artistic; for religion and wisdom and art imply the acceptance of
limitations. But they become powerful and rich. They inherit the
earth and change the face of nature, if they do not possess their own
souls; and they have that appearance of freedom which consists in the
absence of obstacles between opportunities for self-advancement and
those whom birth or wealth or talent or good fortune has placed in a
position to seize them. It is not difficult either for individuals or
for societies to achieve their object, if that object be sufficiently
limited and immediate, and if they are not distracted from its {32}
pursuit by other considerations. The temper which dedicates itself to
the cultivation of opportunities, and leaves obligations to take care
of themselves, is set upon an object which is at once simple and
practicable. The eighteenth century defined it. The twentieth century
has very largely attained it. Or, if it has not attained it, it has at
least grasped the possibilities of its attainment. The national output
of wealth per head of population is estimated to have been
approximately $200 in 1914. Unless mankind chooses to continue the
sacrifice of prosperity to the ambitions and terrors of nationalism, it
is possible that by the year 2000 it may be doubled.
{33}
IV
THE NEMESIS OF INDUSTRIALISM
Such happiness is not remote from achievement. In the course of
achieving it, however, the world has been confronted by a group of
unexpected consequences, which are the cause of its _malaise_, as the
obstruction of economic opportunity was the cause of social _malaise_
in the eighteenth century. And these consequences are not, as is often
suggested, accidental mal-adjustments, but flow naturally from its
dominant principle: so that there is a sense in which the cause of its
perplexity is not its failure, but the quality of its success, and its
light itself a kind of darkness. The will to economic power, if it is
sufficiently single-minded, brings riches. But if it is single-minded
it destroys the moral restraints which ought to condition the pursuit
of riches, and therefore also makes the pursuit of riches meaningless.
For what gives meaning to economic activity, as to any other activity
is, as we have said, the purpose to which it is directed. But the
faith upon which our economic civilization reposes, the faith that
riches are not a means but an end, implies that all economic activity
is equally estimable, whether it is subordinated to a social purpose or
not. Hence it divorces gain from service, and justifies rewards for
which no function is performed, or which are out of all proportion to
it. Wealth in modern societies is distributed according to {34}
opportunity; and while opportunity depends partly upon talent and
energy, it depends still more upon birth, social position, access to
education and inherited wealth; in a word, upon property. For talent
and energy can create opportunity. But property need only wait for it.
It is the sleeping partner who draws the dividends which the firm
produces, the residuary legatee who always claims his share in the
estate.
Because rewards are divorced from services, so that what is prized most
is not riches obtained in return for labor but riches the economic
origin of which, being regarded as sordid, is concealed, two results
follow. The first is the creation of a class of pensioners upon
industry, who levy toll upon its product, but contribute nothing to its
increase, and who are not merely tolerated, but applauded and admired
and protected with assiduous care, as though the secret of prosperity
resided in them. They are admired because in the absence of any
principle of discrimination between incomes which are payment for
functions and incomes which are not, all incomes, merely because they
represent wealth, stand on the same level of appreciation, and are
estimated solely by their magnitude, so that in all societies which
have accepted industrialism there is an upper layer which claims the
enjoyment of social life, while it repudiates its responsibilities.
The _rentier_ and his ways, how familiar they were in England before
the war! A public school and then club life in Oxford and Cambridge,
and then another club in town; London in June, when London is pleasant,
the moors in August, and pheasants in October, Cannes in {35} December
and hunting in February and March; and a whole world of rising
bourgeoisie eager to imitate them, sedulous to make their expensive
watches keep time with this preposterous calendar!
The second consequence is the degradation of those who labor, but who
do not by their labor command large rewards; that is of the great
majority of mankind. And this degradation follows inevitably from the
refusal of men to give the purpose of industry the first place in their
thought about it. When they do that, when their minds are set upon the
fact that the meaning of industry is the service of man, all who labor
appear to them honorable, because all who labor serve, and the
distinction which separates those who serve from those who merely spend
is so crucial and fundamental as to obliterate all minor distinctions
based on differences of income. But when the criterion of function is
forgotten, the only criterion which remains is that of wealth, and an
Acquisitive Society reverences the possession of wealth, as a
Functional Society would honor, even in the person of the humblest and
most laborious craftsman, the arts of creation.
