Ouroboros; or, the mechanical extension of mankind

by Garet Garrett

This is very different from parasitism, which is one-sided, for gain only. And there is a very curious suggestion that organisms now existing together in a state of permanent symbiotic union were once parasitic and learned better.

It cannot be supposed that nations will ever deliberately substitute a principle of mutualism for the principle of gain in trade. They could not if they would. Those that have the advantage must fight for it to the end. Commerce itself, if you look to it, is a complex structure of growth for which there is nowhere any original accountability. It cannot change its philosophy, any more than a tree, for it has none. It has instead a vital instinct for opportunity and a flexible way with necessity and circumstance. There is no hope of its being reformed ideally by mass intelligence. The conglomerate mind is irresponsibly, impersonally selfish; it cannot act without experience. There is no experience of peoples sustaining one another on a sympathetic plan, each willing to give as much as it takes, with no balance favourable or unfavourable to be settled in gold or debt. This has never happened. It is an idea only.

But if now we move our point of view from the centre to the circumference, we shall see already taking place, with the force of natural events, momentous alterations in the scheme of economic life—one of decay and one of revaluation.

We witness almost unawares the ruin of that classic enterprise of empire which is founded upon the theory of a balance of trade and a division of labour whereby the colonies, the dominions, the subject and mandated peoples are hewers, drawers, and food-bringers, serving those who live in cities, practise machine-craft, and think themselves wholly benevolent.

The machine has betrayed it. Nothing more unexpected has occurred since the discovery of a simple chemical reaction that was to destroy the privileged warrior-caste among mankind. When a splendid knight in armour was powerless against the peasant with a musket and a knight with a musket no better than a peasant, the romantic profession of arms was doomed. Gunpowder ended the age of chivalry. Ultimate military power passed to the people.

And now for hundreds of millions of people hitherto inferior in status the machine is a symbol of liberation, freedom, independence, recognition, racial power. Japan is the thrilling example in Asia. Did it not deliver her from a thraldom imposed by the Western Powers in the interest of their own trade? Did it not make her in one generation their equal, a nation to be feared? Certainly for these reasons use and possession of the machine will increase in the world beyond any natural economic ratio, and both the power and profit of empire will cease.

The other alteration, already beginning to be visible though not yet adequately understood, is a change in the value of food. Three causes henceforth will be operating together to make food dear. First, as cities continue to grow and the industrial population of the earth continues to augment faster than the agricultural population, the need to import food will be always greater; second, the exportable surplus of food will be always less because as the agricultural and low-craft nations progress toward their ideal of industrial independence they will consume more and more of their own food products; and third, the supply of those industrial commodities that are exchanged for food will enormously increase.

In the language of the economist, the agricultural index will rise and the industrial index will fall. It will require a greater quantity of manufactures to buy a bushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheat to buy a manufactured article. This will not be for one year or two. It will be lasting. It will affect the status of great groups and classes of people. In the cities and industrial centres the cost of living will move in a vertical manner.

The difficulties of food-importing countries may, almost certainly will, become desperate. The people of Great Britain, for example, will pay dearly for the wealth they have amassed by industry in the last seventy-five years. If the value of food, priced in British machine-wares, should double, then for the same quantity of food as before they would have to give twice the quantity of manufactured goods, which would mean twice as much labour and no more to eat. The same difficulties will beset all countries not self-contained in food. They will exhort their people to return to the fields, which the people will be loth to do, having tasted cities. They will expect their governments to make food cheaper by edict, or to buy it out of taxation and distribute it gratis. Moreover, in some countries, taking again the case of Great Britain as notable, there may not be enough land. The people perhaps could not feed themselves no matter how intensively they worked their fields, industry having multiplied the population beyond the utmost potentiality of a native food supply. Obviously indicated is a movement of dispersal together with a limitation upon the increase of industrial population. More power will pass to countries, like the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, that have the advantage of enormous food-reserves. Their problems will be internal.

None of this can happen without much blind and violent resistance. But, of course, it will not happen all at once, not all in one place, nor in every case with a clear meaning. And it is not certain that any amount of experience, however painful, will bring nations to adopt what we have called a symbiotic principle of commerce with one another. There is at first the danger that agriculture in its turn will exploit industry as industry has exploited peasantry and that those who possess or control resources of food and raw materials will hold them too dear, thereby taking the industrial nations into their debt or provoking them to insane measures.