Transcript

{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

(Philosophy 9, November 18th, 1953.)

Today gentlemen, allow me to compare the modern industry with two other states of our economic history. This will be a kind of digression back into the past. But I think we have here with mass production, and the worker, and the management, and the engineers the heart of the matter. That's after all the way we all live, and the way everybody in this country thinks we should live, and we must live, and we ought to live.

And therefore I think it is quite pertinent for you to see that in two other periods, which I now want to trace, there has been something similar to the relation of engineer and worker. And the sooner you will learn that this is nothing absolutely new, the sooner by -- by -- finding the category inside of which engineer, and worker, and management move, you will begin to master the subject and to see what can be changed in such a situation, and what is ineluctable, inexorable, what has to stay. I do find myself today in this position in front of you that you take many parts of this process not for granted only, but for the only way in which work can be done. So much so that you also think that college professors and students should consider their work by counting, for example, the number of words which they write in an essay. That is a typical mass-production idea. And it is impossible for a poet to say that when he writes 40,000 words he has done more than when he writes 200 words. One poem of 200 words may obviously be much more important than a po- -- a -- a novel or a short story of 40,000 words. But when we once are infected by the idea of mass production and put -- it -- output, then you actually think the asinine writer who is able to work 8 hours a day on his -- on his typewriter and turning out 40,000 words per week, that he must be the more -- bigger shot man than the poet who has -- whom it takes perhaps half a year to write 200 words -- but they are poetry, whereas of course this other writer doesn't write poetry. He's just working. And perspiration is not inspiration, as you know.

But this is the -- the law, you see, of your -- our society here today, that for this reason there are only 200 people in the United States at this moment who can make a living by being writers. All the others have to kneel down, and to crouch, and to be college profe- -- are college professors, or newspapermen, or in some dependent position, because this country will not acknowledge greatness. And of course in -- a man is a real poet, he will only write 200 lines, like Robert Frost, you see. And so this man, if he hadn't had England to fall back on, and some other resources, he couldn't have made a living in this country. And this country is very cruel to the man who is not either an engineer or a worker,

because you have no appreciation of those things which are very small in the end, you see, because you have the courage and the faith to say small is better than big, or short is better than long. You are paid by the line. Is this -- is this a payment for some spiritual output? Can you pay -- pay the prophet Isaiah or the prophet Jeremiah per line? Yet you pay every int- -- every writer by the line. That is metabasis eis allo genos. Who was good enough to give me this clue? We had a conference just -- you did. Thank you. Because I -- you remember what we said about metabasis eis allo genos, this transgression into a field that must be treated differently?

Let us look at the engineer now, and at the worker. Because what I tried to do in your imagination, gentlemen, in your fancy is to draw you away from your dogma, which says that -- that factories have the problem of management. And I tell you that management comes an -- comes in at the end, because there is this tension between inventor -- the engineer, who changes the raw material, changes the form, changes the conv- -- commodity, and the labor force, and the management man is grossly overrated. Everybody can be a manager. He doesn't -- hasn't to understand anything, except to arbitrate between the pressure of the changing technology, you see, and the routines of the workers. As long as you believe in management as it is done today, you see the other metabasis eis allo genos, of which I talked to you, that leadership in this country is studied as though it was management. And they build then these shit-places there for observation in the -- in the Air Force, to get generals, because they think a general is a manager.

So you see, you are surrounded by -- you are really blind, because you do not know that management and -- a -- work, and an engineer are something of a very special kind. I do not turn against this. I know engineers and I know workers. And I have friends -- been great friends with them all my life. But they are in a very special situation.

And now let's look this up once more. THe worker, gentlemen, and the engineer, or the inventor -- to take it most radically, the man in the laboratory -- the research library -- how are they distinguishable, gentlemen? What is permissible to the engineer is not permissible to the worker; and what is permissible to the worker is not permissible to the engineer. The engineer is there usually on a long-time job, even a lifetime. Look at Rensselaer or any one of these polytechnical schools, where the man in the laboratory, the -- of applied physics, for example, has a f- -- lifetime appointment, you see. But he mustn't do the same thing ever. He must all the time change what he does, because he's there to experiment, you see.

Therefore you have on the side of the -- the engineer, or the inventor, or

the research man, tenure -- tenure as a person for his income; and change of what he's doing. With the worker, it's just the opposite. He does the same thing and he has no security for more than a day. I talked to you about this factory of 400 workers in Keene, where notice was given at 2 o'clock in the afternoon to leave off at 4, and not to come back. To 400 people.

So there you have the typical labor situation. They do the same thing. They have done it there fore 20 years. And one day, they realize they had no security of tenure. The research man does his duty only as long as he is secure in his tenure, can afford, because his brain is still working, to do something different every day. You have there the -- you see the op- -- the extremes of research and work? And once you begin to focus attention, I assure you, on this, our dependency, gentlemen, on science, on technology, on research, on change in the choice of raw material, of energy, of oil, coal, as -- as we -- all these questions, you see, atomic energy now, you begin to feel much relieved because you understand industry. As long as you look at capital, and stock exchange, and management, and psycho-technics and psychology, you will grossly overrate, for example, time studies. Never expect that time studies can save a -- a factory from failing. As long as we are hip to think that we can take it out on the worker, we'll think one-half a second of -- shortening his -- his manipulation will do it. Well, it's much more important to find a way in knowing what in the next three years will be the -- the cheapest fuel. Obviously that's much more por- -- important, you see, whether you have to heat this -- your ovens with peat moss, or with coal, or with oil, or -- the -- or with steam, on this your -- your whole future depends.

But people have found the easy way out. All the burden has been put on the workers, and they have made these time studies which are most debatable, I think, and certainly most hatable, because they bring all the pressure to bear on the repetitive job. And mo- -- many of you will have to use them, as things are. We haven't yet shifted the emphasis sufficiently in our thinking from the management front to the research front, where really all the great problems of change bring pressure on management and on labor. And I always try -- hold that management and labor can very well get together facing the engineer, facing the inventor problem, facing the research problem. That is to both of them a common front.

But the main point has been, you see, if you -- if you think of the length of the job which you -- by -- during which you hold the job as A, and the output as B, then it is obviously that with the worker, the situation of tenure is held down to a minimum -- how would you express minimum? Infinitely small. Well, we shall here put it this way, you see.

(Finite.)

Wie?

(Finite?)

No, let's say infinitely small.

(infinitesimal.)

If we put it with the engineer, it's infinitely long, because he's lifetime there. And supposedly if he's -- if he keeps alert, he could go on forever. If he would not die, he would keep his job for the rest of his life -- and however. What? Made a mistake? What was the { }.

("If he would not die, he would keep his job for the rest of his life.")

So {No?}, and that would be -- the -- the typical output. Let us make this "type." The type of work would be infinitely short. And the year would be quite the opposite. The type of work which is expected for him would be infinitely long, or let's say inf- -- infinitely identical, infini- -- -itely the same. Sameness is overwhelming in the worker, and tenure is overwhelming in the -- with the engineer.

So this would be -- the type of work with the research man is infinitesimal -- small, and the type -- typical work with the worker is infinitesimal long. That's probably as we have -- would have to write it.

Gentlemen, there have been two great periods which have not been lived through in this country. And that's why I felt I owed you these two other chapters, because they encroach on our thinking through the poets, and through literature, and the Bible very much. One is the period in which the peasantry was born. And the other is the period in which the handicraft -- the guilds and crafts of the Middle Ages prevail. As you know, all over Europe, and Asia, and Africa, there is a population which is called Bauern, agriculturists, peasants. In this country, however, the word "peasants" has a connotation of backwardness. The peon.

