A Civilization of Technics Part 2
Philip Mairet (1945)
The idea that we should delegate our material production to the gnomes of power-technics, and thus free ourselves for lives of leisure, introduces a serious contradiction if we make the gnomes too clever. It is all right so long as the gnomes are kept to drudge at such work as galley-slaves once had to do. But the distinction between work and leisure can be pushed too far, because as a matter of fact the only thing for man to do with leisure, over and above his needs for relaxation and contemplation, is work of his own choice. To serve God and society by his performance, in the spirit of an artist, by producing something good, or unique, or doing something well or uniquely—this is what every human being ultimately needs and desires, because in the last analysis there is nothing else for him to do. Leisure itself is mainly an added space or margin that is required to give the individual latitude for his full performance. Now, if we are going to produce all the essential services and furniture of life—including houses which, it is now said, are to be mass-produced in sections and assembled, like a compactum bookcase, as many rooms as required—it appears that we shall most of us all the time, or all of us most of the time, be ' unemployed' but provided with means to purchase plenty of gnome-work plus the nutritional standard diet. Most of the theoretical social idealisms of the day appear to be converging towards this ideal, so that it is not quite an idle speculation to consider what we should do with ourselves in such a social milieu; and the first thing that occurs to anyone of any psychological and social experience is that the wealth with which we should be provided would be but little esteemed. Some of us might be tempted to use our plentiful leisure to provide the same things as the gnomes had made for us, and to make them more to our idiosyncratic taste, but this voluntary creative work would also have declined in prestige, as being confessedly 'useless'. There is here the danger of an altogether excessive opposition in thought between what is useful and what is good.
A categorical separation of the two ideas has gone too far, with the increasing mass-production of goods for the masses: already it is noticeable that pride and pleasure in personal property has declined, and that, with all our modern emphasis upon making commodities that are desired, in the sense of being saleable, it has become less and less fashionable to own them. The homes of the past, often overcrowded with household treasures which it took so much household labour to keep clean, are not perhaps to be held up for example; but there is something very paradoxical in the fact that our present age, with its plethoric productivity, has induced an unexpected disinclination to be bothered with possessions, a reluctance to collect fine books, prints or pictures, to have any furniture worth treasuring as of more than lifelong utility or beauty—often indeed, to have any permanent home in which things can be treasured. All this decline in the valuation of things is due to the fact that the gnome-work really is less valuable. A thing cannot hold more value than has been put into it: we cannot have our cake and eat it: and if we will insist upon developing the skill of the gnomes until they can produce by the million things superficially as good as our own handiwork, or better, we cannot at the same time experience an equal enjoyment in possessing such things— and certainly not in the tedious work of overseeing their making. To all appearances the modern gnome-drivers are the most discontented workers, as a class, that the world has ever seen.
The only cure for this decline of values both in production and consumption, would be to restrict the work of the gnomes to relieving human workers of the most purely repetitive and physically laborious tasks; and to set the individual workers as free as possible for independent work in making things or rendering services. We hope that some of the numerous bodies now planning the post-war world will so far work against the stream of current theorizing as to base their plans, not upon standardization and rationalization, but upon the greatest possible devolution of industry. That would be the only way to incorporate the gnome-work into human civilization without reducing the amount of human happiness too seriously. Such an effort will encounter opposition both from the ignorant and from the interested, and the plea for human happiness will be denounced as immoral. The advocates of State industrialism will endeavour to invest with an ethical superiority the work of organizing, perfecting, and designing work for the machines, by making out that it is far more moral to help to make a million things all alike for a million people than to make one unique thing for one person, or a few things for a few. This popular fallacy is not even a specious one, but its growing acceptance is culturally disastrous. If it is ethically wrong to make one man a means to the ends of another, to make him the mere instrument of a multitude is just as bad. The social ideal is that every man's work should be an important part of his own fulfilment, and not the price exacted for it. Every culture which is genuine is occupied not so much with adapting right means to right ends, as in seeking to identify ends and means, for in the perfect civilization, as in Nature, every function would be performed not only as a means and a service to the whole life of the society, but as being in its own degree a manifestation of the very purpose which life itself is seeking.
In the opinion of many good observers—not only of the aestheticians, whose testimony on this point is not to be ignored—this lack of value in the work done is the crucial problem in our civilization. An employer of industrial labour, of long experience and good insight into the minds of workers, tells the present writer that, in his opinion, the dislike of the average man for machine-minding—or shall we say his inability to like it —is so complete that, if it is not cured, it will bring the civilization of technics to a breakdown. Satisfaction cannot be injected by any kind of Stakhanovism: that is a sort of heroics, which makes a bravado of the activity desired, and in rewarding with money and publicity those who drive their machines hardest, it really directs attention to the singular tedium that has to be borne. The political promise that, after the revolution, or after the war, or after the five-year-plan, the workers shall enjoy all the proceeds of the conveyor-belts, is effective enough as a moralistic suggestion, but obviously it does not meet the difficulty at all. The citizen is not going to be satisfied as an individual with a life of movements dictated by machinery, simply because the collectivity has a higher standard of life: rather the contrary; the idea that production is easy and that there is anyhow plenty of it, will make him try to get out of the factory and into a more worth-while occupation.
The one thing that might keep the mass of workers cheerfully going through the motions dictated by automata would be a faith or a conviction that such behaviour was a necessary and essential part of their life and love. If the age of technics is to be prolonged into the future it will be because society will have somehow succeeded in providing this sustaining motive; and we may even ask whether perhaps such a transcendental reason for their recent work has not been present in some measure all the time. Should we have been able to proceed as far as we have towards a mechanized economy, unless men felt, even if vaguely, dimly, and uncertainly, that our society was doing something great in this age of progress, and that the technical miracles were themselves, in some sort, a collective achievement worthy of human life and love? Perhaps even the machine workers have more than half believed that in this phase of history men were doing what men are for—not indeed doing it well enough, nor unmixed with baser purposes, yet on the whole giving expression to something inherent in Man and his world-position-—fulfilling a possibility that ought to be fulfilled.
