Sibylla or, The revival of prophecy
and televisual cinemas; he will be conveyed by the morning aerial
Pullman from his villa-palace in Devonshire to his office in what was
once the Strand. To his Club or restaurant he will proceed by a moving
pavement, or in a bath-chair propelled by radiant power. His week-ends
may be spent in Samarkand or in tobogganing on Mount Everest. His wife,
too, will benefit by this universal progress. Her day’s work will be
done by 9 a.m. The turning of a tap or two will nourish the ectogenetic
child foretold by Mr Haldane, and the pressing of a button will put in
action the automatic cook. By wireless communication with Paris she
will choose a garment, to be delivered by an aerial messenger boy upon
his cycloplane. After luncheon she will, again by wireless, put herself
in visual and auditory contact with other members of the society to
which she belongs. It will probably be a society for the revival of
twentieth-century customs.
But, granting all this, the obvious question occurs. What will be
its effect upon human nature? Is it conceivable that the perfecting
of machinery could leave it unaffected, and will not inevitably
this inventive genius be turned upon man himself? Our future man of
business who, by improved modes of locomotion, spends his week-ends
in Tennessee, Kikuyu, or Zanzibar (according to his religious
predilections), will he enjoy only the advantages of mechanical
invention? Surely a perfected Pelmanism will enable him to learn three
native languages on the Friday’s journey out, and an improved process
of repression assist him to forget them on the Sunday evening’s
journey home.
This is not entirely idle speculation. Applications of science to the
control of the human mind have already begun. They started, perhaps, in
the crude and blundering experiments in Scientific Management. They are
groping towards more solid foundations in Industrial Psychology――the
philosophical significance of which has, up to the present, escaped the
attention it deserves.
Consider briefly the course of this movement up to the present date.
Sometime in the eighties Taylor introduced his principles of Scientific
Management. Some ingenious spirit, indirectly inspired no doubt by
him, produced the following invention for organizing the activities
of man. A certain American establishment paid its employees on the
basis of ‘task work’, i.e. upon piece rates with a time-limit for
the performance of the unit-task. The worker was paid a 25% bonus on
the ordinary wage for the performance of his task, but the task and
time-setter was paid a bonus based upon the number of men who failed
to earn their bonuses. The apparent disadvantage to the worker,
however, was counterbalanced by providing him with a foreman who also
was paid upon the basis of the number of men under him who ‘made
their tasks’. As Muscio[1] comments, “The situation then was this:
The workman was given a bonus as an incentive to expend intense
efforts to accomplishing a task in a set time; the foreman was given
‘blood money’ to drive the man if he became slack, and the task and
time-setter was also paid ‘blood money’ to set the times so short that
‘the making of the tasks’ involved an expenditure of more than the
greatest reasonable amount of energy.” The Trade Unions got to know of
this, with the result that Scientific Management of that sort is now
as dead as mutton. Public interest subsides. But in principle it was
right――right in the sense that its inventor had a glimpse of something
which is ultimately going to prove effective. He made the mistake which
probably every inventor makes. He constructed a machine with the power
to blow itself up; but this only shows that power is there, and power
to be controlled. The mistake, of course, was a natural one to make
for people preoccupied with the parallelogram of forces. Another case
supplies the necessary comment and indicates a more hopeful line of
experiment.
[1] Muscio, _Lectures on Industrial Psychology_, p. 39 (Routledge).
“There was in operation for some years at the leper colony off the
Philippine Islands a system of weekly gratuities to each man, woman,
and child confined to the island colony. From the women and children
no accounting for the subsidy was required. But from the men a certain
amount of manual labour about the island was exacted upon penalty of
having the pocket-money withheld. From the administrative point of
view this had seemed an easy solution for the difficult problem of
getting adequate labour in an isolated place inhabited largely by
the victims of a dread disease. But the men patients took vigorous
exception to this form of compulsory labour, and finally made complaint
about it to the Philippine Government. An investigation into the unrest
at the leper colony was instituted, and the Secretary of the Interior
visited the island and heard all the complaints in person. As a result
of his study the system of gratuities for the men was wiped out. And
the necessary work on the island was paid for at an agreed rate which,
it appeared later, was less than the previous gratuity. Nevertheless,
the men found the new system preferable; there was no more complaint,
the necessary work was done; the men who were inclined to work received
their stipends and the others not. But from that day to the present
trouble on this score has been unheard of.”[2]
[2] Ordway Tead, _Instincts in Industry_, p. 1.
More systematic were the investigations in this country made under the
Ministry of Munitions. In the Interim report of 1917 of the Health
of Munition Workers Committee we find the following reference to
incentives in industry:
“It is essential that the wage system should be equitable and easily
understood by the workers. The evidence collected leaves no doubt that
a wage system the operation of which cannot easily be understood by
the wage earners ... fails to serve as an incentive.”