But take the Mexican peasant, before he had any reason to compare his lot with an American worker, and -- ask yourself why, under Spanish rule, for quite a while the peon was perfectly satisfied. Go to Spain, go to Italy, for example, where you have the { }, where the peasant lives in great peace with his { }, with his landlord. They share the crop half and half at the -- when the

wine is ripe, the whole family of the landlord moves out and controls, and checks with the -- peasant how much they have made. They taste the wine, and there is a great celebration. And they are of one heart and one soul.

So peasantry, gentlemen, although completely obsolete today, must be understood as the victory over clannishness. The peasant in Europe, gentlemen, is the first professional man, the first man who was not expected to go to war. A peasant is a man who is not expected to become a soldier. There were professional knights and soldiers. And there were, on the other hand, the peasant. The peasant was dismissed from his clan. The contra- -- the contrast, gentlemen, to a peasant was the tribe -- tribal warrior, as you have. You can see therefore that a red Indian never became a peasant, because he had to be on the alert, and had into the wa- -- on the warpath all the time, whenever the tribe so decided.

So the first professional group of purely peacetime work in the history of our era, is the peasant. You would, by the way, find the same problem in China, where you still have today two different types of people. You have -- in the union of the hundred tribes of China, you have the peasant. They just determine at this moment the fate of the -- of the Chinese Revolution, the people in the rice fields. They had not -- never been expected to become soldiers.

But you have still interspersed in China frontier districts with purely clannish, purely tribal organization, where the people, for example, are allowed to marry for love, whereas in a peasant society, they are meant to -- marry the daugh- -- the neighbor's wife, because the acres have to be, you see, pooled, and have to be adjacent. As long as you have a pure peasant society, you cannot marry for love. You have to marry for acreage. And even George Washington married in this manner. It is nothing so very bad. Martha Washington after all was married because she had the adjacent land. And that's why the Lee mansion is in Arlington. The -- that was her place, as you know.

So gen- -- this is very crude, of course, the way I put it. And I can't go into this matter. But the peasant is a whole way of life. And it is in opposition to the clansman. The clansman is a nomad. The peasant has settled. He has to till, just very much like a worker, the same piece of land year in, year out. And that's given to him. And he cannot budge. He has no other livelihood. One man of the family at least has to stay put there, if he wants to capitalize on his -- on his possessions at all. If he can leave the -- as the people did here, in this country. Well, it goes to waste and you see, second growth. And the land -- no longer is cultivated. But what you find in Europe is the great miracle that for 3,000 years, the same strip of land has been kept under cultivation, and we have no way of telling whether this will ever be true of these United States. It doesn't look like it. The -- at this moment, asyou know, we have again the second dust bowl

developing. And the people the -- are -- here of course have squeezed out the land, and li- -- treat it like parchment, and thrown it away. And gone to California to live in their old age.

So we have not yet solved this problem by a long shot, that -- whether the soil given to man will be held in this country through 3,000 years. It doesn't look like it. I don't think you will be able to inculcate into your children or grandchildren any of this respect for the soil.

Gentlemen, once we have the -- the -- the contrast of the peasant to the clansman, we have his specialization. We will ask, "Who headed this process? Who inspired these people to take up a piece of uncultivated land, have a clearing made, and settle there for the next 1500 years?" Which is a big order. There is -- still sitting there in Lithuania, in Poland. And you know many of these Finns and Poles are -- when they come over to this country -- just here to Vermont and New Hampshire, how thrifty they are, how shrewd they are, and how steady. They don't become bellboys, like the sons of doctors in this country. They are peasants again.

Gentlemen, the men who inspired these men to go into the woods, and to take on the battle at that time without rifle, without gun, without any firearms, with the -- a bear, and the lynx, and the eagle -- these were the hermits. The hermit in your fairy tale is still left to you just as a funny person. Here lives the hermit, and the raven comes, and he feeds the raven. Or the raven feeds him, usually. Or the bees come and the lion comes and lie down and lick his feet, you know. You may have seen a picture of Saint Jerome, with the lion.

