Manifesto for the Atomic Age/Part 3
With this question we come to another aspect or element of the frame of the future which is less patent and more problematic than the forces of technological and economic change we have been exploring and inseparable from them. Along with these changes which are transmuting the materials and mechanisms of industry, what is happening to the human material of the community—its biological qualities and characteristics as an organism, its ideas, motives, morals, manners and customs, and political institutions? Where Edmund Burke warned against indicting nations, I would not venture even to describe, but as regards the population of Western Europe and America, particularly the urban and industrial population, a few facts which must affect the frame of the future for industry are clear enough.
The most obvious, for which there is abundant evidence, is that it will soon cease to grow, and in fifty years it will begin to decline. The rapid increase in population that accompanied the Industrial Revolution stopped in Europe and America about the same time as the transition from the machine age to the chemical age started, a generation ago. We know that in the preceding century and a half not only did the population multiply faster than in all preceding recorded history, but these people which the machine age seemed to spawn were healthier, stronger, even measurably taller, and lived longer than the average ever before. Since then the main biological change to be seen is that the urban population no longer reproduces itself, and the cities and industries of these areas have long been drawing upon the rural population for replacement. Now, apart from the usual wartime increase, even the rural population in Europe and America is reaching the critical point where it must soon decline. This is specially marked and familiar in England and France, and the after effects of the war in Europe will speed the process. Russia may supply the deficit, if she lets her own people out, or takes Europe in. Throughout the ages the population of the Asiatic heartland, as the geopoliticians call it, which is poor in resources and hard to live in, has multiplied without limit and repeatedly pressed down into Europe and even the Americas, India, and Australia, which are merely peninsulas of that area. But there are no trustworthy statistics about the Russian population, or anything else in that country, and apart from that possibility it seems pretty certain that there will be fewer people of any kind in Europe fifty years hence and that there as well as in America there will be fewer children, more old people, more mere consumers, fewer workers, more pensioners, and probably fewer taxpayers.
We can be fairly sure of these things in the frame of the future, unless the scientists of the brave new world of modern alchemy devise means for mass production of test tube babies; but what they will mean for the industrial picture I do not pretend to surmise, except that they will certainly much complicate the problems of consumption and occupation which accompany the cornucopia economy of the chemical age. The unprecedentedly rapid growth of the Western peoples in the past two centuries seems somehow to have more than merely economic meaning. Power machinery required more workers and consumers, and made it possible to support them. Yet the standard of living is vastly higher and the economic conditions much more favorable for large families today than they were then. While modern science, industry, and government have been able vastly to reduce the death rate, they have nowhere been able to do anything about the birth rate. This part of the human species is not surviving, and all that we can say about the biological significance of that fact is that it does not seem to be successfully adapted to the environment it has created, or vice versa.
Whatever the reasons for this, we can at least see its expression in certain qualities and characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe and America which have become plainly evident in the past generation and which mark a great change from those of the same populations in the preceding century and a half. They are much more uniform, stereotyped, group-minded, and susceptible of mass manipulation and regimentation. They are less differentiated, and have less personal energy, initiative, and ambition. They are less individualistic, enterprising, adventurous, self-reliant, with less sense of personal responsibility, more passive, more concerned with security, more indifferent to freedom, more co-operative, compliant, and dependent. They are more open-minded, less disposed to be dogmatic about ideas or principles, with greater capacity for compromise. Relativitism is their prevailing philosophical attitude or way of thinking about intellectual and moral, political and economic problems. In almost every aspect of their life and work and ideas one may see emerging among these people a more and more collective form of thought, emotion, and action, which expresses itself not only in such things as the importance attached to public opinion polls, but in international and industrial relations, and in scientific, professional, and cultural activities.
