Part 3

And why is there never enough wanting? Because the divisible product of the machine tends to increase faster than wanting.

What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified, taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be put upon them.

There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves, under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer.

Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the furnace?

As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil. And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions. Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.

The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive, thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs are otherwise.

In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for, because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only. Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies, plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of toil will ever be got rid of.

Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly, has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of nature.

The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer. Was that the goal? What else is gained?

You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the machine.

What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him, and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of consumption or consume for the sake of production.

THE MACHINE AS IF

Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original point of view with the eye of new wonder.

Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish intuitively between their works.

Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that goes forty miles in a day and falls down?

Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming, under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred, and in another five thousand a day.

You ask them who makes the horse.

They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The horse is a natural thing.

Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?

They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.

You ask them why they say they make it.

At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born. There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in factories.

Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles. These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they make automobiles? You ask them.

They ask you to say what else it could prove.

You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and, since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts, essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet they are never heard to say they make children. They say children are born.

This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse confusion.

You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do before they had machines?

By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but incomprehensible to them.