In fact, the evidence in detail rather suggests that it is more
important for the system to be intelligible than it is for it to be
just. As in the case of the Philippine lepers a reduction of wages may
in certain cases be the shortest remedy for industrial discontent, just
as the reduction of working hours has often been found to involve an
increase in production.
More important, however, than juggling with the systems of remuneration
is concentrated upon the subtler psychological factors in the
situation. Politicians, artists, bishops, and many members of the
working-classes are played upon by forces which act more powerfully
on their energies than any system of wages that could be applied to
them; the ambitions and interests of their wives, the health of their
children, the criticism or adulation of their associates and a host of
other factors of curious psychological interest. Is it beyond the wit
of man to apply these forces in a scientific way?
One very instructive attempt was that of another American establishment,
which instituted the office of ‘plant mother’. “It is her duty” (as Tead
puts it), “using this motherly disposition and attitude as an entering
wedge, to go among the men and help to straighten out their troubles
with the management. And one of the most successful weapons of appeal
with her is said to be that she puts employées’ problems in family
terms. For example, a man will want to quit because of a slight ruction
with a fellow-worker or a superior, whereupon she will remind him that
his little Johnny should not be forced by father’s unemployment to leave
school to go to work, or that another baby is coming in a couple of
months and that he mustn’t cause anxiety to ‘the wife’.... This
particular ‘plant mother’, I am told, has been instrumental in reducing
the labour turnover to an astonishing extent.”[3]
[3] Tead, _op. cit._, p. 28.
My readers will be able to think of many other possible applications
of this principle. Cannot our domestic parrot be turned to economic
advantage? Its present function would seem to be only that of
preserving the unity of private family life by giving its jaded members
something to laugh and talk about when the bonds of common interest
and filial piety are beginning to wear thin. That which preserves the
family from disruption and armies from revolt will surely soon be
dedicated to the cause of peace in industry.
To these things we are gradually and insensibly being led, so gradually
and insidiously as to evade the inhibitory sense of the ludicrous.
Already it is known that light, ventilation, and the general comfort
of the worker are relevant to production. By slight and inexpensive
changes in these respects output may be augmented say 3.5 or even 10
per cent, and the worker suffers less from nervous irritability and is
less punctual in paying his subscription to his union. At any moment it
may be found that hanging pictures on the workshop walls has a similar
effect. Possibly Landseer’s would raise efficiency and contentment only
1 per cent, whilst Sargent’s would really justify their auction prices.
We should then discover a more satisfactory policy with regard to our
National Galleries. We should go to Port Sunlight to see good pictures
and the Royal Academy would become the testing hall for experiments in
industrial art.
All this is coming about no longer by mere chance or blind experiment,
but by the operation of a principle which I take as a foundation
stone for prophecy. Man has slowly and painfully acquired facility in
adopting the scientific attitude of mind. Gradually he has been able to
achieve this point of view in relation to the material universe. But
he finds a peculiar difficulty in being scientific in the face of the
animate; and the difficulty would appear to be almost insuperable in
the face of mind. It is because we are living at a time when the feat
is being accomplished that I feel impelled to prophesy an important
revolution, a revolution beside which the Bolshevic incident, for
instance, is dwarfed to almost comical insignificance.
The revolutionists are level-headed but far-seeing men of business,
acting in alliance with the scientists. Here is their programme as
voiced by Professor Catell in 1903.
“It is our business to make both a science and an art of human nature.
As in the physical world we select first the material suited to our
purpose, and turn the iron into steel, and temper the steel for a
knife, so in the world of human action we must learn to select the
right man, to educate him and fit him for his exact task. This indeed
we try to do in all our institutions, religions, commerce, system
of education, and government. But we work by rule of thumb――blind,
deaf, and wasteful. The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary
increase in our knowledge of the material world, and in our power to
make it subservient to our ends; the twentieth century will probably
witness a corresponding increase in our knowledge of human nature and
in our power to use it for our welfare.”[4]
[4] Homo Scientificus Americanus: _Science_, April 10, 1903.
Let us note the implications of this programme. At present we have made
but a few experiments and a few discoveries in industrial psychology.
The future, however, is to see the principle applied to education,
criminology, government, war, perhaps religion and the intimate
personal life of man.
Can we foresee the consequences? To some extent, I think, we can. As Dr
Fournier d’Albe puts it in the first of his prophetic volumes,[5] we
have but to extrapolate the curves of present developments into the
future. We must, however, also take into account so far as possible
some of the other factors at work. The general course of evolution
is in outline known to be one of differentiation, specialization,