Nobody's Business
I
‘Knowest thou not,’ asked Pilate of Christ, ‘that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?’ We know today that science has the power to crucify society but that, acting alone, it cannot release it. Science means the discovery of easier and easier ways to control and harness the powers of nature. As such, it constitutes the basis of material progress. Today we know that it can also become the agency of individual and social destruction. Change does not assure wisdom. Mankind is not attuned to easy control over nature.
We know the slow beginnings, and how century followed century without bringing perceptible change. It is only during the last century and a half that steam, gas, oil, and electricity have made possible the tools which increase so tremendously man’s productive capacity. Now our laboratories are developing such marvels as the uranium isotope, U-235, with its dream of controlled power, theoretically millions of times more powerful than gasoline. But science pays little attention to human consequences of such astounding changes. Indeed, it is not in position to control the consequences of its own activities.
Science and change, these are the keynotes. On the one hand, science a beneficent god, releasing men from drudgery, producing new wealth and high achievements. On the other hand, science a shapeless and overwhelming force, an irresponsible agent bringing cumulative and accelerating change in our community and national life; destroying countless little ways of living, and introducing uncertainty into all social activities.
In America, scientific progress has in recent years changed industrial units from a few employees known intimately by the boss to vast armies of employees unknown by any but the foreman. In the process, impersonal hostility is too often substituted for personal acquaintance. By the invention of the cotton gin, science made cotton king in the South, and now, by rayon, it is in process of destroying both the king and his kingdom. Science changed agriculture from a way of life to an uncertain business and tangled it in the maze of international trade.
It induced the immigration of many races. It has done little to assimilate them into the community or to establish social conditions leading to happiness. It built great cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit, where millions make a living but have no settled way of life, and where loneliness and discontent afflict multitudes. It weakened or destroyed the neighborhood, with its sense of responsibility, of partnership, and its habits of working together. Science brought on the paradox of unemployment, for while new products and new processes mean new jobs for many, for too many others they mean the destruction both of jobs and of hard-won skills.
Science has weakened or destroyed the religious faith of millions. For the toughness that comes from constant struggle it has substituted the illusion of ease, and ease too often means softness. Material ease is no substitute for God. Small wonder that, along with material progress, these changes involve widespread discontent and isolation and the collapse of spiritual values.
Our capacity to produce new and potentially destructive instruments of power has clearly outrun our demonstrated capacity to control and direct them for constructive community ends. This is not surprising. We forget the limitations on human capacity; that the emotions and the sentiments which enable men to live together in communities do not change in any such moment of time as one hundred and fifty years. I do not know that human nature ever changes. These new forces have their impact on a race still dominated by fear of the unknown, as were the children in Grimm’s Fairy Tales; by deep-seated instincts, loves and hates, hunger and thirst. In the political field, applications of science have brought on an explosive international situation. Unless the opportunities offered by science are handled with more skill and wisdom, the widespread changes resulting from applications of science to industry threaten an explosive human situation. This threat is not the result, it is nearer to the cause, of the war in Europe. The growing instability of American society disturbed thoughtful observers long before the crisis abroad.
The real problem is whether intelligent administrative effort based on understanding of the structure of society and the nature of human beings can re-create stability before it is too late. In our pride of material progress, we have paid too little attention to the human side of the balance sheet of progress. Again, as in the third chapter of Genesis, mankind eats of the tree of knowledge. Shall we again be sent forth from the garden of opportunity to till the ground from which we sprung? Or shall we, by wise use of the enormous powers placed in our hands, free mankind from great consuming fears which have obsessed it since the dawn of consciousness?
Obviously, such questions call for greatly increased understanding of human and social problems. This requires research. The type of research needed involves field work in direct contact with men as they live and move. Libraries and laboratories, important as they are, are not enough. Such research is expensive and requires large resources not now in the possession of universities. Its results are not easily measured in dollars, as with technological research, and business rarely undertakes or supports it.
Science could do more than it does by directing its research in fields already well recognized. Intellectual freedom should not connote irresponsibility. Science has directed its work most effectively in medicine, with amazing results. Now, more individuals and university scientists should consciously turn their thought to scientific work which will tend to lessen the impact of social change.
Perhaps the biggest business job ahead of this country, other than national defense, is the restoration of the business of agriculture to a decent and proper relationship to the national life. The current necessity for major industrial effort in national defense will almost inevitably lessen the agricultural problem temporarily, both by drawing labor from the farms and by efforts to meet temporary European needs arising out of this year’s crop failure abroad. Famine in Europe may well absorb all our surplus food temporarily, but we shall surely in the near future lose once more our export markets for wheat, and for corn-fattened pork products. We are no longer the principal source of cheap food of the world. Cotton also is more and more displaced by cheaper foreign sources of supply, and simultaneously the demand for cotton is radically affected by rayon and other synthetic fibres.
