The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1912. HOW CIVILISATION WEARS OUT THE INDIVIDUAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 80, 21 August 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 1912. HOW CIVILISATION WEARS OUT THE INDIVIDUAL.

The whole end of civilisation seems to be economic. All progress aims at facilitating and augmenting the production of goods. That in this process the individual is being worn out is not considered. The world-economy does not ask whether it enhances the happiness of the single human being. It produces wealth and sets this on a level with happiness—a manifest illusion. In the stress of intensive modern culture the people that take the lead must needs wear themselves out. Only if they had the courage to retard the rhythm of their economic progress, only then could they retain their health and their full powers. They cannot at the same time be rich and able, shine and endure, but only the one or the other. Dr. Max Nordau has a stimulating article on "Degeneration" in the July issue of the Hibert Journal, in which he considers the social and political aspects and effects of degeneration. The main conclusions he reaches are those stated above. 'The phenomenon of degeneration," he says, '•is now no longer doubted by any man of scientific culture. In face of the advance of degeneration every alarm is intelligible, still, not every alarm is justified. Civilisation itself is not threatened by degeneration, but civilised people are imperilled. The mischief which it does to the nation and the State is enough to force upon us the question whether there is any remedy for degeneration. I fear." adds Max Nordau, "that in the present state of science and of culture, in the present political and economical constitution of society, we must answer 'No.' Tn order to be operative the treatment of degeneracy must not take the degenerates as its object. In their ease it comes too late. It must apply itself to their progenitors who are not themselves degenerate but have reached a condition in which they give life to organically inferior offspring. The root of degeneracy is an intoxication of one or both pro-

geniixrs. So far as the poisons that damage the parental organism are introduced from without a fight against them is not without prospect of success." Dr. Nordau then shows the hopeful features of the fight against absinthe, syphilis, malaria and adulterated food. "All these sources of mischief," he says, "aro accessible to the intervention of the legislator, tlie Government, the forces of society. The case stands otherwise, alas! with the second great cause of degeneration, auto-intoxication and organic wear and tear—l regard these two processes as identical—through fatigue consequent on over-exertion. But this is the inevitable result of the whole course of modern life, and in order to prevent it the modern way of life must be radi- ' eally reformed. The work done in the civilised world to-day is incomparably greater than at any former time. Even the poorest workman who is not a beggar, hut earns his own living, makes greater demands on his existence than his forefathers- did, and the rise in his ' standard of life imposes correspondingly greater efforts upon him, since it is not compensated by the general rise in wages. The dominant part rjlayed in production by the machine, to a mere attendant on which man in the factory has been degraded, and the ever-increas-ing division of labor, which condemns the worker to an eternal, automatic repetition of a small number of move ments, and reduces the part taken in hig work by the intellectual faculties to a minimum, wears him out one-sidedly, and therefore quicker and more completely than is the ease when, with a varied, manifold activity, which calls in turn upon different groups of muscles and requires the continual intervention of imagination, judgment and will, he manufactures some complicated object of common use from the raw material up to the perfect article. In ever greater numbers the population makes its way from the country to the town, to exchange agricultural occupations for labor in workshops and factories. The number of people that dwell in towns of over 100,000 inhabitants is everywhere swelling; everywhere among civilised nations the tendency appears to transform a people that lives on the land and raises natural products into a people of great cities, producing differentiated goods. The whole end of civilisation seems to be economic. All progress aims at facilitating and augmenting the production of goods. That in this process the individual is being worn out is not considered. The world-economy does not ask whether it enhances the happiness of the single human being. It produces wealth, and sets this on a level with happiness—a manifest illusion. The peasant is attracted to the town because he is hypnotised by the figure of industrial wages, which he compares with the pay for agricultural labor, or the net profits of a small farmer. He does not understand or consider that the higher wage is set off by incomparably higher expenses, but that more money will buy less pleasure and bodily prosperity in the town than les» money in the sountry. He is enticed, moreover, by the excitement, the variety, the amusements which the town offers, and he does not see that these doubtful, advantages are balanced by quite certain disadvantages—periodic unemployment, a shorter working life, a poor and forsaken old age, and a permanent dependence on great industries and unsentimental enterprise between which and the workers there exists no thread of human, personal relation. But in all this nothing can be alterered. The world-economy will not dispense with the division of labor, with its great material advantages, and will never return to the idyllic style of production of which Ruskin dreamed, where every workman thinks out with his own head, as a creative artist, the products of his industn, gives his heart to his work and carries it out with his own hands. And teaching and persuasion are likewise useless to stem the flow towards the town.