Manifesto for the Atomic Age/Part 2
Among these factors the most obvious and probably the most basic are the technological and economic, having to do with the fundamental change in the character of the arts of production, distribution, and finance which has occurred more or less unnoticed in the past thirty years, and which the atomic bomb has brought to a catastrophic climax of confusion, fantasy, and fear in men's minds. That change is perhaps more profound and far-reaching in its significance than the change that moved the world in the Industrial Revolution from the productive system of the endless past, based upon tools and machines moved by muscle, and water or wind power, to one based upon machines moved by the molecular energy of coal and oil. We often forget that the first Industrial Revolution did not consist so much in the invention and use of machines and tools to save labor as in the application of a new source of power which made possible the invention and use of new machinery and tools that would have been meaningless or useless before. This change altered the frame of life and work for the Western World because it released labor from its roots in agriculture and localized handcrafts, enormously increased production and distribution, speeded transportation, and expanded the exchange of commodities; but these commodities were for most part still essentially the same as those men had produced from the land and the mines by hand labor for centuries before.
We forget, too, that the Industrial Revolution was paralleled almost simultaneously by the development of the modern banking system, corporate organization of industry, and the payment of labor in money wages, with an enormous expansion both of credit and gold production. These economic mechanisms of finance and exchange vastly assisted in the distribution and consumption as well as in the output of the increased product which steam power machinery made possible. As we look back upon it, we realize that they about kept pace with the new machines of industry, for over the whole period, except for temporary and local wartime inflations and depressions, the value of money in terms of commodities changed little. For a century or more after the first Industrial Revolution, until the internal combustion engine was developed—which means practically up to the beginning of the first World War—the vastly extended machinery of production and finance still revolved around the axis forged of the iron from which the machines were made, the coal that moved them, and the gold that formed the foundation of the credit system that financed the production, distribution, and consumption of the output. Thus, though the Industrial Revolution freed vast populations from local bondage to the soil and gave them larger purchasing power in terms of money wages, industry, labor and markets were still tied to the iron, coal and gold mines, geographically and economically, and limited by the means of transportation and finance which these made possible.
This side of the frame of the industrial picture began to be stretched somewhat toward the end of the Nineteenth Century by the increased use of electric power, the internal combustion engine, and the cyanide process of gold extraction. It was not till a generation ago, when the first World War started, that the frame definitely began to break up on the technological and economic side, and the world emerged from the machine age into the chemical age, but we did not fully realize it till the atomic bomb burst in upon our consciousness.
What has happened is not merely or mainly that in the release of nuclear energy the world has found a new source of power to move machines. We do not need that, for our present sources in coal, oil, and water are inexhaustible, or ample for all needs, and still cheap enough to be wastefully used, nor can we yet be sure that the new sources of atomic energy are abundant, widely distributed, economical, or safe enough to use freely for a long time. The age of alchemy in which we live today means essentially that it has now become possible to make anything—materials, machines, and energy—out of anything or nothing, anywhere in the world, in any amount, almost without measurable cost in terms of time and labor. On the purely technological side this implies that we have lifted the limitations upon the "iron men" of the old Industrial Revolution imposed by the materials of which they were made, the materials which they processed, the power that moved them, the people who operated them, and the place where they worked. The machine age enabled us to make these iron men for every purpose, with almost superhuman capacity, until in our time nothing really new in mere mechanism is imaginable. But they were still born mainly of the iron and coal mine, the blast furnace and the long-term mortgage bond, the thrift of individual investors, the enterprise of management, and the skill of urban labor. They could not reproduce themselves, and they were kept alive as long as possible to pay interest and dividends on investments that were supposed to be permanent. In the chemurgic age, they have been turned loose to roam the world at will, multiplying themselves out of the air or any other material by a sort of parthenogenesis, living more and more without benefit of investment or labor, producing their capital and wages as they go, and vanishing almost overnight like dayflies, leaving behind them an endless stream of synthetic milk and honey seeking insatiable consumers. Since the only scarce commodity upon which they really depend for food is the human imagination and will to power, a recent dramatist has visioned that they may some day be driven to hunt men down in their caves like grubs—"homo-grubs," as he called the surviving humans of the time to come—to sustain themselves. Yet even this image is framed in old-fashioned terms of the machine age, for in little more than a generation modern industry, as we know it, especially in America, has ceased to be an assemblage of miraculous and almost human machines living around coal and iron mines, or even at the end of electric power lines. It has become a chemical or electronic laboratory process, a continuous confluence of atoms, molecules, and energy, involving less and less men, money, machines or natural materials and almost no necessary local habitation or name.
