We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a
menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the
Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening
of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French
militarism—with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor
menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery....
Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these
enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far
from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years
since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on
the other, where precisely it stood _then_ is a question which each may
answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces
to our civilization, such as it is—menaces including the largest war and
the stupidest peace known to history—have confined themselves in most
places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they
bite.
No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the
external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after
them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within,
that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary
man.
Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of
auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems
to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that
curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.”
“Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I
mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known
by the same name) “pleasure”—what nightmare visions the word evokes!
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would
rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned
to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a
million words of journalism a year.
The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of
organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more
imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with
distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In
the seventeenth century, for example, royal personages and their
courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr.
Donne’s, for example) and academical disputes on points of theology or
metaphysics. Part of the entertainment offered to the Prince Palatine,
on the occasion of his marriage with James 1.’s daughter, was a
syllogistic argumentation, on I forget what philosophical theme, between
the amiable Lord Keeper Williams and a troop of minor Cambridge
logicians. Imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince, if a loyal
University were to offer him a similar entertainment!
Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent
pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary
culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a
madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety
of sixteenth-century music will realize what this means. To indulge in
their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an
uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures
requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and
personal initiative. They listened, for example, to _Othello_, _King
Lear_, and _Hamlet_—apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They
sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the
peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites—the dances of
spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest
home—appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were
intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts,
entertained themselves.
We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding
intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that
provide us with ready-made distractions—distractions which demand from
pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of
any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas
bring the same stale balderdash. There have always been fourth-rate
writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died
without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in
which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go
out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak
passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of
them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.
Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it
themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a
little more up-to-date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right
wave-length and listen-in to the fruity contralto at Marconi House,
singing “The Gleaner’s Slumber Song.”
And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true,
the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to
provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind
without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single
thought. This function, it must be admitted, it fulfils with an
extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years and years,
reading two papers every working day and one on Sundays without ever
once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move
the eyes, not very attentively, down the printed column.
Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in
which individual participation is demanded. Great numbers of the middle
and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and, if they are
sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go ski-ing in the
Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport
vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and
dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance; but
dance, all the world over, the same steps to the same tunes. The dance
has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality.
These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the
same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely
a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The
working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human
beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which
no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now,
in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically
stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does
our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day
which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.
Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might
easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost
atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so
wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without
that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence
and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a
chronic and mortal boredom. It will go, perhaps, the way the Romans
went: the Romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing
now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who, like us, lived
on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their
deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope-walking
elephants, more rare and far-fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours
would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists,
doesn’t get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can
only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty
you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair,
however; we may still live to see blood flowing across the stage of the
Hippodrome. The force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet
prove too much for the idealists.