Ouroboros

Part 1

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OUROBOROS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book

OUROBOROS

THE MECHANICAL EXTENSION OF MANKIND

BY GARET GARRETT

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

Ouroboros was a fabulous snake, the encircling serpent, that swallowed its own tail. It represented an infantile thought of the human mind for wish-fulfilment by magical means. Man’s heroic business was to conquer the reptile. As he did this he seized the object he most desired. He might even wish himself into solid gold.

Made and Printed in Great Britain by M. F. Robinson & Co. Ltd. at the Library Press, Lowest

CONTENTS

PAGE

I THE QUEST SINCE ADAM 7

II THE MACHINE AS IF 23

III THE LAW OF MACHINES 31

IV WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE 42

V THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS 58

VI IN PERIL OF TRADE 72

VII DIM VISTAS NEW 84

OUROBOROS

THE QUEST SINCE ADAM

One story of us is continuous. It is the story of our struggle to recapture the Garden of Eden, meaning by that a state of existence free from the doom of toil.

So long as the character of our economic life was agricultural, as it almost wholly was until a very recent time, the attack was naïve. In the file of prayers, if one is kept, the thickest, dustiest bundle is that of our supplications for plenty—miraculous plenty without worry or price. We were loth to believe that the second arrangement between God and Adam made at the gate of exit:

Cursed is the ground for thy sake; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread

was forever; and for a long time afterward local weather conditions were wistfully misunderstood, as a chastisement when they were bad and a sign of relenting when they were good. It was forever. Nature’s ring was closed, never again to open for any darling fructuary.

That is to say, man’s taking from the soil is an arbitrary wage. He may increase the gross of it a little by exerting himself more: the scale he cannot alter. If tilth for the individual has been made easier somewhat and more productive by the use of wheeled implements, power tools and now airplanes to dust the orchard with insecticide, these, you must remember, represent a tremendous increase of effort by mankind at large upon the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth.

When at length the realistic mind perceived that here was a natural fact upon which prayers, thanksgiving, sacrifice, idolatry, and the pretentions of magic were all alike wasted, the spiritual part of us no doubt had been willing to accept the sentence. Not so the earthy and lusty part. The curse was heavy. There was never a risk man would not take, no kind of heroic exertion he would spare himself, to escape the evil, the boredom, the drudgery of repetitious toil.

From such puerile motivation came the Age of Discovery, then physical science, purposeful mechanical invention, the industrial era, and all the artificial marvels of the modern world. These effects are historically traceable; and, if it should occur to you to wonder why they are so much more vivid and astonishing in the West than in the East, that is easily explained. The European mind went on with the phantasy of an earthly paradise of plenty and leisure after the Oriental mind in weariness of wisdom had given it up.

Part 2

Until four hundred years ago the Europeans believed that somewhere in the world was a fabulous land whose inhabitants lived as in dreams, eating and drinking from golden vessels, wearing priceless jewels like common beads, sated with ease and luxury. King, courts, astronomers and navigators believed this. The vulgar fancy was for a place such as Cockaigne of the medieval ballads, where all features of the landscape were good to eat or drink and nobody ever was obliged to work. In quest of this mythical region the pioneer feats of circumnavigation were performed.

What a disparity between the character of the motive and the shape of the dead!—or is it that men do not know their motives?

The earth was explored. It was found to be round and full of labour. This, of course, was a terrible disappointment.

The ceaseless mind then turned to alchemy with the idea that base metals were changeable into gold; from this came chemistry and the study of matter and physical phenomena in a new way, taking nothing for granted. This was the beginning of true Science. As to what might come of it practically there was at first only the rudest kind of notion. Dimly it was understood that exact knowledge must somehow increase man’s power, give him control of the elementary circumstance, enable him perhaps to command that which hitherto he had got by hazard. When a great body of fact-knowledge had been accumulated, men began to see little by little how it might be dynamically applied. Then the epoch of Mechanical Invention.

The idea of machines was not new. Long before the beginning of the Christian era the ancients had produced many wonderful automatic devices; but mechanical knowledge with them was a department of magic. The use of machines was to mystify the multitude. Brazen figures were made to move, dragons to hiss, temple doors to open and close, trees to emit musical sounds, and lamps to trim themselves perpetually by means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons—all acting on sound principles of pneumatics and hydraulics. Much of this ancient technology was lost or forgotten. The European mind rediscovered it gradually in a spirit of scientific curiosity, with no clear economic intention. And, but for a simple practical idea, one that was very slow to come through, the machine no doubt would still be what it anciently was—an object of superstition, the toy of wonder, an accessory of priestcraft.

And what an obvious idea it was!—merely to exploit the machine’s slave value. Merely to see an engine as a beast of burden and the loom as a projection of the hand, both instruments of magnified production, to spare the labour of mankind.

That moment in which the use of mechanical energy came to be so conceived was one of elemental significance. All the chances of human life were altered, though not as anyone supposed or as they were meant to be.

The course of internal evolution requires to be imagined. It is slow beyond perception. It may not be a fact; or, for aught we know, it may be finished in the species. Suddenly man begins to augment himself by an external process. His natural powers become extensible to a degree that makes them original in kind. To his given structure—the weakest among animal structures in proportion to its bulk—he adds an automatic, artificial member, responsive only to his contact, answerable only to his will, uncontrolled by nature, fabulous in its possibilities of strength, variation, and cunning.

His use of it in three generations has changed the design of civilization out of recognition. That change alone which sets our time off abruptly from all time before is the fact of potential plenty. We take this for granted as if it were a natural fact, whereas, instead, all the circumstances have been invented.

We who are born to the view cannot see it. We cannot imagine what it was like to live in a world where famine was a frequent visitation and all things were scarce. Yet never until now has the human race known what plenty was. Immemorially the word has signified food.

See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of wine and corn.

The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only the fruits of the earth.

That old meaning of the word has been recently lost. Modernly we speak of ‘goods’; we talk of the standard of living, which is understood of course to include proper quantities of food, and to mean, besides food, an endless number of artificial things which people increasingly require for their comfort and well-being.

Mechanical energy does not produce food. Nor has the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth been suspended. Yet the machine has enormously increased the food-supply in two ways: first, agriculture is equipped with power—tools, so that one man now may perform the labour of many; second, transportation has made all the food-producing areas of the world accessible, so that grain from the middle of the North American continent and grain from Argentina are mingled unawares in the European loaf.

This use of the machine to distribute food swiftly over the whole world from where there is a surplus to where that surplus is needed has had profound political, economic, and social consequences, beginning with an increase of the human species vastly beyond any number that had at any time previously existed or could ever before have been sustained upon the earth. That is the one most awesome phenomenon of the industrial era. The North American continent has been peopled from European stock. Its present population is equal to that of all Europe in 1800. This drain of emigration notwithstanding, the population of Europe in the same time has trebled.

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