Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1933. SHIFTING THE BLAME

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 10

Evening Post. SATURDAY, AUGUST 5, 1933. SHIFTING THE BLAME

i Before the depression hit America and compensated for the long delay by smashing her unique prosperity at a single blow-Mr. Henry Ford was the great apostle of the energy and the optimism which set no narrower limits to the conquests of her "big business" than those of the planet itself, and this was the keynote of Ihs gospel: Tho way. to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity lies through power; tho mnchine'is only an incident:The function of tho 'machine is to liberate man from brute burdens and release his energies to they building of his intellectual and spiritual powers for conquests in the fields of thought and; higher action. Machinery --is accomplishing in 'tho .'world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or tho written word-rushering in. the United States of the" World! ; In those happy days the opening of a new automatic power-house by the New York Edison Company was hailed by one :bf the lesser lights with. .the confident prophecy that "man will achieve, his greatest goal, universal leisure; through the building of' better and more efficient machines," and even a man so little accustomed to flights of fancy as Mr. Hoover was able to say, "We shall SjOon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation." . Nor was Mr. Ford alone in suggesting that the requirements of the higher life were not being ignored or hindered but were actually being promoted by the breathless progress of American enterprise. "Ex officio," at any rate, the Secretary of x the Bureau of Standards would not be suspected of dreaming dreams or seeing visions, yet was in that capacity that Mr. Henry - Hubbard declared that "man's miracles multiply, break tlie chains of time, place, and circumstance, to give him vast degrees of freedom and new and limitless powers." And in the same spirit Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee added that "it is in machinery we seek' for poetry and for beauty and for the Infinite." It was, of course, open for the cynic to reply that it did not follow that they would find what they.'Were seeking, and that it was even possible that they were not really seeking- what they thought they were. With the best intentions in the world Mr. Lee might say to the representatives of "big business in New York and Chicago, "Seek first the~kingdom of the 100 per cent, dividend, of the s 'full dinner pail, and an auto, for every worker, and poetry and beauty and the Infinite shall be : added unto you," but experience is against it. Authority in the shape of something about serving two masters is also against it. /.-.'.■■ But even in those days of humming business and sky-high speculation there were discordant voices, though it was naturally oh the other side of the Atlantic that; the seamy side of the progressive standardisation of life which was involved in the rapidly expanding dominion of the machine attracted most attention. A striking picture was drawn by Mr. E; M. Forster of the days when the millennium of mechanisation, has been reached and everything moves like clockwork, in a scientifically ordered world.._ The domestic arrangements are perfect. We v are asked to imagine a small room, hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee. There are no windows or lamps, yet it is "rilled with a soft radiance"; no openings for ventilation, yet the air is fresh; no musical instruments, yet it throbs with,melody. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk. In the armchair sits a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that'.tho roomijjclohgs.; ,: ..../'; There are buttons and switches -everywhere— buttons: to call for food, for music, for clothing. There is the hotbath'button, by pressure of which abasin of marble rises/out of the floor,-.filled to the brim, with a warm deodorised liquid. There .'is a button that pro' tluces;'literature. And thero' are, of' course, the buttons by which she communicates /vith her friends. The. room, tii6ugh it contains nothing, is in touch with all that she cares for in tho world. .. . By her \sid,e, on tho littlp read-ing-desk, is a survival from the ages of litter—one book. This is tho Book of tho Machine. If she is hot or cold or dyspeptic or at loss "for a -word, she goes to tho Book, and it tolls her which button, to press. • In 'some respects this ideal chamber recalls the. room described by Tennyson in one of "the least fortunate —we had almost said his mos.t imbecile—-of' his 'efforts: ■$..' . O darling room, my heart's delight, ~ Dear room, the apple of my sight, No little room so warm-mid bright, Wherein to rend, wherein to write. But writing will presumably be hopelessly out of date in the millennium, and in the exclusion of all books but one and, as we may safely assume, the total exclusion of newspapers, Mr. Forster's room has advantages from the housewife's point of view in which Tennyson's was lacking. It is in such perfectly ventilated, lighted, healed, and appointed cubicles as these that all mankind is 'ultimately j

housed under the paternal care of science, and for their belter regulation they are placed far below the surface of the earth. Unfortunately, however, ihe perfect comfort established by the scheme proves ils undoing. Those,who are responsible for the inspection and repair of the great power stations "which pump ease and comfort to all the world," neglect their duties and lose their formulae. The result i*s summarised by Mr. Stewart Chase in his "Men and Machines," to which we are indebted for the bulk of our quotations. Ono day the lights go out, and when they come again, their brilliance \is dimmed. The ventilating fans begin to creak, the music weakens, the synthetic food is not what it used to be. With Book in hand, tho people pray, but it-is oil: tho god needs. Finally, horribly, tho Machine stops, and in a few gasping moments life has ceased for tho mass of mankind. Writing, a >few months before the American crash came, Mr: Chase has nothing to say of "technocracy." but though the name had not then been invented the tiling itself was there, and tyranny of the machine had long since passed from the dream-world of "Erewhon" into the thoughts of practical men. If the. inclusion of the subject in his book is not necessarily covered by its title the title of his first chapter, "Slaves and Philosophers," leaves no doubt of it, at any rate after the interpretation supplied by the opening sentence: "Certain philosophers hold- that machinery is enslaving us." We have no space to deal with his valuable historical survey or his acute analysis of the service and the disservice that the machine is rendering under modern conditions, but may indicate the general drift of his argument by citing a single illustration. A generation or two ago when Andrew Lang was writing for the "Daily News" lie drew, an entertaining but by no means frivolous contrast between..;the excellence of a newspaper's machinery and the spiritual and. :intellectual poverty of the stuff that it, of ten turns out. An analogouspointis made by Mr. Chase. ','.- :>:';s::f;-' ■(% At the headquarters ,'■: of a great broadcasting company in New one-1 evening,-he saw and heard "a fourth-rate politician shouting cheap propaganda into a microphone; filling the room and the outside air for hundreds of miles with a flood of gaseous, empty platitudes." In another room Mr. Chase was able to admire the intricacy.and the beauty of the machinery controlling the broadcasting process. .'..- Hero was a great wall lined ■: with dials, switches, flashing signal lights, instruments, and connections, of tho utmost delicacy, which patiently and uncomplainingly took the sound waves that crashed against the microphone, refined them—now softening, now amplifying—turned them into electrical energy, cast them into space, and followed them like a guardian* angel, fighting, with monstrous, elemental forces seeking to deflect or mar their passage -through the ether. This, it seemed to me, was not a case of the j machine failing man, but of man failing tho machine. . In this particular case, which was, one might say, a case of the political machine's prostituting the beautiful and efficient scientific machine to its owii clumsy and. ugly purposes, nobody could g6' wrong, but in ! the general attack upon machines which Mr. Chase was rebutting an analogous mistake* is habitually made.