by John Fowles
21 It is the possessor who is always the possessed. Our mania for collecting not only objects worth money but experiences that have cost money and our regarding of such a thesaurus of experiences as evidence of a valid existence (just as misers characteristically regard their hoarding as a virtue) finally make us poor in all but the economic sense. We seem to ourselves to live in exile from all we cannot afford. The pleasures that cost nothing come to seem worth nothing. Once we took our good deeds to heaven; now we take our purchases and our expense accounts as heaven.
22 The shoddy-goods economy: workers must be paid to produce more and buy more. Much must be consumed and if much must be consumed, goods must be designed to last for as short a time as the guillible public will tolerate. The community craftsman disappears; he commits the archcrime of making lasting goods. Exit humans and creators, enter mechanics and machines. The mechanics want mechanical pleasures, of course; not human and creative ones.
23 The corollary vogue among the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie is for the antique; for the handmade, the solid, the distinctive, the durable; for the ‘craft’ shop, for goods made in countries too poor to afford machine production.
24 Entertainment at a low cost and everywhere cripples man’s powers of self-pleasing. The mechanical receiver turns man into a mechanical receiver. We object to battery hens; but we are turning ourselves into battery humans.
25 In a town with too many men, prostitution becomes inevitable. Every pleasure experience becomes prostituted or prostitutable. The moneyed workers, those emancipated by social progress from proletariathood, lose all confidence in their own ability to amuse themselves and in their own taste. The price they pay for having money to spend is the surrender of their old working-class freedom in cultural matters to the skilled technological opinion-molders employed by commerce. Their labour is no longer exploited; but their minds are.
26 The aim of commerce has always been to market every pleasure possible and to sell it to as many as possible. The producer and the retailer are neutral, they claim no morality; they simply satisfy the public desire. But what we are being increasingly offered by commerce is not the pleasure, but a reproduction of it. Not the skylark singing in the hayfields, but a skylark in a record player; not a Renoir but a printed ‘replica’; not the play in the theatre, but a ‘television version’ of it; not the real soup, but an ‘instant’ powder; not the Bermudas, but a documentary film of them.
27 It is the technical problems, not a lack of potential consumer demand, that stop us from having cans of tropical sunset, tubes of warm Pacific breezes, and packets of ‘easy-mix’ sexual pleasure. We are able to reproduce almost anything audible or visible; already someone has invented a jukebox for smells; and only Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’ still seem completely out of our reach.*
28 The reasons for this demand that secondhand or imitation experience should be made as available as possible are obvious. Life has never seemed so short, but rich; and death so absolute. And if social and economic circumstances put many direct pleasures out of reach of the majority then they will naturally and reasonably take what substitute for the real thing they can get.
29 This monetization of pleasure is a makeshift means to get us through a period of history when the majority will not be able to have direct access to the things they want. As more and more realize what full being means and that their societies made it impossible for them to give this full being reality, the marketing of reproduction and imitation sources of pleasure – substitutes for the real sources of pleasure – becomes more and more important.
30 We talk of consumer goods and consumer services* but these are in fact placebos society has increasingly to offer its members as they become aware that then-real wants are largely caused by corrigible inadequacies of the social, political, international or human situation. In this field, all controllers of the dispensers of the placebos, that is, the governors, are in the same predicament, however far apart they may seem politically.
THE AUTOMATION VACUUM
31 Now a terrifying, because violently aggravating, new factor has appeared in this situation. It is cybernetics, the already advanced technique of controlling machines by other machines.
32 Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of the capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of the cybernetic society will be employment.
33 There have been absurd suggestions: that the disemployed masses must be forced to take part in compulsory games; that we shall have to undertake vast tasks, like the digging of canals and the moving of mountains, by primitive hand means; that the great majority must be sterilized. These proposals are ridiculous; but the potential quantity and intensity of frustration in a cybernetic society is terrifying.
34 There is surely only one acceptable solution. The energy poured into the old work routine must be poured into new ‘routines’ of education, both learning and teaching, and enjoyment. Working for money, in order to be able to spend and enjoy, must become working for knowledge and the power to enjoy through knowledge.
35 Evolution is about to go over on to a new tack. A reorientation of purpose; a reacclimatization of man. The disappearance of the work routine will also mean the disappearance of the counterpole of much of the pleasure we feel. Most of us will, in capitalist or laissez-faire economic terms, be superseded and obsolete machines, requiring a fuel that no longer exists; like regular soldiers in a sudden and permanent peace.
36 The only persons who have been able to support endless free time without damaging society have until now been the polymath, the scholar, the scientist and the artist; the person of multiple culture. The only work that can never end is the pursuit and expression of knowledge.