To restore equilibrium in the United States, agriculture must be more closely related to other industry, and this cannot be done without active aid from science. Industry should coöperate with science in the search for sun-grown raw materials. Now the emphasis in the search for industrial raw materials is largely concentrated on oil and coal and other earthy materials as sources both of energy and of new synthetic products. More attention to the biological possibilities of the land as sources of raw materials would pay large social dividends. Industry alone cannot solve these problems. A widespread effort should be made by scientists to find alternative uses for land now used in peacetimes to produce food in quantities exceeding the effective demand. We need new crops adapted to the needs of industry, new industrial uses for crops already grown, domestic supplies of foods and other agricultural raw materials now imported. For the long run, such solutions of our agricultural problems are far more hopeful than rearguard actions like killing little pigs, ploughing up crops, or gifts of government money, and more permanent than famine in Europe. The reëstablishment of our farmers on a self-respecting basis may depend on such research. Much can be done if industry and science work together.
Business still has a critical lack of understanding of the lives lived by workmen in the great industrial organizations of the country. How many business administrators are aware that every well-established factory and room in a factory has a complex social organization with its tacitly recognized leaders never appearing in any organization chart? How many realize that these social groupings are easily disturbed by physical changes, and require time for reëstablishment after every important change? Yet the imposing results of research at the Western Electric Company over the last fifteen years leave no doubt of the importance of such facts. Production in a well-organized group, each member of which is doing independent piecework, can be seriously disrupted by such a simple thing as a change in the seating arrangement in a room. Technology is constantly changing conditions surrounding work. Can there be any doubt of the importance of having these informal social groups happy and contented instead of unhappy and discontented? Again the Western Electric Company studies point the way toward methods of finding and removing causes of discontent and emphasize the need for thoughtful, understanding care in introducing changes. Here is an important example of collaboration between a great industry and a group of university scientists trained in this new field of research in social groups.
Technological progress may depend on more attention to such facts. Now the engineering department, the chief executive, and the plant manager work out and agree upon a new technological gadget. Too often it is installed with almost no attempt to consider its impact on the individuals affected by it, and with no understanding of its disrupting effect on the social organization which dominates the morale of the plant. We need more young men well equipped scientifically to study normal men as they go about the business of living, and we need the resources to train them. There is no more important and no more neglected subject for study than the behavior of normal human beings as social animals.
II
But research alone is not enough. We need action. As we apply science in our daily life, someone decides what to do, and then acts. Whatever is done is determined by men and carried out by men. No matter what is done, the results affect the life and happiness of many human beings. The men who do these things are the administrators, — men who determine policies and act, — realizing if they do their jobs that they must act through human beings, and that their decisions affect large groups; realizing that they themselves are human and fallible. It is not enough that they bring into their decisions the immediate situation with all known facts pertinent to it. More often than not, they must act on insufficient premises because they cannot know everything. They must always guard against the unknown. Generally the most important things they should take into account are the direct and indirect consequences of science and the community changes they force. All these things have their impact on human emotions. Science has neglected the effect of material progress on human emotions. If the opportunities offered by science are to be fitted into our human complex of emotions, instincts, desires, and reason, we need both scientific emphasis on this neglected subject and men of action to apply the results of research.
The primary responsibility for action inevitably rests on administrators, both public and private. The scientist is ill equipped and science is ill organized to be of service here. When the scientist approaches such problems, he suffers from his habitual methods of thinking, methods inadequate and misleading in the study of human behavior. He is accustomed to material things which always behave in the same ways under the same conditions. Emotional conditions cannot be fixed. Moreover, age limitations generally prevent his acquiring a useful mastery of another specialty. Shall the social scientist attempt to make himself a physicist or an astronomer?
Administrative action need not, however, halt completely for research to do its part. Surely we need not wait for research to know that fear and loneliness and insecurity are close to the heart of the human problem. Much can be done now by administrators to relieve this situation. Much more can be done if public and private administrators learn to work closely together. This is no time for experiments not related to immediate problems. The questions do not involve distant Utopias. We must stabilize our community now. We should follow the Bellman’s injunction for hunting the Snark, to ‘do all that you know’; but the rest of his advice, ‘ try all that you don’t,’ looks toward increased social instability rather than toward relieving fear. It is a time for sober thought and responsible action.
