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HG Wells
"Sublimation of Interest"
Not only is the average man today an older and graver creature than his ancestor of three centuries ago, but he is very differently employed. There has been a great diversion in his interest from the primary necessities of life.
Three centuries ago, well over ninety per cent of the human population was absorbed either in the direct production of necessities or the scramble to get them from their original producers. Direct producers, the peasants and toilers, the entrepreneurs and their managers and directors, and direct distributors accounted for upward of eighty percent of the human total; the rest were the millions of interveners, usurers, claim-makers, landowners, rentiers, solicitors, speculators, parasites, robbers and thieves who were deemed necessary to ginger up the economic process. The forces of law, order and education, excluding temporary conscription and levies for military ends, took up five or six percent of the residue, and a small minority, something under five per cent of the total population, supplied all the artistic effort, the scientific inquiry, the social and political thought, the living soul of the entire social body.
The systems of interest of most people were therefore restricted almost entirely to work and the struggle to possess. They had to think continually of the work they did either for their own profit or for the personal profit, comfort or fantasy of some employer. They had to think of keeping their jobs or of getting fresh ones, and this, in the days of narrowing employment after the Hoover Slump, became at last a monstrous obsession of the brain. What they earned they had to spend carefully or guard carefully, for the rascaldom of business was everywhere seeking to give nothing for something. Sometimes, sick of their narrow lives, they would gamble in the desperate hope of a convulsive enlargement, and for most of them gambling meant disappointment and self- reproach. Add to these worries a little love, a good deal of hate, and the desperate struggle to see it all in a hopeful and honourable light, a desperate hunger to be flattered and reassured, and you of have the content of ninety-nine per cent of the human brains that made the world of 1930. They could no more escape from this restricted circle of urgently clamorous interests, hardly ampler than the circle of an animal's interests, than the animals can.
The modern state has broken this cramping circle of interests for every human being. We are still creatures with brains like our forefathers, corresponding ganglia to ganglia and fibre to fibre, but we are not using those brains for the same purpose. The modern state, by ensuring plenty and controlling the increase of population, has taken all the interests of the food-hunt and the food-scramble, and all the interests of the struggle to down-and-out our human competitors, away from the activities of the individual brain. A relatively small number of specialised workers keep the necessary controls of these primary preoccupations going. We worry about food, drink, clothing, health and personal freedom no more. The work we must do it is not burthensome in amount, and it is the most congenial our educational guardians can find for us and helped us to find. When it is done we are sure of the result; nobody is left in the world to cheat us or rob us of our pay. We are still competitive, more so perhaps than ever; jealousy still wars with generosity in us; the story of our personal affectations is rarely a simple story; but the interest we feel in our work is a masterful interest and not a driven interest, and the competition is for distinction, appreciation and self- approval and not for mutual injury. There has been a release of by far the moiety of the mental energy of the normal man from its former inescapable preoccupations.
This steady obliteration of primary motives is manifested most illuminatingly by the statistics of what used to be "crime and punishment", figures of the offences, insubordinations and deliberate outages upon social order and the consequent punishment and corrective proceedings that are issued by the disciplinary organisation of behaviour control. Statistics for the years of decadence are not forthcoming, but there is plenty for material from the comparatively orderly and prosperous period between 1890 and 1930. Great Britain then constituted the healthiest and most law-abiding community in the world, but the figures that emerge to the student of history present what seems to be an appalling welter of crime. Stealing, cheating of every sort, forgery, burglary, robbery with violence, poisoning and other forms of murder, occurred daily. It did not seem as though that thick defilement of wrongdoing about property could ever cease. Innumerable suicides occurred through pecuniary worry. Yet now all these crimes which filled the jails, arising out of the scramble for money and property in an age of insufficiency, are almost completely vanished from human life. The Behaviour Control Report for 2104 (2105 is not yet available) record 715 cases of stealing for the whole world. In nearly every case, the objects stolen was some personal work of art, some small jewel, a piece of embroidery, a pet animal, several children, and - in one instance - the bulb of a new variety of lily that aroused the instinct to possess and care for. It is doubtful whether there were many undetected or unreported thefts.
They has not, however been anything like this in abolition of personal offences. They have diminished. But while the property offences have diminished to the scale of one ten-millionth of the old world figures, these others show a reduction in the nature of single instances to former hundreds. Many types in our population are still very easily turn towards sexual lawlessness. Beautiful and attractive people and, particularly, attractive children are not yet perfectly immune from undesired solicitation, personal persecution, annoying assault and resentful injury. Jealousy is still a dangerous passion, more particularly below the age of forty. The Behaviour Control ascribes nearly 520,000 offences to this group of urgencies, mostly assaults of varying degree of malignity, culminating in 67 murders. They were also 2192 suicides in the total. These figures show only a slight improvement upon the annual average for the previous decade.
