The dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers-wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.
Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly, up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and apalling thing that is technically known as pleasure, 'Pleasure' (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name)-pleasure- what nightmare visions the word evokes! Like every man of sense and good feeling. I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of pleasure. I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.
The horrors of modern 'pleasure' arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In the seventeenth century for example royal personages and their courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr. Donne's for example) and academical disputes on the points of theology or metaphysics.
Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety of 16th century music will realize what this means. To indulge in their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a certain intelligent individuality and personal initiative. They listened for example to Othello, King Lear and Hamlet-apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites-the dances of spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest home-appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves.
We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organisation that provide us with ready-made distractions-distractions which demand from pleasure- seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas bring the same stale balderdash. They have always been fourthrate writers and dramatists; but their works in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. Today the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angles across the whole world. Countless audience soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation, they need only sit and keep their eyes open.
Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a little more up to date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right wavelength and listen into the fruity contralto at Marconi House, singing, 'The Gleaner's Slumber song.' And if they want literature, there is the press. Nominally it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought. This function, must be admitted, it fulfils with an extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years reading two papers every working day and one on Sunday without ever once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move the eyes, not very attentively down the printed column.
Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in which individual participation is demanded. Great number of the middle and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and if they are sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go skiing in the Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport vicariously, prefering the watching of football to the fatigues and dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance; but dance all the world over the same steps to the same tunes. The dance has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality.
These effortless pleasures, these ready made distractions that are the same for everyone over the face of the whole Western world are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The working hours of the day are already for the great majority of human beings occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no initiative are required. And now in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.
Self poisoned in this fashion, civilisation looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature serility. With a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready-made distraction offered from without that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom. It will go perhaps the way the Romans went, the Romans who came at last to lose precisely as we are doing now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who like it, lived on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope walking elephants, more rare and far fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists, doesn't get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair, however, the force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet prove too much for the idealists.
(I.A.S., 1964)
