Part IX
4 The inherent
5 the social meaning of Industrialization
6 is not well understood
7 not because it is difficult—
8 only because it is so comprehensive.
9 The form of its ultimate
10 design and behavior pattern
11 has probably been clearly envisaged by few even amongst those
12 who have served it most willingly.
13 It seems least of all understood
14 by the professional
15 painters, architects, novelists, and clergy,
16 who have seen the price that men have paid for it, without understanding what they were paying for. Wherefore sometimes
17 painting Industrialization with AWE
18 mostly have the artists painted it with PAIN.
19 The economic meaning of Industrialization is simple. It is the augmentation
20 of the integrally bom power
21 and mechanical effectiveness of the individual in the struggle to conquer and derive satisfaction out of his precast, involuntary environment.
22 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:—
23 man achieves it as a worker because the tools of modem industry enormously increase his power of doing work.
24 (And one of the problems of our time is that the worker gets insufficiently paid for this increase in power.)
25 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.
26 (But also one of the problems of our times is that individual owners’ opportunities are being curtailed.)
27 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
28 (or profit, abstracted for later use) or for the development of his faculties.
29 (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
30 of the addition to commonwealth provided by their work they might otherwise buy.)
31 Any one, or all three of these economic roles may be filled by the individual.
32 But by and large
33 despite common misapprehension
34 the historical uniqueness of Industrialization, is not as much economic as social.
35 First taking roots in Western Europe
36 while the Pilgrims to America were breaking ground Industrialization’s social significance
37 lies first in its cooperative requirement of individuals
38 considered either as producers or consumers.
39 This cooperative characteristic of Industrialization is neither optional nor voluntary
40 as in the case of the early American pioneers but constitutes a basic principle without which it cannot exist.
41 It may be stated as a scientific tenet that Industrialization involves at minimum
42 the simultaneous work of three people for its sole virtue lies
43 in the leverage principle involved
44 in the dynamic balance of specialization mentally coordinated
45 upon a central fulcrum of knowledge which can out-produce the efforts of any equal number
46 of non-specialized, non-coordinated, non-informed Jack-of-all-trade individuals.
47 A corollary is
48 that the more people coordinated in simple specialization as producers, and comprehensively as consumers, the more efficient will be the total phenomenon—Industrialization.
49 Therefore Industrialization cannot develop without at least tacit standards of performance.
50 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.
51 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
52 in performing the specialized contribution for which he is by heredity and experience at the time best adapted
53 towards the superior productivity of the team as a whole.
54 Only through such certification
55 of superior production and welfaring results may the costly acquisition
56 of the high speed tools
57 both of producer and consumer
58 and vast inanimate energy harnessing (weighing and measuring many thousand fold the integral faculties of the individual) be justified.
59 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.
60 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.
61 Informed 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.
62 However,
63 man unconcernedly sorting mail on an express train with unuttered faith that
64 the engineer is competent,
65 that the switchman are not asleep,
66 that the track walkers are doing their job,
67 that the technologists
68 who designed the train and the rails
69 knew their stuff,
70 that thousands of others
71 whom he may never know by face or name
72 are collecting tariffs,
73 paying for repairs,
74 and so handling assets
75 that he will be paid a week from today
76 and again the week after that,
77 and that all the time
78 his family is safe and in well being
79 without his personal protection
80 constitutes a whole new era of evolution—
81 the first really ‘‘new’’
82 since the beginning of the spoken word.
83 In fact, out of the understanding
84 innate in the spoken word
85 was Industrialization wrought
86 after milleniums
87 of seemingly whitherless spade work.