We will use this lusty knave: No more need for men to slave: We may rise and look about us and have knowledge ere the grave.' But the Brute said in his breast, Till the mills I grind have ceased, The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast! "On the strong and cunning few Cynic favors I will strew; I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies; I will take the joys they know; They shall hunger after vanities and still ahungering go. Brother's blood shall cry on brother up the dead and empty skies. "I will burn and dig and hack Till the heavens suffer lack; God shall feel a pleasure fail Him, crying to his cherubim, "Who hath flung yon mud ball there Where my world went green and fair?" I shall laugh and hug me, hearing how his sentinels declare, ""Tis the Brute they chained to labor! He has made the bright earth dim. Stores of wares and pelf a plenty, but they get no good of him.” Western civilization which for the best part of a century has been in the grip of the machine process and has sung the power and the cunning of its master was rudely awakened from its dream by the apparition of a mail-clad giant in Europe proclaiming the philosophy of the machine in the name of Kultur. The specter of sixty-five millions of people, trained to the highest pitch of efficiency, organized under masterful and unscrupulous leaders, obsessed with the philosophy 1 Kipling, to be sure, has shown us in his "M'Andrew's Hymn" that there is a poetry of the machine that is noble and religious. But even this poetry presupposes a fixed and fatalistic order, as is seen in the following lines Kipling puts into the mouth of his Calvinistic Scotch engineer. "From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see Thy Hand, O GodPredestination in the stride o' yon connectin'-rod. John Calvin might ha' forged the same enormous, certain, slowAy, wrought it in the furnace-flame-my 'Institutio."" of the machine and headed for world-conquest, froze the heart of the western world with terror. Here was a monstrosity grim and terrible, cradled in the Eden which we fondly dreamed the machine was in a fair way to create for man. This nightmare with its gospel of frightfulness made possible by the machine convinced us that after all we were living in a fool's paradise. Once more man had been cruelly tricked and that by his own creature. He must tame the "Brute" that threatens his higher life and start out once again on the via dolorosa that seems to have no end in his eternal quest for the land of his heart's desire. The terror aroused in mankind by the revelation of the spirit of the machine in all its devilishness in militaristic Germany is not a new experience in the history of the race. Men have always entertained more or less fear of the machine. We do not associate this fear, however, with the tool. Around familiar tools such as the distaff, the axe or the pen are centered intimate and appealing human sentiments that have found expression in poetry, music, and art. The machine, on the other hand, especially if it combines power with complexity and mystery, arouses in us distrust which under certain circumstances mounts to indescribable terror. Why do we love the tool and fear the machine? The answer is that the tool is the servant of the human will and in the case of the artist or skilled worker is almost a part of himself and breathes his own rational and creative genius. The machine, on the other hand, is independent of the will, self-sufficient, indifferent. It works with rhythmic, deadly, predestinated accuracy. It is the grinning skeleton of a self that is utterly without a soul. It has the precision, the logical sequence, the coördination and finality of reason but is devoid of conscience. When, therefore, the machine closes in upon us and seeks to subject us to its economy the very essence of personality is threatened, namely, the free, creative, moral will. We fear the machine, therefore, because when it seeks to rule it becomes a moral monstrosity. To surrender to the machine process, therefore, is to negate all those values that make human life worth while. The horror of German militarism lay in the mechanizing of an entire civilization. It was the spectacle of a great people organized with all the effectiveness of a skilfully articulated machine and yet actuated by the conscience of a mob that filled the world with a nameless horror. For here was a transvaluation of values that seemed to change our hard won paradise into a hell. Mankind had been taught to associate the achievements of science with the darling aspirations of the race. Now men beheld to their dismay the devil masquerading in the apparel of an angel of light. The disillusionment was a terrible one but it has brought much searching of the heart. It has taught us that the machine process can only be of value as it is made to serve and not to rule the spirit of man. For the human intellect to be terrified at its own contrivance is to acknowledge its own weakness and stupidity. The future belongs to those who neither fear the machine nor blindly bow to its rule but who make it serve the cause of justice, mercy, and truth. § 3. THE CULTURAL INCIDENCE OF THE MACHINE It is to be expected