“…the new problems are not the consequences of incidental failure but of technological success.”
Here again, nothing can be “proved”. But does it still look probable or plausible that the grave social diseases infecting many rich societies today are merely passing phenomena which an able government - if only we could get a really able government! - could eradicate by simply making faster use of science and technology or a more radical use of the penal system? I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the moderm sense. Because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.
Permanence is incompatible with a predatory attitude which rejoices in the fact that
‘what were luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us’
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom.
It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war. The economics of permanence implies a profound reorientation of science and technology, which have to open their doors to wisdom and, in fact, have to incorporate wisdom into their very structure.
They enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and nation against nation, because man’s needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material. Man assuredly needs to rise above this humdrum ‘world’; wisdom shows him the way to do it; without wisdom, he is driven to build up a monster economy, which destroys the world, and to seek fantastic satisfactions, like landing a man on the moon.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.
Although this bit of figuring work need not be taken too literally, it quite adequately serves to show what technology has enabled us to do: namely, to reduce the amount of time actually spent on production in its most elementary sense to such a tiny percentage of total social time that it pales into insignificance, that it carries no real weight, let alone prestige.
‘The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.’
Tolstoy
The problem is not new. Leo Tolstoy referred to it when he wrote:
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”
So this is the first question I suggest we have to face. Can we establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not simply acquired a ‘passport to privilege’?
So let’s not mesmerise ourselves by the difficulties, but recover the commonsense view that to work is the most natural thing in the world. Only one must not be blocked by being too damn clever about it. We are always having all sorts of clever ideas about optimising something before it even exists.
In his urgent attempt to obtain reliable knowledge about his essentially indeterminate future, the modern man of action may surround himself by ever-growing armies of forecasters, by ever-growing mountains of factual data to be digested by ever more wonderful mechanical contrivances: I fear that the result is little more than a huge game of make-believe and an ever more marvellous vindication of Parkinson’s Law. The best decisions will still be based on the judgments of mature non-electronic brains possessed by men who have looked steadily and calmly at the situation and seen it whole.
Socialists should insist on using the nationalised industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists - an attempt in which they may or may not succeed but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilisation of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do that, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men.
Social organisation
So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on that of rights, implies three: things.
- It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not.
- It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lust, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain.
- It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional organisations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organisations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged.
We shrink back from the truth if we believe that the destructive forces of the modern world can be ‘brought under control’ simply by mobilising more resources - of wealth, education, and research - to fight pollution, to preserve wildlife, to discover new sources of energy, and to arrive at more effective agreements on peaceful coexistence.
Needless to say, wealth, education, research, and many other things are needed for any civilisation, but what is most needed today is a revision of the ends which these means are meant to serve. And this implies, above all else, the development of a life-style which accords to material things their proper, legitimate place, which is secondary and not primary.
It is hardly likely that twentieth-century man is called upon to discover truth that had never been discovered before.