In such circumstances the use made of leisure would evidently become more important than it had ever been before.
How would Mankind use this prospective universal leisure? The question, which was a disturbing one, had been raised by Sir Alfred Ewing in a presidential address to the British Association on the 31st August, 1932.
‘Some may envisage a distant Utopia in which there will be perfect adjustment of labour and the fruits of labour, a fair spreading of employment and of wages and of all the commodities that machines produce. Even so, the question will remain: How is Man to spend the leisure he has won by handing over nearly all his burden to a tireless mechanical slave? Dare he hope for such spiritual betterment as would qualify him to use it well? God grant that he may strive for that and attain it. It is only by seeking [that] he will find. I cannot think that Mankind is destined to atrophy and cease through cultivating what, after all, is one of his most God-given faculties—the creative ingenuity of the engineer.’
The Pax Romana fell a very long way short of the future that we are now envisaging in respect of the ease that it provided for human existence; yet, even so, the author of a treatise on Sublimity in Style , writing at an undetermined date during the Roman Empire’s heyday, felt that the relaxation of tension due to the establishment of the Hellenic universal state had led to a deterioration of human quality.
‘One of the cancers of the spiritual life in souls born into the present generation is the low spiritual tension in which all but a few chosen spirits among us pass their days. In our work and in our recreation alike, our only objective is popularity and enjoyment. We feel no concern to win the true spiritual treasure that is to be found in putting one’s heart into what one is doing and in winning a recognition that is truly worth having.’
These findings of an Hellenic critic were endorsed, at the beginning of the Modern Age of Western history, by one of the pioneers of the modern scientific spirit. The following passage is to be found in The Advancement of Learning , which was published by Francis Bacon in A.D. 1605.
‘For as it has been well observed, that the arts which flourish in times while virtue is in growth, are military; and while virtue is in state, are liberal; and, while virtue is in declination, are voluptuary: so I doubt that this age of the World is somewhat upon the descent of the wheel. With arts voluptuary I couple practices joculary; for the deceiving of the senses is one of the pleasures of the senses.’
‘Practices joculary’ would cover a good deal of the use of leisure in the wireless and television age. The raising of the working class to the material standards of the middle class was apparently being accompanied by a proletarianization of the life of a large portion of the middle class on the spiritual plane.
The guests at Circe’s banquet had soon found themselves penned in Circe’s sty; the open question had been whether they were going to remain there indefinitely. Was this a fate to which the Human Race was likely to resign itself? Would the Human Race really be content to ‘live happy ever after’ in a Brave New World in which the only change from a monotony of insipid leisure would be a monotony of mechanical work? Such a forecast surely failed to take account of a creative minority that had been the salt of the Earth in all ages of history. The gloomy diagnosis of the author of the Late Hellenic treatise on Sublimity in Style had overlooked an all-important element in the situation under his eyes; he appears to have been unaware of the Christian martyrs.
It may seem—and indeed it is—a far cry from a prospect of technological unemployment to an expectation of another Day of Pentecost; and the reader may incline to ask the sceptic’s question: ‘How may these things be?’ Midway through the twentieth century of the Christian Era it was not possible to tell how they might be; yet something might already be said to suggest that such a hope was not merely ‘wishful thinking’.
One of the devices by which Life achieves the tour de force of keeping itself alive is by compensating for a deficit or surplus in one department by accumulating a surplus or incurring a deficit in another. We might therefore expect that, in a social milieu in which there is a deficit of freedom and a surplus of regimentation in the. economic and political spheres, the effect of such a law of Nature would be to stimulate freedom and to relax the tyranny of regimentation in the sphere of Religion. Such, undeniably, had been the course of events in the days of the Roman Empire.
One lesson of this Hellenic episode was that in Life there is always an irreducible minimum of psychic energy that will insist on discharging itself through one channel or another; but it is equally true that there is also a maximum limit to the quantity of psychic energy which Life has at its disposal. From this it follows that, if a reinforcement of energy is required for putting a greater drive into one activity, the requisite additional supply will have to be obtained by making economies of energy in other quarters. Life’s device for economizing energy is mechanization. For example, by making the beating of the heart and the alternating inflation and deflation of the lungs automatic, Life had released human thought and will for other uses than the continuous maintenance of physical vitality from moment to moment. If a conscidus act of thought and act of will had never ceased to be required for the initiation of each successive breath and each successive heartbeat, no human being would ever have had any margin of intellectual or volitional energy to spare for doing anything else but just keeping alive; or, to make the same point more accurately, no sub-human being would ever have succeeded in becoming human. On the analogy of this creative effect of the economy of energy in the life of Man’s body physical, we might surmise that, in the life of his body social, Religion would be likely to be starved so long as thought and will were preoccupied with economics (as they had been in the West since the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution) and with politics (as they had been in the West since the Western renaissance of a deified Hellenic state). Conversely, we might infer that the regimentation that was now being imposed on the Western society’s economic and political life would be likely to liberate Western souls for fulfilling the true end of Man by glorifying God and enjoying Him once again.
This happier spiritual prospect was at least a possibility in which a dispirited generation of Western men and women might catch a beckoning gleam of kindly light.
1 Schumpeter, J. A.: Business Cycles (New York 1939, McGraw-Hill, 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 1033.
1 The idea that, one day, the machines would ‘grow up’ and dispense with their human assistants had been elaborated in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , published A.D. 1870.