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.