Another difficult class of offence, which finds no exact parallel in the criminal statistics of former times, unless the British offence of "malignant mischief" is to be put in this group, are acts of annoyance, destruction, assault and so forth, due to competitive jealousy and the exasperation aroused, often quite unwittingly, by the bearing or achievements of one's fellow creatures. This sort of misbehaviour varies in degree from the black hatred and fury of an uncontrolled egotism to what verges in some cases upon justifiable criticism of slightly fatuous self-complacent behaviour. Four murders, some hundreds of assaults and acts of wanton destruction in this category witness to the fact that the world is still not a paradise for every type of individual. Either they are bitter by some inner necessity or they have been embittered. Yet when we take the grand total of every misdeed that had to be dealt with last year, counting even the most petty occasions for restoration, warning or reproof, and find it is just three quarters of a million in a world of 2,500 million people, we have a quantitative measure of human progress in three centuries that justifies a very stalwart confidence in the human outlook. The imagination of man's heart is no longer evil continually. It is only evil occasionally, and the practical task of our social psychologists is to reduce those occasions and provocations.
The abundant release of brain-stuff, the mental plenty which has resulted from the organisation of material plenty, is of necessity being directed into the into new channels. That meagre half per cent or less of creative workers in the old regime, the few curious men who played about with novel ideas, the odd men of leisure who collected rarities and inventions, has grown into a mighty body of inquiry, experiment, verification and record which is becoming now the larger part of the world's population.
We know now with certainly what the people of three centuries ago never suspected, that the human brain released from hunger, fear and the other primary stresses is very easily amenable not the only to creative and directive desire but also to kindly and helpful impulses. Almost all the people who keep our productive, our distributing and transport services going are there because they find the work entertaining, because they like making the machine work well and helping people. There is satisfaction in being able to do things skilfully for others that they could not do nearly so well for themselves. The barbers, shoe-makers, tailors, dress-makers, hatters, outfitters and so forth in the great stores today are very different people from the rather obsequious, deferential "inferiors" who made our great-great-grandfathers presentable to the world. Their essential interest is to make their customers sightly and comfortable, but not to turn a profit for an employer. The old literature wreaks with contempt for barbers and tailors and cobblers, often the contempt of profound resentment. If the common man despised the cobbler, the cobbler pinched his toe and chafed his heel. The barber, it seemed, did no more than cut hair rather badly, and the tailor cut clothes. Except by accident, the barber had ceased to be a barber-surgeon. But nowadays the old-world barber will scarcely recognise himself in the barber-dentist, the kindly expert who sees to our coiffure, gives attention to our teeth, scrutinises our mouth, hair and skin to detect any evidence of failing health, and sends us on our way refreshed, encouraged and warmed. Often his friend the tailor or dress-maker will call while he deals with us to consider our general bravery and improvement, and suggest variations of our exercise and habits.
The old distributing trades have lost their sharp demarcation from the advisory professions. They are in touch with the guardians of development who have replaced the schoolmasters, nurses, governesses, tutors and so forth of the old time, and with the general advisors who have taken on the task of family solicitor, religious minister, private confessor and general practitioner of the past. These advisory and directive professions probably number two or three times as big a proportion of the whole population as the lawyers, educationalists and doctors of the 19th century. They merge again into another stratum, the specialist teachers, concerned with developing and passing skills and building up and maintaining the common ideology. This class again passes by insensible degrees in to the worlds of technical work, art, literature and scientific research.
The primary producers and elaborators of material, or agriculturalists, engineers, chemists, transport men and industrial directors, also do their work because they like doing it. It satisfies them. They like their materials, they like their difficulties, they like the order of their days. In spite of an increasing output per head of population and the increasing variety and elaboration of the things we use, socially or individually, the numerical proportion of this section of the human population does not increase. Efficiency still outruns need and desire. The two and a half years of compulsory public service, which is an integral part of our education, supplies a larger and larger proportion of such toil as is still unavoidable.
The release of human energy from primary needs is a process that seems likely to continue indefinitely. And all the forces that have made our worldwide social life and keep it going direct the released energy towards the achievement of fresh knowledge and the accumulation and rendering of fresh experience. There is a continual sublimation of interest. Man becomes more curious, more excited, more daring, skilful, and pleasantly occupied every year. The more we learn of the possibilities of our world and the possibilities of ourselves, the richer, we learn, is our inheritance. This planet, which seemed so stern a mother to mankind, is discovered to be it inexhaustible in its bounty. And the greatest discovery man has made it has been the discovery of himself. Lionardo da Vinci, with his immense breadth of vision, his creative fervour, his curiosity, his power of intensive work, was the precursor of the ordinary man, as the world is now producing.
From The Shape of Things to Come, 1933.