These hermits, gentlemen, all over Europe opened up the savatic, wild country between the scar- -- very scarred settlements of man, the nom- -- the camps of the Indians. You can see it in Vermont. As long as the Indians roamed here between -- 1763, there was not one human settlement, you see. And what in 1763, correspondingly under Charlemagne or under -- { } the Merovingians happened in Europe in -- was that a hermit went into this no-man's land, and showed that it could be done. And he did it with great -- the same courage as today the physicist who investigates the reaction of atomic energy. It may explode, and it does explode. Or you may have seen Mr. Sidney Howard's play, Yellow Fever. Have you -- General Jack? Who has read this? You remember? The man is the -- the victim of his enterprise, of his research.

Now the same way the -- many of these hermits of course perished. But in the name of God, they wanted to show the land was the Lord's; the earth was the Lord's, and everything in it. And they wanted to sanctify the bush, the bush where the -- he -- where the dragon lived, you see, and the evil spirits. And in

order to convince these pagans, these Gentiles, these Germanic tribes, for instance -- but it happened everywhere -- Arabia, the same way -- the Christian missionaries, in the form of hermits first, invaded this no-man's land, and dared to live there.

And the word spread, and the sequence was, of course -- just as with the inventor and the engineer, that it went from hermit to monk -- to monks. And where the hermit had lived in the first generation -- and we have stories of Irish hermits, going from Ireland into these woods, living there, you see, that they -- that was an incentive for other Irish monks to -- people to come over and found Iona, as you know in Scotland, or St. Gallen in Switzerland, or any one of the most famous monasteries -- St. Columba, and St. Martin of Tours, well, hundreds and hundreds of such places, where monks lived in the wilderness then in organized work, and cultivation of this clearing in the midst of a march, a frontierland, a no-man's land, where so far the clans said, "We cannot live, because we need that much frontier."

So the step, gentlemen, from the -- from the clansman to -- to the peasant is not only that one is constantly on the alert, a mobile soldier, a warrior, and the peasant having disarmed, lying down -- laying down his -- his -- his dagger, and his sword, and his spear and taking to the plow, but it is also that the new economy of, let us say from 400, roughly speaking, to 1100 -- for you -- they -- you call this the Dark Ages -- was a very bright time in which two-thirds of the land of Europe was for the first time freed from its mortgage as being fortification, as being land for military purposes, from -- which -- because between every two settlements, the red Indians here and the Germanic tribes in the inland of -- interior of Europe, supported and maintained these vast stretches of impenetrable bush, so that they might feel secure against invasion -- against -- how do you call it? Ambu- -- if you are overtaken by the enemy suddenly?

(Ambush.)

Oh, no. If they -- well, "invasion," but there is another term from -- slaughter -- when a whole village is suddenly taken by surprise.

(Siege? Siege?)

Ja, ja. Wie?

(Massacre.)

Yes, Blitzkrieg. Exactly. Blitzkrieg. Very good.

(What is it?)

Blitz. Blitz. Against the Blitz.

Gentlemen, every new technology changes the necessity for boundaries. Now the -- the new hermit economy enabled people to give up a vast land around every one single village, and to concentrate on larger marches, like Austria, which we -- eastern march of the Rom- -- of the older empire, of the -- France, you see, vast -- or the Mark Brandenburg -- vast stretches of land where Vermont, you see, served as the frontier between English and French settlements. And -- that's already concentrated fortification, you see. You have 10,000 square miles of land in which nobody is settled, so that it must -- is difficult for the enemy to bring forward the supply, you see. And you gain time, and you cannot be taken by surprise, because before he can move in, you see, you have ample time to make sure that he is coming.

