Man Devoured by His Machines

MAN devoured by his machines, body, mind and soul, and his civilization poisoned to its approaching death by their influences and their products that is the picture which R. Austin Freeman paints of what is now going on in this “Machine Age” as the result chiefly of that vast and evergrowing structure of machinery of which most men are accustomed to think with the highest complacency and admiration. He presents his picture and argues his case with a vigorous and a cogent pen, for his mental vision is alert and piercing, his mental habit that of the trained scientist, his point of view independent and his faculty of expression virile, lucid and interesting. Havelock Ellis, whose sane, clear thinking and gifted, unprejudiced mind American readers have long admired, writes an introduction in which he welcomes the book with cordial appreciation. Into the following quotation he pithily puts the heart of the author’s thesis and his own feeling about the book:

There are few whom the work can be said not to concern. Today, indeed, when, as never perhaps before, there is so much searching of heart concerning the foundation on which we have based our civilization and so bitter a sense of disillusionment concerning the results so far attained, there may be many to heed the truths so clearly and so uncompromisingly set forth in this book. We are here shown what a Machine Age actualy means, and what it must inevitably mean; how the machine, which was meant to be the slave of man, its master, becomes itself the master and man its slave; how the effects of machinery on human welfare always tend to be illusory, for the “labor-saving device increases labor, and the “time-saving” device destroys leisure; how the whole process is necessarily accompanied by a general and increasing degradation not only in the products of machinery, but in the men and in the society which is responsible for them. Whatever we propose to do about it, here certainly is a book which will help us to realize along what road our civilization is now moving.

Mr. Freeman is an Englishman, the author of one previous book, some twenty years ago, of which Mr. Ellis speaks with praise in the introduction; but apparently the years since then he has devoted to scientific study and to observation of social conditions and all the varied phenomena of the life of our time. Almost wholly, his observations have been confined to the British Isles, and, like practically all Englishmen, he writes of what is going on there as if those phenomena were universal. In his case, however, there is less fault to be found with the results of this insular viewpoint than sometimes happens, because most of what he says, except perhaps that concerned with the extent of the spread of Collectivist theories, is Just as true for other civilized nations. He makes a few references to affairs in the United States, but for the most part these show little information and less understanding concerning their subjects. But as regards developments in his own country and those of universal occurrence the reader feels, as Havelock Ellis well says in the introduction, that he has acquired a singularly wide, varied and precise acquaintance with the phenomena of our social life,” and that “he gives the impression of having learned to approach his task, not in the study, but by a large contact with human life and affairs and by a sensitive intellectual receptivity to that contact.” Nor must one forget to mention the forceful, impressive and always interesting manner in which Mr. Freeman expresses his ideas.

Mr. Freeman sets out with the statement that the human race has not fulfilled its early promise of progress, that it has not achieved during the historical period of civilization the advance which its development during previous centuries gave every warrant for expecting. Comparing the state of man when he first emerges into view in the Eolithic Period with that to which he had attained, as in the Nile Valley, in about the year 3000 B. C., and this stage with the present, he declares that at once it becomes evident that “the great and splendid progress of the earlier days of the race has not been maintained.”

Nevertheless, it was not until these later times that he made the first radical change in his condition. The author thus describes that momentous happening:

Startling as it may appear, it is nevertheless true that from the dawn of human history to the latter half of the eighteenth century nothing had occurred to alter substantially the relation of man to his environment. At the beginning of the Stone Age he confronted the forces of nature with the power of his own muscles or of these animals he had subjugated; and such was still his condition when the eighteenth century was drawing to a close. Then befell an event that radically altered his “place in nature.” He discovered—or, if you prefer it, invented—the automatic power machine. That is to say, he discovered the possibility of liberating energy which was not the energy of his own body nor that of any animal body; of liberating it in quantities to which there appeared to be practically no limit. … From a personal conflict with his surroundings he could now retire to become a spectator of the activities of a giant slave whose colossal powers he could control and direct by the pressure of a finger. Nothing like it had ever occurred before. Even the invention of the printing press and the discovery of explosives were events which had affected only the relations of man to man, leaving his position in nature untouched.

