Manifesto for the Atomic Age/Part 4
The fundamental fact of our time is the simultaneous release of atomic energy, the transmutation of matter, and the return to unlimited government. This fact presents to us two paradoxes, one immediate and local in its application to America, the other profound and world-wide in its implications.
The first paradox is simply this: No one, in this country at least, is content to justify the World War just ended as having been fought merely for the safety and freedom of the United States. It was fought for human freedom, to release the peoples of Europe and Asia from the tyranny and savagery of the absolute State, embodied in the economic and political institutions, the military power, and the imperial ambitions of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan. Yet the plain truth is that the idea of unlimited government has emerged as the universal victor in this war in the minds of men everywhere, among conquerors and conquered alike, and it has done so by force of the overwhelming power of America, where the age of alchemy has come to fruition in the atomic bomb. The defeat of Germany, the occupation of Japan, the election of a socialist government in England, the conquest of a continent from Calais to Korea by Soviet Russia, and the proposal of the Full Employment Act, in Amercia, are coincidences too striking to be explained as historical accidents of the calendar. This is the kind of paradox which William Graham Sumner tried to put and explain in his famous speech in 1898, called "The Conquest of the United States by Spain," which is a pertinent parable for the present, but its implications for the American people today are too wide and deep and probably dangerous for me to interpret, and pass to another.
I have said that the most important aspect of the age of power-machinery born of the steam engine is that it freed men from a society of status, serfdom, or slavery, released their individual energies for initiative, enterprise, and acquisition of property, and destroyed the power of unlimited government and the superstition of the "Supreme State." Representative constitutional government, the Bill of Rights, parliamentary control of the power of the purse were accompaniments and consequences of the first Industrial Revolution. The State did not even try to tax the steam engine, as Faraday suggested it would do to the electric generator, and as it has since done to the gasoline motor. Yet since the power machine age was so bound to what I have called the coal-iron-gold axis, so dependent upon fixed plant, long-term investment, and skilled urban labor forces, it seems to us now that nothing could have been easier than for the State to have assumed monopoly ownership or control of the new mechanism of production, and of its workers, or its consumers. Governments did, indeed, continue to struggle among themselves for control of natural resources, and property owners for control of labor; and that they did not succeed in time may be merely a mistake or an historical accident; but as Professor Beard tells us in the recently revised edition of his book, The Economic Basis of Politics, so long as private individuals and groups were able to assert or maintain their economic interest or independence as against the supreme political interest or authority of the State, its power was broken or limited.
The paradox that faces us today, in this second Industrial Revolution of the atomic or chemical age, is that a productive system and economic organization so fully fluid, flexible, unlimited, and unlocalized, as we can see it in the frame of the future, should not merely have come automatically and unconsciously under complete control of the State, but should have become by common consent or without resistance the instrument of unlimited government power. Let us make no mistake about this: What we face in the frame of the future industrial picture, in its aspect of men's political institutions and ideas, is the fundamental fact of unlimited government armed with unlimited power—power of production, destruction, and compulsion. Today, with unlimited sources of energy and materials a complete and permanent monopoly at the command of the State, one can name or imagine no economic interest save the universal collective interest of consumption, which individuals or groups can assert or maintain against the political interest of government in the preservation of unlimited power. Certainly it seems inevitable that in such a situation all the former incentives to activity, enterprise, thrift, and property ownership must flow in political channels and be assimilated to political purposes, which are by definition those of power, prestige, protection, and security. Men's ideas, too, must necessarily shape themselves to this paradoxical fact, in terms of compulsory compliance, or voluntary collective co-operation.
In some of the things I mentioned in discussing the biological aspects of the frame of the future, one can already see this process of reshaping human nature, thought, and behavior proceeding partly by compulsion, partly by voluntary or instinctive participation. Some cynic has pointed out that it will at least be necessary for the Supreme State to keep the taxpayer population alive, at home or abroad, and maintain the reproduction rate of public officials; but except as a matter of sentiment this seems of minor importance in view of the modern monetary alchemy of which government now has a monopoly.
During the past decade. business men in America as well as in England have become, consciously or unconsciously, deeply divided among themselves in their attitude toward expansion of government power and their dependence upon State support. Though most still surround their ideas and aspirations with the traditional frame of sentimental devotion or formal lip-service to voluntary enterprise, competition and the free market, there are many organizations of business men in America today which are being moved blindly by delusion or driven deliberately by design to seek security or place for themselves, or the solution of the problems put by the technological revolution, in the expanding pattern of State power and protection. More and more business men have adapted themselves to the idea that they are mere paymasters for labor or tax collectors for government, and that their principal responsibility as well as their personal interest is to promote consumption by distributing purchasing power, in co-operation with government. This fact is itself part of the frame of the future being shaped by the force of the atom and that of government, and we must face it frankly, though it leaves us with the embarrassing question of what business men will be for when they shall have been fully fitted into that frame.
