One of the characteristics of the age we live in is that we are forever trying to explain it. We feel that if we understood it better we should know better how to live in it, and should cease to be aliens who do not know the landmarks of a strange country. There is, however, a school of philosophic historians who argue that this sense of novelty in the modern world is an illusion, and that as a matter of fact mankind has passed before through the same phase of the same inexorable cycle. The boldest of them, like Oswald Spengler, cite chapter and verse to show that there have been several of these great cycles of development from incubation through maturity to decay, and that our western civilization which began about 900 A.D. is now in the phase which corresponds with the century after Pericles in the classical world.
That the analogy is striking no reader of Spengler will deny who can endure Spengler's procrustean determination to make the evidence fit the theory. We can see the growth of towns at the expense of the farms, the rise of capitalism, the growth of international trade and finance, a development of nationalism, of democracy, attempts at the abolition of war through international organization, and with it all a dissolution of the popular religion, of the traditional morality, and vast and searching inquiry into the meaning of life. There is little doubt that the speculation of the Greek philosophers seems extraordinarily fresh to us, because they were confronted with a situation in many respects remarkably like our own.
But however nicely such analogies are worked out they are superficial and misleading. There is something radically new in the modern world, something for which there is no parallel in any other civilization. This new thing is usually described as power-driven machinery. Thus Mr. Charles A. Beard says that "what is called Western or modern civilization by way of contrast with the civilization of the Orient or Mediaeval times is at bottom a civilization that rests upon machinery and science as distinguished from one founded on agriculture or handicraft commerce. It is in reality a technological civilization … and … it threatens to overcome and transform the whole globe." By way of illustrating how deeply machinery affects human life, Mr. Beard says that because they are untouched by this machine civilization "there are more fundamental resemblances between the culture of a peasant in a remote village in Spain and that of a peasant in a remote village in Japan than between the culture of a Christian priest of the upper Pyrenees and that of a Baptist clergyman in a thriving manufacturing town in Illinois."
Mr. H. G. Wells uses much the same argument to show that in spite of the apparent similarities there is an essential difference between our civilization and the later phases of the classical. "The essential difference," he says, "between the amassing of riches, the extinction of small farmers and small business men, and the phase of big finance in the latter centuries of the Roman republic on the one hand, and the very similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in the character of labor that the mechanical revolution was bringing about. The power of the old world was human power; everything depended ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft oxen, horse traction, and the like contributed. Where a weight had to be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it; the Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its banks of sweating rowers .... The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and degraded human beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap mechanical power."
These differences are genuine enough, and yet it is doubtful whether Mr. Wells has described the really "new thing in human experience." After all a great deal of cheap man power is still used in conjunction with cheap mechanical power; it is somewhat of an idealization to talk as if the machine had supplanted the drudge. What Mr. Wells has in mind, of course, is that in the Roman world a vast proportion of mankind were doomed to "purely mechanical drudgery" whereas in the modern world there is tangible hope that they will be released from it. They are not yet released from it, however, and their hope of release rests upon the really new element in human experience.
The various mechanical inventions from James Watt's steam engine to the electric dishwasher and vacuum cleaner are not this new element. All these inventions, singly or collectively, though they have revolutionized the manner of human life, are not the ultimate reason why men put such hope in machines. Their hope is not based on the machines we possess. They are obviously a mixed blessing. Their hope is based on the machines that are yet to be made, and they have reason to hope because a really new thing has come into the world. That thing is the invention of invention.
Men have not merely invented the modern machines. There have been machines invented since the earliest days, incalculably important, like the wheel, like sailing ships, like the windmill and the watermill. But in modern times men have invented a method of inventing, they have discovered a method of discovery. Mechanical progress has ceased to be casual and accidental and has become systematic and cumulative. We know, as no other people ever knew before, that we shall make more and more perfect machines. When Mr. Beard says that "the machine civilization differs from all others in that it is highly dynamic, containing within itself the seeds of constant reconstruction," he is, I take it, referring to this supreme discovery which is the art of discovery itself.
Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have originated in remote antiquity, it was not until the Sixteenth Century of our era that it ceased to appear spasmodically and as if by chance.
The Greeks had their schools on the shores of the Ægean, in Sicily, and in Alexandria, and in them some of the conclusions and much of the spirit of scientific inquiry was imaginatively anticipated. But the conscious organized effort to relate "general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts," as Mr. Whitehead puts it, began about three hundred years ago. The first society chiefly devoted to science seems to have been founded by della Porta at Naples in 1560, but it was closed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Forty years later the Accademia dei Lincei was founded at Rome with Galileo among its early members. The Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662. The French Academy of Sciences began its meetings in 1666, the Berlin Academy in 1700, the American Philosophical Association was proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and organized in 1769.
The active pursuit of science is a matter, then, of only a few hundred years. The practical consequences in the form of useful inventions are still more recent. Newcomen's air-and-steam engine dates from 1705, but it was not until 1764 that James Watt produced a practicable steam engine. It was not until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that invention really got under way and began to transform the structure of civilization. It was not until about 1850 that the importance of invention had impressed itself upon the English people, yet they were the first to experience the effects of the mechanical revolution. They had seen the first railway, the first steamboat, the illumination of towns by gas, and the application of power-driven machinery to manufacture. Professor Bury fixes the Exhibition of London in 1851 as the event which marks the public recognition of the role of science in modern civilization. The Prince Consort who originated the Exhibition said in his opening speech that it was designed "to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which the nations will be able to direct their further exertions."
But this public recognition was at first rather sentimental and gaping. The full realization of the place of science in modern life came slowly, and only in our generation can it be said that political rulers, captains of industry, and leaders of thought have actually begun to appreciate how central is science in our civilization, and to act upon that realization. In our time governments have begun to take science seriously and to promote research and invention not only in the art of war, but in the interest of trade, agriculture, and public hygiene. Great corporations have established laboratories of their own, not merely for the perfecting of their own processes, but for the promotion of pure research. Money has become available in great quantities for scientific work in the universities, and the educational curriculum down to the lowest grades has begun to be reorganized not only in order to train a minority of the population for research and invention, but to train the great majority to understand and use the machines and the processes which are available.
The motives and the habits of mind which are thus brought into play at the very heart of modern civilization are mature and disinterested. That may not be the primary intention, but it is the inevitable result. No doubt governments encourage research in order to have powerful weapons with which to overawe their neighbors; no doubt industries encourage research because it pays; no doubt scientists and inventors are in some measure moved by the desire for wealth and fame; no doubt the general public approves of science because of the pleasures and conveniences it provides; no doubt there is an intuitive sense in modern communities that the prospects of survival both for nations and for individuals are somehow related to their command of scientific knowledge. But nevertheless, whatever the motives which cause men to endow laboratories, to work patiently in laboratories or to buy the products, the fact remains that inside the laboratory, at the heart of this whole business, the habit of disinterested realism in dealing with the data is the indispensable habit of mind. Unless this habit of mind exists in the actual research, all the endowments and honorary degrees and prize awards will not produce the results desired. This is an original and tremendous fact in human experience: that a whole civilization should be dependent upon technology, that this technology should be dependent upon pure science, and that this pure science should be dependent upon a race of men who consciously refuse, as Mr. Bertrand Russell has said, to regard their 'town desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the world."
When I say that the refusal is conscious I do not mean merely that scientists tell themselves that they must ignore their prejudices. They have developed an elaborate method for detecting and discounting their prejudices. It consists of instruments of precision, an accurate vocabulary, controlled experiment, and the submission not only of their results but of their processes to the judgment of their peers. This method provides a body in which the spirit of disinterestedness can live, and it might be said that modern science, not in its crude consequences but in its inward principle, not, that is to say, as manifested in automobiles, electric refrigerators, and rayon silk, but in the behavior of the men who invent and perfect these things, is the actual realization in a practicable mode of conduct which can be learned and practiced, of the insight of high religion. The scientific discipline is one way in which this insight, hitherto lyrical and personal and apart, is brought down to earth and into direct and decisive contact with the concerns of mankind.
