A more efficient police force is not the only obstacle which technological progress has put in the way of desirable change. I have said that even the most ruthless dictatorship needs the support of public opinion; unhappily, modern technology has put into the hands of the ruling minorities new instruments for influencing public opinion incomparably more efficient than anything possessed by the tyrants of the past. The press and the radio are already with us, and within a few years television will doubtless be perfected. Seeing is believing to an even greater extent than hearing; and a government which is able to fill every home with subtly propagandist pictures as well as speech and print, will probably be able, within wide limits, to manufacture whatever kind of public opinion it needs. Missionaries for our hypothetical associations are likely to find in this synthetic public opinion an enemy even more difficult to overcome or circumvent than the secret police. Part of their work will have to be a work of education—the building up in individual minds of intellectual and emotional resistance to suggestion. (See the relevant passages in the chapter on ‘Education.’)
So much for the first task of our associations—the establishment of peace through the doing and teaching of those things which make for peace. Their other task is to cure themselves and the world of the prevailing obsession with money and power. Once more, direct approach to the sources of the individual will must be combined with the ‘preventive ethics’ of a social arrangement that protects from the temptations of avarice and ambition. What should be the nature of this social arrangement? It will be best to begin with a consideration of what it should not be. Most of those who in recent years have actually founded associations of devoted individuals have not even attempted to solve the economic problems of our time: they have simply run away from them. Appalled by the complexities of life in an age of technological advance, they have tried to go backwards.
Their communities have been little Red Indian Reservations of economic primitives, fenced away from the vulgar world of affairs. But the problem of modern industry and finance cannot possibly be solved by setting up irrelevant little associations of handicraftsmen and amateur peasants, incapable in most cases of earning their livelihood and dependent for their bread and butter upon income derived from the hated world of machines. We cannot get rid of machinery, for the simple reason that, in the process of getting rid of it, we should be forced to get rid of that moiety of the human race whose existence on this planet is made possible only by the existence of machines. The machine age in Erewhon had evidently led to no startling increase of population; hence the relative ease with which the Erewhonians were able to return to the horse and handicraft civilization. In the real world, machinery has resulted in the trebling of the population of the industrial countries within a century and a half.
A return to horses and handicrafts means a return, through starvation, revolution, massacre and disease, to the old level of population. Obviously, then, such a return is outside the sphere of practical politics. Those who preach such a return and, in their communities of devoted individuals, actually practise it, are merely shirking the real issues. Machine production cannot be abolished; it is here to stay. The question is whether it is to stay as an instrument of slavery or as a way to freedom. A similar question arises in regard to the wealth created by machine production. Is this wealth to be distributed in such a way as to secure the maximum of social injustice, or the minimum? Governments and private companies in the ordinary way of business are not specially concerned to discover the proper solutions of these problems. The task, therefore, devolves upon associations of devoted individuals.
We see then, that if such associations are to be useful in the modern world, they must go into business—and go into business in the most scientific, the most unprimitive way possible.
Now, in order to engage in any advanced form of industrial or agricultural production, considerable quantities of capital are required. The fact is unfortunate; but in existing circumstances it cannot be otherwise. Good intentions and personal devotion are not enough to save the world; if they were, the world would have been saved long before this—for the supply of saints has† never† failed. But the good are sometimes stupid and very often ill-informed. Few saints have also been scientists or organizers. Conversely, few scientists and organizers have been saints. If the world is to be saved, scientific methods must be combined with good intentions and devotion. By themselves, neither goodness nor intelligence are equal to the task of changing society and individuals for the better.
Where modern industrial and agricultural production are concerned, scientific method cannot be applied in vacuo. It must be applied to machines, to workmen, to an office organization. But machines must be bought and supplied with their motive power, workmen and administrators must be paid. Hence the need of capital. In the circumstances of modern life, associations of devoted individuals cannot do much good unless they command the means to make a considerable investment.
Having made its investment and embarked upon production, the association will have to work out, by practical experiment, the most satisfactory solutions of such problems as the following:—
To find the best way of combining workers’ self-government with technical efficiency—responsible freedom at the periphery with advanced scientific management at the centre.
To find the best way of varying the individual’s labours so as to eliminate boredom and multiply educative contacts with other individuals, working in responsible self-governing groups.
To find the best way of disposing of the wealth created by machine production. (Some form of communal ownership of property and income seems, as we have seen, to be a necessary condition of successful living in an association of devoted individuals.)
To find the best way of investing superfluous wealth and to determine the proportion of such wealth that ought to be invested in capital goods.
To find the best way of using the gifts of individual workers and the best way of employing persons belonging to the various psychological types. (See the chapter on ‘Inequality.’)
To find the best form of community life and the best way of using leisure.
To find the best form of education for children and of self-education for adults. (See the chapters on ‘Education’ and ‘Religious Practices.’)
To find the best form of communal government and the best way to use gifts of leadership without subjecting the individuals so gifted to the temptation of ambition or arousing in their minds the lust for power. (See the chapter on ‘Inequality.’)
Devoted and intelligent individuals living in association and working systematically along such lines as these should be able quite quickly to build up a working model of a more satisfactory type of society.
Chapter XI INEQUALITY
The world which a poor man inhabits is not the same as the world a rich man inhabits. If there is to be intelligent co-operation between all members of a society, there must be agreement as to the things upon which they are to work together. People who are forced by economic inequality to inhabit dissimilar universes will be unable to co-operate intelligently.
To obtain complete equality of income for all is probably impossible and perhaps even undesirable. But certain steps in the direction of equalization can and undoubtedly ought to be taken.
Even in capitalist countries the principle not only of the minimum but also of the maximum wage has already been admitted. Within the last thirty years it has generally been agreed that there are limits beyond which incomes and personal accumulations of capital ought not to go. In such countries as England, France and, more recently, the United States, fortunes are diminished at every death by anything from a tenth to three-quarters. Between deaths, the tax collector regularly takes away from the rich anything from a quarter to three-fifths of their incomes. Now that the principle of the limitation of wealth has been implicitly accepted, even by the wealthy, there should be no great difficulty in imposing an absolute maximum.
At what figure should the maximum wage be fixed? A judge of the London Bankruptcy Court, retiring after half a lifetime of service, made an interesting statement recently on the relation between income and happiness. He had observed, he said, that increase of income tended to result in increase of personal satisfaction up to a limit of about £5000 a year. After that figure, satisfaction seemed generally to decline. (Non-attachment, we might add, becomes difficult or impossible for most people at a point considerably below this figure. ‘It is harder for a rich man . . .’ The possession of considerable wealth causes men to identify themselves with what is less than self—does so as effectively as the possession of means so small that the individual suffers hunger and continual anxiety. Extreme poverty can also be a needle’s eye.)
The problem of the maximum wage can also be approached from another angle. The question may be posed in this way: in existing circumstances, how much does an individual require in order to live in the highest state of