What function labor organizations will serve in the atomic age is doubtful, too, and in most countries they have already become a form of government monopoly, operated mainly for purposes of political stage setting or choral activity. They have long since ceased to be able to assert any real group economic interest as against ownership, which has become more or less nominal in most of industry, except for legal or accounting purposes. Professional management, which has come to personify the modern employer, has become increasingly a branch of official bureaucracy, and where it is not able to cope successfully with labor problems by using less labor as time goes on, it more and more will pass what remains of the buck to government.
Indeed, today, labor-management relations have become a branch of government, but labor organization is less and less willing to assert any effective economic interest or power against the State. Even in Soviet Russia, still forty years behind us industrially, the position of labor unions tells us all we need to know about that aspect of freedom in the frame of the future. As we move into the chemical and atomic technology there will be less and less for labor and management to dispute about anyway, so far as problems of production and wages are concerned. In the early stages of the power machine age, as I have said—and as Hilaire Belloc indeed thought it did—it would have been easy enough for the State (except for the factor of free land) to have consolidated the feudal system of serfdom and status for industrial workers, if they had wanted it; but now, in the chemical age, when people seem spontaneously to prefer it in its new forms, it is more difficult and complex to manage. In the future, when less and less labor will be necessary, a system of status cannot easily be based on compulsory labor, except for purposes of providing occupation or discipline; it must be centered in matters of consumption, and depend upon monetary and mental manipulation of the masses. In most countries the idea of a kind of universal labor pool, expressed in the current concept of "the labor force" and conscription, has already developed as a result of the war; but the State is now concerned increasingly with citizens mainly as consumers; with problems of their consumption and occupation, and with such mechanisms of control as compulsory collective saving, investment, and spending. The labor problem, as we know it, is rapidly becoming an economic problem of distribution and marketing, and a political problem of discipline and morale.
All these conditions are most clearly and definitely expressed in the profound and widespread transmutation that has taken place in men's attitudes and ideas about the State and its functions and responsibilities in matters both of international relations and domestic economic policy. It is not merely that the idea of unlimited government authority is now universally accepted, but that the concept of unlimited government responsibility is now automatically coupled with it, extending to the most minute matters of personal conduct, as when it seems natural that the President should worry more about the way people drive their automobiles on holidays than about whether or not they have any to drive. It is now accepted, almost unconsciously as a matter of course, that this pervasive and unlimited responsibility of political authority is concerned primarily with the collective satisfaction and security of citizens as consumers, not as individuals, with their freedom from want and fear as part of the State, not with their freedom of spirit as independent personalities. In the new bill of rights which the second Industrial Revolution has brought with it, the right to consume has been added to and put foremost above all other rights, natural or political. Freedom to maintain that right is more important than all other freedoms for the individual, and the responsibility to protect that right precedes or supercedes all other responsibilities of the State. Though it is still framed in terms of the machine-age as a "right to work," which in the atomic age must become more and more meaningless save as a matter of occupational discipline, the proclamation of this right in the Full Employment Act, for the first time since the feudal system was dissolved, is of profound significance for the future. It means not merely that in a new sense the ancient system of status, if not necessarily of serfdom, has returned; but that for the individual the moral principle of personal responsibility has been compromised and transmuted into a political responsibility of the State.
In the area of international relations this shift in philosophy is reflected in several ways. We see it, of course, in the principle of collective security, or responsibility for preservation of peace, though it is not very sincerely or adequately implemented in the Charter. The concept of national sovereignty and independence in international affairs is the counterpart of the social principle of individual responsibility and self-reliance. But modern war is mainly an occupational problem, or one that arises from international economic inequalities or differentials which the emergence of the chemical age has not yet dissolved. So it is in the economic aspect of international affairs that the application of the new principle of collective responsibility appears most important.
The United States has emerged from the war as the most powerful and richest nation in the world because the most productive. By comparison the war has left all other countries bankrupt, and in the position of international economic or political parasites or dependents. The internal collectivism of the other victorious Allies cannot sustain itself without international collectivism. Communism and Socialism outside America is broke, and even the conquered nations, driven back by defeat to a measure of individual responsibility, may prove to be better off than the collectivized victors. But in any case it is plain that the United States is the new center of the principle of international collective responsibility and must be expected to implement and maintain the new planetary right to consume, as well as that of "security." It must be prepared to support out of its immense productive resources not only the insolvent collectivisms in the rest of the world, but to bear most of the burdens and collective responsibilities of empire, and pay the costs of governments of unlimited authority and responsibility for hundreds of millions of people in the conquered areas, whose right to consume, even though on a bare subsistence basis, must be protected.