It is no exaggeration to say that pure science is high religion incarnate. No doubt the science we have is not the whole incarnation, but as far as it goes it translates into a usable procedure what in the teaching of the sages has been an esoteric insight. Scientific method can be learned. The learning of it matures the human character. Its value can be demonstrated in concrete results. Its importance in human life is indisputable. But the insight of high religion as such could be appreciated only by those who were already mature; it corresponded to nothing in the experience and the necessities of the ordinary man. It could be talked about but not taught; it could inspire only the few who were somehow already inspired. With the discovery of scientific method the insight has ceased to be an intangible and somewhat formless idea and has become an organized effort which moves mankind more profoundly than anything else in human affairs. Therefore, what was once a personal attitude on the part of a few who were somewhat withdrawn and disregarded has become the central principle in the careers of innumerable, immensely influential, men.
Because the scientific discipline is, in fact, the creative element in that which is distinctively modern, circumstances conspire to enhance its prestige and to extend its acceptance. It is the ultimate source of profit and of power, and therefore it is assured of protection and encouragement by those who rule the modern state. They cannot afford not to cultivate the scientific spirit: the nation which does not cultivate it cannot hold its place among the nations, the corporation which ignores it will be destroyed by its competitors. The training of an ever increasing number of pure scientists, of inventors, and of men who can operate and repair machinery is, therefore, a sheer practical necessity. The scientific discipline has become, as Mr. Graham Wallas would say, an essential part of our social heritage. For the machine technology requires a population which in some measure partakes of the spirit which created it.
Naturally enough, however, the influence of the scientific spirit becomes more and more diluted the further one goes from the work of the men who actually conceive, discover, invent, and perfect the modern machines. From Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz who did the chief work which made possible the wireless it is a long way to the broker who sells radio stock or the householder with his six-tube set. I have not been supposing that these latter partake in any way of the original spirit which made the radio possible. But it is a fact of enormous consequences, cumulative in its effect upon the education of succeeding generations, that the radio, and all the other contrivances around which modern civilization is constructed, should be possible only by the increasing use of a scientific discipline.
The application of science to the daily affairs of men was acclaimed at first with more enthusiasm than understanding. "That early people," said Buffon, speaking of the Babylonians, "was very happy, because it was very scientific." Entranced with the success of the Newtonian physics and by the dazzling effect of inventions, the intellectuals of the Eighteenth Century persuaded themselves that science was a messianic force which would liberate mankind from pain, drudgery, and error. It was believed that science would somewhat mysteriously endow mankind with invincible power over the forces of nature, and that men, if they were released from the bondage of religious custom and belief, could employ the power of science to their own consummate happiness. The mechanical revolution, in short, was inaugurated on the theory that the natural man must be liberated from moral conventions and that nature must be subjugated by mechanical instruments.
There are intelligible historical reasons why our great grandfathers adopted this view. They found themselves in a world regulated by the customs and beliefs of a landed society. They could not operate their factories successfully in such a society, and they rebelled fiercely against the customs which restricted them. That rebellion was rationalized in the philosophy of laissez-faire which meant in essence that machine industry must not be interfered with by landlords and peasants who had feudal rights, nor by governments which protected those rights. On the positive side this rebellion expressed itself in declarations of the rights of man. These declarations were a denial of the vested rights of men under the old landed order and an assertion of the rights of men, particularly the new middle-class men, who proposed to make the most of the new industrial and mechanical order. By the rights of men they meant primarily freedom of contract, freedom of trade, freedom of occupation--those freedoms, that is to say, which made it possible for the new employer to buy and sell, to hire and fire without being accountable to anyone.
The prophet of this new dispensation was Adam Smith. In the Wealth of Nations he wrote that
All systems either of preference or of restraint . being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.
