26 The aim of commerce has always been to market every pleasure possible and to sell it to as many as possible. The producer and the retailer are neutral, they claim no morality; they simply satisfy the public desire. But what we are being increasingly offered by commerce is not the pleasure, but a reproduction of it. Not the skylark singing in the hayfields, but a skylark in a record player; not a Renoir but a printed ‘replica’; not the play in the theatre, but a ‘television version’ of it; not the real soup, but an ‘instant’ powder; not the Bermudas, but a documentary film of them.
27 It is the technical problems, not a lack of potential consumer demand, that stop us from having cans of tropical sunset, tubes of warm Pacific breezes, and packets of ‘easy-mix’ sexual pleasure. We are able to reproduce almost anything audible or visible; already someone has invented a jukebox for smells; and only Aldous Huxley’s ‘feelies’ still seem completely out of our reach.*
28 The reasons for this demand that secondhand or imitation experience should be made as available as possible are obvious. Life has never seemed so short, but rich; and death so absolute. And if social and economic circumstances put many direct pleasures out of reach of the majority then they will naturally and reasonably take what substitute for the real thing they can get.
29 This monetization of pleasure is a makeshift means to get us through a period of history when the majority will not be able to have direct access to the things they want. As more and more realize what full being means and that their societies made it impossible for them to give this full being reality, the marketing of reproduction and imitation sources of pleasure – substitutes for the real sources of pleasure – becomes more and more important.
30 We talk of consumer goods and consumer services* but these are in fact placebos society has increasingly to offer its members as they become aware that then-real wants are largely caused by corrigible inadequacies of the social, political, international or human situation. In this field, all controllers of the dispensers of the placebos, that is, the governors, are in the same predicament, however far apart they may seem politically.
THE AUTOMATION VACUUM
31 Now a terrifying, because violently aggravating, new factor has appeared in this situation. It is cybernetics, the already advanced technique of controlling machines by other machines.
32 Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of the capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of the cybernetic society will be employment.
33 There have been absurd suggestions: that the disemployed masses must be forced to take part in compulsory games; that we shall have to undertake vast tasks, like the digging of canals and the moving of mountains, by primitive hand means; that the great majority must be sterilized. These proposals are ridiculous; but the potential quantity and intensity of frustration in a cybernetic society is terrifying.
34 There is surely only one acceptable solution. The energy poured into the old work routine must be poured into new ‘routines’ of education, both learning and teaching, and enjoyment. Working for money, in order to be able to spend and enjoy, must become working for knowledge and the power to enjoy through knowledge.
35 Evolution is about to go over on to a new tack. A reorientation of purpose; a reacclimatization of man. The disappearance of the work routine will also mean the disappearance of the counterpole of much of the pleasure we feel. Most of us will, in capitalist or laissez-faire economic terms, be superseded and obsolete machines, requiring a fuel that no longer exists; like regular soldiers in a sudden and permanent peace.
36 The only persons who have been able to support endless free time without damaging society have until now been the polymath, the scholar, the scientist and the artist; the person of multiple culture. The only work that can never end is the pursuit and expression of knowledge.
37 The state of the future will not be the industrial state, and cannot be it, unless automation is retarded artificially. It must be the university state, and in the old sense of university: a state in which there are endless opportunities to acquire knowledge, where the educational system is the widest possible (of the type I propose in the ninth group of notes), where there are faculties, enjoyable to all, to learn and to create and to travel and to experience; where the element of hazard, of surprise, is incorporated into the social system; and where pleasure is not monetized.
38 Slave-owning societies of the past show the obvious dangers facing a leisured class. They have been either stagnantly sybaritic or aggressively military. Leisure that has no other aim than the perpetuation of leisure breeds decadence or war, since peace and leisure need frequent purges. Soon, in much less than another hundred years, it will be the machines that are the slaves, and slaves that cannot revolt; and all humanity will then be potentially the leisured class. But we are long past the age of clysters and bleeding.
39 Evolution seems always to seize on some such force as the obsession with money, because it is easier to organize life when there is such a force on hand. Such forces invariably land mankind in the Midas Situation – almost literally so, in this case. The lust to find cheaper methods of production, such as automation, finally destroys the lust itself. We chase the reward, we get the reward; and then we discover that the true reward is always the next reward. Automation may seem an end in itself, just as buying pleasure may; but these false ends in themselves simply take us to where we can see they are not.
THE DUTIES OF LEISURE
40 That leisure seems to have no duties is precisely what puritans object to in it; the puritan fallacy is that there is something intrinsically noble in work. This historically explicable need to enhance the value of work really undertaken only in order to get wages has created a climate in which too much external pleasure and enjoyment very quickly cloy. It is a mistake to think that a man who has been long conditioned to enjoy three weeks’ holiday a year is necessarily happier when he is suddenly given six. Whatever situation we are in we try to derive some relativity of recompense from it; and so in a condition without, for a stranger, any possibility of happiness a habitué will find some happiness. Indeed, he is almost certainly a habitué because he has found rewards in the condition. Our ability to enjoy is conditioned by the situation in which we have had to learn to enjoy.
41 The first duty of having leisure is thus to learn to enjoy it; and this seems to me enormously more difficult than the optimists would have us believe. No union has yet called its members out on strike for less wages and longer hours; but the day may come.
42 The second duty of having leisure is more like one of the old duties. It is to share one’s leisure, that is, to give some of it to those who still have insufficient leisure.
43 Poverty is the counterpole that drives us now; soon it will be ignorance. The hungry brain, not the hungry belly; lack of knowledge and experience, not lack of food. A society of leisure must to begin with be a minority society. The counterpole of ignorance will be easily found outside its frontiers. The chief function of the first leisure societies will be the education, improvement and enleisurement of the backward societies of the world. There cannot be any true leisure until all the world possesses it equally.
44 This is the great change that must take place in human history. The rich societies must give away not only their surplus money, but their surplus leisure and their surplus capacity to educate.
45 These things will never come to be without planning; above all planning and reorientating our systems of education. Shaw (in Major Barbara) saw the pointlessness of expecting any moral progress before economic advancement has been achieved. In some countries that economic advancement has now largely been achieved; yet there is no sign of any change in the educational systems. They are still geared to the necessities of the first stage – to Andrew Undershaft’s insistence on concrete economic achievement-not to his daughter Barbara’s vision of a proper human education.