Part 1

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: _italic_ Bold text displayed as: =bold=

OUROBOROS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW

_For the Contents of this Series see the end of the Book_

OUROBOROS

OR

THE MECHANICAL EXTENSION OF MANKIND

BY GARET GARRETT

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

_Ouroboros was a fabulous snake, the encircling serpent, that swallowed its own tail. It represented an infantile thought of the human mind for wish-fulfilment by magical means. Man’s heroic business was to conquer the reptile. As he did this he seized the object he most desired. He might even wish himself into solid gold._

Made and Printed in Great Britain by M. F. Robinson & Co. Ltd. at the Library Press, Lowest

CONTENTS

PAGE

I THE QUEST SINCE ADAM 7

II THE MACHINE AS IF 23

III THE LAW OF MACHINES 31

IV WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE 42

V THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS 58

VI IN PERIL OF TRADE 72

VII DIM VISTAS NEW 84

OUROBOROS

I

THE QUEST SINCE ADAM

One story of us is continuous. It is the story of our struggle to recapture the Garden of Eden, meaning by that a state of existence free from the doom of toil.

So long as the character of our economic life was agricultural, as it almost wholly was until a very recent time, the attack was naïve. In the file of prayers, if one is kept, the thickest, dustiest bundle is that of our supplications for plenty—miraculous plenty without worry or price. We were loth to believe that the second arrangement between God and Adam made at the gate of exit:

Cursed is the ground for thy sake; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread

was forever; and for a long time afterward local weather conditions were wistfully misunderstood, as a chastisement when they were bad and a sign of relenting when they were good. It was forever. Nature’s ring was closed, never again to open for any darling fructuary.

That is to say, man’s taking from the soil is an arbitrary wage. He may increase the gross of it a little by exerting himself more: the scale he cannot alter. If tilth for the individual has been made easier somewhat and more productive by the use of wheeled implements, power tools and now airplanes to dust the orchard with insecticide, these, you must remember, represent a tremendous increase of effort by mankind at large upon the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth.

When at length the realistic mind perceived that here was a natural fact upon which prayers, thanksgiving, sacrifice, idolatry, and the pretentions of magic were all alike wasted, the spiritual part of us no doubt had been willing to accept the sentence. Not so the earthy and lusty part. The curse was heavy. There was never a risk man would not take, no kind of heroic exertion he would spare himself, to escape the evil, the boredom, the drudgery of repetitious toil.

From such puerile motivation came the Age of Discovery, then physical science, purposeful mechanical invention, the industrial era, and all the artificial marvels of the modern world. These effects are historically traceable; and, if it should occur to you to wonder why they are so much more vivid and astonishing in the West than in the East, that is easily explained. The European mind went on with the phantasy of an earthly paradise of plenty and leisure after the Oriental mind in weariness of wisdom had given it up.

Until four hundred years ago the Europeans believed that somewhere in the world was a fabulous land whose inhabitants lived as in dreams, eating and drinking from golden vessels, wearing priceless jewels like common beads, sated with ease and luxury. King, courts, astronomers and navigators believed this. The vulgar fancy was for a place such as Cockaigne of the medieval ballads, where all features of the landscape were good to eat or drink and nobody ever was obliged to work. In quest of this mythical region the pioneer feats of circumnavigation were performed.

What a disparity between the character of the motive and the shape of the dead!—or is it that men do not know their motives?

The earth was explored. It was found to be round and full of labour. This, of course, was a terrible disappointment.

The ceaseless mind then turned to alchemy with the idea that base metals were changeable into gold; from this came chemistry and the study of matter and physical phenomena in a new way, taking nothing for granted. This was the beginning of true Science. As to what might come of it practically there was at first only the rudest kind of notion. Dimly it was understood that exact knowledge must somehow increase man’s power, give him control of the elementary circumstance, enable him perhaps to command that which hitherto he had got by hazard. When a great body of fact-knowledge had been accumulated, men began to see little by little how it might be dynamically applied. Then the epoch of Mechanical Invention.

