THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE 



to become President of the Institution of Mining Engineers, and the 

 presidential address which he gave on that occasion was reprinted in 

 his book of essays, Materialism, eight years later. After some intro- 

 ductory paragraphs about the capital value of British coal-mines, in 

 which he showed a naive acceptance of the whole usurious system of 

 shareholders and owners, he proceeded to develop a peculiar argument. 

 Modern materialism, he felt, was at the bottom of the failure of the 

 capitalist system to work properly. Modern materialism involves the 

 tacit assumption that everything, including the economic system, 

 works mechanically, hence the industrial machine of a coal-mine is 

 conceived of as a "soulless" interplay of forces. The corollary is that 

 pitmen are not thought of as human beings but simply as "hands," 

 and are to be asked to work as long hours as possible for as small a 

 wage as they can be induced to accept. 



If this is "materialism," there is certainly nothing good to be said 

 for it. But has it anything to do with the philosophical debate ? Is it 

 not rather a question of ethics and morality incarnate in problems of 

 practical economics.'^ The question is whether the welfare of the 

 workers, or the accumulation of profits, is the primary consideration. 

 If profit-making is by far the most important consideration, as under 

 capitalism it must be, then all that has to be done is to hand the factory 

 over to the investigations of "efficiency engineers," who will plan for 

 maximum production irrespective of anything else. Care for the 

 workers will take the form of pushing "rationalisation" up to the very 

 maximum limits of what the "hands" will stand. Thus the conveyor 

 belt (satirised in Chaplin's famous film Modern Times) has in- 

 creased both drudgery and tension. Most jobs simple enough to be 

 done in series can be done entirely mechanically, but where labour is 

 cheap and conditions need not be considered, it is naturally not worth 

 while making the machines. Few people yet realise the marvels of 

 self-acting productive machinery which the linking of "receptor 

 engines" such as the selenium cell and the infra-red ray receiver,^ with 

 the "effector engines," could achieve. This was the moral of another 

 famous film (whether understood or not by the audiences which saw 

 it) — Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberie, which ends with the gramo- 

 phone factory turning out the gramophones almost entirely auto- 

 matically, while the factory staff sit on the banks of the adjacent canal 

 enjoying the fishing. Under this symbolism a profound truth was 



^ See R. Calder's article "Millions of Men with Teaspoons" in New Statesman, 1940, 

 p. 178. 



