IITHE MACHINE AS IF
Eitherthe machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original point of view with the eye of new wonder.
Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish intuitively between their works.
Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton from cellulose more wonderful than the silkwormsimilarly converting the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that goes forty miles in a day and falls down?
Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming, under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred, and in another five thousand a day.
You ask them who makes the horse.
They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The horse is a natural thing.
Then the automobile is an unnatural thing?
They say no, smiling a little. Not anunnatural thing. The automobile is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves.
You ask them why they say they make it.
At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born. There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in factories.
Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles. These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they make automobiles? You ask them.
They ask you to say what else it could prove.
You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and, since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts, essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet they arenever heard to say they make children. They say children are born.
This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse confusion.
You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do before they had machines?
By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but incomprehensible to them.
The facts are as follows: People have been here on the earth a very long time, millions of years they think. Machines they have had for only a very short time, or, as you now see them, for only two generations. Before they had machines nearly everyone tilled the soil. There was no industry save handicraft. In the space of one hundred years these conditions have so remarkably changed that now only half the people are required to till the soil; the other half live by industry. This does not mean what you thought at first; it does not mean that half the fields have been abandoned so that half the people might gointo industry. You are careful to get this straight, for it is very important. On the contrary, since machines appeared whole new continents of land have been opened to cultivation. This was necessary in order to feed the industrial workers who live in cities, far off from fields, and buy their food, whereas formerly everyone generally speaking produced his own food, even the people of what once were called cities going forth seasonally to till and reap the earth. Actually, the number of people engaged in agriculture has greatly increased; yet it is only half the population where before it was the whole of it. What does this mean? It means that since the advent of machines the human race has enormously increased in number; it has so increased that the half of it which now is agricultural is greater than the whole of it was before. The new, non-agricultural half is the industrial part: it is the part that serves machines.
This fact is so astonishing that you wish to verify it. You ask them what would happen if all the machines in the world should vanish suddenly away. Their answer is that half the people living would perish in a week. And that is what you thought.
What may you deduce from these facts?
First, you will be amused that people are so naïve as to think they make machines. Then you may say there are two kinds of people here, agricultural and industrial. The earth makes one kind; machines make the other. And you will feel as sure of this as if you had proved it to your senses when you have looked at a typical industrial city where people live densely in compacted habitations with no visible errand on earth but to run to and fro tending the machines that hum night and day in the factories. Those tall, cylindrical, erupting forms called smokestacks will appear to you as generative symbols. If they were not there, neither would the people be there. Not only would the people not be there. They would be nowhere. They could never have existed. If the smokestacks disappeared, so would all these people, the industrial part of the population, leaving only the agricultural part—the part belonging to the soil—as it was before.
As a planetary tourist, you may be at least as certain these thoughts are true as men are that they are untrue; and even if they were true that would make no differencereally. The problems are practical. We must think of machines as machines act, logically.
One difficulty is that whereas the machine is automatically, unerringly logical, and nothing else, man has only a little logic; he has, besides, emotions, sentiments, instincts. In his unlogical character he has often opposed himself to the machine, meaning to destroy it. At the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first railroad in Great Britain and the first in the world, the anti-machine feeling of British craftsmen was dramatically symbolized by a lone weaver seated at a loom on a high hill. England was the industrial machine’s first habitat on earth. There fanatical men led mobs against it.
Frail and clumsy as it was at first, its life was indestructible. And now man would not dare destroy it if he could. His own life is bound up with it. Steadily it has grown more powerful, more productive, more ominous. It has powers of reproduction and variation which, if not inherent, are yet as if governed by an active biological principle. Machines produce machines. Besides those from whichwe get the divisible product of artificial things, there are machines to make machines, and both kinds—(both the machines that make machines and those that transform raw materials into things of use and desire)—obey some law of evolution.
Compare any kind of machine you may happen to think of with what its ancestor was only twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled, trebled; its shape has changed; and, as it is in the animal kingdom so too with machines, suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak, with no visible ancestor.
Man’s sense of material power within his environment has increased proportionately. It is colossal. Benefits such as formerly he would have thought beyond supernatural agency if he could have imagined them at all he now confers upon himself. More without end presents only technical difficulties. No physical circumstance forbids him. Nevertheless the fact, and only the more strange it is, that for reasons which he names economic or political he seems powerless to inform the augmenting body of machine phenomena with a rational or benign spirit.