Part IX
1 The inherent
2 the social meaning of Industrialization
3 is not well understood
4 not because it is difficult—
5 only because it is so comprehensive.
6 The form of its ultimate
7 design and behavior pattern
8 has probably been clearly envisaged by few even amongst those
9 who have served it most willingly.
10 It seems least of all understood
11 by the professional
12 painters, architects, novelists, and clergy,
13 who have seen the price that men have paid for it, without understanding what they were paying for. Wherefore sometimes
14 painting Industrialization with AWE
15 mostly have the artists painted it with PAIN.
16 The economic meaning of Industrialization is simple. It is the augmentation
17 of the integrally bom power
18 and mechanical effectiveness of the individual in the struggle to conquer and derive satisfaction out of his precast, involuntary environment.
19 This augmentation is achieved by industrialized man in many ways, and of the mechanics of the augmentation, more later, but economically analyzing, it may be said that:—
20 man achieves it as a worker because the tools of modem industry enormously increase his power of doing work.
21 (And one of the problems of our time is that the worker gets insufficiently paid for this increase in power.)
22 He achieves it as a capitalist or owner because of the endless opportunities offered for the development of new tools in the competition of tools.
23 (But also one of the problems of our times is that individual owners’ opportunities are being curtailed.)
24 And he achieves it as consumer because he can buy, for the dollars gained by a limited number of hours of work, any number of tools or extensions to use for his personal satisfaction
25 (or profit, abstracted for later use) or for the development of his faculties.
26 (And a third problem of our day is that so many are disenfranchised from even limited hours of work, with whose interpolated pro rata share
27 of the addition to commonwealth provided by their work they might otherwise buy.)
28 Any one, or all three of these economic roles may be filled by the individual.
29 But by and large
30 despite common misapprehension
31 the historical uniqueness of Industrialization, is not as much economic as social.
32 First taking roots in Western Europe
33 while the Pilgrims to America were breaking ground Industrialization’s social significance
34 lies first in its cooperative requirement of individuals
35 considered either as producers or consumers.
36 This cooperative characteristic of Industrialization is neither optional nor voluntary
37 as in the case of the early American pioneers but constitutes a basic principle without which it cannot exist.
38 It may be stated as a scientific tenet that Industrialization involves at minimum
39 the simultaneous work of three people for its sole virtue lies
40 in the leverage principle involved
41 in the dynamic balance of specialization mentally coordinated
42 upon a central fulcrum of knowledge which can out-produce the efforts of any equal number
43 of non-specialized, non-coordinated, non-informed Jack-of-all-trade individuals.
44 A corollary is
45 that the more people coordinated in simple specialization as producers, and comprehensively as consumers, the more efficient will be the total phenomenon—Industrialization.
46 Therefore Industrialization cannot develop without at least tacit standards of performance.
47 Though standards so flexible that they may be limitlessly refined or become ever more inclusive,—because they are dynamic,—they are nevertheless standards that are more cosmically inviolable than morals or man-made laws.
48 Though rarely discussed, these standards are so certainly assumed by every individual in an industrial society that each may dare to relax vigilance over his whole broad survival problem and thus be free to concentrate his best effort
49 in performing the specialized contribution for which he is by heredity and experience at the time best adapted
50 towards the superior productivity of the team as a whole.
51 Only through such certification
52 of superior production and welfaring results may the costly acquisition
53 of the high speed tools
54 both of producer and consumer
55 and vast inanimate energy harnessing (weighing and measuring many thousand fold the integral faculties of the individual) be justified.
56 No individual may unaided accomplish a railroad system, an automobile (and the highway implicit to the automobile) or an electric lighting net-work of more than toy proportions and characteristics.
57 The individual can hue wood and fashion a chair by himself and this handicraft he has performed for centuries, but craft skill is ever less numerically essential to the total industrial population and organization pattern due to cooperative specialization in mechanical extension.
58Informed skill has replaced craft skill and the only scarce factors in high industrialization,—besides comprehension of the phenomenon itself, by society in general are combined ingenuity, experience, imagination,—an unshakable faith in a god of orderly meaning,—and the will to sacrifice self for others in setting the pace,—advancing the standards of performance and evolving the new standard prototypes worth mass reproducing.
59 However,
60 man unconcernedly sorting mail on an express train with unuttered faith that
61 the engineer is competent,
62 that the switchman are not asleep,
63 that the track walkers are doing their job,
64 that the technologists
65 who designed the train and the rails
66 knew their stuff,
67 that thousands of others
68 whom he may never know by face or name
69 are collecting tariffs,
70 paying for repairs,
71 and so handling assets
72 that he will be paid a week from today
73 and again the week after that,
74 and that all the time
75 his family is safe and in well being
76 without his personal protection
77 constitutes a whole new era of evolution—
78 the first really ‘‘new’’
79 since the beginning of the spoken word.
80 In fact, out of the understanding
81 innate in the spoken word
82 was Industrialization wrought
83 after milleniums
84 of seemingly whitherless spade work.