Man Under the Machine

...Bell quotes Lenin's approval of "Tay-lorism...

...Bell quotes H. G. Wells's criticism of the Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, who were the real founders of the modern welfare stale but who also symbolized the passion for efficiency inherent in a technocratic culture...

...It might also have been valuable to find how much the unions supply the worker with a sense of human dignity and give him the sense of status and security which partially restores his humanity against the perils of the mastering machine...

...Was it the Puritan sanctification of secular pursuits...

...The last chapter, on the decline of religion and the effect of the dissipation of the hope of an afterlife, attributes some of the modern passion for work and some of the aberrations of irrational political utopianism to the "belief that death means total annihilation...

...At any rate, one reader at least would have welcomed an exploration of the roots of the cult of efficiency in our nation by so wise a student as Bell...

...The author evidently masters enough material for a full-scale study of the "cult of efficiency" in our nation, and every chapter raises significant issues which could have been enlarged on...

...Obviously even believers (even Catholic ones, I suspect) are not as preoccupied with the hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell as in the Middle Ages...

...Bell has given us, though he has not painted a pretty picture...

...Ultimately, socialism and capitalism are two aspects of the cult of efficiency in a technical civilization...

...Bell defines the cult of efficiency, and the most religious...

...Bell finds no comfort in the famed social mobility of our technical civilization...

...The author is not studiedly pessimistic and does not view with anxious alarm...

...The question arises whether we are not so given to efficiency because we are a nation of immigrants...

...He produces statistics to prove that the mobility is real if several generations are measured, but that within a single generation manual workers usually remain manual workers...

...That may also be the reason why religion, which traditionally prospered among men of the soil and withered in the sophisticated cities, has taken a new turn in America...

...But, on the other hand, believers and non-believers would probably express a belief-ful agnosticism and confess, in the words of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir: "I can understand man only as an immortal spirit, but I am not interested in any intellectual arguments about the validity of the hope of immortality...

...The point is that religious faith expresses man's conviction that his existence is meaningful rather than absurd...

...The price is man hitched to the machine, for the sake of efficiency...

...That is true even though much of the cur-rect religion is not impressive, because it obscures rather than grapples with the antinomies of life, particularly with the problem of meaning and the abyss of death and mean-inglessness...

...Their output was not increased, and thus democracy perished in this encounter...

...Furthermore, employment in the various entertainment industries, as well as the necessity of keeping machines running for 24 hours, makes for unnatural employment hours which imperil the home life of the worker...

...It is used more frequently in viewing spectacles of sport or the movies and in relaxing nervous tension...

...Rationalizing" industry Reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr means sacrificing the humanity of the worker for the sake of efficient industrial operation...

...The worker has become a pampered slave...

...emancipated from his traditional culture, may also be freed from all the restraints which a traditional culture places upon economic activity...

...Bell draws on all the efficiency studies, first inspired by Frederick W. Taylor, whose passion for efficiency prompted stop-watch studies of every industrial motion and transaction, and who was, in effect, the father of the cult of efficiency...

...Since we know that contemporary contracts are as rigorous in regulating assembly-line speeds as in fixing escalator clauses for the level of wages, I would have been grateful for a study of the effect of collective bargaining in mitigating the rigors of the speed-up...

...Increased automation does relieve the worker of onerous physical toil but demands the expenditure of nervous energy in managing and servicing the ever more intricate machines...

...Bell wisely rejects the thesis of Max Weber that the Puritan ethic prompted the diligence of the worker...

...He will express this conviction in the teeth of evidence to the contrary, including the evidence which the horrors of an efficient civilization multiply...

...Nor docs he find comfort in the increased "leisure" which the ever shorter work-day and work-week make possible, because this leisure is not spent ordinarily in creative enjoyment like the aristocratic leisure of the past...

...But, if this was the case, the decision was prompted by the criterion of efficiency and not by humanity...

...This conclusion is puzzling...

...Since he subtitles his essay "The Cult of Efficiency in America," one could wish for another enlargement of his theme...

...shift in the factories...

...One of his chapters proves that socialism could not, and did not, emancipate the man from the machine...

...One would like to know why Americans have given themselves with such abandon to the cult...

...An immigrant nation, we are also the only consistently bourgeois nation in the world...

...It is questionable whether the decline of religion prompts either believers or non-believers to the conclusion that "death means total annihilation...

...It withers in the countryside and prospers in the cities, where it offers havens of human dignity against the dehumanizations of an efficient civilization...

...Bell reports one study on the effect of letting an office group make their own decision in contrast to hierarchically-imposed decisions...

...At the time, Henry Ford's reputation for generosity was worldwide, but the inexpensive "tin lizzy," which laid the foundation of the Ford empire, was literally made possible by low labor costs, due to the speed of the assembly line...

...I was a resident of Detroit before the unionization of the industry...

...Bell reveals that the price of this abundance is not the misery of poverty, which was the initial price that European workers paid in the beginning of industrialism...

...The only trouble with this thoughtful essay is that it should have been expanded into a larger book...

...It has grown religious in reaction to its own secularism...

...That, perhaps, is the reason why the decline of religion is not as consistent as Mr...

...Bell devotes some attention to the complicated negotiations in which the Ford Motor Company engaged with the UAW in regard to the rate of speed on the assembly line, which prompts me to suggest one place in which the study might well have been extended...

...The immigrant...

...why they have far outstripped the first industrial nation, Britain, in the consistent application of techniques and left France so far behind in its rather moribund version of capitalism...

...But we should be grateful for what Mr...

...I may be mistaken, but I thought that some of the efficiency studies of the big industries had prompted the abolition of the mid-night-to-8 a.m...

...He thinks it may have motivated the zeal of the entrepreneurs, but thai hunger rather than the grasp after Godliness accounted for the zeal of the workers...

...America is a land of abundance and of "unlimited possibilities," as the Europeans say...

...Bell assumes, and why America is at once the most "secular" of nations, in the sense in which Mr...

...He merely sets down, in deadpan mien, the price which our nation pays for the efficiency which creates our famed abundance...