All these things, abstractly described, reflect, for one thing, a kind of decline in individual creative vitality that would be expected to express itself not only biologically, in an indifference to the future of the race and a receding birth rate, but also more immediately in a revaluation of individual economic incentives, which is already evident. Clearly the monetary, financial, or acquisitive incentives to work, thrift, enterprise, saving, investment, and ownership of property—even possession of personal property—which were the main motive power of the economic expansion of the machine age, are evaporating and are being replaced by a kind of collective search for automatic security, which is increasingly thought of in terms of free or effortless consumer satisfactions and passive spectator pastimes and amusements. The rapid and steady drift toward socialization of finance, production, and consumption evident in England, Europe, and America, as well as the movement toward international economic and political collectivism, are merely superficial manifestations of these changes in the character and motives of the human material in the community.
Bulwer Lytton in The Coming Race, and many others, have tried to imagine what kind of men might emerge under these conditions, and usually have suggested that they would be of a much better type; but it remains very doubtful as a purely biological problem whether the human animal can survive at all under them, for some form of competitive effort, some kind of struggle for existence, seems to be necessary for it. At any rate, given these changes, if the peoples of Western Europe and America are not overwhelmed and submerged or absorbed by biologically stronger races whose numbers are multiplying more rapidly and whose vitality is heightened in continued struggle for survival, it seems probable that the most important political problem that may preoccupy the statesmen of these countries will be the problem of human time and activity, of providing occupation and entertainment for the masses—or to put it brutally, the problem of boredom.
There are some signs that this problem is already rising to the surface, in such matters as the implications of the Full Employment Act, and in the universal movement toward permanent military training systems at a time when international peace pacts or atomic bombs would seem to make armies unnecessary or meaningless. If these references seem cynical, we should remind ourselves that the pyramids of the Pharaohs and probably most wars have helped many desperate statesmen in ancient and modern times to solve not merely the economic and political problems of unemployment, but also its moral and psychological problems. In the past both religious mysticism and militarism have always served the masses in some measure as a means of compensation or escape, not only from the frustrations of economic difficulties, but also from those of boredom and idleness. As the atomic age emerges our economic difficulties may disappear from the frame of the future, but we may be sure our psychological and moral ones will not. Though organized religion lost much of its force with the coming of the power machine, the age of alchemy and atomic energy, which is more mystical than religion, is a different matter, and it is not impossible that by a curious reversion men may come increasingly to seek compensation and spiritual security from the frustrations and boredoms of a push-button world in the contemplation or pursuit of some hereafter, as they did under the economic hardships of the Middle Ages. Military life may lose much of its appeal as an amusement, pastime, or "escape" mechanism with the coming of permanent peace, or under the menace of the atomic bomb, and in the modern war most men get little chance to fight, anyway; but it may still serve as a kind of disciplinary device or activity program which could help to banish boredom and make busy work for the masses.
I imagine, however, that whatever the role of religion or war may be in meeting this problem, as we come into the age of alchemy most men in the Western World are likely to exercise their energies increasingly in kinds of collective activity which are centered in that mystical entity we call the State, and which involve pursuit of the satisfactions of political power and prestige or protection. More and more in the modern world of transmutation—of matter into energy and energy into matter—men seem moved as by a powerful and persistent compulsion to dissipate their individuality and shed its burdens, to shun solitude, personal integrity, and responsibility, to merge or submerge themselves and their minds into some group shape or purpose or concept, to find peace, pleasure, or pride by participating or sharing in the sense of effectiveness, importance, or safety offered by some collective Nirvana or governmental heaven, however incompetent or clay-footed the political gods who guard it may be at the time. Ever more evidently the individual energies, ambitions, the enterprise, initiative, even the acquisitiveness of the men and women of our time, are being diverted, dissipated, and carried off in political channels, along the invisible lines of force formed by the magnetic power of the State. In this father's house, too, there are many mansions, and all manner of men feel that a place is prepared for them in it. It is not too much to say that the new age of alchemy has in essence not only substituted nuclear energy of the atom for the nuclear energy of the individual man, it has substituted government for God. Though it is not easy yet to understand the transformation, it is perhaps the most important part of the frame of the future, and puts to us what is probably our most difficult and important problem—the problem of human freedom and its meaning in a time when men's life and work, their ideas, aspirations and action seem everywhere rigidly framed between the inexhaustible atom and the unlimited State, and move between electrons and elections.