The idea of machines was not new. Long before the beginning of the Christian era the ancients had produced many wonderful automatic devices; but mechanical knowledge with them was a department of magic. The use of machines was to mystify the multitude. Brazen figures were made to move, dragons to hiss, temple doors to open and close, trees to emit musical sounds, and lamps to trim themselves perpetually by means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons—all acting on sound principles of pneumatics and hydraulics. Much of this ancient technology was lost or forgotten. The European mind rediscovered it gradually in a spirit of scientific curiosity, with no clear economic intention. And, but for a simple practical idea, one that was very slow to come through, the machine no doubt would still be what it anciently was—an object of superstition, the toy of wonder, an accessory of priestcraft.

And what an obvious idea it was!—merely to exploit the machine’s slave value. Merely to see an engine as a beast of burden and the loom as a projection of the hand, both instruments of magnified production, to spare the labour of mankind.

That moment in which the use of mechanical energy came to be so conceived was one of elemental significance. All the chances of human life were altered, though not as anyone supposed or as they were meant to be.

The course of internal evolution requires to be imagined. It is slow beyond perception. It may not be a fact; or, for aught we know, it may be finished in the species. Suddenly man begins to augment himself by an external process. His natural powers become extensible to a degree that makes them original in kind. To his given structure—the weakest among animal structures in proportion to its bulk—he adds an automatic, artificial member, responsive only to his contact, answerable only to his will, uncontrolled by nature, fabulous in its possibilities of strength, variation, and cunning.

His use of it in three generations has changed the design of civilization out of recognition. That change alone which sets our time off abruptly from all time before is the fact of potential plenty. We take this for granted as if it were a natural fact, whereas, instead, all the circumstances have been invented.

We who are born to the view cannot see it. We cannot imagine what it was like to live in a world where famine was a frequent visitation and all things were scarce. Yet never until now has the human race known what plenty was. Immemorially the word has signified food.

See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of wine and corn.

The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only the fruits of the earth.

That old meaning of the word has been recently lost. Modernly we speak of ‘goods’; we talk of the standard of living, which is understood of course to include proper quantities of food, and to mean, besides food, an endless number of artificial things which people increasingly require for their comfort and well-being.

Mechanical energy does not produce food. Nor has the principle of limited fecundity that governs the earth been suspended. Yet the machine has enormously increased the food-supply in two ways: first, agriculture is equipped with power—tools, so that one man now may perform the labour of many; second, transportation has made all the food-producing areas of the world accessible, so that grain from the middle of the North American continent and grain from Argentina are mingled unawares in the European loaf.

This use of the machine to distribute food swiftly over the whole world from where there is a surplus to where that surplus is needed has had profound political, economic, and social consequences, beginning with an increase of the human species vastly beyond any number that had at any time previously existed or could ever before have been sustained upon the earth. That is the one most awesome phenomenon of the industrial era. The North American continent has been peopled from European stock. Its present population is equal to that of all Europe in 1800. This drain of emigration notwithstanding, the population of Europe in the same time has trebled.

And still there is plenty.

Where it is not actual, it is potential. Who have not plenty are either too inert or too ignorant to put forth the modern effort. What people may use, enjoy, and consume now is an _x_ quantity, determined neither by the rhythms of nature nor any biological principle, but simply by the free total of their own exertions.

Faster than the race has multiplied the powers of the machine have increased. One of these is the power of transportation, whereby the food product of the whole earth is made uniformly available. The other power is represented by a divisible product of artificial things tending to exceed the sum of effective human desire.

To wishful desire there is no limit whatever; but there is a point at which the effort necessary to obtain the object—that is, the toil—will be weighed against the desire to possess it, and only when and if the object is deemed worth the effort is desire effective in the economic sense.

From the paradox mentioned—that tendency of the machine’s divisible product to overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series of complex phenomena of which there is nowhere yet a complete understanding.

This now is a buyer’s world where formerly it was the seller’s. Business no longer sits in Asiatic dignity waiting for its customers; it must up and seek them. The buyer is pursued.

As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhapsody float through my window. They come from a farmer’s cottage a little way down the road. Yesterday a motor-truck stopped at his house and unloaded a self-playing piano. I saw it and noticed that it got slightly damaged squeezing through the tiny doorway.