In the meantime man had made vast accumulations of knowledge and a multitude of important extrinsic changes in his condition. But his intelligence had not increased in proportion and this mighty power had come to him too soon, before he had become competent to exercise it,” and he has used it to alter his environment to his own disadvantage.’ Machines beget machines by an ever-growing need, becoming themselves agents of production and agents of consumption, demanding ever more and more complexity and power and scope. The conditions of human life are adjusted to the needs of the machine and not to the needs of man, and the evolution of the machine drives man out of his field of activities, replacing his brains and his skill with its automatic labors. Not only has the machine reduced him from the position of master to that of slave, but it is consuming him and destroying his civilization. The universal mechanism of a Machine Age has had a disastrous effect. Mr. Freeman contends through many vigorous pages, upon the individual man, undermining his physique, depriving him of the training which produces skill, weakening his character by stealing his self-reliant qualities. It has taken from him that pleasurable mental state in which it was once usual for him to work because of the creative character of his labor, and it has aroused in him resentment and dissatisfaction because of his dull and disagreeable occupations. It has lowered the social status of the worker and vulgarized his taste by its meretricious products. It has sent man whizzing about the country and over the world at such a pace that it has lessened his interest in what countries and peoples can teach him. destroyed in him curiosity and wonder, filled him with restlessness and an aimless longing for motion, speed, “hustle,” strenuous action. The effect of the Machine Age, therefore, upon man’s body, mind and character has been bad. Upon man’s natural environment mechanism has had a disastrous effect, devastating regions of natural beauty and creating great industrial towns that are planned and adjusted in accordance with the needs of the machine and are irretrievably bad for the human beings who must live in them. It has induced a gigantic and wasteful consumption of natural resources, which have been despoiled to make products man does not need, regardless of how nature’s wealth is depleted. And those products, Mr. Freeman declares, “have suffered a debasement unknown to any former age. With the exception of the machines themselves, they are the worst ever produced by man.” In many pages which, whether or not one agrees with their argument, are always stimulating and enlivening, the author deals with the results of this immense production of goods of every sort, which grow ever poorer in quality and greater in quantity, since otherwise the machines could not be kept busy and the whole vast structure of mechanism would crash, and with it modern civilization.

Due to the machine—the colossal structure of mechanism in this Machine Age, says Mr. Freeman, are the industrial combinations of the present time, the trusts, the monopolies, the cartels, whose control furnishes one of the toughest of the problems of our civilization. And equally due to it are the menacing labor combinations and the advance of collectivist ideas. In the chapter called “The Social Anti-Bodies” he considers under four heads as many developments of civilization which are reacting upon it in a poisonous way similar to the reactions upon organisms of poisonous “anti-bodies” which they develop within themselves when they transform a favorable to a destructive environment. This last, he argues, is what mechanism has done for the human race, and in the transformation have been developed these four “anti bodies”: The domination of man by mechanism; collectivism; the progressive increase of the population; and the survival and relative increase of the unfit.

The chapters in which he deals with collectivism and its influence upon human character are likely to excite to wrath any socialist or communist or syndicalist who is so forgetful of his own comfort as to read them. Its principal peculiarity,” he says. is that it enables the unfit to become completely parasitic upon the fit,” and in the case of one organism parasitic upon another similar one the chances of survival are manifestly in favor of the parasite.” In collectivism, as in the domination of man by mechanism, “the ultimate factor of evil is the man of low intelligence. It is he who has made collectivism possible; it is he who clamors for its further development; it is he who finds it adjusted to his needs; it is he who, when it is fully established, will enable it to accomplish its mission of racial degradation and annihilation.”

For years biologists and sociologists have been trying to awaken the race to a sense of its danger from the rapid multiplication of racial strains and individuals of lower type. They have long been showing how inevitably at the present rates of increase the races and individuals of best intelligence and finest characters will be overwhelmed and submerged by those of lower grade. Mr. Freeman takes up this question as a part of his discussion of social anti-bodies,” and draws an appalling picture of what will happen to civilization and humanity if somehow that great stream of low intelligence by which the populations of most of the nations is being chlefly increased I cannot be checked and the contributions of higher grade increased. He examines at some length the proposals that have been made by various scientists looking toward this result, and finally offers a suggestion of his own. He does not think that the segregation of the unfit, except in the very lowest grades of unfitness, as insanity and imbecility, 18 possible. But he sets forth at much length and with all the persuasiveness of an eloquent pen a scheme whereby the fit would segregate themselves and endeavor to propagate their kind in greater numbers than their enemies, the unfit, could equal. He would try to arouse men and women of intelligence in all classes of society to the crucial importance of the experiment and persuade them to join themselves together in voluntary co-operation in a sort of huge colony to which would be admitted only those of good physique, of passable mental endowment, of fine character and of untainted family history of at least several generations. He thinks that a community, or several communities, of such selected members, numbering a million or so in one country, might soon prove itself so valuable in lifting the standards of intelligence and character in that nation that others would hasten to follow the example. And these developments of better intelligence would, he believes, deal with the adverse results of mechanism in some way that would make it possible for man to become the master instead of the slave of his machines. “Shall our populations,” he asks, “be kept within bounds by the extermination of the fit by the unfit, as we have seen in Russia? Or by the humane elimination of the unfit with progressive selection of the best? These are the alternatives. And I affirm that they are the alternatives of racial decay and annihilation on the one hand, and on the other of advance toward a goal of racial perfection and nobility, the splendor of which it is beyond our powers to conceive.”

Suggestive and stimulating as the book is from beginning to end, the reader nevertheless feels that Mr. Freeman’s ardor sometimes leads him to make statements rather too sweeping. For instance; his roseate account of the conditions of life in the pre-machine age does not make adequate allowance for the poverty and degradation of large masses of the people. So, also, his interesting scheme of the voluntary segregation of people of good bodies and good minds and good characters and good heredity makes one wonder if the parents of some of the great men to whom the world owes much would have been admitted to such a society. But the book as a whole is so virile, So independent in its thinking, that it is well worth the perusal of those who are interested in sociological problems. It is of particular consequence because of the author’s clear-sightedness in linking up the eugenic problem—which Havelock Ellis well says in his introduction has become the most fundamental of social problems — with collectivism and with the domination of man by mechanism.