Flexing the muscles

John Milton, the supreme seventeenth century Puritan poet, wrote his great baroque cathedral of a poem Paradise Lost on the Fall of Man and the inverted heroics of the Devil so that:

“I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.”

He had also witnessed, though blind, the fall of that Cromwellian Commonwealth of which he had been Foreign Secretary. However at Cambridge someone else was working on a similar theme of explaining the workings of God’s mind. As the Catholic poet Alexander Pope was to say of him in his Epitaph:

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.

Pope was also to write his Essay on Man to refute the Deism that resulted from the misinterpretations of Newtonian mechanics beginning;

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind in Man.

After Newton enlightened rationalists saw God as the great clockmaker and prime mover. Not for nothing did the American Constitution contain the checks and balances of clock manufacture. The French Revolution had already taken place in the head of Louis XV1, whose hobby was clock and lock making, and whose mechanical bent led him to improve Dr Guillotine’s new humane killer with a diagonal blade rather than the half moon of that original replacement to the painfully slow death penalty of breaking on the wheel; the which Louis XV used to discreetly spy on from behind the curtains of the refinement of Versailles.

However already before the French Revolution the Industrial Revolution had found its motive force in Scotland where James Watt was perfecting the steam engine. Suddenly one machine could do the work of hundreds, even thousands, of men and women. Rather than a rational Voltairean deism, where the Anglican Archbishop Tolland could write a tome called Christianity Not Mysterious, now there was a titanic Frankenstein’s Monster. Atheism was the new religion of these Rousseauean beings in chains yet without original sin. The great machine – mechanistic thinking – had become the new god. Society could, indeed had to be, engineered to fit the new imperatives of the factory state. Marx saw man fuelled to function in much the same way as an engine. Darwin divined no hand of God in his mechanistic view of evolution.

At the same time the francophone aristocratic neo-classical internationalism of the eighteenth century gave way to the nationalism and liberalism of the nineteenth century. The State became a bourgeois possession. For the English the Risorgimento was not revolution but the Italian repossessing their own. L’Etat c’est nous. Frederick the Great of Prussia in the eighteenth century had not let “barbarous” German to be taught in his francophone universities but by the turn of the century the Grimm Brothers were researching in folk tales the origins of this barbarous Teutonic tongue while Alfieri goes to Florence to learn Italian and Foscolo leaves Greek speaking Zante for the same purpose. Liberalism is the move for representative government of these new “possesssions”.

Soon however the factory system is creating the mass society: mass political parties with mass universal suffrage and mass trades unions, mass entertainment such as cinema, mass travel with the railway, mass advertising, mass food with tins and refrigerated ships, mass production in factories itself fuelling the shells and guns for mass warfare in first the American Civil War where “men equal munitions” and then the First World War. The Strike and the lock-out were the main and only weapons of industrial power broking and were as sophisticated and self-defeating as the frontal attacks of the trench warfare of the First World War.

In the twentieth century it was the “Corporals” – Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin (and arguably Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood) – who mobilised a mass society, from which they had sprung, into varieties of People’s Republics. The eventual victory of liberalism showed the resilience of capitalism. Britain however won by becoming a more state centralised war economy than Germany. State planning was used to win the peace. Mrs Thatcher understood that the Labour voting skilled workers aspired to be property and share owners and “stole” them. As they became middle class in an increasingly self employed service sector, Tony Blair gave them a new home in New Labour.

The workers now rule having become middle class. However it is not just the service sector creating a Western Europe where 60%+ of the population define themselves as middle class. Above all just as the steam engine created the Industrial Revolution and a society to match it, so the computer led Information Revolution has created a new society not driven by the dialectic of the steam compression chamber but the chaos of endless permutations of 1s and 0s.

Forty years ago and less the working class was a majority working in large units. Now it is a minority and striking is not the best weapon for a minority nor is it one for a once necessary bureaucracy already made redundant by Information Technology. Incidentally in a world with the chaos of more information than knowledge and which has witnessed the mess man has made of the planet, there is a widespread loss of faith in the “priests in white coats” who no longer seem able to find solutions for the problems they have engendered. The “how?” and “how much?” concerns of consumerism have led to record levels of depression as man struggles with the spiritual imperatives of “why?”

Britain has the lowest level of unemployment in the Western world and Blair and Brown his Chancellor, the son of a Calvinist manse, believe that work, not benefits, are good for you. However work now means flexibility as to when, where and in what economic sector. London is set to grow by 750,000 by 2016 with 600,000 new jobs. This is because anyone can get off the train or plane and get a job – but it may mean working evenings or week-ends – it may not be secure, but then whole industries are disappearing as new ones replace them. If despite recruiting teachers world-wide there are still not enough in London because of the cost of living and competition from other jobs, then pay will have to rise. Industrial action in Britain in teaching and the railways is over the end of national pay levels and the introduction of market and cost of living led differential pay. Housing in the North of England costs less than half of that in the South East.

All government services will be on-line by 2005. This has already happened in my Region and this means that half the staff are being re-trained to join the productive private sector this year. Customers/voters access the Council’s services via the Internet at home or at the local public library. Telephone enquiries are answered by staff with lap-top access to all County Council Services and so one call can solve all enquiries. However the council officer you contact may be working from home or from the nearest office to their home, which is both family friendly and cuts down on the pollution and congestion caused by commuting. Yet since customers/voters expect a service, public or private, to be available when it is convenient for them this flexible public service worker is expected to provide the flexibility of a service with shifts up to 8pm at night and at week-ends. Both the customer and the working mother council worker can benefit from the flexibility provided by the Information Revolution in this way. Indeed only 17% of British workers now work a “standard week”.

When Blair calls for flexibility in European Labour markets he is saying that we cannot ignore technology – steam or digital – but we must maintain the human values, but these cannot survive without productive work. “The essence of New Labour,” said Blair on 12 March, “is to strip away all outdated dogma and doctrine, the “hallowed positions” and return to those first principles, to those values. The same values as those of the great Liberal reformers of the 19th cnetury and early 20th century as well as those of the Labour heroes of 1945: the belief in social justice, opportunity for all, liberty, the belief that an individual does best in a strong community and the society of others.”

The current prosperity of Italy in a Republic founded on work is due to the fact that the kinds of work Italians have engaged in since 1948 has radically changed. However Man and God and their relationship on the other hand – and its digits – remain immutable.

*TEMPI © Column, March 18. 2002