So wealth becomes the foundation of public esteem, and the mass of men
who labor, but who do not acquire wealth, are thought to be vulgar and
meaningless and insignificant compared with the few who acquire wealth
by good fortune, or by the skilful use of economic opportunities. They
come to be regarded, not as the ends for which alone it is worth while
to produce wealth at all, but as the instruments of its {36}
acquisition by a world that declines to be soiled by contact with what
is thought to be the dull and sordid business of labor. They are not
happy, for the reward of all but the very mean is not merely money, but
the esteem of their fellow-men, and they know they are not esteemed, as
soldiers, for example, are esteemed, though it is because they give
their lives to making civilization that there is a civilization which
it is worth while for soldiers to defend. They are not esteemed,
because the admiration of society is directed towards those who get,
not towards those who give; and though workmen give much they get
little. And the _rentiers_ whom they support are not happy; for in
discarding the idea of function, which sets a limit to the acquisition
of riches, they have also discarded the principle which alone give
riches their meaning. Hence unless they can persuade themselves that
to be rich is in itself meritorious, they may bask in social
admiration, but they are unable to esteem themselves. For they have
abolished the principle which makes activity significant, and therefore
estimable. They are, indeed, more truly pitiable than some of those
who envy them. For like the spirits in the Inferno, they are punished
by the attainment of their desires.
A society ruled by these notions is necessarily the victim of an
irrational inequality. To escape such inequality it is necessary to
recognize that there is some principle which ought to limit the gains
of particular classes and particular individuals, because gains drawn
from certain sources or exceeding certain amounts are illegitimate.
But such a limitation implies a {37} standard of discrimination, which
is inconsistent with the assumption that each man has a right to what
he can get, irrespective of any service rendered for it. Thus
privilege, which was to have been exorcised by the gospel of 1789,
returns in a new guise, the creature no longer of unequal legal rights
thwarting the natural exercise of equal powers of hand and brain, but
of unequal powers springing from the exercise of equal rights in a
world where property and inherited wealth and the apparatus of class
institutions have made opportunities unequal. Inequality, again, leads
to the mis-direction of production. For, since the demand of one
income of L50,000 is as powerful a magnet as the demand of 500 incomes
of L100, it diverts energy from the creation of wealth to the
multiplication of luxuries, so that, for example, while one-tenth of
the people of England are overcrowded, a considerable part of them are
engaged, not in supplying that deficiency, but in making rich men's
hotels, luxurious yachts, and motorcars like that used by the Secretary
of State for War, "with an interior inlaid with silver in quartered
mahogany, and upholstered in fawn suede and morocco," which was
recently bought by a suburban capitalist, by way of encouraging useful
industries and rebuking public extravagance with an example of private
economy, for the trifling sum of $14,000.
Thus part of the goods which are annually produced, and which are
called wealth, is, strictly speaking, waste, because it consists of
articles which, though reckoned as part of the income of the nation,
either should not have been produced until other articles had already
{38} been produced in sufficient abundance, or should not have been
produced at all. And some part of the population is employed in making
goods which no man can make with happiness, or indeed without loss of
self-respect, because he knows that they had much better not be made;
and that his life is wasted in making them. Everybody recognizes that
the army contractor who, in time of war, set several hundred navvies to
dig an artificial lake in his grounds, was not adding to, but
subtracting from, the wealth of the nation. But in time of peace many
hundred thousand workmen, if they are not digging ponds, are doing work
which is equally foolish and wasteful; though, in peace, as in war,
there is important work, which is waiting to be done, and which is
neglected. It is neglected because, while the effective demand of the
mass of men is only too small, there is a small class which wears
several men's clothes, eats several men's dinners, occupies several
families' houses, and lives several men's lives. As long as a minority
has so large an income that part of it, if spent at all, must be spent
on trivialities, so long will part of the human energy and mechanical
equipment of the nation be diverted from serious work, which enriches
it, to making trivialities, which impoverishes it, since they can only
be made at the cost of not making other things. And if the peers and
millionaires who are now preaching the duty of production to miners and
dock laborers desire that more wealth, not more waste, should be
produced, the simplest way in which they can achieve their aim is to
transfer to the public their whole incomes over (say) $5,000 a year, in
order that it may {39} be spent in setting to work, not gardeners,
chauffeurs, domestic servants and shopkeepers in the West End of
London, but builders, mechanics and teachers.