We are already somewhat familiar with the fantastic technological consequences that flow from the age of alchemic transmutation of matter, for we have been living in and by the chemical and electronic laboratory for nearly a generation, and have used plastics, synthetic rubber and textiles, vitamin extracts, hormones, new organic materials, and new metals in our everyday life, or in war. It is easy to imagine how this second Industrial Revolution has made, or will make, the process of production an unlimited, inexhaustible, universal, and completely flexible flow of atomic and molecular materials and energy, unrestricted by natural resources to any part of the world, and less and less dependent upon time, labor, and fixed plant. It is easy to understand, too, how the age-old dream, hope or demand for unlimited, universal, automatic, and almost magical abundance and leisure, has emerged anew with this second age of alchemy. But few of us are yet able to see clearly what the transition from a mechanical to a chemical productive technology may mean for those economic institutions and mechanisms—money wages, savings, investment, credit, private property, free enterprise, and foreign trade—which framed the machine age following the first Industrial Revolution. Still less are we able to envision its effect upon men themselves, upon their growth, vitality, and qualities, upon their political ideas and institutions, and upon international relations. It would be foolish to forecast these consequences in concrete terms, for it is as yet by no means fantastic or impossible to suppose that mankind may be destined to destroy itself by some accident, some deliberate stupidity, or some mistake in the position of a decimal point before it has a chance to answer any of these questions, if it leaves its life and work wholly to the custody of its scientists and the laboratories now that they have come so largely under the domination and control of its politicians.
So far as concerns the economic effects upon the frame of the future, a few things are fairly clear, though their implications are still superficial, and their ultimate consequences cannot be imagined. Much of what is said today about the economic problems of postwar reconstruction is significant only in that it shows a confused groping toward a comprehension of these changes, but it fails largely because our thinking in these matters is still shaped by the frame of the machine age, with its money wage system, its fixed plant, long-term investment, voluntary employment and consumption, and free markets.
The most general fact we must face is that the age of alchemy must ultimately dissolve, and is already dissolving, the monetary mechanism of exchange of goods and services as we have known it, just as it is dissolving and transforming other materials and machines. It is not merely that we have found the philosopher's stone and can make gold or almost any other element in our laboratory, but that it is really no longer worth doing, because nothing, whether gold or any other material, can be of permanent or lasting value to anybody when a technology of transmutation supplants one of manufacture. Even today no one can define with any confidence or clarity what a dollar is or what it is worth, in terms of gold or anything else, except in connection with some specific international transaction or current domestic use; and no one would dare to guess what it would be worth fifty years from now for either purpose. Dollars are now being made not in mints, or even in banks, but in laboratories and government bureaus. What they are or will be worth depends mainly upon atoms, chemists and governments, to some extent still on management, but hardly at all on land and labor.
So my guess is that as you come to a time when gold or paper or anything can be made anywhere of anything else, money as we have been accustomed to it must be of little or no use as a store of wealth, and its value will probably tend to disappear. We can now think of such a process only in terms of rising prices in a free, voluntary market, or what we call "inflation" or depreciation of the currency; but it may not happen that way at all, for if things were freely available, without much effort or time, money also would be worth little or nothing, except as an arithmetical or accounting convenience, which might be served some other way, as by some sort of general ration card, consumer's license, or blanket lien on the national product. Certainly no one would think of saving any of it, for it would be entirely subject to the erosion of time and technological change.
