SOCIETY AND HAPPINESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 820, 15 April 1955, Page 5

SOCIETY AND HAPPINESS

Sir,-I feel that your correspondent Guy Powell has missed the point which James K. Baxter made when he referred to society as "that mechanical mother we have invented for ourselves." The clue word is "mechanical." In his penetrating book Art and Technics, Lewis Mumford has explored the compulsive mechanisms which in fact govern our daily lives. It is in this context, I believe, that Mr. Baxter refers to society as responsible for the dehumanising effect which reduces our fellows to the "deadpan, doughnut-eyed, clawed and shambling husk of them.’ The inner life of modern man has all but disintegrated under the impact of a society overcommitted to the ideology of the machine and the cult of "production" more particularly in the economic field with its murderous division of labour. As a corollary, the personalising and humanising influence of art and the artist has been all but obliterated by this idolatry of the machine. Mr. Powell writes: "The happiness of the individual depends upon his degree of adaptation to the needs of the efficient functioning of his particular culture.’ He does not say that in a world increasingly being made over in the image of the machine man is rapidly being reduced to the status of a blind, unthinking, unfeeling robot. Surely, in these circumstances, there is something wrong with the "culture" rather than the "degree of adaptation." The slaughterhouse of sensibility which is modern society is certainly not synonymous with culture. To that extent I heartily agree with-Guy Powell's hice distinction between the two terms. But I stand by Mr. Baxter’s poetic protest. "The deadpan, doughnut-eyed, clawed and shambling husk" which is

modern industrial man is the inevitable result of his "adaptation to the needs of the efficient functioning of his particular culture." A poet, alas, is not efficient.

A.K.

B.

(Auckland).