What does this mean? First, it means that the day before yesterday a salesman from the city went through this road selling self-playing pianos for a nominal cash sum down and the balance on monthly instalments. He sold one there, another in the next house but one, and a third further on. How many he sold to the end of the road I do not know.

But what does it mean that the city sends a man through a country road in southern New Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling manner to people who cannot afford them? Those who bought them I know were all in debt for other things bought on the instalment plan. It means there is a necessity to sell this industrial product. It is the necessity of a factory that has overtaken the normal demand for self-playing pianos and must force the sale of its surplus. It is the necessity of all who work in that factory and live thereby. It is the necessity of industry in general, governed as it is by a principle it did not invent.

The principle is that the divisible product of the machine is cheap in proportion to the quantity. Remember that principle. We shall meet it again.

As with player-pianos and radio-sets in my country road, so with all manner of artificial things, with the whole divisible product of the machine, in every road, every street, every market of the world. How to produce enough is no longer any problem at all. How to sell what is increasingly produced—that is the problem. Evidence thereof is the commonest thing we see. It is painted in the landscape. It illuminates the cities at night. It is in our marginal vision when we read. There is no lifting one’s eyes to heaven, no casting them down in shame, no seeing whatever without seeing it.

Each day a forest is cut down and consumed for wood-pulp to make the paper on which producers advertize their wares. The use of advertizing is to stimulate in people a sense of wanting. Selling is a high profession to which men are trained in special schools. To exchange goods for money over a counter, to higgle with the individual buyer—that is not selling. Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is to create new ways of wanting, new habits of comfort and luxury, new customs of having. This is done by agitating the mass-imagination with the suggestive power of advertizing. Business reserves its most dazzling rewards for one who can think of a way to make thousands, millions, whole races of people want that thing to-day which they knew not the lack of yesterday.

Why is this so? Because there is never enough wanting.

And why is there never enough wanting? Because the divisible product of the machine tends to increase faster than wanting.

What advertizing cannot accomplish governments may undertake. There are backward, inert, idle races that do not want much. They are content to do with little. It becomes therefore the diplomatic and military business of the powerful industrial governments to change the ways of such races. They must be brought forward, modernized, electrified, taught how to want more. Why? In order that they shall be able to consume their quota of the machine’s divisible product. Plenty shall be put upon them.

There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves, under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer.

Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the furnace?

As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil. And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions. Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.

The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive, thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs are otherwise.

In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for, because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only. Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies, plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of toil will ever be got rid of.

Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly, has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of nature.

The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer. Was that the goal? What else is gained?

You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the machine.

What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him, and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of consumption or consume for the sake of production.

II

THE MACHINE AS IF

Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original point of view with the eye of new wonder.

Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish intuitively between their works.

Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that goes forty miles in a day and falls down?

Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming, under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred, and in another five thousand a day.

You ask them who makes the horse.

They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The horse is a natural thing.

Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?

They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.

You ask them why they say they make it.

At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born. There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in factories.

Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles. These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they make automobiles? You ask them.

They ask you to say what else it could prove.

You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and, since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts, essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet they are never heard to say they make children. They say children are born.

This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse confusion.

You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do before they had machines?

By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but incomprehensible to them.

The facts are as follows: People have been here on the earth a very long time, millions of years they think. Machines they have had for only a very short time, or, as you now see them, for only two generations. Before they had machines nearly everyone tilled the soil. There was no industry save handicraft. In the space of one hundred years these conditions have so remarkably changed that now only half the people are required to till the soil; the other half live by industry. This does not mean what you thought at first; it does not mean that half the fields have been abandoned so that half the people might go into industry. You are careful to get this straight, for it is very important. On the contrary, since machines appeared whole new continents of land have been opened to cultivation. This was necessary in order to feed the industrial workers who live in cities, far off from fields, and buy their food, whereas formerly everyone generally speaking produced his own food, even the people of what once were called cities going forth seasonally to till and reap the earth. Actually, the number of people engaged in agriculture has greatly increased; yet it is only half the population where before it was the whole of it. What does this mean? It means that since the advent of machines the human race has enormously increased in number; it has so increased that the half of it which now is agricultural is greater than the whole of it was before. The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part: it is the part that serves machines.