The Coming of a New Era
The amazing inventions and technological advances which the liberated intellect of humanity has developed open up an era of plenty, prosperity, leisure, and comfort for all. The Machine Age is ousting the Muscle Age. People today use less bodily energy for daily work and living than their forefathers ever did. Consequently, they ought to have more leisure for higher tasks. If, as is the case, they haven't such leisure, it is not the machine's fault but society's. Electric servants and other mechanical aids to living will do much to lighten even the domestic labour of the new age as they have already lightened its industrial labour. They will cook, sew, wash, carry, clean. It is not unreasonable to expect that at least one-half of the human effort expended in the operations involved in industrial, mining, and agricultural processes will become quite unnecessary. The Machine Age has made possible the Leisure Age. Individuals, for the first time, may work less and produce more. We are on the threshold of an era of unheard-of plenty, leisure, and culture, not for a few, as in the past, but for all. We can cross that threshold as soon as we reorganize society. Culture for all and not merely for the few may come into its own. Record players, for instance, are today grinding out the art of the few in the homes of the many. Once the struggle for bare existence is over, once men are able to give themselves less to the day-long drudgery of physical work and more to leisure-hour mental education, once we take full advantage of the machine's potentialities and make its benefits freely available to all, a big step forward in the possibility of human liberation will have been taken.
The inventions and innovations, the new discoveries, materials, and processes which will begin as a trickle during the opening years of the twenty-first century will pour out as a flood before the closing ones. The wars have given the sharpest stimulus to this development so far, but the real peace to come will complete it. The impetus of technological development in our own century has already become so swift and its inventiveness so enormous that the entire economic and domestic life of humanity will in the next century be magically altered. The first significance of this is that it will give both men and women more leisure; the second, that it will give them less labour. It will then be not beyond human intelligence and human goodwill to make the leisure and luxury that could emerge from a more effective use of the machine serve hapless millions. For too long, life for them has been too hard a struggle merely to exist. The lowliest man will share in a minimum of comforts and conveniences which the labour of the scientist, the power of the engineer, and the knowledge of the chemist will bring him. Scientific progress is multiplying the wealth of man. It can and will be converted into economic plenty. Modern power productivity has rendered more easily attainable the realization of idealistic dreams of economic betterment. It may be said that when James Watt sold and set to work in 1776 the steam engine on which his fame rests, he inaugurated the era of applied science. From that epochal year, men were able to manufacture goods with a swiftness and a plentifulness previously unknown.
There is no scarcity in Nature. It is simply a matter of competently mobilizing, by machine power, what she is willing to give us. It is not wrong to take advantage of new inventions and human ingenuity to give the body more comfort and the mind more freedom.
Those who are frightened by what the machine has done in the war may be cheered by what it could do in peace. Anyway, it is here and they'd better accept it. For so long as man's mind functions, so long as his thinking process continues, so long will the process of inventing new or better machines go on. The only way to eliminate their destructive use is not by eliminating the machine but by improving man.
The machine was born to help humanity. In the next century, it will help so amazingly and so widely that it will provide sufficient food, goods, and services to banish poverty and eliminate the jungle-like struggle for existence. Science has shown the way to enormously increased productivity. The inventive power of man has constructed wonderful machines, devised amazing techniques, developed extraordinary skills, created new materials, and made possible astronomical production figures. It has begun to make it possible for him to extract enough food, clothing, fuel, and shelter from the earth to give a worthwhile existence to all the members of his species. The multiplication of his power on earth is becoming a tremendous actuality. The human being stands behind the machine. He invented it, he exploits it, he must partake of its products. The sight of starving, ragged people could, in the next century, everywhere disappear. The degradation of slums could be wiped out once and for all. There would be no need for continuous class wars, no necessity for endless capital-labour struggles.
The amplitude of choice in attractive new materials and gleaming new colours which are available for manufacturing and constructional purposes are nothing less than amazing. Architectural beauty and practical utility meet and marry as they could never before. Utter cleanliness and dignified simplicity become possible for enrichment of the poorest home. Efficient accomplishment and aesthetic charm may join to satisfy everybody's everyday needs. All this casting aside of ancient limitations, crudenesses, and inefficiencies tends to change the stuff, the utility, and the appearance of our environmental forms and to change them greatly for the better. Life in the external physical sense could become better worth living for the toiling classes as it has always been for the sheltered few. Easily controlled temperatures in homes and vehicles could defy the worst inconveniences of arctic snow and tropic sun. The new materials of the coming age, the lighter metals and the stronger plastics, would alone make possible a productive transformation which could raise living standards, improve construction possibilities, and provide better opportunities and better employment. These materials will reflect the dynamic spirit of this age. Instead of waiting a whole lifetime for timber to grow, we can wave a wizard's wand over milk or grain or chemicals and compress the result into an instantly available substance which can be used in most of the ways that we have hitherto used wood. The most revolutionary invention of the century has yet to manifest itself, however. Steam changed the industrial character of the nineteenth century. Petrol and electricity have already changed the transport and domestic character of the first half of the twentieth century. But a cleaner, cheaper, safer source of power drawn from the air itself could yet immeasurably change its closing decade. Thus the setting of man's bodily life could be radically altered and rapidly evolved in the twenty-first century, both to express and to stimulate the alternations and evolutions of his mental life. New ideas and ideals will move in a flowing stream across the world. New patterns will spontaneously shape themselves to reflect and promote them.
It will be the business of the community to ensure that every member is able to earn a livelihood, to give him work that will support him, or, if it fails to do so, to supply him with the food, goods, and services which he needs. This will be regarded as not only ethical duty on its part, but also economic wisdom. A public dole system of relief is a confession of failure; a public works system, of half-failure. Such systems are bred by minds steeped in a psychology of scarcity. Success lies with an expansionist outlook, a full-employment policy, and a higher standard of common living. In this machine age, it is not production but consumption that lags behind. The equilibrium between the two must be maintained if economic health is to be maintained.
If the working masses could be delivered from the worst extremes of their economic servitude, they might begin to benefit by and even contribute towards the spiritual enlightenment which is historically due. This indeed is one of the main hidden reasons why destiny has decreed the immense economic and social changes happening today.
When economic anxieties, pressures, or deprivations absorb men's minds to the extent that they are unable to find the will, hope, time, or energy for spiritual studies, then the form of society which creates such a condition is harmful and undesirable. The toiling masses have had little time to think of spiritual truth in the past, much less to undertake its conscious and independent investigation. Hence, they have had to accept ready-made religion from others--mysticism and philosophy being so remote from their lives as to be almost non-existent for them. Thus, by promoting their exterior welfare, we shall not merely provide for the demands of social justice but also surround the masses with conditions more favourable for their progress spiritually. Physical well-being and worldly security are a necessary part of any economy which is to provide expression for higher values. Those who are interested only in their own comfort and security may not be interested in any altruistic proposals for the uplift of the underprivileged, but those who acknowledge an interest in the spiritual advancement of humanity cannot escape their responsibility in this matter.
We have, on the one hand, the machinery, the people, and the techniques whereby immense quantities of consumable goods and foods could be produced. We have, on the other hand, an immense human demand for them. But what prevents us from converting this potential demand into an actual one? For the transformation could be made if a great change of heart and a little change of head could be brought about. Society has ceased to desert and begun to accept its responsibility for the individual. Many of the overworked objections about the so-called impracticability of ethical and social idealism have been disarmed and disproved. We are ruefully waking up to the fact that the mentality which begins by imagining rigid restrictions on what can be done to construct a better world, ends by imposing them. We had to wait for the terrible stimulus of war before beginning to make needed reforms and overdue changes. Wartime necessity has shown that abundant production can be successfully achieved; peacetime events will one day show that abundant consumption can just as successfully be got, too.
When the world changed over from manual to mechanical production, it began to change over from feudalistic to modern ideas also. The twenty-first century will complete the process and apply it to the financial sphere, too. The twirling of a knob on a radio set and the touch of a control on an airplane switchboard--simple physical operations such as these, for instance--have twirled and touched a new order of financial ideas into actuality. Consider how the so-called bankrupt Germany which Hitler took over was able successfully to finance its gigantic preparations for the greatest war in history. It could not have done this if it had followed fear and tradition and limited itself to "bank wealth" or to the full backing of its paper currency by metallic reserve in gold and silver. It departed from the classic traditions of political economists with their mesmerisms of "sound" monetary equilibrium, economic cycles, and the law of supply and demand, knowing that the State's prestige assured the circulation of its paper. It went ahead with full confidence in the principle that there was no real bankruptcy while there was a sufficiency of labour, machinery, and materials--the rest was a matter of organization.
Only in this way can we advance at last to social sanity. If and when it comes, with the twenty-first century, we shall see the co-partnership of co-operative classes replacing the menagerie of conflicting ones. We shall see that nation greeted by history which knows how to serve best, not how to grab most. We shall see the stronger races, groups, and classes using their strength not to oppress the weaker ones, but to lift them up. We shall see a world of diverse peoples who have ceased trying to impose their will, their creeds, their trade upon each other and have learned to live and let live. We shall see public life converted from a wrangle for prizes into a field of constructive service. We shall see a world where the children of the lowest classes can share freely and adequately in the fruits of the highest education.
Such an order will bring out the best possibilities, as Communism brings out the worst. And instead of inducing men to struggle against each other, it will induce them to co-operate with each other. The principle of co-operation will help to crush individual and national selfishness and thus tend to promote ethical progress.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 270
