MASTER OR SLAVE?

Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.)
​1854-1972,  October 25,  1931,  Image 75

THE MACHINE—Master or Slave?

by George W. Gray ~ 1931

“A Billion Wild Horses ” That Have Gotten Out of Hand in the Modern Age—But If Machines Were Eliminated the World “Would Need Five Thousand Million Slaves to Keep Up Production ”

The Paradox of Overproduction

Since Samuel Butlers “Erewhon"- and even before—the idea of mechanical invention as a Frankenstein monster that will some day turn and destroy--or at least, enslave—human kind has been a frequent subject for the imagination. Today the chorus affirming this onrushing doom is loud and repetitious. The outcome la so graphically pictured by able analysts of graphs and trends and cycles that one wonders if Thoreau's retreat on Walden Pond is not in danger of being overcrowded with these refugees from mechanization. (Parking apace there, it should be noted, is limited.) The machine, we are told, is “a billion wild horses" that have somehow got out of hand and have themselves turned slave driver, and are riding Western civilization with a ruthless hand The “wild horses" have already chased some millions of us out of our jobs; the? have piled up surpluses of food and textiles so huge that millions of us are near starvation and contemplate the coming Winter with acute apprehension; they have made life so noisy and hurried that machine-less Mexico is recommended as a paradise where one may loaf and invite the soul without fear of food shortage, blizzards or the vagrancy law.

MOST of these criticisms have come from economists, historians and others of the so called humanities, but recently a representative of the natural sciences added his voice to the  hue and cry. Dr. C E. K. Mees, research director for the Eastman Kodak Co., expressed his doubt that engineering progress has been a blessing to mankind. "Will any student of history agree," asks Dr. Mees, “that the inhabitants of an American city are. on the whole, happier than those of a Greek or a Babylonian city of the past? This is a thing difficult to assess, but for myself if I could exchange the life that I lead In a modern city for a life in Athens of the Periclean Age or in Thebes under the eighteenth dynasty, I should undoubtedly accept it.

“In those days there was more leisure, less pressure, more opportunity for the exchange of ideas, less emphasis on material things. There is little that a man can get today which he could not have had In Athens.” 

I asked Dr. Karl T. Compton about this. Dr. Compton is president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a school which probably is responsible for more Industrial explorers, more inventors and engineers than any other Incubator of mechanization on this continent. And yet, Dr. Compton himself is not an engineer nor an industrialist, but a pure scientist whose original work in atomic physics gives him leave to speak representatively for the good fellowship of research.

“My first thought,” answered President Compton. “is that a man’s enjoyment of Periclean Greece or eighteenth dynasty Egypt would be dependent on his political status—on whether he was a member of the small aristocratic class that had the leisure, the freedom from pressure, the sufficiency of material things which allowed them opportunity to exchange ideas and to live the cultural life of intellectuals, or a member of the many times large group of slaves. “Without the slaves there could have been no leisure for the aristocrats, and every patrician of intellectual detachment and philosophical discourse demanded grinding hour of brutish labor on the part of human slaves. 

“It is said that 100,000 men in slavery worked 3O years to build the great Pyramids of Egypt  driven by the lash and dying by the thousand from overwork and disease. The Panama Canal, a work of equal magnitude, was built i third of the time by free men, comfortably housed, well fed, well paid and safeguarded bf|sanitary measures, which are as truly a product of the machine age as the giant shovels and dredges and engines with which they worked. “The glory of the machine,” added the scientist, “lies In this: That it has taken from the overloaded muscles of men and women its numerable burdens and agonies and transferred them to the steel muscles of machinery. “If we had to abolish the machine, to put back into muscles of men all the labor not performed by hydraulic, steam, electric and gasoline power, we should need, as Dr. Wickenden of the Case School of Applied Science recently put it, at least five thousand million human slaves in America—more than double the population of the whole earth!

CONTINUE TO THE REST OF THE ARTICLE FROM 1931