Such sentences as these, I am well aware, have become commonplaces, and such wisdom as they contain has so become almost impotent.This drawing of the fangs of truth by reducing it to truisms is one of the most serious obstacles to intellectual and moral progress.From the time of Wordsworth to the present day our wisest teachers have demanded that industry and property shall be put in their right places as servants, not masters, of men, and that our conquest over nature shall be attended by a liberation of all sorts and conditions of men from the tyranny of matter.In no adequate degree has this liberation been achieved.The iron of industrialism has entered so deeply into our souls that we are loth to use our liberty.Why is this so?
Man is a spiritual as well as a material being.His ascent in civilisation implies an increasing satisfaction of his spiritual needs.In this higher life economic processes and market values play a diminishing part.How comes it, then, that the vast economies of modern industry have done so little to release us from the bondage of the economic system? Why have industry and property retained so dominant a grasp upon our thoughts and feelings, continually checking our aspirations to the higher life, continually encroaching on the time and energy which by rights would seem to belong to that life?
§5.The true answer to these questions is not difficult to find.
We have sketched a growing order, harmony and unity, of industrial life, concerned with the regular supply of economic needs for mankind.Were such an order effectively achieved, in accordance with the rational and equitable application of our human law of distribution, the economy of industrial processes would be accompanied by a corresponding economy of thought and emotion among the human beings engaged in this common cooperation.This social economy demands, as we have seen, the substitution of social welfare for private profit as the directing motive throughout industry.But it does not imply a completely socialistic system in which each productive process is under the direct and exclusive control of Society.For that assertion of absolute unity would contain a denial of the manifoldness of desire and purpose involved in the very concept cooperation.Scope must remain, in the interests of society itself, for the legitimate play of individuality.The well-ordered society will utilise the energies of egoism in fruitful fields of individual activity.The human ego will always seek a directly personal self-expression in the free exercise of artistic instincts and other creative or adventurous activities that yield the glory of achievement.
These primarily self-regarding impulses are made socially profitable by allowing them free expression in these fields.The attempt to regulate and direct these impulses and their productive activities would be disastrous.
This play of unfettered personality in the fine arts, in literature, in the unsettled and experimental section of each profession and each trade, must be conserved, not as an inherent right of individuals but as a sound social economy.For the distinction between these free creative activities and the ordinary run of routine work in the trade and professions is fundamental.
It is not that the former, the free unorganised activities, are not as truly social as the latter in their ultimate significance and worth.But their social value is best secured by leaving them to the stimuli of personal interests.The creative activities, including all work which pleasure, interest, surprise or personal pride, cause to be desired upon its own account, need no social compulsion to evoke them.Their product is the free gift which the individual makes to the commonwealth out of the riches of his active personality.As their cost to him is more than compensated by the pleasures of creation, he will contribute them freely to the service of mankind.But even if a coarser streak of selfishness causes the creative artist, poet, inventor, discoverer, to claim some large share of the marketable value of his product for himself, it will better serve society to pay him his price, than to attempt to 'organise' creation on a public basis.Such sufficient material rewards of genius or high talent, if they are really necessary to evoke the creative activity, must rightly be considered 'costs'
rather than 'surplus.' There will remain a margin of such unfettered private enterprise, not only in the fine arts and the learned professions, where the creative mind seems most in evidence, but at the growing point of every living industry.For the distinction between creation and imitation or routine, as we have seen, cannot be applied in a wholesale way to entire trades and occupations.Budding and experimental industries, involving large application of inventive and constructive energy, appealing to new and uncertain tastes, carrying heavy risks of capital and reputation, are better left to individual enterprise.The same industries, settled on established lines, with smaller risks and smaller opportunities of useful change, will properly pass under direct social control.It is hardly conceivable that the development of the motor-car and the aeroplane could have been so rapid, if these industries had been at the outset claimed as State monopolies and official experts had alone been set to operate them.The injurious retardation of electric lighting and transport in this country by the legal shackles imposed upon them has been a striking testimony to the social harm done by premature application of social control to an industry in its early experimental stage.
