After Industrial Society?

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning … one of the games to which it is most attached is called … ‘Cheat the Prophet’. [The prophets] took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened and that it shows the signs of the times…. The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. (G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill ²)

In the advanced societies of the world, with their market economies, open societies and democratic politics, a dominant theme appears to be spent, the theme of progress in a certain, one-dimensional sense. The new theme … is no longer expansion but what I shall call improvement, qualitative rather than quantitative development. (Dahrendorf, The New Liberty, p. 14)

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be … threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence…. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the job of work and the bliss of leisure. From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one which enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave. (Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, pp. 46–7)

… if an industrial society is defined by the quantity of goods as marking a standard of living, the post-industrial society is marked by the quality of life as measured by the services and amenities — health, education, recreation and the arts — which are now deemed desirable and possible for everyone. The word ‘services’ disguises different things and in the transformation of industrial to post-industrial society there are several different stages. First … a necessary expansion of transportation and public utilities as auxiliary service in the movement of goods. … Second, in the mass consumption of goods and the growth of population, there is an increase of distribution, finance, real estate and insurance, the traditional centres of white collar employment. Third, as national incomes rise as in the theorem of Christian Engel … the proportion of money devoted to food at home begins to drop, and marginal increments are used first for durables and then for luxury items, recreation and the like. Thus a third sector, that of personal services, begins to grow; restaurants, hotels, auto-services, travel, entertainments, sports, as people’s horizons expand and new wants and tastes develop … two areas that are fundamental to [the good life] — health and education. (Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, pp. 127–8)