37 The state of the future will not be the industrial state, and cannot be it, unless automation is retarded artificially. It must be the university state, and in the old sense of university: a state in which there are endless opportunities to acquire knowledge, where the educational system is the widest possible (of the type I propose in the ninth group of notes), where there are faculties, enjoyable to all, to learn and to create and to travel and to experience; where the element of hazard, of surprise, is incorporated into the social system; and where pleasure is not monetized.
38 Slave-owning societies of the past show the obvious dangers facing a leisured class. They have been either stagnantly sybaritic or aggressively military. Leisure that has no other aim than the perpetuation of leisure breeds decadence or war, since peace and leisure need frequent purges. Soon, in much less than another hundred years, it will be the machines that are the slaves, and slaves that cannot revolt; and all humanity will then be potentially the leisured class. But we are long past the age of clysters and bleeding.
39 Evolution seems always to seize on some such force as the obsession with money, because it is easier to organize life when there is such a force on hand. Such forces invariably land mankind in the Midas Situation – almost literally so, in this case. The lust to find cheaper methods of production, such as automation, finally destroys the lust itself. We chase the reward, we get the reward; and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Automation may seem an end in itself, just as buying pleasure may; but these false ends in themselves simply take us to where we can see they are not.
THE DUTIES OF LEISURE
40 That leisure seems to have no duties is precisely what puritans object to in it; the puritan fallacy is that there is something intrinsically noble in work. This historically explicable need to enhance the value of work really undertaken only in order to get wages has created a climate in which too much external pleasure and enjoyment very quickly cloy. It is a mistake to think that a man who has been long conditioned to enjoy three weeks’ holiday a year is necessarily happier when he is suddenly given six. Whatever situation we are in we try to derive some relativity of recompense from it; and so in a condition without, for a stranger, any possibility of happiness a habitué wil
l find some happiness. Indeed, he is almost certainly a habitué because he has found rewards in the condition. Our ability to enjoy is conditioned by the situation in which we have had to learn to enjoy.
41 The first duty of having leisure is thus to learn to enjoy it; and this seems to me enormously more difficult than the optimists would have us believe. No union has yet called its members out on strike for less wages and longer hours; but the day may come.
42 The second duty of having leisure is more like one of the old duties. It is to share one’s leisure, that is, to give some of it to those who still have insufficient leisure.
43 Poverty is the counterpole that drives us now; soon it will be ignorance. The hungry brain, not the hungry belly; lack of knowledge and experience, not lack of food. A society of leisure must to begin with be a minority society. The counterpole of ignorance will be easily found outside its frontiers. The chief function of the first leisure societies will be the education, improvement and enleisurement of the backward societies of the world. There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.
44 This is the great change that must take place in human history. The rich societies must give away not only their surplus money, but their surplus leisure and their surplus capacity to educate.
45 These things will never come to be without planning; above all planning and reorientating our systems of education. Shaw (in Major Barbara) saw the pointlessness of expecting any moral progress before economic advancement has been achieved. In some countries that economic advancement has now largely been achieved; yet there is no sign of any change in the educational systems. They are still geared to the necessities of the first stage – to Andrew Undershaft’s insistence on concrete economic achievement-not to his daughter Barbara’s vision of a proper human education.
DEATH BY NUMBERS
46 Over all this obsession with money, this lust for an equal happiness, hangs the black cloud of the world population rate. This is the ultimate horror in our present situation.
47 At current birthrates the population of the world will have doubled in fifty years. Therefore in the lifetimes of many of us every problem caused by overpopulation – big-city neurosis, traffic problems, famine, inflation, foul air, the annihilation of nature, the regimentation of the individual – all these will be at least doubly intense. In this context the human and economic wealth poured into space travel and the nuclear arms race is the most stupendous example of fiddling while civilization burns in the history of man.
48 There are two kinds of objection to the controlled reduction of population; one, that such control is morally bad, and the other, that it is evolutionally wrong.
49 The opposers on moral grounds are of three principal kinds: religious, political and individualist.
50 There were formerly very dubious ecclesiastical reasons for encouraging a high birthrate: more of the faithful were born, and large families created or perpetuated the kind of economic situation in which poverty, ignorance and despair drove the victims into the ‘sanctuary’ of the church. But such policies worked only in priest-dominated environments, and these have largely ceased to exist except in a few backward countries.
51 A much more convincing religious argument is this: birth-control practices encourage private promiscuity and in particular adultery. It is difficult to deny this, but equally difficult to show that the suppression of birth-control practices (the repression of private promiscuity) would bring a stabler society. The flood current of evolution is set for sexual freedom. It is no longer a question of damming it up; but of controlling the flood. And this is a flood of something much more dangerous than water.
