Servants Became Masters
by The third great defect of our civilization is that it does not know what to do with its knowledge. Science has given us powers fit for the gods, yet we use them like small children.
SERVANTS BECAME MASTERS
The third great defect of our civilization is that it does not know what to do with its knowledge. Science has given us powers fit for the gods, yet we use them like small children. For example, we do not know how to manage our machines. Machines were meant to be man’s servants; yet he has grown so dependent on them that they are in its fair way to become his masters. Already most men spend most of their lives looking after and waiting upon machines. And the machines are very stern masters. They must be fed with coal, and given petrol to drink and oil to wash with, and they must be kept at the right temperature. And if they do not get their meals when they expect them, they grow sulky and refuse to work, or bust with rage, and blow up, and spreads ruins and destruction all round them. So we have to wait upon them very attentively and do all that we can to keep them in a good temper. Already we find it difficult either to work or play without machines, and a time may come when they will rule us altogether, just as we rule the animals.
And this brings me to the point at which I asked, “what we do with all the time which the machines have saved for us, and the new energy they have given us”? On the whole, it must be admitted, we do very little. For the most part we use our time and energy to make more and better machines; but more and better machines will only give us still more time and still more energy, and what are we to do with them? The answer I think, is that we should try to become mere civilized. For the machines themselves, and the power which the machines have given us, are not civilizations but aids to civilization. But you will remember that we agreed at the beginning that being civilized meant making and linking beautiful things, thinking freely, living rightly and maintaining justice equally between man and man. Man has a better chance today to do these things then he ever had before; he has more time, more energy, less to fear and less to fight against. If he will give his time and energy which his machines have won for him, in making more beautiful things, to finding out more and more about the universe, to removing the causes of quarrels between nations, to discovering how to prevent poverty, then I think our civilization would undoubtedly be the greatest among all, then there has ever been.
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