A MACHINE CIVILISATION?

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 47, 23 August 1930, Page 26

A MACHINE CIVILISATION?

"The new conception, of production jw-hieh is making America great is surireptitiously transforming the man himself, and there lies its main and intense gravity," says M. Andre Siegfried, in B contribution to the "Yale Review," 5u -which he- expounds his misgivings at -trie application of mass-production Imethods. '' We have in. France, as well as in many other countries of Europe, a class of artisans in which the the European genius, as formed by a tradition p£ more than a thousand years, still expresses itself. ... It is, above all, an expression of the dignity of the man, considered mainly as creator. Artisans and artists belong, after all, to the same family. It is doubtful whether massproduction and intense mechanisation, as we see them growing everywhere, ■would allow such a class to maintain itself in Europe. In America, it is already a thing of the past. "There is something pathetic in this opposition of the old and the new worlds because, although the discussion is chiefly about wages and cost of production, its real meaning goes much deeper than merely technical considerations. What is at stake, after all, is nothing less than a whole conception of man, of society, and of life. At the yery moment when our employers are feligioualy introducing mass-production fend scientific management according to the latest methods on the other side,

SIEGFIELB STATES HIS DOUBTS

many of us instinctively feel the latent presence of a danger." "I do not want, of course, to suggest that America is materialistic, in contrast with an idealistic Europe; it would not beitrue," says M. Siegfried. "But I feel entitled to say that in. its conception of a new order America has, above all, emphasised the prestige of production. Eightly or wrongly, we fear that the individual, considered not as a producer or as a consumer, but as a human being, may appear in the long run to be the loser. I should not dare to take sides on such an issue— but what, finally, do we wish mankind to stand for; tho individual as a thinking unit or as a unit of production? "If, to-day or to-morrow, the human race prefers to be well-equipped, comfortable, with a high standard of living, the answer is clear, it will follow America and Hoover. We make no mistake about it; we know perfectly well that, for the present, it is on tho American plan that the world is revising its estimates. Yet, if humanity is ever again preoccupied with the question of the individual, his thoughts, and his right to think for himself, irrespective of economic production, then it will not be talks about refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and efficiency which will movo the world. Old passions, now unknown in new and prosperous countries, may win again the hearts of men."