It is doubtful whether military victories or imperial conquests ever paid out, even in the machine age or before, and it will probably be more expensive to implement the new principle of collective responsibility than it was in the days of imperialistic enterprise and colonial exploitation or pure looting. But application of the principle in international relations is now in complete accord with universally accepted ideas and attitudes in problems of domestic policy in fact, a mere expansion of them. It will probably help, on the military side, to diminish the occupational problems of full employment, and on the economic and political side, to meet the problem of consumption, for we shall probably continue conscription or some form of military training and service to maintain large administrative and police forces abroad, and a large part of our surplus production will continue to be siphoned off to the conquered nations and the insolvent victors, under some new form of lendlease or relief or rehabilitation loans.
Unless the atomic age brings an embarrassment of abundance very quickly, or an outburst of push-button war that will obliterate us before then, we may weary of this process because of its burdens, or because of the bitterness and hatred which unlimited government power and responsibility may bring in the international sphere; but in domestic matters there is no doubt that these ideas are deep-seated and widespread. In nearly every aspect of internal economic policy—financial, fiscal, monetary, employment, price and wage control—the idea of collective action, usually compulsory, in applying the principle of unlimited government power and responsibility is fully accepted. Wage, income, employment, and purchasing power guarantees and subsidies; measures for universalizing collective economic security and free social services, for expanding or stabilizing consumption, are all part of the ideological order of the day, and the concept of individual responsibility is steadily and rapidly disappearing as a principle of personal thought or action.
The individual mind, which by the Industrial Revolution, mastered energy, matter, and government, has lost control of all of them, and is being replaced by a kind of collective mind, upon which the individual is dependent and which has become his new master. The very idea of the integrity of the individual has evaporated, like the elements in the atomic series with transmutation. The "categorical imperative" of Immanuel Kant—that sense of the eternal, absolute, and unique reality of the individual spirit and its responsibility to itself as the creator of moral and intellectual truth—has dissolved into a collective consciousness, in which all thought and moral standards have become relative to the purpose of the State. It was the famous philosopher of Koenigsberg who formulated in metaphysical terms the real discovery of the Industrial Revolution, that the true and the good are the creation of the individual human spirit, that the world is the projection of the thought and will of the individual human personality. So it is a somewhat symbolic circumstance that the birthplace of Immanuel Kant has now become part of the Communist State, surrendered in Berlin to Soviet Russia by the peoples of Western Europe and America who lived and wrought by these principles so long.
This means more than a change in a physical or political boundary; it signifies the disappearance of a spiritual frontier in the life of men everywhere. With it a form of thought and feeling, a structure of instincts, inhibitions, and incentives—of self-reliance, personal integrity, independence, enterprise, competitive effort, and reverence for the individual human life—which shaped the ideas and conduct of the Western World for two centuries, seem to be fading out. We still try, and probably will for some time, to fit the facts of the atomic age into the intellectual and moral framework of the ideas, aspirations, and motives of the machine age; but the alchemy that splits the atom and transmutes the molecule is already atomizing man, and is transforming him into a kind of communal molecule—more and more a mere collective consumer of nuclear energy rather than a source of creative power, an instrument for something he can no longer do himself.
In face of this fact, which seems fundamental in the frame of the future, whether we are concerned with the prospective picture in terms of industry, politics, education, social progress, or anything else, most of the great issues of the machine age, moral or economic, appear to evaporate. Questions of compulsion versus voluntary cooperation, of equality, democracy, political freedom, civil liberty, and the like seem irrelevant and relative, as monetary, mental, and moral values are transvalued. In a sense the change confirms the nihilism of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who made such an uncomfortable bedfellow for the Nazis, and who said that man himself is something that must be surpassed.
The question that remains is not philosophical, political, economic, or even moral, but biological and spiritual. It still remains to be seen whether or not the new atom around us can destroy the old Adam within us—whether or not human nature can assimilate and adapt itself to the age of alchemy and its implications, and man still survive not merely as a species but as a spirit. As someone recently put it, rather whimsically: "The atomic age is here to stay; but are we?"
The final answer, I feel, rests not in any scientific, social, economic, or political formula or frame, but within the spirit of the individual human, who is the ultimate measure of all things, and shapes the world in his own image, for good or evil. J. P. von Mirandola, one of the last mystics of the Middle Ages, put to us the deepest challenge of the atomic age in these words of the Supreme Being to man from his essay on The Dignity of Man:
"Neither fixed abode, nor fitting form, nor special function did I give to thee, O Adam; this, that you may possess and enjoy whatever abode, form or function you may by your inclination and judgment desire. Nature, to all things ultimate, is limited by laws ordained by Me; thou, hedged in by no bounds, shall limit it for yourself, in accordance with your mind, within the limits of which you shall live. I have placed you in the very midst of the Cosmos, that you may more properly survey what is therein. I have created you neither heavenly, nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, that you may with more dignity and freedom mould your phases, aye, and even as creator, make yourself into what you will. In you is the seed to debase yourself to what is lowly and vile; but you also have wherewith to rise again, by the reversal of your spirit, to things lofty and divine."