Now gentlemen, the hermit then sets the example. He had all the genius, all the spirit, all the inventiveness of a man who goes into something new and showed that it can be done. And he lived by faith. The peasants that when -- then around the monasteries in -- by the thousands were allowed in, got their land. They got their manor, their -- their -- manse. That's always, as you know, the normal mans at that time was 60 acres, or 50 acres, or 30 acres. It was less than a Vermont farmer here had. But it was much more intensified. These 30 acres were actually tilled -- a till- -- a tillable share. And he had a share in the commons, and he had a share in the -- not then enclosed forest land which go -- went with the -- for the -- belonged to the whole community. So by and large, a peasant in the Middle Ages had not so much less compared to a Vermont farmer, who has his own woodlot, and comes up to 150 acres. But if you look into the matter, it's only 30 acres that actually are under cultivation. The 30 acres of a medieval peasant were really tilled, and planted, and -- very well -- intensified, and cultivated. We may ask ourselves, gentlemen: Who set the rhythm of this work? It was of course the knowing group, the priesthood, the monks, the abbot, the hermit, who allowed these peasants to settle around the sanctuary, in the wilderness.

This goes so -- well, I won't go into the details, because I would -- it's very interesting. But in 58, I get -- tell more of this story. At this moment, gentlemen, what I'm driving at is: I want to find the corollary, or the parallel to the situation -- worker and engineer. We have here this tension. And we said this man does everything differently from anybody else every day, but he'd say -- all his life; and the worker has to do the same thing, and he has no tenure.

Well, if you compare the hermit and the monks in a Benedictine monas-

tery -- and they were all Benedictines, the so-called Cistercians, and the so-called Trappists, these people who make the good cheese in Canada and the -- all these monks are all descendants of this one Benedictine order in the West. This hermit knew the order of the year. He declared, so to speak, the days at which harvest time and spring time was, so the whole ritual, the schedule of production was -- came from the -- from the priestly center, because these clansmen had never had time to stay in one place for more than seven months. Every Irish clansman -- we know this, still in the 8th and 9th century of our era, had to go out on a raid -- "raid" is the word I should have used, raid -- r-a-i-d, on a raid every springtime. In Roman history, too in antiquity, war was for these clansmen a part of their business by which they lived. They had to get booty. So it was much easier instead of raising your own cows, stealing some cows from the enemy.

And so the great event of the Middle Ages was that by and -- slowly, the monks told these peasants, there is no war in spring time. You have a three-year turnover, and as you know, the -- we owe to the monks all Europe has this rotation of crops. And that is the gist of the matter, that you have no cotton land in Europe, and you have no potato land, and you have no tobacco land, but you have rotation of crops. And that's why it has been possible to keep the same land cultivated for such a long time. Since you don't have this here, you -- you poke your nose on -- about peasantry, but you don't know what they've done. What they have enabled the people in Europe to do is, that the soil is as fertile there as it has ever been before; whereas here, everybody shrugs his shoulders and says, "What do you want? It has been fertile once, when the people first came, but now of course, they -- they have all sucked it dry."

Gentlemen, is there any excuse for doing that? You take it for granted that everything with regard to raw material is just exploited, and then thrown away. We can't do this anymore. It's over with this -- we either develop some way of a rotation of crops, as you know, in the various countries -- corn belt, cotton land, tobacco land, or we have to secede, we have to abandon these -- these pl- -- these places. This is a very practical matter today, and only today perhaps do you begin to see the -- the grandeur of an order of -- economic order which was able to instill in people a schedule. And the schedule came from the monks, and the hermits. Just as the resear-- the way of producing comes from the research laboratory. And the single worker has no idea why he only has to do this one manipulation, you see. The -- the -- the synthesis comes from the higher abo- -- higher ups.

In the same way, these peasants, as you know, have lived through the same holidays, and the same celebrations, and the same ritual through the ages, and have always therefore remained good Catholic people. The monks are responsible for the non-defection of the Catholic peasantry of Europe, when the

Reformation came, or when the free-thinkers of the French Revolution came, or now when the Bolsheviks come. The reason is because the peasantry owes their daily, and yearly, and family existence to the scepter of the Church. And that is the only backlog the pope in Rome still can point to when he says that there is still some Christianity left in Europe.

