AND ANOTHER THING
Searching for the Michelangelos and the Beethovens of the capitalist system
PAUL JOHNSON
Now that is what I call real power. Few possess it, certainly not writers. I suppose I have had a certain influence through my articles and books but it is hard to be sure about it and quite impossible to quantify. Most politicians fear the same. Cabinet ministers often tell me how powerless they feel. When Dick Crossman was a secretary of state and I was an editor, he used to say to me, 'You have a damn sight more power than I do.' Nonsense,' said I, and we would argue hotly. But the truth is neither of us had much. Even in the matter of jobs, when a politician embarks on a job-creation scheme he is seeking short-term popularity and piling up long-term mischief. But for a young man to make secure 150 jobs and bring relief to all those families, just by making efficient something which was badly run, is a marvellous exercise in real Power.
It is also, in a curious sense, creative, and this is a point that is often missed about the capitalist system. We have been taught to see it, particularly by Marxists and their contemporary successors, entirely in finan- cial terms, 'shuffling bits of paper about' as they often say in the left-wing press. But capitalism also involves, starting from noth- ing, building vast factories, digging mines and launching exciting new products on the market. I am deeply grateful, for instance, to whoever designed and marketed this tYpewriter I am using. It is the best I have ever had, I have written huge books on it and countless articles and it suits me per- fectly. To me, the man or woman responsi- ble for getting it on to the market is a cre- ative person of a high order. Again, in America, South Africa and Australia, I have had a fascinating time talking to a spe- cialist category of mining engineers, who actually design deep-level goldfields, or those complicated mines where various base metals are extracted on conjunction (sometimes with silver added). The design of the mine is the key to its success, but the engineers have to work in the dark because, despite the most modern instrumentation, no one really knows what lies in the bowels of the earth until they dig deep enough to find out. So the mine designer has to use his imagination and often work by intu- ition. He is rather like a playwright who doesn't know what reception his lines and effects will have until they are presented to a live audience.
When I was writing my last big book, The Birth of the Modem, which among other things dealt with early industrialisation, I had to study the lives of a large number of entrepreneurs, and I became convinced that the desire to make a lot of money was only one of their motives, not necessarily the most important one. The elder Brunel, who built the world's first production line in Portsmouth, was a creative spirit if ever there was one, and his son, Isambard King- dom Brunel, was a major artist as well as a great engineer. The titans of early industry did not see themselves — as they are often now pre- sented — as the destroyers of beauty but as its creators. Bringing good wages to a fami- ly hitherto living at subsistence level was to them creative. To mark the fact they hired fine artists and designers to embellish their mills and mines and forges. The passionate love of good, clean design which Thomas Telford put into his bridges and toll-hous- es, docks, locks and road-furniture — much of which happily still survives — amounts to a major artistic achievement. And the 'I'm afraid you have to pay the first 7p.' first Stephenson, though illiterate until his son, who had been to school, taught him to read and write, took constant trouble to make his engines beautiful. But he also made his business pay, through hard-head- ed entre-preneurial skills, knowing full well that any businessman who can't meet the wage-bill at the end of the week is no good to anyone.
The sheer creativity of capitalism has in recent years become the theme of a num- ber of fine American writers, such as Thomas Sowell and George Gilder. Michael Novak, who has presented demo- cratic capitalism as an important expression of the creative Christian spirit, has now had his work recognised by the award of this year's Templeton Prize. These writers, and others pursuing similar themes, are today well known in the United States, and their message is getting over at some of the more vigorous universities, such as Adelphi in Long Island, Temple in Pennsylvania and Southern Baptist in Dallas. Their ideas are also spreading outside the United States; for instance, the huge new University of Latin America now being planned in Miami, which will move to its permanent headquarters in Cuba as soon as the failing Castro regime disintegrates, will have a special department called after Novak, in which the creative aspects of capitalism will be explored, taught and developed.
We do not seem to get any of this here in Britain, where most dons — who, of course, know little or nothing about the subject present capitalism to their pupils as a horri- bly materialistic activity characterised by greed and dishonesty. Some of them posi- tively discourage their brighter charges from going into industry. First-year stu- dents who tell their tutors that they hope to make a career producing motor-cars or household appliances are soon likely to be sneered out of it. Yet these dons are exactly the same people who criticise Margaret Thatcher and the Tories for 'destroying Britain's manufacturing base'. We will keep a manufacturing base into the next century and beyond only if we can persuade our cleverest, most imaginative and innovatory spirits to work in it. That means we must develop the habit, at various levels of our society, and especially in our education process, of presenting capitalism as a cre- ative activity, akin in its own way to writing symphonies or novels, or painting great landscapes.
Previous page
