Part 7 (1/2)

A race of individualists obey reluctantly, when they obey at all, any laws which they regard as unreasonable or vexatious. Indeed, they are increasingly opposed to any law, which affects their selfish interests. Thus many good women are involuntary smugglers. They deny the authority of the state to impose a tax upon a Paquin gown. The law's delays and laxity in administration breed a spirit of contempt, and too often invite men to take the law into their own hands. These causes are so familiar that their statement is a commonplace.

Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with the advance of democratic inst.i.tutions. Undoubtedly, the excessive emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has contributed to this malady of the age. Men talked, and still talk, loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties. And yet if we were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause.

To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the change must, therefore, be of environment.

I know of but one such change that is sufficiently widespread and deep-seated to account adequately for this malady of our time.

Beginning with the close of the eighteenth century, and continuing throughout the nineteenth, a prodigious transformation has taken place in the environment of man, which has done more to revolutionize the conditions of human life than all the changes that had taken place in the 500,000 preceding years which science has attributed to man's life on the planet. Up to the period of Watt's discovery of steam vapour as a motive power, these conditions, so far as the princ.i.p.al facilities of life, were substantially those of the civilization which developed eighty centuries ago on the banks of the Nile and later on the Euphrates. Man had indeed increased his conquest over Nature in later centuries by a few mechanical inventions, such as gunpowder, telescope, magnetic needle, printing-press, spinning jenny, and hand-loom, but the characteristic of all those inventions, with the exception of gunpowder, was that they still remained a subordinate auxiliary to the physical strength and mental skill of man. In other words, man still dominated the machine, and there was still full play for his physical and mental faculties. Moreover, all the inventions of preceding ages, from the first fas.h.i.+oning of the flint to the spinning-wheel and the hand-lever press, were all conquests of the tangible and visible forces of Nature.

With Watt's utilization of steam vapour as a motive power, man suddenly pa.s.sed into a new and portentous chapter of his varied history. Thenceforth, he was to multiply his powers a thousandfold by the utilization of the invisible powers of Nature-such as vapour and electricity. This prodigious change in his powers, and therefore his environment, has proceeded with ever-accelerating speed.

Man has suddenly become the superman. Like the giants of the ancient fable, he has stormed the very ramparts of Divine power, or, like Prometheus, he has stolen fire of omnipotent forces from Heaven itself for his use. His voice can now reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and, taking wing in his aeroplane, he can fly in one swift flight from Nova Scotia to England, or he can leave Lausanne and, resting upon the icy summit of Mont Blanc-thus, like ”the herald, Mercury, new-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill”-he can again plunge into the void, and thus outfly the eagles themselves.

In thus acquiring from the forces of Nature almost illimitable power, he has minimized the necessity for his own physical exertion or even mental skill. The machine now not only acts for him, but too often thinks for him.

Is it surprising that so portentous a change should have fevered his brain and disturbed his mental equilibrium? A new ideal, which he proudly called ”progress,” obsessed him, the ideal of quant.i.ty and not quality. His practical religion became that of acceleration and facilitation-to do things more quickly and easily-and thus to minimize exertion became his great objective. Less and less he relied upon the initiative of his own brain and muscle, and more and more he put his faith in the power of machinery to relieve him of labour. The evil of our age is that its values are all false. It overrates speed, it underrates sureness; it overrates the new, it underrates the old; it overrates automatic efficiency, it underrates individual craftsmans.h.i.+p; it overrates rights, it underrates duties; it overrates political inst.i.tutions, it underrates individual responsibility. We glory in the fact that we can talk a thousand miles, but we ignore the greater question, whether when we thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth saying. We have now made the serene s.p.a.ces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!

This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man. The l.u.s.t has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive. Quant.i.ty, not quality, becomes the great objective. Man consumes the treasures of the earth faster than he produces them, deforesting its surface and disembowelling its hidden wealth. As he feverishly multiplied the things he desired, even more feverishly he multiplied his wants.

To gain these, man sought the congested centres of human life. While the world, as a whole, is not over-populated, the leading countries of civilization were subjected to this tremendous pressure. Europe, which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, barely numbered 100,000,000 people, suddenly grew nearly five-fold. Millions left the farms to gather into the cities to exploit their new and seemingly easy conquest over Nature.