The employing class in the early days of capitalism honestly believed, and indeed its less enlightened members still believe to this very day, that somehow the general welfare will be served by trusting naively to the acquisitive instincts of the employing capitalist. Thus at the outset the machine technology was applied under the direction of men who scorned as sentimental, when they did not regard as subversive, that disinterestedness which alone makes possible the machine technology itself. They did not understand science. They merely exploited certain of the inventions which scientists produced. What they believed, insofar as they had any philosophy, was that there exists a preestablished harmony in the universe--an "Obvious and simple system of natural liberty," in Adam Smith's language, "which establishes itself of its own accord"--by which if each man naively pursued his primitive impulse to have and to hold in competition with other men, peace, prosperity, and happiness would ensue.
They did not ensue. And the social history of the last seventy-five years has in large measure been concerned with the birth pains of an industrial philosophy that will really suit the machine technology and the nature of man. For the notion that an intricate and delicately poised industrial mechanism could be operated by uneducated men snatching competitively at profits was soon exposed as a simple-minded delusion.
It was discovered that if each banker was permitted to do what seemed to him immediately most profitable, the result was a succession of disastrous inflations and deflations of credit; that if natural resources in oil, coal, lumber, and the like were subjected to the competitive principle, the result was a shocking waste of irreplaceable wealth; that if the hiring and firing of labor were carried on under absolute freedom of contract, a whole chain of social evils in the form of child labor, unsuitable labor for women, sweating, unemployment, and the importation of cheap and unassimilable labor resulted; that if business men were left to their own devices the consumer of necessary goods was helpless when he was confronted with industries in which there was an element of monopoly. There is no need here to recount the well-known story of how in every modern community the theory of free competition has in the course of the last generation been modified by legislation, by organized labor, by organized business itself. So little has laissez-faire worked under actual experience that all the powers of the government have actually had to be invoked to preserve a certain amount of compulsory "free competition." For the industrial machine, as soon as it passes out of the early phase of rough exploitation in virgin territory, becomes unmanageable by naively competitive and acquisitive men.
It was frequently pointed out by moralists like Ruskin and William Morris, and by churchmen as well, that this "obvious and simple system of natural liberty" by which "every man was left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way," was not only contrary to the dogmas of the popular religion but irreconcilable with moral wisdom. The credo of the unregenerate business man was utterly atheistical in its premises, for it displaced the notion that there is any higher will than his own to which the employer is accountable. It was more than atheistical, however; it was, in Aristotle's sense of the word, barbarous in that it implied "the living as one likes" with virtually complete acquiescence in the supremacy of the acquisitive instinct.
There is no reason to suppose that such theoretical comments on the credo of naive capitalism did more than rub off a little of its unction. Capitalism may be, as Mr. Maynard Keynes has said, "absolutely irreligious... often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers." Were the credo workable in practice, some way would have been found of anointing it with attractive phrases. The real reason for the gradual abandonment of the credo, proclaimed by Adam Smith and repeated so steadily since his day, is that the credo of naive capitalism is deeply at variance with the real character of modern industry. It rests upon false premises, is therefore contradicted by experience, and has proved to be unworkable.
The system of natural liberty assumes that if each man pursues his own interest his own way, each man will promote his interest. There is an unanalyzed fallacy in this theory which makes it utterly meaningless. It is assumed that each man knows his own interest and can therefore pursue it. But that is precisely what no man is certain to know, and what few men can possibly know if they consult only their own impulses. There is nothing in the natural equipment of man which enables him to know intuitively whether it will be profitable to increase his output or reduce it, to enter a new line of business, to buy or to sell, or to make any of the other thousand and one decisions on which the conduct of business depends. Since he is not born with this wisdom, since he does not automatically absorb it from the air, to pursue his own interest his own way is a fairly certain way to disaster.
