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.

And still there is plenty.

Where it is not actual, it is potential. Who have not plenty are either too inert or too ignorant to put forth the modern effort. What people may use, enjoy, and consume now is an x quantity, determined neither by the rhythms of nature nor any biological principle, but simply by the free total of their own exertions.

Faster than the race has multiplied the powers of the machine have increased. One of these is the power of transportation, whereby the food product of the whole earth is made uniformly available. The other power is represented by a divisible product of artificial things tending to exceed the sum of effective human desire.

To wishful desire there is no limit whatever; but there is a point at which the effort necessary to obtain the object—that is, the toil—will be weighed against the desire to possess it, and only when and if the object is deemed worth the effort is desire effective in the economic sense.

From the paradox mentioned—that tendency of the machine’s divisible product to overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series of complex phenomena of which there is nowhere yet a complete understanding.

This now is a buyer’s world where formerly it was the seller’s. Business no longer sits in Asiatic dignity waiting for its customers; it must up and seek them. The buyer is pursued.

As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float through my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor-truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the tiny doorway.

What does this mean? First, it means that the day before yesterday a salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not know.

But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent.

The principle is that the divisible product of the machine is cheap in proportion to the quantity. Remember that principle. We shall meet it again.

As with player-pianos and radio-sets in my country road, so with all manner of artificial things, with the whole divisible product of the machine, in every road, every street, every market of the world. How to produce enough is no longer any problem at all. How to sell what is increasingly produced—that is the problem. Evidence thereof is the commonest thing we see. It is painted in the landscape. It illuminates the cities at night. It is in our marginal vision when we read. There is no lifting one’s eyes to heaven, no casting them down in shame, no seeing whatever without seeing it.

Each day a forest is cut down and consumed for wood-pulp to make the paper on which producers advertize their wares. The use of advertizing is to stimulate in people a sense of wanting. Selling is a high profession to which men are trained in special schools. To exchange goods for money over a counter, to higgle with the individual buyer—that is not selling. Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is to create new ways of wanting, new habits of comfort and luxury, new customs of having. This is done by agitating the mass-imagination with the suggestive power of advertizing. Business reserves its most dazzling rewards for one who can think of a way to make thousands, millions, whole races of people want that thing to-day which they knew not the lack of yesterday.

Why is this so? Because there is never enough wanting.