we have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a menace to civilization. first it was prussian militarism; then the germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening of the same; then, after a time, the treaty of versailles; then french militarism—with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor menaces as prohibition, lord northcliffe, mr. bryan, comstockery....
civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well. for still, in 1923, it stands not so very far from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years since. where, in relation to neanderthal on the one hand and athens on the other, where precisely it stood then is a question which each may answer according to his taste. the important fact is that these menaces to our civilization, such as it is—menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history—have confined themselves in most places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they bite.
49no, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. the most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.
of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.” “pleasure” (i place the word between inverted commas to show that i mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) “pleasure”—what nightmare visions the word evokes! like every man of sense and good feeling, i abominate work. but i would rather put in eight hours a day at a government office than be condemned to lead a life of “pleasure”; i would even, i believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.
the horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. there was a time 50when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. in the seventeenth century, for example, royal personages and their courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (dr. donne’s, for example) and academical disputes on points of theology or metaphysics. part of the entertainment offered to the prince palatine, on the occasion of his marriage with james 1.’s daughter, was a syllogistic argumentation, on i forget what philosophical theme, between the amiable lord keeper williams and a troop of minor cambridge logicians. imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince, if a loyal university were to offer him a similar entertainment!
royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent pleasures. in elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a madrigal or a motet. those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety of sixteenth-century music will realize what this means. to indulge in their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an uncommon degree. even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and personal 51initiative. they listened, for example, to othello, king lear, and hamlet—apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. they sang and made much music. and far away, in the remote country, the peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites—the dances of spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest home—appropriate to each successive season. their pleasures were intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves.
we have changed all that. in place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions—distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. to the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas bring the same stale balderdash. there have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. to-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from los angeles across the whole world. countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. no mental effort is demanded of 52them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.
do the democracies want music? in the old days they would have made it themselves. now, they merely turn on the gramophone. or if they are a little more up-to-date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right wave-length and listen-in to the fruity contralto at marconi house, singing “the gleaner’s slumber song.”
and if they want literature, there is the press. nominally, it is true, the press exists to impart information. but its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought. this function, it must be admitted, it fulfils with an extraordinary success. it is possible to go on for years and years, reading two papers every working day and one on sundays without ever once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move the eyes, not very attentively, down the printed column.
certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in which individual participation is demanded. great numbers of the middle and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and, if they are sufficiently 53rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go ski-ing in the alps. but the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and dangers of the actual game. all classes, it is true, still dance; but dance, all the world over, the same steps to the same tunes. the dance has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality.
these effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the germans were. the working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. and now, in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.
self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility. with a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to 54entertain itself and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom. it will go, perhaps, the way the romans went: the romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing now, the capacity to distract themselves; the romans who, like us, lived on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. their deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope-walking elephants, more rare and far-fetched animals to be slaughtered. ours would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists, doesn’t get all it asks for. the most violent forms of entertainment can only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty you must become a member of the ku klux klan. let us not despair, however; we may still live to see blood flowing across the stage of the hippodrome. the force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet prove too much for the idealists.