The fallacy of the theory of natural liberty is undetected in a bonanza period of industrial development. Where the business man has unexhausted natural resources to draw upon, where there is a surplus of customers competing for his goods, he can with naive and furious energy pursue his own interests his own way and reap enormous profits. There is no real resistance from the outside; there are no stubborn and irreducible facts to which he must adjust himself. He can proceed with an infantile philosophy to achieve success. But this bonanza period when the omnipotence of the capitalist is unthwarted, and his omniscience therefore assumed, soon comes to an end. In advanced communities the mere multiplication of industries produces such a complicated environment that the business man is compelled to substitute considered policies for his intuitions, objective surveys for his guesses, and conferences world without end for his natural liberties.
What has upset the idea of the old-style business man that he knows what's what is that the relevant facts are no longer visible. The owner of a primitive factory might have known all his working men and all his customers; the keeper of a little neighborhood shop may still, to a certain extent, know personally his whole business. But for most men to-day the facts which matter vitally to them are out of sight, beyond their personal control, intricate, subject to more or less unpredictable changes, and even with highly technical reporting and analysis almost unintelligible to the average man.
It is, of course, the machine process itself which has created these complications. Men are forced to buy and sell in markets that for many commodities are world-wide: they do not buy and sell in one market but in many markets, in markets for raw materials, in markets for semi-finished goods, in wholesale and retail markets, in labor markets, in the money market. They employ and are employed in corporate organizations which are owned here, there, and everywhere. They compete not only with their obvious competitors in the same line of business, but with competitors in wholly different lines of business, automobiles with railroads, railroads with ships, cotton goods with silk and silk with artificial silk, pianos with furs and cigarettes with chewing gum. The modern environment is invisible, complex, without settled plan, subtly and swiftly changing, offering innumerable choices, demanding great knowledge and imaginative effort to comprehend it.
It is not a social order at all as the Greek city state or the feudal society was a social order. It is rather a field for careers, an arena of talents, an ordeal by trial and error, and a risky speculation. No man has an established position in the modern world. There is no system of rights and duties to which he is clearly subject. He moves among these complexities which are shrouded in obscurity, making the best he can out of what little it is possible for him to know.
Naive capitalism--that is to say, the theory of each for himself according to such light as he might happen to possess--produced such monstrous evils the world over that an anti-capitalist reaction was the inevitable result. What had happened was that the most intricate and consequential technology which man has ever employed on this planet was given over to the direction of a class of enterprising, acquisitive, uneducated, and undisciplined men. No doubt it could not have been otherwise. The only discipline that was known was the discipline of custom in a society of farmers, hand-workers, and traders. The only education available was one based on the premises of the past. The revolution in human affairs produced by the machine began slowly, and no one could have anticipated its course. It would be absurd, therefore, to complain in retrospect over the fact that no one was prepared for the industrial changes which took place. The only absurdity, and it is still a prevalent one, is to go on supposing that the political philosophy and the "economic laws" which were extemporized to justify the behavior of the first bewildered capitalists have any real bearing upon modern 'industry.
But it is almost equally absurd to take too seriously the "reforms" and "solutions" which were devised by kindhearted men to alleviate the pains suffered by those who were hurt by the results of this early capitalist control of the machine. These proposals, when they are examined, turn out almost invariably to have been proposals for coercing or for abolishing the then masters of industry. I do not mean to deny the utility of the long series of legislative enactments which began about the middle of the Nineteenth Century and are still being elaborated. The factory acts, the regulatory laws, the measures designed mo protect the consumers against fraud were, looked at singly, good, bad, or indifferent. As a whole they were a necessary attempt to police those who had been left free to pursue their own interest their own way. But when it has been said that they were necessary, and that they are still necessary, it is important to realize just what they imply. They imply that the masters of industry are unregenerate and will remain unregenerate. The whole effort to police capitalism assumes that the capitalist can be civilized only by means of the police. The trouble with this theory is that there is no way to make sure that the policemen will themselves be civilized. It presupposes that somehow politicians and office-holders will be wise enough and disinterested enough to make business men do what they would not otherwise do. The fundamental problem, which is to find a way of directing industry wisely, is not solved. It is merely deposited on the doorsteps of the politician.