that the philosophy of the machine would be most in evidence among those most directly concerned, namely, the workers. This is to a certain extent true. The testimony of those in close touch with the industrial worker is to the effect that he is inclined to a more or less mechanistic world-view. Society is judged in terms of the machine's philosophy. "Suffering, love, mercy, faith, hope, are nothing to this universal dominating and transforming physical force. The explosion is not delayed, the fire burns, the knife cuts, the machine mangles, and the process goes on unmoved by the defiance of the strong or the prayers and sufferings of the weak or the just " At trade union meetings and in their literature are found such expressions as Physical power the motive force of everything; might is 1 Hoxie, "Class Conflict," The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XIII,p. 777. right". The machine philosophy as to the structure of society is seen in the statements, "The capitalists perform no work", "Employers are parasites ", " Property rights are not rights but privileges ". Sceptical and iconoclastic attitudes towards the traditional economic and moral standards induced by the discipline of the machine process can be detected in the following, "Labor has no reason to be patriotic; the capitalists own the country", "The Church and State-the great pillars of the capitalists and of capitalistic society". "Self-denial and saving are not virtues for the workers but should be condemned ". "Contracts with the employers are not sacred". "Competition for others, not for us. Rival organizations are futile and a detriment". There is, however, abundant evidence that the worker is not dominated by the philosophy of the machine. The eternally human in him would never tolerate such a humiliation. It is in the opposition of the unions to scientific management, the last refinement of the machine process, that this emerges clearly, as we shall see in a later chapter. Trade unionism is in fact a protest against the logic of the machine process in the interest of larger human values. The philosophy of the machine is most clearly in evidence in that phase of the industrial world for which it is chiefly responsible, namely, in the modern large corporation. The materialism, the impersonal selfishness, the heartless exercise of power, the cold and unscrupulous rationalism that has made the term "big business" anathema in the minds of many good people is to be explained by the fact that the largescale business of to-day still to a large extent reflects the spirit of the machine process of which it is but the creature. The influence of the machine is in evidence in the impersonality of society. The machine is assuming more and more of those services that men once performed for each other. The telephone, the telegraph and the printing press have depersonalized our social contacts. Even the people on a crowded street-car hurrying to their places of business are wrapped in an atmosphere of impersonal remoteness. This impersonality made possible by the machine saves time and energy, to be sure, but at the sacrifice of the social and moral discipline gained through entering sympathetically and intelligently into the lives of our fellows. It makes the problem of securing democratic like-mindedness increasingly difficult. Corresponding to the impersonality of the Great Society demanded by the machine we have the impersonality of the money-economy. In the rapid whirl of our modern industrial order, with its multifarious mechanical standardizations and its utter indifference to those values represented by ethics, religion and democracy, the machine process when allowed free play, works like a powerful acid to disintegrate the tissues of the social organism. It is not only impersonal but it favors a sort of mechanical atomism. The human atom is related to the industrial establishment or to the community not by the ties of home, church, party or a sense of duty but by the demands of the various applications of physical energy to production, transportation and distribution that have been standardized and rationally coördinated by the machine process. He is shifted from machine to machine in the shop, from trade to trade, from employment to employment, from city to city, from hemisphere to hemisphere, according to the impersonal demands of the machine process. Because of this impersonal and mechanical atomism peculiar to the machine process it becomes imperatively necessary to have some universal arbiter of values, a common denominator to which these various standardizations of the machine process can be reduced. The dollar coördinates the mechanical units of the machine process and saves us from chaos. Yet the dollar partakes of the impersonality of these units. The pecuniary impersonalism of the dollar, therefore, is the correlative of the mechanical impersonalism of the machine process. It is in scientific management, however, that the last refinements in the philosophy of the machine process appear. In it we find expressed the quintessence of the spirit of the machine. Scientific management, so its great protagonist Mr. Taylor tells us, breaks frankly with the former most approved |