Part 2

The relief in the scientific world was heartfelt and instantaneous. Scientists and others, of various degrees of eminence, literally scrambled into Mr Haldane’s bus. In the year or so that followed some twenty prophetic volumes had been produced, and the publishers tell us of many others in the press.

However, in many of these documents we fail to detect the authentic guiding hand, and these uncanonical works we must leave to the Higher Critics of the future. The genuine prophet is to be known by his strictly impersonal manner. He tells you neither what he wants nor what he fears. So far as we can judge, he has no wants or fears. He merely tells you what is going to be. Judged by this test we must, I think, reject Thrasymachus, as purely propagandist. Mr Joad wants to popularize immorality. He tries to persuade us to join the ranks of the libertines lest we be swamped in the coming Neopuritan revival. By the same token we must, reluctantly, reject Mrs Bertrand Russell. In Hypatia the quasi-prophetic rôle is assumed, we fear, merely as a vantage point from which to wage sex-war.

Coming to the genuine prophets, I would divide them into two kinds; the mechanists and the vitalists, not however, using these terms in their traditional philosophical senses. The mechanists are those who view the future in terms of the development of machinery. Man, having a nature very much what it is to-day, is seen in an environment of mechanical perfection, a world of wireless telegraphy, television, fuelless traffic, moving pavements, rubber roads, windows of flexible glass, rustless metals, dustless and smokeless cities, and private houses fit for a plumber’s paradise.

The vitalists, of whom I take Mr Haldane to be the leading spokesman, have a message in the face of which the wonders of wireless are relatively tame. The time has come, they say, when our science and our inventive genius are to be applied to life itself. In a sense, of course, the journalists and men of letters got in first. Kapek with his Robots made the idea dramatic; but the mechanical tradition was too strong. The Robot was little more than clockwork. Wells’s “Men like Gods” are perhaps a slight advance, but the gods are all too human, and a bit too much like Mr Wells. Shaw, I think, got nearest. In Back to Methuselah the problem of biological invention was approached in a more biological manner. But all these are prophets of the transition. They are at heart Utopians, and neglect the evidences of the present upon which the forecast must be based.

It would tempt us too far afield to inquire into the logical foundations of the new science of “Prophetics”, as no doubt this branch of learning will be called. A young science must not at first aim at too much systematic order, nor be too introspective. Let us, rather, glance into the future and try to fill in the larger of the empty spaces in the vision so far presented to our eyes.

We can readily grant at the outset all that the mechanists claim. In fact, there is nothing, I think, unlikely in the suggestion that, so far as mechanical invention is concerned, we are approaching the time when all that is physically possible will be realized. The future customer at Selfridges’ who inquires for a teleofactor in order to smell the perfumes of Arabia will be told that the impossibility of this has now been finally proved. For the rest of his desires, however, he will be quite amply supplied. He will have perfect wireless concerts and televisual cinemas; he will be conveyed by the morning aerial Pullman from his villa-palace in Devonshire to his office in what was once the Strand. To his Club or restaurant he will proceed by a moving pavement, or in a bath-chair propelled by radiant power. His week-ends may be spent in Samarkand or in tobogganing on Mount Everest. His wife, too, will benefit by this universal progress. Her day’s work will be done by 9 a.m. The turning of a tap or two will nourish the ectogenetic child foretold by Mr Haldane, and the pressing of a button will put in action the automatic cook. By wireless communication with Paris she will choose a garment, to be delivered by an aerial messenger boy upon his cycloplane. After luncheon she will, again by wireless, put herself in visual and auditory contact with other members of the society to which she belongs. It will probably be a society for the revival of twentieth-century customs.

But, granting all this, the obvious question occurs. What will be its effect upon human nature? Is it conceivable that the perfecting of machinery could leave it unaffected, and will not inevitably this inventive genius be turned upon man himself? Our future man of business who, by improved modes of locomotion, spends his week-ends in Tennessee, Kikuyu, or Zanzibar (according to his religious predilections), will he enjoy only the advantages of mechanical invention? Surely a perfected Pelmanism will enable him to learn three native languages on the Friday’s journey out, and an improved process of repression assist him to forget them on the Sunday evening’s journey home.