So to those who clamor, as many now do, "Produce! Produce!" one simple
question may be addressed:--"Produce what?" Food, clothing,
house-room, art, knowledge? By all means! But if the nation is
scantily furnished with these things had it not better stop producing a
good many others which fill shop windows in Regent Street? If it
desires to re-equip its industries with machinery and its railways with
wagons, had it not better refrain from holding exhibitions designed to
encourage rich men to re-equip themselves with motor-cars? What can be
more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should
be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is
misapplied? Is not _less_ production of futilities as important as,
indeed a condition of, _more_ production of things of moment? Would
not "Spend less on private luxuries" be as wise a cry as "produce
more"? Yet this result of inequality, again, is a phenomenon which
cannot be prevented, or checked, or even recognized by a society which
excludes the idea of purpose from its social arrangements and
industrial activity. For to recognize it is to admit that there is a
principle superior to the mechanical play of economic forces, which
ought to determine the relative importance of different occupations,
and thus to abandon the view that all riches, however composed, are an
end, and that all economic activity is equally justifiable.
{40}
The rejection of the idea of purpose involves another consequence which
every one laments, but which no one can prevent, except by abandoning
the belief that the free exercise of rights is the main interest of
society and the discharge of obligations a secondary and incidental
consequence which may be left to take care of itself. It is that
social life is turned into a scene of fierce antagonisms and that a
considerable part of industry is carried on in the intervals of a
disguised social war. The idea that industrial peace can be secured
merely by the exercise of tact and forbearance is based on the idea
that there is a fundamental identity of interest between the different
groups engaged in it, which is occasionally interrupted by regrettable
misunderstandings. Both the one idea and the other are an illusion.
The disputes which matter are not caused by a misunderstanding of
identity of interests, but by a better understanding of diversity of
interests. Though a formal declaration of war is an episode, the
conditions which issue in a declaration of war are permanent; and what
makes them permanent is the conception of industry which also makes
inequality and functionless incomes permanent. It is the denial that
industry has any end or purpose other than the satisfaction of those
engaged in it.
That motive produces industrial warfare, not as a regrettable incident,
but as an inevitable result. It produces industrial war, because its
teaching is that each individual or group has a right to what they can
get, and denies that there is any principle, other than the mechanism
of the market, which determines what {41} they ought to get. For,
since the income available for distribution is limited, and since,
therefore, when certain limits have been passed, what one group gains
another group must lose, it is evident that if the relative incomes of
different groups are not to be determined by their functions, there is
no method other than mutual self-assertion which is left to determine
them. Self-interest, indeed, may cause them to refrain from using
their full strength to enforce their claims, and, in so far as this
happens, peace is secured in industry, as men have attempted to secure
it in international affairs, by a balance of power. But the
maintenance of such a peace is contingent upon the estimate of the
parties to it that they have more to lose than to gain by an overt
struggle, and is not the result of their acceptance of any standard of
remuneration as an equitable settlement of their claims. Hence it is
precarious, insincere and short. It is without finality, because there
can be no finality in the mere addition of increments of income, any
more than in the gratification of any other desire for material goods.
When demands are conceded the old struggle recommences upon a new
level, and will always recommence as long as men seek to end it merely
by increasing remuneration, not by finding a principle upon which all
remuneration, whether large or small, should be based.
Such a principle is offered by the idea of function, because its
application would eliminate the surpluses which are the subject of
contention, and would make it evident that remuneration is based upon
service, {42} not upon chance or privilege or the power to use
opportunities to drive a hard bargain. But the idea of function is
incompatible with the doctrine that every person and organization have
an unlimited right to exploit their economic opportunities as fully as
they please, which is the working faith of modern industry; and, since
it is not accepted, men resign themselves to the settlement of the
issue by force, or propose that the State should supersede the force of
private associations by the use of its force, as though the absence of
a principle could be compensated by a new kind of machinery. Yet all
the time the true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true
cause of international warfare. It is that if men recognize no law
superior to their desires, then they must fight when their desires
collide. For though groups or nations which are at issue with each
other may be willing to submit to a principle which is superior to them
both, there is no reason why they should submit to each other.
Hence the idea, which is popular with rich men, that industrial
disputes would disappear if only the output of wealth were doubled, and
every one were twice as well off, not only is refuted by all practical
experience, but is in its very nature founded upon an illusion. For
the question is one not of amounts but of proportions; and men will
fight to be paid $120 a week, instead of $80, as readily as they will
fight to be paid $20 instead of $16, as long as there is no reason why
they should be paid $80 instead of $120, and as long as other men who
do not work are paid anything {43} at all. If miners demanded higher
wages when every superfluous charge upon coal-getting had been
eliminated, there would be a principle with which to meet their claim,
the principle that one group of workers ought not to encroach upon the
livelihood of others. But as long as mineral owners extract royalties,
and exceptionally productive mines pay thirty per cent. to absentee
shareholders, there is no valid answer to a demand for higher wages.