As one implication of this process, long-term, fixed interest investment in fixed plant or property seems likely to disappear, not only because interest will have no point where money as such has no value, but also because the value of fixed plant itself must evaporate very swiftly in a productive system so protean in its output, flexible in process, and fluid in location as the industry of the alchemic or atomic age is likely to be. For a while, in a few remote parts of the planet still struggling to master the methods of mechanical mass production, a few primitive and predatory political junkmen like Uncle Joe may continue to collect and cart off pieces of machinery and set up factories financed with thousand-year mortgage bonds, or government securities, but as far as America is concerned, even now most of the plants, machines, and productive methods of yesterday are out-of-date tomorrow, and whatever form of financing may be used for them must correspond to the perishability of such property and its product. Perhaps the only kind of mortgage bond on any sort of real property it will be possible to imagine in the age of alchemy would be some form of general obligation or nominal lien on the national income, resembling public debt; and indeed, with a national debt approximating the national wealth, we are close to that condition today; but even this situation would not have much practical meaning in an economy where money has none. Already the very idea of debt, public or private, as either a moral obligation or an economic burden or asset, is regarded as a hang-over from the old-fashioned frame of the machine age, with its fixed plant, long-term investments, and ethical prejudices about paying what you owe, even when you owe it only to yourself.
To speak of property at all in an age of automatic or magical abundance is probably a confusion out of the past, except perhaps as regards the passing possessions of purely personal use. The seizure of plants and business concerns by the State to compel continuous operation or compliance with labor union demands, and the nationalization of banks and basic industries in Britain are symptoms of what has happened to the sense of property even among the English-speaking peoples during the past decade. Property is now thought of more and more in terms of current consumer purchasing-power, and already a large and growing part of our consumption, use or ownership of goods and services is communal and compulsory. We all have to lay out a large portion of our personal money income for things we did not individually choose to buy or own, whether we use them or not. The amount of things we are individually able to consume voluntarily is limited, and it is plausible to expect that in an era of unlimited and almost effortless production an increasing portion of the output would be bought or provided for us collectively for communal use.
This is essentially what happens in war, and we are told often enough today that the same principle of involuntary collective consumption can and should be applied in peace for better purposes. Current programs for public works, public housing, communal feeding, free medical, dental and other social services and facilities, reflect this conception of collective consumption and property ownership, and are, after all, a natural extension of free compulsory education and other established economic mechanisms. The ideas underlying the Full Employment Act are fundamentally merely an expression of the drift of thought in this direction, confused as it is with old-fashioned conceptions, formulas and phrases carried over from the machine age, including its devout dedication to "free enterprise." Though these tendencies raise many questions in our minds, it is meaningless either to condemn or defend them, for they flow inescapably from technological forces, so far as these may come to fruition.
I shall mention only two more implications of this change in the technological frame of the industrial future, one of minor and the other of major importance. The expanding tendency toward collective consumption and the diminishing sense of property ownership which accompany the cornucopia era of modern alchemy must affect our international as well as internal economic relations, and especially the mechanism of foreign trade which reflected the exchange of natural raw materials and manufactured goods in the machine age. It seems plain that this change is already expressed in the intensified and swiftly spreading impulse to compulsory collectivism in international affairs precipitated by the recent war. Beneath it is the simple technological fact that, as we have emerged into the chemical age when it has become possible to make material, machines, and energy of anything anywhere in the world, the old-fashioned system of foreign trade and international economic or political struggle for markets and sources of raw materials, centered in the coal-iron-gold axis of the machine age and the exchange of natural materials for manufactures, must be more and more meaningless. For a few decades more, Uncle Joe, the global junkman, may continue to steal secondhand or obsolete machinery, or exchange his furs and caviar for it, but except for a few primitive, impoverished, pastoral, predatory, or parasitic countries, foreign trade is likely to be of steadily diminishing importance, save as a means of extending the process of compulsory collective consumption of the products poured out by the atomic alchemy of the American cornucopia. Even such foreign commerce as we seem to carry on is likely to be largely collectivized in fact through mechanisms of international government financing and state control, and through forms of lend-lease for relief and rehabilitation, or for domestic "full employment." Though only dimly realized, this is the latent idea beneath the Bretton Woods and other international economic agreements that emerged from this war. Whether or not in this sense the future role of America appears merely as a sort of purse of Fortunatus, a global Santa Claus, an international almoner, or as an Aladdin's lamp lighting the path and providing the means to planetary peace, prosperity, or full employment, we should not imagine that what we may be doing is old-fashioned foreign trade. The frame of the future does not include the free competitive world market for voluntary exchange of raw materials and manufactures which built the British Empire and the prosperity and depressions and wars of the machine age. The chemical age has dissolved it and the atomic bomb has vaporized it.