We already know much about labor relations, although not nearly enough. Unfortunately we are hampered in translating into action well-understood facts about labor. The human race tends to fight for the maintenance or restoration of what it has had. Collective bargaining in some form is here to stay, yet many business men hesitate to act on this knowledge. Business must learn to adjust itself to the new condition and to work out values leading to better and more continuous production before it is too late. The defense emergency may well give an opportunity for this. There are no heavier responsibilities and I believe few greater rewards open to business than are offered by the sympathetic studies now going on in many industries to find ways of making collective bargaining work.
Government administrators must assume heavy responsibilities for economic, social, and military national defense, none of which can be initiated by anyone else. All require speedy decisions and wise, farsighted action. The problem is the aggressive defense of this nation as this nation is related to the world situation. Social reform must be deferred to defense, or our old gains may well be lost. Moreover, if the long struggle of the English-speaking world to limit the scope and even the efficiency of government, to substitute government by law for government by man, is not to be lost for centuries, the scope of political action must be clearly defined.
Direct government competition with private initiative stultifies and stunts industry. It produces unemployment and adds to fear. Detailed control of human and business practices is unnecessary and unwise, except for national defense. Such controls build great bureaucracies and upset established routines. Great bureaucracies ultimately require dictators, for in the last analysis someone must have power to break through the coils of red tape and meet new situations. Yet the defense program will require centralized responsibility. It is essential to the restoration of freedom to the people that those exercising this authority realize its temporary nature and be prepared to limit their own power as rapidly as possible.
Labor leaders have social responsibilities which cannot be discharged today merely by tactical skirmishes to secure temporary advantage for one group at the expense of others. Far more can be gained by coöperation than by strife. This country is the country of labor as well as of other groups, and all groups share the responsibility for its future. Nor will these responsibilities be discharged by blind opposition to technological progress, which alone gives a basis for higher standards of living. Labor will do well to recognize that revolt against technological progress is a sure way to close the economy and to open the door to dictators. Our longtime stability requires in the future, as our material progress has required in the past, the continuous search for new ways of getting more results per hour of human labor. We need to fit material progress into the social situation, not to destroy it. For the immediate future, labor will do well to survey Germany and France and realize that labor progress can easily be lost by too great insistence on short hours and leisure. The world situation has suffered beyond all comprehension by emphasis on the fortyhour week and one shift. A nation taught to work can surely outdo in combat a nation attuned to ease. Business administrators, on the other hand, should realize that labor has a case against relative overemphasis on technological progress, against bad timing and hasty action, too often involving human insecurity and human unhappiness — a case that reflects a situation so unbalanced as to call for immediate and concerted action. Herein lies one of the dilemmas of material progress.
The heaviest responsibility and the greatest social opportunity of all rest, I conceive, on business administrators. They have an obligation to support and apply the results of scientific work in the alleviation or cure of the unemployment problem, and in a new and constructive attack on our distressed agriculture. They have a heavy burden in national defense. They must invent new jobs and methods to establish our youth and reëstablish our unemployed on a self-respecting basis in spite of the lapse in training skilled labor for the last dozen years. They must collaborate in training men to catch up on all critical labor shortages. These things involve willingness to take risks, but the risks are trivial compared with the risks of unemployment in our cities, pauperism on our farms, and above all, the risk of failure in our defense program.
Business administrators must realize that it is no longer enough to finance, produce, and sell material products. They must as never before study their employees and the conditions they face both individually and in their ways of life. They must in every possible way build up a sense of security and relieve fear, and they must do this without, paternalism. I note with sincere appreciation their strides in this direction in the last ten years. Human relations are always close to the core of administrative problems. The task is to give the workman a better basis for joy on the job and in his community — for loyalty to his employer and to his nation.
We need to study methods of communicating with labor and of making them feel a share of the responsibility for results and the thrill of accomplishment. I have seen and experienced the effect of nagging conflict with a recently established union, the inefficiency and loss resulting from continued efforts to turn back the leaves of history and restore the old conditions, although everyone knew such restoration was impossible. I have seen and experienced the growth of mutual confidence and of mutual responsibility when management changed its policy and used the new union mechanisms as a means of communication and understanding. Unionized business must make this transition, and when it is done the workman may get a better basis for joy on his job. High wages are not enough.