This is not entirely idle speculation. Applications of science to the control of the human mind have already begun. They started, perhaps, in the crude and blundering experiments in Scientific Management. They are groping towards more solid foundations in Industrial Psychology――the philosophical significance of which has, up to the present, escaped the attention it deserves.

Consider briefly the course of this movement up to the present date. Sometime in the eighties Taylor introduced his principles of Scientific Management. Some ingenious spirit, indirectly inspired no doubt by him, produced the following invention for organizing the activities of man. A certain American establishment paid its employees on the basis of ‘task work’, i.e. upon piece rates with a time-limit for the performance of the unit-task. The worker was paid a 25% bonus on the ordinary wage for the performance of his task, but the task and time-setter was paid a bonus based upon the number of men who failed to earn their bonuses. The apparent disadvantage to the worker, however, was counterbalanced by providing him with a foreman who also was paid upon the basis of the number of men under him who ‘made their tasks’. As Muscio comments, “The situation then was this: The workman was given a bonus as an incentive to expend intense efforts to accomplishing a task in a set time; the foreman was given ‘blood money’ to drive the man if he became slack, and the task and time-setter was also paid ‘blood money’ to set the times so short that ‘the making of the tasks’ involved an expenditure of more than the greatest reasonable amount of energy.” The Trade Unions got to know of this, with the result that Scientific Management of that sort is now as dead as mutton. Public interest subsides. But in principle it was right――right in the sense that its inventor had a glimpse of something which is ultimately going to prove effective. He made the mistake which probably every inventor makes. He constructed a machine with the power to blow itself up; but this only shows that power is there, and power to be controlled. The mistake, of course, was a natural one to make for people preoccupied with the parallelogram of forces. Another case supplies the necessary comment and indicates a more hopeful line of experiment.

Muscio, Lectures on Industrial Psychology, p. 39 (Routledge).

“There was in operation for some years at the leper colony off the Philippine Islands a system of weekly gratuities to each man, woman, and child confined to the island colony. From the women and children no accounting for the subsidy was required. But from the men a certain amount of manual labour about the island was exacted upon penalty of having the pocket-money withheld. From the administrative point of view this had seemed an easy solution for the difficult problem of getting adequate labour in an isolated place inhabited largely by the victims of a dread disease. But the men patients took vigorous exception to this form of compulsory labour, and finally made complaint about it to the Philippine Government. An investigation into the unrest at the leper colony was instituted, and the Secretary of the Interior visited the island and heard all the complaints in person. As a result of his study the system of gratuities for the men was wiped out. And the necessary work on the island was paid for at an agreed rate which, it appeared later, was less than the previous gratuity. Nevertheless, the men found the new system preferable; there was no more complaint, the necessary work was done; the men who were inclined to work received their stipends and the others not. But from that day to the present trouble on this score has been unheard of.”

Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry, p. 1.

More systematic were the investigations in this country made under the Ministry of Munitions. In the Interim report of 1917 of the Health of Munition Workers Committee we find the following reference to incentives in industry:

“It is essential that the wage system should be equitable and easily understood by the workers. The evidence collected leaves no doubt that a wage system the operation of which cannot easily be understood by the wage earners ... fails to serve as an incentive.”

In fact, the evidence in detail rather suggests that it is more important for the system to be intelligible than it is for it to be just. As in the case of the Philippine lepers a reduction of wages may in certain cases be the shortest remedy for industrial discontent, just as the reduction of working hours has often been found to involve an increase in production.

More important, however, than juggling with the systems of remuneration is concentrated upon the subtler psychological factors in the situation. Politicians, artists, bishops, and many members of the working-classes are played upon by forces which act more powerfully on their energies than any system of wages that could be applied to them; the ambitions and interests of their wives, the health of their children, the criticism or adulation of their associates and a host of other factors of curious psychological interest. Is it beyond the wit of man to apply these forces in a scientific way?