We can be fairly sure of this economic consequence of the technological revolution, and of some of its political implications. A major economic enigma remains, which I can only put as a question, and to which I do not pretend to know the answer. In the era of limitless, effortless, automatic production which the age of alchemy makes possible, what will take the place of money wages, dividends, interest and profits, and property ownership as incentives to labor, enterprise, and saving? It is trite to say that the immense expansion of production, the spread of prosperity and employment, the rise in the standard of living which came with the development of the machine age after the first Industrial Revolution—indeed, the emergence of the age of alchemy itself—were the product of the increased individual voluntary initiative, enterprise and thrift, and the impulse and power to acquire property which accompanied the transition from status, serfdom, or slavery to political freedom and civil liberty. The economic and political philosophers of the Eighteenth Century told us that these things were in accordance with the natural character and rights of man, and their truth seemed to be attested to by the success with which the resulting release of creative human energies enabled men in the Western World to attain unprecedented prosperity, security, and social progress by more effective voluntary work and thrift. Why is it that now, as the whole world stands already far beyond the threshold of the age of alchemy and atomic energy which these instincts and ideas made possible, they have become meaningless or even menacing to hundreds of millions of men, in America as elsewhere in the world?
It is possible to comprehend that, as I have said, in an economic organization in which goods and services may become available anywhere almost without limit or cost and with less and less labor of muscle or mind, the values put upon effort, time, thrift, money, and property must change. In the slot-machine or push-button economy of the chemical age it seems likely that the conflicts and collective bargaining problems as between labor and ownership—already rather illusory—about wages and work time will disappear, though the political problems of management may not. Work, and even mental labor, will be worth so little or be so unnecessary in industrial production that the distribution of the product cannot be related to it; the main economic problem will probably be to get the product consumed and the main political problem to keep the population occupied and amused. Since scientific discoveries, artistic talent, or intellectual wisdom are usually accidental or not dependent upon money reward, the danger will not be that we may have too little of them, but that we may not be able to prevent scientists, artists, and philosophers from eliminating the rest of mankind, or at least removing its government officials, by some chance inspiration. It must be plain already that some other way of distributing the products of industry for consumption or use than by means of money wages, interest, dividends, or profits proportioned to time, effort, or thrift, or collective "bargaining," must be discovered. Indeed, there are many indications that such means are being developed now in the devices of government to provide free goods and services, social security, minimum wage guarantees, et cetera, though the arithmetic of the money system is still being used in most of them. Through compulsory collective saving and consumption, through the growing tendency to equalize and guarantee money incomes or living standards by law, taxes, and public spending, it is clear that we are moving swiftly away from the form of economic organization which related remuneration in some fashion to individual effort, thrift, risk, ingenuity, or enterprise, or collective bargaining power or even "social justice," and thus the force and significance of these ideas, instincts, manners, morals, customs, and institutions is being dissolved. But what is replacing them as the impulse, motive power, or principle of life and work? To anyone who understands the meaning of what is happening today it must be plain that in fact we are no longer living in a money economy. But the bridge to the future, over the abyss—not merely of financial bankruptcy, but of human behavior—has not yet been built.
We are perilously near its edge today, for with the coming of the atomic age something momentous has happened not merely to matter, and to money, but to men. As we in America have moved swiftly since the last war from a technology of manufacture to one of transmutation, from an economy shaped by voluntary competitive production to one of compulsory collective consumption shaped by the power of the State, in the deepest sense we have entered a desperate race between technology and insolvency. We can no longer argue with atomic energy. It is a fact which we must accept and use for the welfare and freedom of mankind. The inescapable problem which atomic power puts to us is the biological, spiritual, and political problem of men's power over themselves.