Coketown has, in fact, only one question for the arts to answer: What are they good for? If the answer can be expressed in money, the art in question is taken to be almost as satisfactory as a device to save labor, to increase speed, or to multiply the output.
IX
There is one phenomenon still to be accounted for in the economy of Coketown; one monumental instrument without which the wheels of Coketown would become clogged and the very breath of Coketown be extinguished.
I refer to the rubbish heaps.
The aim of production in Coketown is naturally more production, and it is only by making things sufficiently shoddy to go to pieces quickly, or by changing the fashion sufficiently often, that the machinery of Coketown can for the most part be kept running. The rage and fury of Coketown’s production has to be balanced off by an equal rage and fury of consumption—continence would be fatal. As a result, nothing in Coketown is finished or permanent or settled: these qualities are another name for death. Coketown makes china to be broken, clothes to be worn out, and houses to be torn down; and if something remains over from an earlier age which made things more soundly, it is either incarcerated in a museum, and derided as the monument of a non-progressive age, or it is demolished as a nuisance. (So powerful is the idolum of Coketown that in the workaday world building after building continues to meet with irreparable ruin at the hands of barbarians from Coketown: why, I have even seen innocent little half-timbered fifteenth century cottages whose fronts were obliterated by a nineteenth century plasterer, in the name of progress.)
The status of every family in Coketown can be told by the size of its rubbish heap. In fact, to “make a pile” in the markets of Coketown is ultimately to make another pile—of dust and junk and litter—on the edge of the town where the factory district dribbles off into the open country. So in Coketown consumption is not merely a necessity: it is a social duty, a means of keeping “the wheels of civilization turning.” At times there appears to be a possibility that this utopia may defeat its purposes by producing goods at such a pace that the rubbish heaps will fall behind the demands of the market; and while this mars the theoretic perfection of the Coketown social organization, it is offset by periods of war, when the market is practically inexhaustible, and Coketown’s prosperity increases to a point at which the working classes are on the point of becoming the comfortable classes without having had sufficient previous training to make their contribution to the rubbish heap—a serious pass, amidst which confusion the working classes of Coketown might take to reducing their working days and enjoying their leisure without sufficient consumptive effort.
This, then, is the idolum of Coketown. There are certain features in it which need to be noticed. The first is that there is a certain solid reality in Coketown that remains when all its pretensions and idiocies have been incinerated. An environment that is devoted solely to the production of material goods is obviously no sort of environment for a good community, for life is more than a matter of finding what we shall eat and wherewithal we shall be clothed: it is an interaction with a whole world of landscapes, living creatures and ideas, in comparison with which Coketown is a mere blister on the earth’s surface. Nevertheless, with respect to the business of melting steel and building roads and performing certain essential industrial operations, the aims of Coketown are, up to a certain point, relevant: we have already encountered them in Andreae’s Christianopolis. There is no need to dismiss the good that lies inside of industrialism because it does not embrace the good that lies beyond it.
Up to a certain point, then, using mechanical power rather than human power is good; so is large-scale production, so is the division of labor and division of operation; so is rapid transportation; so is the accurate methodology of the engineer; and so are various other features in the modern industrial world. One might even say a word for efficiency, as against “doing things rather more or less.” Coketown made the horrid mistake of believing that all these things were good in themselves. New factories, for example, drew a bigger population into the city: Coketown did not perceive that, as Plato pointed out, beyond a certain point the city as a social unit would cease to exist. Bigger and better was Coketown’s motto; and it resolutely refused to see that there was no necessary connection between these adjectives. The whole case for and against Coketown rests upon our admission of the phrase “up to a certain point.” Up to a certain point, industrialism is good, especially in its modern, neotechnic, electrical phase: Coketown, on the other hand, believes that there is no limit to the usefulness of industrialism.
Up to a certain point—but what point? The answer is, up to the point at which the cultivation of a humane life in a community of humane people becomes difficult or impossible.
Men come together, says Aristotle, to live; they remain together
