BOOKS
The Age of Boredom
By ANTHONY HARTLEY
n NE of the more depressing features of British J culture today is a shortage of sages. On the death of George Orwell that peculiar genus, the English moralist, seems to have become extinct. And this is no small loss. One can laugh as much as one likes at the majestically whiskered proces- sion of liberal or not so liberal thinkers who move throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries uttering gravely acute remarks on a variety of topics, but what has replaced them to- day is an almost total lack of self-criticism about the deeper trends of our society. There has been a good deal of talk about 'angry young men' sound- ing of in a symposium called Declaration, but most of the opinions expressed there were about as perceptive as the yelp of a dog into whom someone has just stuck a pin. A generalised state of irrita- tion-in intellectuals can only be a symptom, never a diagnosis, of the discontents of our age. If we want the genuine article with the wearisome effort towards actual thinking that it implies, we must go either to France, where a traditional concern for general ideas still exists, or to America; where the trends of modern technocratic society are easier to discern for the simple reason that they have developed farther. A large number of the phrases, which we use to describe modern society and social types, come from across the Atlantic : `organisation man,' other-directed,"beat genera- tion.' There a sociologist like David Riesman plays Precisely the part of the kind of prophet of which Victorian England produced so plentiful a crop. A book like The Lonely Crowd is not primarily a scientifically descriptive work. Its purpose is to put forward certain values, and this it does with origin- ality and with an adequate intellectual and philo- sophical equipment. Professor Riesman's essays on Freud in individualism Reconsidered suggest an- other comparison. No English writer seems willing to embark on a general discussion of anything like this magnitude. All they do is drool about the Royal Family or the Labour Party. Why? Is this native empiricism or is it simply (as 1 should suspect from a reading 'of Declaration) that our education has been neglected?
With this in mind it is not surprising to find that a book,called The Human Condition* is published in America—such a title would appear intolerably ambitious in Oxford or Cambridge. Hannah Arendt has made a most interesting attempt to study man in action, or, as she puts it, his vita activa. Her analysis divides this into three categor- ies: labour (the biological operation through which man produces enough' to keep himself alive and to ensure his own reproduction), work (the production by homo faber of objects which are for `use' not for 'consumption' and which, therefore, offer the possibility of the creation of a semi- permanent world of objects) and action (which comprises man's relations in the public world of *TiE HUMAN CONDITION. By Hannah Arendt. (Chicago University Press. Published in England by the Cambridge University Press at 36s.) other men and is therefore essentially political in character). In the Greek and Roman worlds the first two categories were regarded as essentially `private': only action on the stage of the Greek polls (the community of the city state) was public, serving the human need for noble self-expression and regarded as being superior to other human activities. The first thing that happened to upset this scheme was the value attributed to the contem- plative life following the development of post- Socratic thought and the rise of Christianity. Dis- credit was thus cast upon action, and, after the Cartesian undermining of contemplation as a way of access to truth, work and the values of homo faber took up a predominant position in the hierarchy.
Now, however, labour powerfully aided by the techniques of mass production (the earlier supremacy of the Immo tuber ethos was extin- guished when 'tools' became 'machines' and objects were. made for consumption rather than for use) has iasserted itself over the other two categories of vita activa, and, corresponding to this movement, there has been a fusion of 'private' and 'public' into `social'—a world in which human beings display those characteristics which they share as members of the same species of the animal kingdom. The only people left who can work are artists and writers. As for action, it is the preroga- tive of scientists acting on nature. The sheep have eaten up the men, and, for Dr. Arendt, the polls as polls in our day and age is null and void.
This summary of Dr. Arendt's work is inade- quate, but, 1 hope, not too oversimplified. The book is difficult, proceeding by brilliant flashes and abounding in intuitions and subtleties, which I cannot discuss here. What emerges from its main line of argument is that any highly developed industrial society is now faced with a grave crisis centred around the nature of work (taken in its usual sense). Labouring to live has produced a mass society, which lives to labour, just at the very moment when technical discoveries have reached the point where life may be sustained with infinitely less trouble. 'A society of job- holders' is likely to find itself out of a job, not because of mass unemployment, but because the level of production required to keep the human race going can be attained and exceeded with the utmost ease by automatically controlled machines rather than by human sweat. Mankind, therefore, will soon be in the position of some prehistoric animal which, having evolved webbed feet over thousands of years in order to cope with a marshy environment, suddenly finds itself faced with climatic change and the transformation of swamps into deserts. There will soon be a surplus of human activity and no purpose to which it can be put, all other purposes than survival having been elimin- ated by the modern emphasis on simply continuing to live. We shall be stranded with a dinosaur of a society and no mutations in sight.
The eternity of passive boredom, with which Dr. Arendt threatens mankind, may be a good
way off yet, and, in any case, her analysis is schematic rather than strictly historical. But there are=a number of signs which suggest that she is not far wrong when she points to the submersion of all other activities by that of labouring to keep alive as a potentially dangerous characteristic of the twentieth century. If we take Science Fiction as in part an expression of the innate desires of our time—it is certainly molt like the eighteenth- century philosophic fable than it is like any other literary form—then the continued protests uttered by its authors against modern mass society must be considered to be significant. The values put for- ward in SF are nearly always aristocratic : cour- age, individualism, decision, solitude, beauty, austerity. Many of the stories even show an un- conscious longing for some return to the Greek city state, to a society where individual qualities could make some visible impression on events. Then there is the phenomenon of adolescent gangsterism, which, occurring in countries ap- parently so ideologically different as America and Russia, also points to some deep flaw in the struc- ture of modern industrial society. And it is worth noting that all this has little to do with whether that society is democratic in its political forms or not. Every individual in a modern society is in the position of suffering too much from it and of being able to affect it too little. It is harder now than at any time in history to be either a hermit or an anarchist. Society is determined that nobody shall contract out, and, this being so, the only safeguard for individual• freedom lies in the inefficiency of the instruments by which it imposes its will. It might be held that a rackety and decaying dictator- ship allows more freedom to its citizens than an up-to-date parliamentary democracy disposing of an efficient bureaucracy.
Without going as far as this, however, it is easy to see that the present well-ordered mass society, where all States are Welfare States (it is hard to think of a modern State that is not a Welfare State in some degree), suppresses some human instincts and presses too hard upon others. And it is equally easy to predict that this will not con- tinue for ever. Sooner or later we shall be in for a reversal of values, when those elements in man, which liberal humanitarianism has refused to admit to decent company, will take their revenge.
If violence is to be to the mid-twentieth century as shocking as sex was to the nineteenth, then we may expect that it will be to the twenty-first cen- tury what sex has been to the twentieth : a means of liberation. This is not an entirely comfortable thought, but it is the inevitable result of sitting on bits of human nature in the name of a system. The trouble with pacifism is that it produces militarists. One day, when discontent with our present 'society of jobholders' has hardened into rebellion, we shall be faced with the question of how to widen or replace its exhausted values. Then, no doubt, the mistakes will be made in the opposite direction. And that is as it should be. Three cheers for the pendulum!
Previous page