The peasantry has never rebelled against this economic order, as far as the peasantry -- the Church was able to bestow land on them, and to show them the way of holding this land from generation to generation. Where it wasn't able to do this, of course, where the people were thrown out of work, and had to go to the city, you see, or where war invaded the region or -- this wouldn't work. If you would now see who is now the -- the -- the enemy, that's the clan; that is the vendetta of the clan, and the whole peasant -- peasantry and the monks -- they have a common front against the clannishness. That is the older order to be overcome. Just as in our society, you go to a housewife and say, "Buy a freezer. So far you have natural ice now, and you had to buy it in a store. Now you can all have it yourself," we fight there the pre-ca- -- -industry order, when you go to a farmwife today, you try to persuade her not to specialize in her own -- in her own growth, but to talk her into buying everything from the market.

So gentlemen, our economy drives out, as you know, the handicraft. This economy drove out the vendetta, the non-professional, the -- all-around attitude of the villager. By the way, if you want to understand something about Russia, you must know that Russia still was -- had an -- an unspecialized so-called peasantry, and that's not what you call a farmer, is what a peasant in Russia was, but -- very much a man like the 7th-century Irishman in an Irish village, or in a Swiss village at that time.

However -- who -- the man who organized both -- his hermits, and monks, and the peasants -- usually was an abbot or a bishop. Or we call it with one word, the Church. Here. The Church in the Middle Ages -- the early Middle Ages, down to 1100, was the carrier of economic progress. The progress made was, instead of warriors exploiting the soil only year by year, you get the settlement of peasants having a rotation of club -- crops, and being held down to this faithful service of the soil, because it -- once you have a rotation of crops, you can see that you get engaged into a process out of which you cannot step out easily, you see. The sto- -- you have to have a storage economy, because every one fruit gained in one year, of course, has to cover the two other years, too.

That is then your -- our Cross of Reality in this economy of the Middle Ages. The -- you drive out the vendetta, more and more. That is, you attract more and more settlers around the monasteries. The frontier is no -- we couldn't call it the market, gentlemen, but it is the clan of whom more and more people

are -- to be persuaded to give up their clannishness and to settle as peasants, so that there is a constant transformation of tribesmen. We have thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands of documents which simply always say the same thing: "I, William Miller, and my sons, and grandsons are offering our land to the Church, and receive it back for three generations at least," you see, "from the church, willing to comply with the order of the agricultural life as prescribed by the Church." And in this kind of surrender of their property to the Church, the whole medieval territory became expanded in such a way that what had been the exception -- the bush, the hermits, wa- -- the forest, you see -- became the rule. That is, you can say that when the Crusades came in 1100, when the -- when the people came to -- Greenland here on their first visit, the church of -- in Europe had achieved very simply this one thing: the -- it was now normal to live by rotation of crops in fixed settlements, and it was quite abnormal to keep still armed to the teeth, and go out on raids every spring time, and to move on from one -- from one location to another. The migration had subsided.

That's why you learn in history that from 400 to 700 there was a migration of tribes. This is the last migration of tribes. For the previous 6,000 years, the Celts, the Germans, the Irish, the Galatians, the -- the -- the Persians, the Hindus, the Greeks, the Romans all had migrated all the time. But funny enough, in your history books, you read about the migration of tribes, because it is the last one. The last one -- ended in the settlement. It ended, because there was now the Church which took the things in hand and said, "Settle. Sedate, you see. Quiet down, calm down. No longer migration. We have room for you in the bush."

And suddenly there had been computations, gentlemen, on the same area on which before 70,000 people could live in 400, let us say, now 7 million could live. And that's a fact still in Canada. You may know that th Algonquin tribe there, 5,000 people in numbers cover 70,000 square miles at this moment. Have you heard of this? And if you would cultivate this land and get it under modern conditions, you could of course have the -- not 5,000 people, but 500,000 people living. That is the game when you disarm, when you can afford to let down your -- your fortification, you see. Your armor. This is still going on under your noses, gentlemen. But the most interesting facts -- you never seem to realize that the economic change means -- is only done because it allows more people to live in the same area.

