Morality and Machinery,
(By FREDK. J. BALL, B.A., B.Sc.)
III.
NEW YORK Jan 4.
Opinions radically differ as to the future of civilisation under the rule of the technocrat. The first attitude is that of despair. The machine has placed such unlimited power in the hands of its master, whose moral character and development are not adequate to the new responsibility, that society as we know it will disintegrate. As that tremendous thinker, Spengler, expresses it, the machine will engender such terrific hatred in the heart of the machine slave toward its master that irresistible revolt will blot out of existence the whole "devil's technique," and remould a new world. Or there is Keyserling's dirge of doom for Western civilisation—that the American machine will strike the final deathblow at modern culture; everywhere the beautiful and aesthetic and ancient are in impetuous flight before it. Many of our own thinkers admit that technocracy has caught us entirely unprepared, and that at one end of the scale you have the technocrat, thus far morally unfit to be trusted with such unlimited power, and at the other end a Babbitt—no invention of Sinclair Lewis, but the product of the impact of the new machine on the old religion and psychology. Nor are all the Babbitts in the U.S.A.. for mechanical revolution is girdling the globe, and wherever in any land men see their old faith knocked kite-high and have neither the brains nor the time to evolve a better one, they inevitably become Babbitts, unthinking reflections of their environment. Let other lands, while pitying our multitudes of Babbitts, learn from our experience that unless they culturally, morally, and spiritually prepare for the advancing wave of technocracy they will find themselves living in a world of Babbittry.
Events are forcing us to the conclusion that we cannot run twentieth century machines on a nineteenth century economic morality. The machine demands a higher type of character for its proper use and control that we have at present developed, and if we fail to evolve a new morality, new social standards of character, then the worst anticipations of Spengler and Russell will be tragically realised. In shame we confess that in some dozens of our States we still harness children to our machines, and the machine masters move heaven and earth to hold them there. Not a week passes but we read in our papers some such tale as this—the suicide of a long unemployed father. I take this as an example as it is so poignantly eloquent, the letter of the man's brother: "Should my brother have been treated less kindly than a beast? Was it just, was it Christian, was it ordinary humanity to send him forth to starve? Was there not in the sight of God a contract between my brother's employer and himself that, since he had served so well in the days prosperity, the great corporation should least grant him bread and shelter in evil days?"
Gradually we are getting away from the old idea that immorality is simply a form of sex disobedience, and many of our leading clergy are fearlessly preaching the new morality and the true morality, that any form of wrong or injustice inflicted on the weak or defenceless or unorganised is immorality, equally reprehensible as other forms of depravity and vice. And the wealthy church member who is horrified by the operations of the bootlegger or the latest marital infidelity, but who may be a grafter in politics or pitiless toward those in his power, is now in the way of getting some wholesome teaching from some of the biggest pulpits of the land.
THE RURAL GOSPEL.
The second attitude is that of query. Is a gospel adequate to the hillsides and blue lakes of primitive Galilee a sufficient economic ethic in the new technocracy? Did Christ's social gospel, so perfectly adapted to the agricultural State, ever envisage the day of Smith of Milwaukee, or Ford of Detroit? Tolstoi firmly believed that our sole economic salvation lay in the literal application of the Galilee gospel, though Russia has travelled far since his unfortunate experiment. The question this age must decide is whether an agricultural state gospel is applicable to a machine state civilisation. Is the rule of gold so universal and so utterly deep-seated that there is no hope left for the Golden Rule? Is the profit motive so engrained in human nature that human values must always be subordinated? Must the sublime ideal of the infinite glory and grandeur of human personality be crushed under the wheels of the machine? After two thousand years of the Galilee gospel, is human greed reaching its zenith among Christian nations? In these changing times that demand adaptation, adjustment, and advance are we mumbling old creeds and mediaeval dogmas while society and religion slowly sink to final ruin? Has the "simple gospel" any word in it for the machine master or the machine tender, or is there any hope of mutual co-operation between them? What place has any preachment on resignation to your lot in a land where people are hungry and cold, and yet warehouses burst with cotton and silos overflow with grain? Submission to those in authority has a fine Bible ring; but what if you are a citizen in a Tammany-controlled New York? Has the old Gospel got the power to morally regenerate the machine master and the banker; to direct aright the befuddled capitalist and the mazed economist? So the second attitude is just a great question mark; a wonder at the pathos of conflict between traditionalism and modernism, like that of two motorist, disputing the right of way on a railroad track with an express train thundering down on them at sixty miles an hour. What matter which is right if both be swept into irreparable ruin?
The third attitude, while not immediately optimistic, takes long views, and puts mighty faith in a coming entente between religion, science, and philosophy, which will co-operate in the emancipation of humanity from the thraldom of poverty, disease, exploitation, and injustice. When we remember what human society and human nature were when Christianity first found them and see what they are to-day we must agree that religion does possess some strange genius for human regeneration. That in the long run the gods have always been on the side of the Golden Rule for human relationships, and there is an inflexible moral order and a benevolent Divine Mind back of the universe. That strange leaven that has worked in other great revolutionary periods is working again to-day. The heart of the machine master is undergoing great change; he grows every year more honourable and humane. Never in history have those who control wealth so dedicated it to productive public use, and in the interest of all human values. A new evangel is abroad in the land, and the blind heavings in this country and in that are undeniable indication that humanity, responsive to the new moving spirit, is on the march again, following that upward gleam toward which it has consistently worked for two score milleniums.
Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ) 1932, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article28034983
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