52 Some religious people still believe that birth-control practices are contrary to divine will. But the ‘divine will’ is not against life insurance boards, or parapets, or insecticides, or surgery, or computers, or antiseptics, or sea walls, or fire brigades. Why does it allow these forms of scientific control (some abusable) of the hazards of life, and not birth control?
53 Another absurd religious argument is this: prophylaxis is murder, since it prevents the unconceived child from being conceived. But this doctrine, even if one accepts its premise (that we exist before we are conceived), raises considerable problems. There are a thousand ways of preventing a child being conceived without resorting to specific prophylaxis. Should husbands go away on business? Are they murdering every conception-phase night they are away from home? Are all copulatory positions except the most apt for conception murder?
54 We can stop babies being conceived; but we cannot murder unconceived babies. All law requires a body.
55 We are given freedom so that we may control; and there cannot be special fields in which control is totally forbidden; in which, in short, we are condemned not to be free.
56 The opposers on political grounds say this: a powerful state needs a large population, and the higher the birthrate the more soldiers and workers it will have.
57 Since the advent of atomic weapons it is clear that what matters militarily is not number but know-how; this situation was already apparent as soon as the first machine gun was invented. Even from the point of view of conventional military requirements every country in the world today, including those with the most overseas commitments, is overpopulated.
58 Since automation, it is quite apparent that the unskilled workers of the world must become increasingly redundant. A conservative 1967 estimate of the current redundancy in highly industrialized countries was one in every four workers.
59 It is only in unmechanized peasant economies such as those in India that large families can be argued to be a necessity; and even if the argument is granted, clearly they are a necessity only for as long as the world allows such economies to be unmechanized.
60 The opposers on individualist grounds say this: choice of size of family is one of the last free choices left to adults in civilized society. To oblige them to limit the size of their families would be the surrender of the final citadel of the individual. I find such arguments the most attractive; and yet they collapse before the pressure of reality. For this kind of decision, to have or not have a certain number of children, is far more than a merely personal one. If this man and his wife decide to have a family of six, then they are making decisions that affect their society and their world far beyond the furthest scope of their own rights as individuals, and indeed far beyond their own existences.
61 As American sociologists have discovered, an ominous by-product of economic prosperity is that it turns the extra child into a desirable and affordable adjunct of the affluent life. From there it becomes a symbol of affluence, of success in life. The large family has always been encouraged by politicians and priests; the idolatry of those great gods Virility and Fecundity is easily induced. But surely the extra child is, in a world of starving children, the one luxury the already fortunate affluent have no right to offer themselves. For if we claim we are free to breed like rabbits, then evolution will see that we die like them.
62 There remains the second category of opposers: those who claim that it is evolutionally wrong to control population. There is a generational selfishness: let our children look out for themselves. There is a better argument. It is this: our capacity to multiply ourselves goes, and is meant to go, hand in hand with our capacity to feed ourselves. But according to this breed-and-brave-it theory if we are all to remain healthy we must remain in a state of acute crisis. We should build all our boats with a hole in the bottom-then pump.
63 Even if we could feed a population twice the size of the present world population, and feed them better than they are fed now, there is no likelihood that such an overpopulated world would be happier than a properly populated one. People need more than food, and all the other things they need flourish best when the crowd is least; that is, peace, education, space, and individuality.
64 The future will surely see our apathy over population control as the greatest folly of our time. They will see that a va
st structure in our societies was totally unnecessary, a mere product of having too many mouths to feed, too many hands to keep occupied. But above all they will see that the state of overpopulation turns progress into regress. How many modern inventions, how many economic theories, are really not progressive, but simply desperate attempts to stop up the leaks in the sinking boat? How much ingenuity and energy is poured into keeping us afloat instead of moving forwards?
CONCLUSION
65 Money-obsessed societies produce dissatisfied men and women because power to buy is as habit-forming, and finally as pernicious, as heroin. One is dead before one has enough. They produce guilty men, because too few have too much, and too many are savagely punished for their innocent poverty and ignorance. Behind each shilling, each franc, each mark, rouble, dollar is the stick-limbed child, the future, the envious and famished world to come.
66 Scientifically we know more of one another, and yet, like the receding galaxies, we seem to become each lonelier, remoter. So most of us concentrate, in an apparently meaningless and only too evidently precarious universe, on extracting as much pleasure for ourselves as we can. We act as if we were born into the death cell; condemned to a dangerous age, to an inevitable holocaust; to a being whose only significant aspects are that it is ludicrously brief and ends in a total extinction of the power to enjoy. What hollows us operates, like an awl, in two directions simultaneously. We have not only an exasperating inability to get all that we want but also the excoriating counter-cutting fear that what we want to get is, in terms of a dimly glimpsed but far richer human reality, worthless. Never were there so many hollow people in the world, like a huge and mounting shore of empty cockleshells.