For if the community pays anything at all to those who do not work, it
can afford to pay more to those who do. The naive complaint, that
workmen are never satisfied, is, therefore, strictly true. It is true,
not only of workmen, but of all classes in a society which conducts its
affairs on the principle that wealth, instead of being proportioned to
function, belongs to those who can get it. They are never satisfied,
nor can they be satisfied. For as long as they make that principle the
guide of their individual lives and of their social order, nothing
short of infinity could bring them satisfaction.
So here, again, the prevalent insistence upon rights, and prevalent
neglect of functions, brings men into a vicious circle which they
cannot escape, without escaping from the false philosophy which
dominates them. But it does something more. It makes that philosophy
itself seem plausible and exhilarating, and a rule not only for
industry, in which it had its birth, but for politics and culture and
religion and the whole compass of social life. The possibility that
one aspect of human life may be so exaggerated as to overshadow, {44}
and in time to atrophy, every other, has been made familiar to
Englishmen by the example of "Prussian militarism." Militarism is the
characteristic, not of an army, but of a society. Its essence is not
any particular quality or scale of military preparation, but a state of
mind, which, in its concentration on one particular element in social
life, ends finally by exalting it until it becomes the arbiter of all
the rest. The purpose for which military forces exist is forgotten.
They are thought to stand by their own right and to need no
justification. Instead of being regarded as an instrument which is
necessary in an imperfect world, they are elevated into an object of
superstitious veneration, as though the world would be a poor insipid
place without them, so that political institutions and social
arrangements and intellect and morality and religion are crushed into a
mold made to fit one activity, which in a sane society is a subordinate
activity, like the police, or the maintenance of prisons, or the
cleansing of sewers, but which in a militarist state is a kind of
mystical epitome of society itself.
Militarism, as Englishmen see plainly enough, is fetich worship. It is
the prostration of men's souls before, and the laceration of their
bodies to appease, an idol. What they do not see is that their
reverence for economic activity and industry and what is called
business is also fetich worship, and that in their devotion to that
idol they torture themselves as needlessly and indulge in the same
meaningless antics as the Prussians did in their worship of militarism.
For what the military tradition and spirit have done for Prussia, {45}
with the result of creating militarism, the commercial tradition and
spirit have done for England, with the result of creating
industrialism. Industrialism is no more a necessary characteristic of
an economically developed society than militarism is a necessary
characteristic of a nation which maintains military forces. It is no
more the result of applying science to industry than militarism is the
result of the application of science to war, and the idea that it is
something inevitable in a community which uses coal and iron and
machinery, so far from being the truth, is itself a product of the
perversion of mind which industrialism produces. Men may use what
mechanical instruments they please and be none the worse for their use.
What kills their souls is when they allow their instruments to use
_them_. The essence of industrialism, in short, is not any particular
method of industry, but a particular estimate of the importance of
industry, which results in it being thought the only thing that is
important at all, so that it is elevated from the subordinate place
which it should occupy among human interests and activities into being
the standard by which all other interests and activities are judged.
When a Cabinet Minister declares that the greatness of this country
depends upon the volume of its exports, so that France, with exports
comparatively little, and Elizabethan England, which exported next to
nothing, are presumably to be pitied as altogether inferior
civilizations, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of one minor
department of life with the {46} whole of life. When manufacturers cry
and cut themselves with knives, because it is proposed that boys and
girls of fourteen shall attend school for eight hours a week, and the
President of the Board of Education is so gravely impressed by their
apprehensions, that he at once allows the hours to be reduced to seven,
that is Industrialism. It is fetich worship. When the Government
obtains money for a war, which costs $28,000,000 a day, by closing the
Museums, which cost $80,000 a year, that is Industrialism. It is a
contempt for all interests which do not contribute obviously to
economic activity. When the Press clamors that the one thing needed to
make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and
yet more productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of
means with ends.
Men will always confuse means with ends if they are without any clear
conception that it is the ends, not the means, which matter--if they
allow their minds to slip from the fact that it is the social purpose
of industry which gives it meaning and makes it worth while to carry it
on at all. And when they do that, they will turn their whole world
upside down, because they do not see the poles upon which it ought to
move. So when, like England, they are thoroughly industrialized, they
behave like Germany, which was thoroughly militarized. They talk as
though man existed for industry, instead of industry existing for man,
as the Prussians talked of man existing for war. They resent any
activity which is not colored by the predominant interest, because it
seems a rival to it. So they {47} destroy religion and art and
morality, which cannot exist unless they are disinterested; and having
destroyed these, which are the end, for the sake of industry, which is
a means, they make their industry itself what they make their cities, a
desert of unnatural dreariness, which only forgetfulness can make
endurable, and which only excitement can enable them to forget.