MACHINES AND PEOPLE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 751, 4 December 1953, Page 5

MACHINES AND PEOPLE

Sir,-Mr. J. K. Baxter’s quotation of Lewis Mumford’s comments on our obsessions prompts me to suggest that every new machine invented means more human. slavery. Theoretically machines lighten human labour, even to the extent of inducing the unwelcome leisure of unemployment. But any Sunday morning one can see thousands of human slaves washing, polishing and tinkering with their mechanical masters. In immense buildings on land.and in the

bowels of ships at sea, enormous numbers of human slaves sit up all night cosseting and coaxing mechanical gods. At countless wheels and levers, slaves guide the motions of mechanical monsters, and a momentary lack of devotion may bring appalling disaster. It is part of our inexplicable misuse of our talents and their fruits. In his Conduct of Life Mumford says: "The new age will begin when a sufficient number of men and women in every land and culture take upon themselves the burden men once sought to trarisfer to an emperor, a Messiah, a dictator, single God-like man... . each one of us accepts this desperate condition for survival, that which seems a threat to man’s further development will be transformed into a dynamic opportunity." Other persons, organisations or supernatural forces cannot hand man a new age on a platter; he must do the job of re-creation himself, and begin with himself. As Mumford later says: "If most of us realised early enough the fact that we have only one life to lead, and that every moment of it that escapes reflection is irretrievable, we should live,it differently." We might even cultivate "the daily practice of love and friendship" instead of the acquisitive appetite. In a universe coldly indifferent to us and our affairs, we have in fact to create and re-create our own world, for, as Mumford also says: "God himself has become more of a problem than the problems his existence would solve." Dwelling on a hypothetical hereafter in which we shall enjoy compensations and consolation for our self-created miseries in this one, benumbs the power to make this life better worth living.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru).