Criticism of this series of articles is not always praise. Critics,
and even friendly critics, complain that I run things down. I imagined
that my real failing was an impatience to push things up. It has been
complained and repeated, even by Sir Alan Cobham, who ought to know
better, that I take a gloomy view of aviation, whereas I take so
bright a view of its possibilities that I am driven to exasperation
by the financial incompetence and narrow patriotism that restrict its
practical development. And I am reported to be “pessimistic” about
broadcasting, though the truth is that I have anticipated its complete
disappearance--confident that the unfortunate people, who must now
subdue themselves to “listening-in” will soon find a better pastime for
their leisure.
But these comments and certain observations arising out of that
film “Metropolis,” a stray article by Mr. Mencken, and a week-end
conversation, have turned my attention to the astonishing prevalence
of a disposition to disregard and deny, firstly that life in general
is happier than it ever was before, and secondly, that it needs but a
little vigour and clearheadedness to make it much happier than it is
now or ever has been.
It was pretended in that film “Metropolis,” for example, that the
development of a great mechanical civilization must reduce a large
part of the population from some imaginary old-world happiness, sweet,
golden, tender, and true, to machine-minding drudgery. That is a quite
common assertion made without a shadow of justification in fact. And
we are constantly being told that the human animal is “degenerating,”
body and mind, through the malign influence of big towns; that a miasma
of “vulgarity” and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich
and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the
human “soul,” which was formerly quite all right, is now in a very bad
way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to
mediæval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath
brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry,
handmade furniture, honest, homely surgery without anæsthetics, long
skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more
slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but
nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness. This sort of stuff is exuded
in enormous volume, and it offers an immense resistance to systematic
progress. It is sustained by multitudes of people who are in a position
to be better informed. The Gummidge chorus is never silent; the
thoughtful headshaker moping for a return to mediævalism casts his
daily shadow on every patch of sunshine, on each new social enterprise
and hopeful effort. Everything we have is cheapened by comparison with
an entirely legendary past and with an entirely imaginary state of
“natural” health and joyfulness.
Let us admit that life still displays much unhappiness and that it is
overhung by the frightful dangers of modern war. Let us concede the
black possibilities latent in nationalism, flag worship, educational
slackening, and the class jealousy and class malignancy of the
prosperous. Even so, there are the soundest reasons for maintaining
that never, since life first appeared upon this planet, has there been
so great a proportion of joy, happiness, and contentment as there is
about us now, nor so bright an outlook.
But before we can see this issue plainly, we have to clear our minds
of certain popular errors based mainly on a misconceived theology.
Many people believe it is their duty to assume the perfection of
nature, and with them there is no arguing. They will hold the hyena
lovely and the fever germ a perfect device. If, however, we dismiss
such preconceptions and ask ourselves plainly what happiness there is
now in the wild life of the jungle or desert or deep sea, we shall
come upon a different answer. Nature is clumsy and heedlessly cruel.
Life apart from man is not a happy spectacle. It is a flight and a
chase, a craving, famished business, a round of assassinations. The
jungle is no merry meeting place; it is a rustling ambush in which
things lurk and creep. They become noisy only under the spur of an
extravagant sexual desire. How cruel and tormented seems the sexual
life of almost every living creature except our modern, sophisticated
selves! Even over the herd browsing in the midst of plenty hangs a
constant, vague apprehension. A cracking twig will start a panic. The
first motives in animal life are hunger and fear. Apart from the brief
capering spring-time of young creatures--and how brief it is!--there
is no intimation of any happiness whatever except the fierce, bolted
gratification of an intense appetite or the monstrous triumph of a
“kill.” The most fortunate thing in the life of an animal is the
shortness of its memory and its want of foresight. Throughout the whole
realm of nature it is only among birds and mammals that we detect any
indication whatever of a real delight in life. Birds sing in spring and
the young of birds and mammals play through a brief phase of parental
protection; mere gleams of sunshine these on the universal hard drive
for bare existence.
Thoughtless people talk of “nature’s remedies” and imagine that
every wild animal with that instinctive pharmacopœia must be in the
pink of condition. But variations are far too infrequent and natural
selection far too loose a guide to keep pace with the secular change
of conditions and equip animals with an inherent cure for every
ailment and an automatic counter-stroke to every danger. There is no
such self-righting arrangement in the natural world. Most of nature’s
handwork is loose-jointed and casual. The sick and weak and maimed
are sooner destroyed and less in evidence, that is all. Wild species
are just as subject to epidemics and hideous parasitism as man. Few
creatures seem to have found their “perfect” food, or, having found it,
are able to keep to it. Indigestion and malnutrition are as rife in the
forest as the slum. Elephant-hunters say they can tell the proximity
of a herd by the borborygmic noises the poor brutes emit, and Glasfurd
describes a tiger’s life as an alternation of uncomfortable hunger and
uncomfortable repletion. There is no reason to suppose that early man
was any better off than an animal or any happier. Like the animals
he was a fear-driven, hunger-driven, lust-driven creature, feeding
perforce on what he could find. Some of the earliest known human bones
are diseased bones.
The story of the common man since the beginning of social life has
been anything but a record of innocent festivals and homely happiness.
With the development of agriculture he began to escape from the hunger
and fear, the tramp’s life in the wilderness, of the wandering savage,
but only by accepting an increasing burthen of regular toil. History
and archæology preserve only the records of the successful few; we
must guess how many myriads of drudges worked the mines, pulled the
galleys, and hoed the fields for the greatness of the Pyramids or the
pretty palaces of Cnossus. And pestilence and famine returned in every
lifetime. Pestilence and famine have disappeared from the general
routine of life in the last hundred years or less, and that only in
the Atlantic civilizations. The social history of the Old Testament
goes to the accompaniment of a prolonged groan from the common people.