For the masses have not been left in ignorance of what has been happening. At least they know that the great navigators, astronomers, and geographers have combined to discover the whole planet, and that the engineers have linked all its parts together in systems of transport; the attainment of flight and of wireless communication and many other achievements are not only well known even to the least instructed factory hand; they do also furnish a world spectacle at which he is assisting, in however humble a capacity. The consciousness of every man has been affected powerfully by this transformation of Man's world, and there seems no doubt that he has felt its greatness and believed, with whatever reservations, that it must be right and true to the cosmic scheme of things that man has attained and is exercising such powers. That may be a judgement of pride, of course—far too much of such pride has gone before our present fall—but is not this pride the defect of a better quality, also present in some degree? Dare we assert that the feelings which have enabled ordinary mankind to co-operate in this world-metamorphosis have not had one of their deepest sources in a kind of reverence and awe?
It is at bottom untrue, I would submit, that the mighty works of this civilization, the uses it has made of its material power, have come about through the predatory instinct, the profit-seeking motive or the lust for wealth and comfort of Economic Man. All these psychic forces have operated for millennia; have played their part in previous cultures and helped to wreck them. But the recent transfiguration of Man's world is, as much as any previous culture, an attainment of spiritual significance, made possible by certain material conditions, but inspired, in all its most creative moments, by a wonder akin to worship not only of the powers within the human intellect (which had found anew application and expression) but also of the infinity and variety of the created universe. As the mind of Man was applied, with a new discipline and method, to the perception of Nature, it was as though Nature responded with self-revelation: to seek thus earnestly was to find much more than one sought. In the great European scientists and naturalists up to and including the early nineteenth century, there is to be found such a love of the creation, united with such intelligence, modesty, and finely schooled perception, as is recorded of no other place or time: it is a spirit that still worthily reflects and continues the great philosophic tradition of the West. As the growing body of knowledge that these men founded was exploited for more and more narrowly practical ends, something of their sublime afflatus was also transmitted, popularized and largely vulgarized, but still it was the meaning and the soul of the Age of Science. In so far as this spirit may have departed, the very meaning of •what we are doing is misconceived. When men began to tell one another, and even to believe, that this scientific revelation grew out of the mere search for profit and comfort, they lied to themselves, inverted the true relation of cause and effect, and also perverted the character of their own activity, with disastrous results. For the process of exploiting Nature, carried on with such powerful means, threatens the heritage of the entire race; and by the same process men intensify their competition for the sources of life to the point at which mutual extermination begins to appear as a logical—or even a biological—necessity. These tragic degradations of an Age of Science would have been impossible if its development had been directed in the spirit of the great scientists by whose work it was initiated.
Our collective error is not that we have too much worshipped Science: rather it might be said that we never worshipped Science half enough. The worst consequence of the deplorable controversy between Science and Religion during the last century is not that it weakened religion but that it left science vulgarized. The natural reverence of Man before the miracles of Mind and Nature—although that sentiment remained a half-conscious motive and force in scientific activity—began to be repressed as an irrelevance which the scientific spirit must discard, with much else, as mere emotional instability or mental immaturity. It is a pity we should so have belittled our own works by thus disconnecting them from their source in the human soul. The immense railways and bridges, the great swift ships, the flying machines and radio communications of this age are as great in their own way as the pyramids of Egypt, the temples and dramas of Greece, the cathedrals of Christendom in theirs. These are all we shall have to show at the last judgement as the collective attainments of our age, and in greatness of conception, devotion in execution, they can hardly be held unworthy, still less in the team work and co-operation, the wide international interchange of gifts, that have gone to their making. So far as they are condemned, it must be for the widely prevalent unconsciousness of their quality and purpose, due to false reflections upon essential motives, which has to so great an extent perverted their purpose and corrupted their use. In truth Man never had a good idea, scientific or otherwise, because he wanted to be richer, or in order to make himself more comfortable, individually or collectively. Not desire, not even necessity was ever the mother of invention, though necessity may have been stepmother to some inventions. Ideas are born from love—love of the wonders of Nature or of the human mind. Sometimes they are also useful, but they only continue to be so while we remember that their source is more important than any particular idea or any use which may be made of it. If we have failed to cultivate, discipline, and direct this affection of the soul from which research and invention spring, it is largely because the very existence of it has not been recognized. Here is the deepest cause of the dilemma of a civilization of technics, of its ignorance what to do with its brilliant abilities. For in the first and last analysis, there is nothing to do with them, except to dedicate them to the Source whence they come.
A superabundance of energy at disposal is the ultimate problem of every successful society, unless, as in that of the Eskimos, the struggle with natural conditions absorbs all its strength. The tendency to exploit the enhanced powers of an improving society for the pursuit of power-fantasies is the greatest of social dangers; and a main function of religion in society has always been to canalize the excess of energies, spiritual, psychic, and physical, into worship of the majesty and mystery of their origin; for worship not only inspires men to great collective works of no utilitarian value, but also to innumerable useful and creative occupations of every kind of value and refinement. An age in which the physical energies of society are multiplied many times over could only escape an extraordinary crisis if the spiritual function of worship were correspondingly magnified, and unhappily, we live in the former of these conditions without the benefit of the latter: hence a marked and unlooked-for tendency towards brutalization.
Chapter from Prospect for Christendom: Essays in Catholic Social Reconstruction, Maurice Reckitt (ed), Faber and Faber (1945/6)
COMMENT: Part 3 to follow.
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