Manifesto for the Atomic Age/Part 1

Every industrial system, every organization of production, distribution, and consumption, anywhere at any time, is simply a pattern of human behavior framed by general forces and conditions which delimit it and distinguish it from others that have been or might be imagined.

The forces and conditions which compose this frame of the industrial picture are of several kinds. They are partly biological, having to do with the qualities and characteristics of the human material involved in the industrial process, its growth, vitality, health, adaptability, capacity to survive; and they are partly cultural and institutional, having to do with men's ideas, hopes, habits, manners, customs, and morals, their technical arts of production, distribution, and finance, and the character of the State or the political institutions by which they are governed.

​Up to about two hundred years ago, with a few local variations, the picture of the productive organization framed by those factors seemed essentially changeless for centuries. It was set in a rigid frame of force and fatalistic necessity, characterized by slow growth of population, rooted in an agrarian and handcraft economy, dependent upon human and animal muscle power, and ruled by the elaborate structure of political and religious ideas and institutions of unlimited government embodied in the divine right of kings, princes and priests, feudal serfdom, slavery or status, state ownership of property and labor, absolute monarchy, and military imperialism. Men worked, lived, and died within that kind of frame during most of the human record until the close of the Eighteenth Century, and except for the few whose sense of individual initiative and responsibility found expression in art, religious contemplation, military prowess, or pursuit of personal political power, perhaps the only salvation or escape from it which the mass of mankind could ​find was in some hereafter their priests and prophets promised them.

That iron frame was shattered, for the first time in history, by the immense release of human and molecular energies which came with the application of steam power to the productive process in what is called the Industrial Revolution. It not only removed to a remote distance the checks upon population of which Malthus warned, but also freed industry and labor from bondage to the land, the slave market and the guilds. It was the power machine that broke the power and overwhelmed the superstition of unlimited government, which never had the wit or imagination to harness the inventor or scientist to its chariot, or chain them to its throne, and did not have the foresight then or the strength thereafter to make the steam engine a monopoly of its own. So, for a hundred and fifty years, men and their minds escaped into the world, and spread over it, enjoying for a while a freedom and prosperity, vitality and creative power they had never known, and mul​tiplying in Western Europe and America to three times the number they had attained in all recorded history up to that time. With it came an expanding instinct and opportunity for individual adventure, responsibility, and risk, which expressed itself in a vast increase in production, acquisition and distribution of wealth, through exploration, invention, and enterprise.

Few who have not looked at it in the perspective of the past realize how fully and firmly the picture of life and work in the Western World up to the first World War was set in this frame shaped by the rapid growth of population, the use of power machines, the world-wide exchange of raw materials for manufactures, private individual and group ownership of property, voluntary private investment in fixed plant, free enterprise and voluntary employment, and limited government under constitutional guarantees and parliamentary control of the public purse. Fewer still are aware how widely and steadily that frame was dissolved in nearly every country during the generation ​since the first World War, and hardly anyone can yet see clearly what has taken its place. Every element that formed the frame of life and work in the century and a half before 1914 has changed so fundamentally and swiftly during the past generation that, despite the speed and scope of information and education, men's minds have not as yet been able to absorb the significance of the transformation, still less to adjust their lives to it. So we live in a time of confusion and deep-seated anxiety without parallel in our experience, as the almost psychopathic emphasis on the idea of security and the frantic search for mechanisms and formulas to attain it attests. I shall try only to sketch a few of the more obvious changes in the frame of reference which have taken place, and suggest some of their possible implications for the problems of the relationships between management, labor, and ownership in American industry. In these changes I distinguish several factors or forces which seem to be shaping the frame of the future, and for convenience they can be di​vided into three classes—the technological, biological, and idealogical—though they are constantly interacting and cannot be clearly separated.