The Roman Empire was an administrative pyramid based on slaves,
serfs, and distressed taxpayers. Its distinctive instrument of social
discipline was the cross. There is no period in the past upon which a
well-informed man can put his finger and say, “At this time common men
had more joyful lives than they have to-day.”
There is only a very scanty account of the life of the common man
through most of the historical period. It was not worth writing about.
As M. Abel Chevalley points out in his admirable study of that father
of the English novel, Thomas Deloney, it is suddenly in the Elizabethan
period that literature stoops so low as to tell of tradespeople
and their servants. Peasant life still remained in darkness. Even
now we get only half-lit pictures of that earthly underworld. Mr.
Liam O’Flaherty’s glimpses of the Irish cultivator and Mr. Caradoc
Evans’s sketches of the primitive folk in Wales are more convincing
than pleasant. Deloney shows us a squabbling, insecure, undignified
life, much pervaded by envy and malice, ill-housed, ill-clothed, and
irregularly fed, without medical attention, amusement, reading, change
of scene. It is much the same squalor that we find as the background
of the adventures in the Roman world of Petronius. And still it was a
marked advance, as Chevalley notes, on mediæval life.
That squalid life remained the common life until the third or
fourth decade of the nineteenth century. There seemed little hope
of any improvement. There were great social changes, an increase of
productivity and population in the eighteenth century, but they brought
no perceptible amelioration of the common lot. The common man remained
dirty and ignorant, needy, or incessantly laborious. The first clumsy
machines brought trouble rather than relief; they threw multitudes out
of employment; they needed drudges to prepare the way for them; they
needed drudges to supplement their mechanical imperfections.
It was only after the middle of the nineteenth century that the real
significance of mechanical invention and the practical applications
of scientific knowledge and method became apparent. Then it began to
dawn upon mankind that the age of the mere drudge was at an end. The
outbreak of universal education in Western Europe was the practical
recognition of this. Meanly and grudgingly planned, against the
resistance of many privileged people, and much disturbed by their
intense jealousy of their “social inferiors,” the establishment of
compulsory elementary education marks, nevertheless, a new phase in
the history of our species. It is the beginning of at least a chance
for everybody. Close upon it came a fall in the birth-rate, and an
even greater fall in the infantile death-rate--clear intimations that
the common people no longer consented to leave their increase to
the unchecked urgency of bestial instincts nor the health of their
offspring to chance. Concurrently, too, there began such a shortening
of the hours of work as to extend leisure, which had once been the
privilege of a minority, to nearly the whole population.
The present phase of these changes shows us the old once necessary
drudge population becoming in part an unemployable and unwanted abyss
of people who are either natural inferiors or exceptionally unlucky
individuals, and in part a much larger and increasing new mass of
comparatively versatile semi-skilled workers, whose efficiency and
standards of life are rising, whose security, leisure, and opportunity
increase. These latter are the new common people that the extension
of knowledge and machine production has given the world, and their
development will be the measure of civilization in the future. Even at
its present level it is an unprecedented mass of happy and hopeful life
in comparison with any common life that has ever existed before, and
there are many reasons for hoping--if great wars can be avoided and if
it does not swamp itself by unrestrained proliferation--that it will go
on to much higher levels still.
This expanding mass of new common people bulks largest in the United
States of America, but it is as highly developed in the more complex
British system even though proportionally it is not so great, and
it exists with qualifications and differences in all industrialized
Europe. It needs only a decade or so of peace and security to appear in
China, and as the economic reconstruction of Russia brings that country
into line and co-operation again with other European developments,
we shall probably find that there also the conditions of machine
production have evoked a new town population and a new agricultural
worker, able to read, write, discuss, and think, with much the same
amount of leisure and freedom as his Western comrade. The dictatorship
of the proletariat may dictate what it likes, but the machine will
insist, there as everywhere, that the people who will work it and for
whom it will work must have minds quickened by education and refreshed
by leisure, must be reasonably versatile, and must not be overworked or
embittered.
Let me note one or two other points making for happiness in our days.
For the first time in history over large parts of the earth the beating
of inferiors has disappeared. For the first time in history the common
worker has leisure assigned to him as his right. Never have common
people been so well clad or so well housed. Never have they had so much
freedom of movement. There is a horror of cruelty to men and animals
more widely diffused than it has ever been before. There has been an
extraordinary increase in social gentleness. There has never been so
small a proportion of sickness and death in the community. All these
things mean happiness--more universal than it has ever been.
But this general march towards happiness is not fated and assured.
There is no guarantee in progress. This much of release for the common
man from disease, privation, and drudgery has come about very rapidly
as a consequence of inventions and discoveries that were not made to
that end, and the development of the new common people into a world of
civilization of free and happy individuals is manifestly challenged by
enormous antagonistic forces. It may be impeded, delayed, or defeated.
Flags and the loyalties and passions of insensate nationalism are
flatly opposed to the attainment of a general human welfare. Every man
in military uniform is a threat of violence; every gun and military
implement is a man-trap in the path to a universal order. The false
legend of the glorious past of our race is in a perpetual struggle
against the hope of its future. Obscurantism and fear lie in wait for
every courageous innovation in social and economic life. Indolence is
their ally and false thinking their friend. Continual progress can only
be assured by an incessant acutely critical vigilance. None the less,
the common man to-day is happier than he has ever been, and with a
clearer hope of continuing betterment. The common man in quite a little
space of years may be better off than are even the fortunate few to-day.
And now call me a pessimist if you can!
_1 May, 1927._