III
There remain vital questions of coordination and balance between business and government. We hear much of the need for coöperation between government and business, but the need will not be met until business recognizes that government is only doing its job when it sets appropriate minimum controls. The problems are new. It is not strange that government, pressed by widespread discontent and the obligation to give a greater sense of security, sometimes sets rules which make it difficult for business to do its essential part. Here is a dilemma which requires close and sympathetic coöperation. The time is past when business can expect to dominate government. For this reason the responsibility for coöperation lies most heavily on business. But government adds immensely to the difficulties facing the nation if it does not meet real business coöperation halfway. The defense program will fail if government considers cooperation a one-way street.
Universities have a major part in carrying out the necessary research in human problems affecting our social stability. They too must work in cooperation both with business and with government. Partly for historic reasons, but mainly for lack of funds in this new field, the relative overemphasis on scientific as compared with social research goes through our universities as well as through our industry.
Let us examine this question of emphasis in research and pose the question whether research directed toward new products and processes is enough.
In 1939, American industry spent an estimated 215 million dollars for technological research in pure and applied science, and a much greater sum studying and creating customer demand for new and improved products resulting from scientific research. Universities and technical schools added their effective efforts. The purpose of these expenditures was to change individual habits and customs on a mass scale — to stimulate and accelerate changes affecting not only consumers but producers as well. Not counting advertising expenses, industry spent perhaps 300 million dollars in translating technological research into action.
In contrast, I believe that our universities and industries combined spent less than a million dollars in first-hand research to find how the rapid material and social changes resulting from the advance of science and technology affect the stability of a democracy and the happiness of individuals and groups composing it. They spent almost nothing studying the human biology of normal men as they live and move. This estimate of a million dollars does not include expenditures on labor relations at the level of controversy.
Yet in 1939, and for ten years preceding, the major problems of industry were not technological. They were and will continue to be concerned with human relations, government relations, public opinion, and widespread discontent; with the breakdown of capacity to coöperate; with the maladjustments of human beings to changes which affect seriously the lives of most of our city folk and all of our farmers. To these we must now add the urgent problems of national defense.
Over half a billion dollars to accelerate change, less than a million in studying the effects of change on human beings! How long, in face of the new totalitarian challenge, can modern industry, modern democracy, and even science itself stand this relative scale of expenditures?
If, in spite of the new horizons opened by science, our economy is closed and our democracy thereby destroyed, it will be because our business, labor, and political administrators — yes, and our educators — fail for lack of foresight and courage to solve these problems in time. They cannot be solved without adequate research, and this can flourish only in an atmosphere of freedom. It flourishes best in well-supported universities, but in this new area no university is well financed. We may win the struggle for stability through effective military defense against aggressors—and lose it through internal stresses and strains resulting from our failure to rebuild and strengthen our own national ideals, to find a new basis for effective social collaboration, and thereby to restore a sense of purpose and solidarity to the nation. These problems are human problems.
The trouble is that in a democracy everybody’s business is nobody’s business. Here, in the study of man as he goes about the business of living, are both a responsibility for business and an opportunity for philanthropists — for those who, as the dictionary says, have the desire and readiness to do good to all men. I know of no area in which their intelligent support is more urgently needed.
An Austrian, most of whose life has been unhappy, lonely, and isolated, who perhaps never had normal contacts with his fellow human beings, now threatens western civilization with destruction. Right here in America, countless men are unhappy, lonely, and isolated. But we must not forget that this Austrian has supplied an ideal, a driving force, and a basis for social collaboration to his nation. The fact that we do not like what he does and thinks, that we believe his ideals are idols, should not blind us to the importance of ideals, driving force, and collaboration. We need a fresh stock of ideals in this country. Our need for immediate national defense may help us to redefine and appreciate the values in our national life; may lead a nation which has been operating part time for a dozen years to feel again the satisfaction of stretching itself to capacity; and may give an opportunity for rebuilding the spirit of collaboration so essential to an effective democracy. National defense can restore to millions at least temporarily a sense of social value in their jobs. If free and orderly civilization is not to disappear in face of constantly accelerating change, a greater sense of responsibility, a better and more permanent basis for human collaboration, must be discovered and put into effect. A discontented democracy cannot survive.
In 1898, Sir William Crookes startled the world by stating that science must fix nitrogen from air within a comparatively short time or mankind would starve. By 1914 this problem had been solved, but its first influence was in timing and prolonging the first World War. The final verdict of history may be that science saved the world from starvation but destroyed western civilization. The only chance to avert this lies in responsible, sensitive, and cooperative public and private administration, reënforced by an immediate intellectual attack on human and social problems comparable in effectiveness with the present attack on scientific problems.
Our stability is but balance, and wisdom lies In masterful administration of the unforeseen.