The revolutionary programs sponsored by the socialists in the half century before the Great War were based on the notion that it is impossible to police the capitalist employers and that, therefore, they should be abolished. In their place functionaries were to be installed. The theory was that these functionaries, being hired by the state and being deprived of all incentive for personal profit, would administer the industrial machine disinterestedly. The trouble with this theory is in its assumption that the removal of one kind of temptation, namely, the possibility of direct personal pecuniary profit--will make the functionaries mature and disinterested men.
This is nothing but a new variant of the ascetic principle that it is possible to shut off an undesirable impulse by thwarting it. Human nature does not work that way. The mere frustration of an impulse like acquisitiveness produces either some new expression of that impulse or disorders due to its frustration. It produces, that is to say, either corruption or the lethargy, the pedantry, and the officiousness which are the diseases of bureaucracy the world over. The socialists are right, as the early Christians were right, in their profound distrust of the acquisitive instinct as the dominant motive in society. But they are wrong in supposing that by transferring the command of industry from business men to socialist officials they can in any fundamental sense alter the acquisitive instinct. That can be done only by refining the human character through a better understanding of the environment. I do not mean to say that a revolution like the Russian does not sweep away a vast amount of accumulated rubbish. I am talking not about the salutary destruction which may accompany a revolution, but of the problem which confronts the successful revolutionists when they have to carry on the necessary affairs of men.
When that time comes they are bound to find that the administration of industry under socialism no less than under capitalism depends upon the character of the administrators. Corrupt, stupid, grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish, and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism. There is no escape from this elementary truth, and all social policies which attempt to ignore it must come to grief. They are essentially utopian. The early doctrine of laissez-faire was utopian because it assumed that unregenerate men were destined somehow to muddle their way to a harmonious result. The early socialism was utopian because it assumed that these same unregenerate men, once the laws of property had been altered, would somehow muddle their way to a harmonious result. Both ignored the chief lesson of human experience, which is the insight of high religion, that unregenerate men can only muddle into muddle.
A dim recognition of this truth has helped to inspire the procedure of the two most recent manifestations of the revolutionary spirit. I refer to bolshevism and to fascism. It is proper, I believe, to talk of them as one phenomenon for their fundamental similarities, as most everyone but the bolshevists and the fascists themselves has noted, are much greater than their superficial differences. They were attempts to cure the evils resulting from the breakdown of a somewhat primitive form of capitalism. In neither Russia nor Italy had modern industrialism passed beyond its adolescent phase. In both countries the prevailing social order for the great mass of people was still pre-machine and pre-industrial. In both countries the acids of modernity had not yet eaten deeply into the religious disposition of the people. In both countries the natural pattern of all government was still the primitive pattern of the hierarchy with an absolute sovereign at the top. The bolshevik dictatorship and the fascist dictatorship, underneath all their modernist labels and theories, are feudal military organizations attempting to subdue and administer the machine technology.
The theorists of the two dictatorships are, however, men educated under modern influences, and the result is that their theories are an attempt to explain the primitive behavior of the two dictatorships in terms which are consistent with modern ideas. The formula reached in both instances is the same one. The dictatorships are said to be temporary. Their purpose, we are told, is to put the new social order into effect, and to keep it going long enough by dictation from on top to give time for a new generation to grow up which will be purged of those vices which would make the new order unworkable. The bolshevists and fascists regard themselves as ever so much more realistic than the old democratic socialists and the laissez-faire liberals whom they have executed, exiled, or dosed with castor oil. In an important sense they are more realistic. They have recognized that a substitute for primitive capitalism cannot be inaugurated or administered by a generation which has been schooled in the ways of primitive capitalism. And therefore the oligarchy of dictators, as a conscious, enlightened, superior, and heavily armed minority, propose to administer the industrial machine as trustees until there is a generation ready to accept the responsibilities.
It would be idle to predict that they will not succeed. But it is reasonable, I believe, to predict that if they succeed it will be because they are administering relatively simple industrial arrangements. It is precisely because the economic system of Russia is still fundamentally pre-capitalist and pre-mechanical that the feudal organization of the bolshevists is most likely to survive. Because the economic system of Italy is more modern than Russia's, the future of the fascist dictatorship is much less assured. For insofar as the machine technology is advanced, it becomes complex, delicate, and difficult to manage by commands from the top.
While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly clear, I think, that they are, in the literal meaning of the term, reactionary. They have won their victories among the people to whom modern large scale industrial organization is still an unnatural and alien thing. It is no accident that fascism or bolshevism took root in Italy and Spain, but not in Germany and England, in Hungary but not in Austria, in Poland but not in Czechoslovakia, in Russia but not in Scandinavia, in China but not in Japan, in Central America but not in Canada or the United States. Dictatorship, based on a military hierarchy, administering the affairs of the community on behalf of the "nation" or of the "proletariat," is nothing but a return to the natural organization of society in the pre-machine age. Some countries, like Russia, Mexico, and China, for example, are still living in the pre-machine age. Others, like Italy, had become only partially industrialized when they were subjected to such strains by the War that they reverted to the feudal pattern of behavior. Unable to master the industrial process by methods which are appropriate to it, the fascists and the bolshevists are attempting to master it by methods which antedate it. That is why military dictatorship in a country like Mexico may be looked upon as the normal type of social control, whereas in Italy it is regressive and neurotic. Feudal habits are appropriate to a feudal society; in a semi-industrialized nation they are a social disease. It is the disease of frightened and despairing men who, having failed to adjust themselves to the reality of the industrial process, try, by main force and awkwardness, to adjust the machine process to a pre-machine mentality.
The more primitive the machine process is--that is, the more nearly it resembles the petty handicrafts of earlier days--the better are the chances for survival of a bolshevist or fascist dictatorship. Where the machine technology is really established and advanced it is simply unmanageable by militarized functionaries. For when the process has become infinitely complicated, the subdivision of function is carried so far, the internal adjustments are so numerous and so varied that no collection of oligarchs in a capital city, however much they may look like supermen, can possibly direct the industrial system. In its advanced stages, as it now exists in England, Germany, or the United States, nobody comprehends the system as a whole. One has only to glance over the financial pages of an American newspaper, to look at the list of corporations doing business, to try and imagine the myriad daily decisions at a thousand points which their business involves, in order to realize the bewildering complexity of modern industrial society. To suppose that all that can be administered, or even directed, from any central point by any human brain, by any cabinet of officeholders or cabal of revolutionists, is simply to have failed to take it in. Here is the essential reason why bolshevism and fascism are, as we say, un-American. They are no less un-Belgian, un-German, un-English. For they are unindustrial.
The same reasons which make dictatorship unworkable are rapidly rendering obsolete the attempts to reform industry by policing it. Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the legislative control for which the pre-war progressives fought becomes less effective. It becomes more and more difficult for legislatures to make laws to protect the workers which really fit the rapidly changing conditions of work. Hence the tendency to put the real law-making power in the hands of administrative officials and judges who can adjust the general purpose of the law to the unclassifiable facts of industry. The whole attempt to regulate public utilities in the interest of the consumer is chaotic, for these organizations, by their intricacies, their scale, and their constant revolutions in technology, tend to escape the jurisdiction of officials exercising a local jurisdiction. The current outcry against the multiplication of laws and the meddling of legislatures is in part, but not wholly, the outcry of old fashioned business men demanding their old natural liberty to pursue their own interest their own way. The outcry is due no less to a recognition that the industrial process is becoming too subtly organized to be policed successfully by the wholesale, uninformed enactments of legislatures.
