The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
The good and evil of work put upon us some of the most perplexing of
our problems. Industry, we say, is the way to the rich and the
abundant life. It makes life more complex. The relations of life are
multiplied by it. It represents and it achieves man's conquest over
nature. It puts force into his hands. It has its ideal side and its
romance. It gives scope to pure motives of creativeness. But the
industrial life has also its dark side. It has created the city with
all its good and its evil. It has created great nations, but see what
the added populations consist of. It brings on the old age of nations.
It stands for struggle that is often fruitless and unproductive. It
engenders moods and arouses interests and powers that lead to wars
and revolutions. It fosters sordid interests, and has made almost
universal the necessity of an excess of toil in order barely to live.
The great majority of workers do not live in their work, because they
produce nothing that is in itself satisfying. The spirit remains
outside their daily life. Life is divided into a period of toil
without deep interest and motive, and play which may be only a
narcotic to kill the sense of monotony and fatigue. Individuals have
specialized at the expense of a whole life. Men have been exploited
and used like material things. Bergson says that by industry man has
increased his physical capacities, but now it is likely that his soul
will become mechanized rather than that his soul will become great
like his new body. Industry, worst of all, has become an end in
itself, rather than a means to higher ends. To live, on the one hand,
to gain wealth on the other, men give all there is in them to toil.
We saw all this before the war, but one important result of the war
has been that we now see that this industrial life which has so
rapidly created new institutions, and which grips the world almost
like a physical law, is not in all its ways so fixed and inevitable as
we had perhaps thought. In regard to the industrial life, more than in
any other department of life, we see new and radical thought, and the
possibility of conscious effects, although it must be admitted that
some of the proposed changes may well cause apprehension.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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