In the United States, as recently as 1880, only 15 per cent. of the people were crowded in the cities, 85 per cent. remained upon the farms and still followed that occupation, which, of all occupations, still preserves, in its integrity, the dominance of human labour over the machine. To-day, 52 per cent. of the population is in the cities, and with many of them existence is both feverish and artificial. While they have employment, many of them do not themselves work, but spend their lives in watching machines work.

The result has been a minute subdivision of labour that has denied to many workers the true significance and physical benefit of labour.

The direct results of this excessive tendency to specialization, whereby not only the work but the worker becomes divided into mere fragments, are threefold. Hobson, in his work on John Ruskin, thus cla.s.sifies them. In the first place, narrowness, due to the confinement to a single action in which the elements of human skill or strength are largely eliminated; secondly, monotony, in the a.s.similation of man to a machine, whereby seemingly the machine dominates man and not man the machine, and, thirdly, irrationality, in that work became dissociated in the mind of the worker with any complete or satisfying achievement. The worker does not see the fruit of his travail, and cannot therefore be truly satisfied. To spend one's life in opening a valve to make a part of a pin is, as Ruskin pointed out, demoralizing in its tendencies. The clerk who only operates an adding machine has little opportunity for self-expression.

Thus, millions of men have lost both the opportunity for real physical exertion, the incentive to work in the joyous compet.i.tion of skill, and finally the reward of work in the sense of achievement.

More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of quant.i.ty, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of quality.

Take, for example, the printing-press: No one can question the immense advantages which have flowed from the increased facility for transmitting ideas. But may it not be true that the thousandfold increase in such transmission by the rotary press has also tended to muddy the current thought of the time? True it is that the printing-press has piled up great treasures of human knowledge which make this age the richest in accessible information. I am not speaking of knowledge, but rather of the current thought of the living generation.

I gravely question whether it has the same clarity as the brain of the generation which fas.h.i.+oned the Const.i.tution of the United States. Our fathers could not talk over the telephone for three thousand miles, but have we surpa.s.sed them in thoughts of enduring value? Was.h.i.+ngton and Franklin could not travel sixty miles an hour in a railroad train, or twice that speed in an aeroplane, but does it follow that they did not travel to as good purpose as we, who scurry to and fro like the ants in a disordered ant-heap?

Unquestionably, man of to-day has a thousand ideas suggested to him by the newspaper and the library where our ancestors had one; but have we the same spirit of calm inquiry and do we co-ordinate the facts we know as wisely as our ancestors did?

Athens in the days of Pericles had but thirty thousand people and few mechanical inventions; but she produced philosophers, poets and artists, whose work after more than twenty centuries still remain the despair of the would-be imitators.

Shakespeare had a theatre with the ground as its floor and the sky as its ceiling; but New York, which has fifty theatres and annually spends $100,000,000 in the box offices of its varied amus.e.m.e.nt resorts, has rarely in two centuries produced a play that has lived.

To-day, man has a cinematographic brain. A thousand images are impressed daily upon the screen of his consciousness, but they are as fleeting as moving pictures in a cinema theatre. The American Press prints every year over 29,000,000,000 issues. No one can question its educational possibilities, for the best of all colleges is potentially the University of Gutenberg. If it printed only the truth, its value would be infinite; but who can say in what proportions of this vast volume of printed matter is the true and the false? The framers of the Const.i.tution had few books and fewer newspapers. Their thoughts were few and simple, but what they lacked in quant.i.ty they made up in unsurpa.s.sed quality.

Before the beginning of the present mechanical age, the current of living thought could be likened to a mountain stream, which though confined within narrow banks yet had waters of transparent clearness. May not the current thought of our time be compared with the mighty Mississippi in the period of a spring freshet? Its banks are wide and its current is swift, but the turbid stream that flows onward is one of muddy swirls and eddies and overflows its banks to their destruction.

The great indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work. The great enigma which it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will solve or be destroyed, is this:

Has the increase in the potential of human power, through thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the potential of human character?

To this life and death question, a great French philosopher, Le Bon, writing in 1910, replied that the one unmistakable symptom of human life was ”the increasing deterioration in human character,” and a great physicist has described the symptom as ”the progressive enfeeblement of the human will.”

In a famous book, Degeneration, written at the close of the nineteenth century, Max Nordau, as a pathologist, explains this tendency by arguing that our complex civilization has placed too great a strain upon the limited nervous organization of man.