The knowledge so required as a general and commonplace equipment requisite for the pursuit of these modern skilled occupations is of the general nature of applied mechanics, in which the essence of the undertaking is a ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably exact quantitative terms. This class of knowledge presumes a certain intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman, such an attitude and animus as will readily apprehend and appreciate matter of fact and will guard against the suffusion of this knowledge with putative animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-personal interpretations of the observed phenomena and of their relations to one another. The norm of systematisation is that given by the logic of the machine process, and the scope of it is that inculcated by statistical computation and the principle of material cause and effect.
In some degree the routine of the machine industry necessarily induces such an animus in its employees, since such is the scope and method of its own working; and the closer and more exacting the application to work of this kind, the more thorough-going should be the effects of its discipline. But this routine and its discipline extend beyond the mechanical occupations as such, so as in great part to determine the habits of all members of the modern community. This proposition holds true more broadly for the current state of the industrial arts than any similar statement would hold, e. g., for the handicraft system. The ordinary routine of life is more widely and pervasively determined by the machine industry and by machine-like industrial processes today, and this determination is at the same time more rigorous, than any analogous effect that was had under the handicraft system. Within the effective bounds of modern Christendom no one can wholly escape or in any sensible degree deflect the sweep of the machine’s routine.
Modern life goes by clockwork. So much so that no modern household can dispense with a mechanical timepiece; which may be more or less accurate, it is true, but which commonly marks the passage of time with a degree of exactness that would have seemed divertingly supererogatory to the common man of the high tide of handicraft.[141] Latterly the time so indicated, it should be called to mind, is “standard time,” standardised to coincide over wide areas and to vary only by large and standard units. It brings the routine of life to a nicely uniform schedule of hours throughout a population which exceeds by many fold the size of those communities that once got along contentedly enough without such an expedient under the régime of handicraft. In this matter the demands of the machine have even brought on a revision of the time schedule imposed by the mechanism of the heavenly bodies, so that not only “solar time,” but even the “mean solar time” that once was considered to be a sufficient improvement on the ways of Nature, has been superseded by the schedule imposed by the railway system.
The discipline of the timepiece is sufficiently characteristic of the discipline exercised by the machine process at large in modern life, and as a cultural factor, as a factor in shaping the habits of thought of the modern peoples, it is itself moreover a fact of the first importance. Of the standardisation of the time schedule just spoken of, the earlier, the adoption of “mean solar time,” was due immediately to the exigencies of the machine process as such, which would not tolerate the seasonal fluctuations of “apparent” solar time. This epithet “apparent,” by the way, carries a suggestion that the time schedule so designated is less true to the actualities of the case than the one which superseded it. And so it is if the actualities to which regard is had are those of the machine process; whereas the contrary is true if the actualities that are to decide are those of the seasons, as they were under the earlier dispensation. “Standard time” has gone into effect primarily through the necessities of railway communication,—itself a dominant item in the mechanical routine of life; but it is only in a less degree a requirement of the other activities that go to make up the traffic of modern life. The railway is one of the larger mechanical contrivances of the machine age, and its exigencies in this respect are typical of what holds true at large. Communication of whatever kind, as well as the supply of other necessaries, is standardised in terms of time, space, quantity, frequency, and indeed in all measurable dimensions; and the “consumer,” as the denizens of these machine-made communities are called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in his demand and uses of them, on pain of “getting left.” To “get left” is a colloquialism of the machine era and describes the commonest form of privation under the régime of the machine process. It is already a time-worn colloquialism, inasmuch as it is now already some time since the ubiquitous routine of the machine process first impressed on the common man the sinister eventuality covered by the phrase.
The relation in which the consumer, the common man, stands to the mechanical routine of life at large is of much the same nature as that in which the modern skilled workman stands to that detail machine process into which he is dovetailed in the industrial system. To take effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels of routine go round, in the way of work and play, livelihood and recreation, he must know by facile habituation what is going on and how and in what quantities and at what price and where and when, and for the best effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exactitude and a cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced moving equilibrium of the mechanical processes engaged. To live—not to say at ease—under the exigencies of this machine-made routine requires a measure of consistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. The mere mechanics of conformity to the schedule of living implies a degree of trained insight and a facile strategy in all manner of quantitative adjustments and adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of population, where the routine is more comprehensive and elaborate.