Yet the very thing which makes an advanced industrial organization too complex to be directed by a dictatorship or to be policed by democratic politicians, is forcing the leaders of industry to evolve forms of self-control. When I say that they are being forced to do this I am not referring to those ostentatiously benevolent things which are done now and then as sops to Cerberus. There is a certain amount of reform undertaken voluntarily by met who profess to fear 'bolshevism,' and if not bolshevism then Congress. That is relatively unimportant. So also is the discovery that it pays to cultivate the good will of the public. What I am referring to is the fact that the sheer complexity of the industrial system would make it unmanageable to business men, no less than to politicians or dictators, if business men were not learning to organize its control.
It is the necessity of stabilizing their own business, of directing technical processes which are beyond the understanding of stockholders, of adjusting the supply and demand of the multitudinous elements they deal in, which is the compelling force behind that divorce between management and ownership, that growing use of experts and of statistical measurements, and that development of trade associations, of conferences, committees, and councils, with which modern industry is honeycombed. The captain of industry in the romantic sense tends to disappear in highly evolved industrial organizations. His thundering commands are replaced by the decisions of executives who consult with representatives of the interests involved and check their opinions by the findings of experts. The greater the corporation the more the shareholders and the directors lose the actual direction of the institution. They cannot direct the corporation because they do not really know what it is and what it is doing. That knowledge is subdivided among the executives and bureau chiefs and consultants, all of them on salary; each of them is so relatively small a factor in the whole that his personal success is in very large degree bound up with the success of the institution. A certain amount of jealousy, intrigue, and destructive pushing, of office politics, in short, naturally prevails, men being what they are. But as compared with the old-style business man, the ordinary executive in a great corporation is something quite strange. He is so little the monarch of all he surveys, his experience is so continually with stubborn and irreducible facts, he is so much compelled to adjust his own preferences to the preferences of others, that he becomes a relatively disinterested person. The more clearly he realizes the nature of his position in industry, the more he tends to submit his desires to the discipline of objective information. And the more he does this the less dominated he is by the acquisitiveness of immaturity. He may on the side gamble acquisitively in the stock market or at the race track, but in relation to his business his acquisitive instinct tends to become diffused and to be absorbed in the job itself.
It is my impression that when machine industry reaches a certain scale of complexity it exerts such pressure upon the men who run it that they cannot help socializing it. They are subject to a kind of economic selection under which only those men survive who are capable of taking a somewhat disinterested view of their work. A mature industry, because it is too subtly organized to be run by naively passionate men, puts a premium upon men whose characters are sufficiently matured to make them respect reality and to discount their own prejudices.
When the machine technology is really advanced, that is to say when it has drawn great masses of men within the orbit of its influence, when a corporation has become really great, the old distinction between public and private interest becomes very dim. I think it is destined largely to disappear. It is difficult even to-day to say whether the great railways, the General Electric Company, the United States Steel Corporation, the bigger insurance companies and banks are public or private institutions. When institutions reach a point where the legal owners are virtually disfranchised, when the direction is in the hands of salaried executives, technicians, and experts who hold themselves more or less accountable in standards of conduct to their fellow professionals, when the ultimate control is looked upon by the directors not as "business" but as a trust, it is not fanciful to say, as Mr. Keynes has said, that "the battle of socialism against unlimited private profit is being won in detail hour by hour."
Insofar as industry itself evolves its own control, it will regain its liberty from external interference. To say that is to say simply that the "natural liberty" of the early business man was unworkable because the early business man was unregenerate: he was immature, and he was therefore acquisitive. The only kind of liberty which is workable in the real world is the liberty of the disinterested man, of the man who has transformed his passions by an understanding of necessity. He can, as Confucius said, follow what his heart desires without transgressing what is right. For he has learned to desire what is right.
The more perfectly we understand the implications of the machine technology upon which our civilization is based, the easier it will be for us to live with it. We shall discern the ideals of our industry in the necessities of industry itself. They are the direction in which it must evolve if it is to fulfill itself. That is what ideals are. They are not hallucinations. They are not a collection of pretty and casual preferences. Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible. As we discern the ideals of the machine technology we can consciously pursue them, knowing that we are not vainly trying to impose our casual prejudices, but that we are in harmony with the age we live in.