Secretly, like an earthquake underground hardly noticed, a revolution is going on which will eventually change completely the way the world is organized. The world, at least the Western world, as we have known it for a long time has been based on two unchallenged assumptions. The first is that economic progress is by far the most important measure of any country’s well-being. And the second assumption, closely allied to the first, is that ‘employment,’ meaning employment in work, is by far the most important measure of any man’s success in life. Because these assumptions have been automatically, unthinkingly, installed as Holy Writ in all societies, the conclusion has been drawn as a matter of course that lack of economic progress and rising ‘unemployment’ are twin evils representing ultimate disaster in a nation.
These assumptions are going to disappear. The cult of economic progress has simply ended up breeding selfishness, greed and crass materialism in nation after nation. And the Puritanical insistence that gainful employment is the be-all and end-all of a man’s life has degraded man to the status of an anxious automaton.
Quality of life is going to replace economic progress as the measure of how well a nation is doing. No longer will nations be mesmerized by the one or two percentage points on or off GNP which seem to count for everything. Future generation will shake their heads in disbelief that humanity was so obsessed for so long by such crude, demeaning aspirations more applicable to fattening pigs than to aspiring mankind.
The other assumption which will one day be scrapped is that employment in work is the alpha and omega of a man’s life. It is not so. In any case, this realization, whether we like it or not, is already being forced on us. Around the world today unemployment is growing inexorably. And commentators are now beginning to say that no amount of economic recovery is going to reduce this unemployment to previous levels. The micro-chip revolution, allied to the burgeoning industrial science of robotics, is going to create an entirely new world order in which eventually there will be far less ‘work,’ in the sense that it is currently defined, than there is now.
The prospect is that men will be liberated from the workplace. Yet this liberation is still considered a fate to be deplored and confronted. A stigma attaches to unemployment. This will seem strange to our descendants who will consider those we now call unemployed as playing just as valuable a part in the community as their fellows who are in work. Indeed, it will almost certainly come to pass that nations will measure their progress and success by the steadily decreasing numbers needed to do the nation’s drudgery. Already, employment in the sense of what was known as the three 48s (48 hours work a week for 48 weeks a year for 48 years) has in many countries been consigned to the grim scrap-heap of economic history.
A time is approaching when enormously greater wealth will be produced with the expenditure of substantially fewer man-hours of work. In such a situation it will, of course, be essential to re-define what it is most important for a man to do with his life. Some will still work if that is what they have the talent and inclination to do. But the time is coming when most men and women will be engaged in activities other than work as we know it. Already in the more developed countries the physical drudgery in field and factory that men most commonly called work now makes up a smaller and smaller part of the nation’s activity. The co-called service and information industries now represent in these societies a much larger percentage of activity than the old-fashioned ‘work’ that used to dominate the economic indices. This trend will continue and will soon extend until what we now call leisure activities are much more importantly enumerated in judging a nation’s standing in the world.
When that happens the stage will be set for an entirely transformed and much more creative judgement of how well a nation is doing – a judgement that enters in the sum of progress not only how much its people work but also how they play and how they think and how they write and paint and make music and how they behave towards each other and towards other men. When that day comes exhibitions of paintings and sculpture by Philip Moore will be worth a rice crop and what help a more developed country gives a less developed and vulnerable one will be measured in the indices as much more important than a chain of luxury-glutted supermarkets or a fleet of battleships putting out to sea.