One very instructive attempt was that of another American establishment, which instituted the office of ‘plant mother’. “It is her duty” (as Tead puts it), “using this motherly disposition and attitude as an entering wedge, to go among the men and help to straighten out their troubles with the management. And one of the most successful weapons of appeal with her is said to be that she puts employées’ problems in family terms. For example, a man will want to quit because of a slight ruction with a fellow-worker or a superior, whereupon she will remind him that his little Johnny should not be forced by father’s unemployment to leave school to go to work, or that another baby is coming in a couple of months and that he mustn’t cause anxiety to ‘the wife’.... This particular ‘plant mother’, I am told, has been instrumental in reducing the labour turnover to an astonishing extent.”

Tead, op. cit., p. 28.

My readers will be able to think of many other possible applications of this principle. Cannot our domestic parrot be turned to economic advantage? Its present function would seem to be only that of preserving the unity of private family life by giving its jaded members something to laugh and talk about when the bonds of common interest and filial piety are beginning to wear thin. That which preserves the family from disruption and armies from revolt will surely soon be dedicated to the cause of peace in industry.

To these things we are gradually and insensibly being led, so gradually and insidiously as to evade the inhibitory sense of the ludicrous. Already it is known that light, ventilation, and the general comfort of the worker are relevant to production. By slight and inexpensive changes in these respects output may be augmented say 3.5 or even 10 per cent, and the worker suffers less from nervous irritability and is less punctual in paying his subscription to his union. At any moment it may be found that hanging pictures on the workshop walls has a similar effect. Possibly Landseer’s would raise efficiency and contentment only 1 per cent, whilst Sargent’s would really justify their auction prices. We should then discover a more satisfactory policy with regard to our National Galleries. We should go to Port Sunlight to see good pictures and the Royal Academy would become the testing hall for experiments in industrial art.

All this is coming about no longer by mere chance or blind experiment, but by the operation of a principle which I take as a foundation stone for prophecy. Man has slowly and painfully acquired facility in adopting the scientific attitude of mind. Gradually he has been able to achieve this point of view in relation to the material universe. But he finds a peculiar difficulty in being scientific in the face of the animate; and the difficulty would appear to be almost insuperable in the face of mind. It is because we are living at a time when the feat is being accomplished that I feel impelled to prophesy an important revolution, a revolution beside which the Bolshevic incident, for instance, is dwarfed to almost comical insignificance.

The revolutionists are level-headed but far-seeing men of business, acting in alliance with the scientists. Here is their programme as voiced by Professor Catell in 1903.

“It is our business to make both a science and an art of human nature. As in the physical world we select first the material suited to our purpose, and turn the iron into steel, and temper the steel for a knife, so in the world of human action we must learn to select the right man, to educate him and fit him for his exact task. This indeed we try to do in all our institutions, religions, commerce, system of education, and government. But we work by rule of thumb――blind, deaf, and wasteful. The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary increase in our knowledge of the material world, and in our power to make it subservient to our ends; the twentieth century will probably witness a corresponding increase in our knowledge of human nature and in our power to use it for our welfare.”

Homo Scientificus Americanus: Science, April 10, 1903.

Let us note the implications of this programme. At present we have made but a few experiments and a few discoveries in industrial psychology. The future, however, is to see the principle applied to education, criminology, government, war, perhaps religion and the intimate personal life of man.

Can we foresee the consequences? To some extent, I think, we can. As Dr Fournier d’Albe puts it in the first of his prophetic volumes, we have but to extrapolate the curves of present developments into the future. We must, however, also take into account so far as possible some of the other factors at work. The general course of evolution is in outline known to be one of differentiation, specialization, integration, growing consciousness of ends, and substitution of systematic experiment in place of blind trial and error. We shall find other clues which, carefully studied, enable us to speak about the future with at least as much assurance as biologists and anthropologists enjoy in speaking about the remoter past. We shall, moreover, have the added benefit of finding confirmation in the years to come.

Quo Vadimus.

III