And here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity. The complex of technological ways and means grows by increments that come into the scheme by way of improvements, innovations, expedients designed to facilitate, abridge or enhance the work to be done. Any such innovation that fits workably into the technological scheme, and that in any appreciable degree accelerates the pace of that scheme at any point, will presently make its way into general and imperative use, regardless of whether its net ulterior effect is an increase or a diminution of material comfort or industrial efficiency. Such is particularly the case under the current pecuniary scheme of life if the new expedient lends itself to the service of competitive gain or competitive spending; its general adoption then peremptorily takes effect on pain of damage and discomfort to all those who fail to strike the new pace. Each new expedient added to and incorporated in the system offers not only a new means of keeping up with the run of things at an accelerated pace, but also a new chance of getting left out of the running. The point is well seen, e. g., in the current competitive armaments, where equipment is subject to constant depreciation and obsolescence, not through decline or decay, but by virtue of new improvements. So also in the increase and acceleration of advertising that has been going on during the past quarter of a century, due to increased facilities and improved methods in printing, paper-making, and the other industrial arts that contribute to the appliances of publicity.
It is of course not hereby intended to imply that these modern inventions meet no wants but such as they themselves create. It is beyond dispute that such mechanical contrivances, for instance, as the telephone, the typewriter, and the automobile are not only great and creditable technological achievements, but they are also of substantial service. At the same time it is at least doubtful if these inventions have not wasted more effort and substance than they have saved,—that they are to be credited with an appreciable net loss. They are designed to facilitate travel and communication, and such is doubtless their first and obvious effect. But the net result of their introduction need by no means be the same. Their chief use is in the service of business, not of industry, and their great further use is in the furtherance, or rather the acceleration, of obligatory social amenities. As contrivances for the expedition of traffic both in business and in social intercourse their use is chiefly, almost wholly, of a competitive nature; and in the competitive equipment and manœuvres of business and of gentility the same broad principle will be found to apply as applies to competitive armaments and improvements in the technology of warfare. Any technological advantage gained by one competitor forthwith becomes a necessity to all the rest, on pain of defeat. The typewriter is, no doubt, a good and serviceable contrivance for the expedition of a voluminous correspondence, but there is also no reasonable doubt but its introduction has appreciably more than doubled the volume of correspondence necessary to carry on a given volume of business, or that it has quadrupled the necessary cost of such correspondence. And the expedition of correspondence by stenographer and typewriter has at the same time become obligatory on all business firms, on pain of losing caste and so of losing the confidence of their correspondents. Of the telephone much the same is to be said, with the addition that its use involves a very appreciable nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence conduces to an unremitting nervous tension and unrest wherever it goes. The largest secure result of these various modern contrivances designed to facilitate and abridge travel and communication appears to be an increase of the volume of traffic per unit of outcome, acceleration of the pace and heightening of the tension at which the traffic is carried on, and a consequent increase of nervous disorders and shortening of the effective working life of those engaged in this traffic. But in these matters invention is the mother of necessity, and within the scope of these contrivances for facilitating and abridging labour there is no alternative, and life is not offered on any other terms.[142]
Other kinds of routine, standardised and elaborate, have been or still are in force, besides this machine-like process of living as carried on under modern technological conditions; and one and another of these will at times rise to a degree of exigence quite comparable with that of the machine process. But these others are of a different character in that their demands are not enforced by sanctions of an unmediated mechanical kind; they do not fall on the delinquent with a direct mechanical impact, and the penalties of non-conformity are of a conventional nature. So, e. g., the punctilios of religious observance may come to a very rigid routine, to be observed on pain of sufficiently grave consequences; but in so far as these eventual (eschatological) consequences are statable in terms of material incidence (of fire, sulphur, or the like) the mechanically trained modern consumer will incline to hold that they are of a putative character only. So, again, in the matter of fashion and decorum the schedule of observances may be sufficiently rigorous, but here too failure to articulate with the sweep of a punctilious routine with all the sure and firm touch of the expert is not checked with an immediate disastrous impact of mechanical shock. Conformity in the technological respect with the routine of living under other technological systems than that of the machine process had also something of this character of conventional prescription; and the discipline exercised by the routine of living in these more archaic technological eras was also something more in the nature of a training in conventional expedients. The resulting growth of habits of thought in such a community should then also differ in a similar way from what comes in sight in the present.
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Both in its incidence on the workman and on the members of the community at large, therefore, the training given by this current state of the industrial arts is a training in the impersonal, quantitative apprehension and appreciation of things, and it tends strongly to inhibit and discredit all imputation of spiritual traits to the facts of observation. It is a training in matter-of-fact; more specifically it is a training in the logic of the machine process. Its outcome should obviously be an unqualified materialistic and mechanical animus in all orders of society, most pronounced in the working classes, since they are most immediately and consistently exposed to the discipline of the machine process. But such an animus as best comports with the logic of the machine process does not, it appears, for good or ill, best comport with the native strain of human nature in those peoples that are subject to its discipline. In all the various peoples of Christendom there is a visible straining against the drift of the machine’s teaching, rising at time and in given classes of the population to the pitch of revulsion.