So this is then the situation, gentlemen. The constant streaming-in of people into the -- into the rhythm of production as guilded by the Church, and as pioneered by these servants who very often were very much out of step with the aful- -- official church. You know, to be a hermit is -- was just as bad at that time as to be as Mr. Einstein is today. That is, you were a rebel, and you were irregular.

But gentlemen, one thing I want you to -- make -- to -- to u- -- to make use of: the relation of monk and peasant has remained, as I told you, unbroken today. That's why the peasants of Italy, and Spain, and Yugoslavia, are still Christians. Because you must understand what the hypnosis today is between the eng- -- inventor and the worker. That's never mentioned. But our civilization bel- -- rests on the belief of the housewife that she better -- goes into an efficient business and works in an 8-hour day factory than to stand at her kitchen stove. It's so attractive today. Science is simply magnetic, in its forms of technology. And when you see how many married wives today -- not just for money, but also so that she may have a regular piece of work, of high technological validity, when they leave their homes and go there, you can -- must think of the peasantry that went out of their clannishness, because our womenfolk, gentlemen, are the last remnants of the clan. They are the -- the -- the last remainders of a tribal, of a clannish system, of blood relations only.

And you see them leaving this -- many of your wives will tell you one day, "It's too tiresome at home. It's better to be an office clerk, or a secretary, or to do some good work in a high- -- well-paying factory, because then I'm a member of this technological family of today." The same attraction prevailed there in the economy of peasant and hermit. And as long as you do not understand it, you do not know that man loves his mirror image most. No worker loves management. And it's idiotic to -- to contemplate this. It would be terrible. These wouldn't be red-blooded people, if they had to love management. But they do worship -- not love, but worship -- the inventor, because they know that their whole civilization is built around the man who invents television. And the reason why they buy television I think is only half that they want to look at it. The other is: they want to be in on the newest invention. That is, by having television, they participate in the worship, not of the golden calf, but of the radio beam. That is, they are in on it.

Take all these youngsters who now want to walk through the stratosphere one day. I mean, they want to be in on that which is the wheel within wheels of the economy, and the production in which we move and on which -- which gives us our daily bread. Things are much different from what you think they are. It isn't the -- the looks, but it is this str- -- dynamic movement that runs through all your veins, that you want to be part and parcel of that which makes all these wheels go round.

And as far as this is the reason why you do it, I think it is a real, cosmic religion, which man has today. You must only begin to understand that this cosmic religion has existed always. And it expresses itself that you have a special kind of leader. The leader into the cosmos, into the unknown world in those days was the hermit. Today it is the inventor. And you have to make the two

people, you see, one in order to understand the human soul. That when a man has to do chores, he wants to worship the man who has enabled them to do just these chores, as compared to no chores.

And that's why the -- in this situation, you study your own present day, when you look into this, because you understand that the hermit setting the schedule the same days -- the rotation of crops -- and the peasant complying patiently over the years -- and what a hard life, I mean, you see -- going out for work undauntedly from -- from 4 o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at evening -- that they honored each other, entrusted each other, and that one worshiped the other in -- because he recognized his own situation as different now through these services the courage, the saftyness, the faith, the sacrifice of the hermit, and the following monks. Can you see where I'm going?

Gentlemen, there is a third group in which you can study the same tension. It's a very different group again. And that's the group from 1100 to 1600 until -- industry comes in, which has built our cities. The cities have not been built by monks. The cities have not been built by the Church. The cities have been built by the warlords, the knights of the Middle Ages, the lords, and their craftsmen. And -- I need a piece of chalk.

You know that all -- Europe, and even this country down to 1800 was organized in guilds and crafts. That is, you had to be a fellow, you see, and a master before you could practice a profession. And Heaven knows that if -- it is terrible now to have a blacksmith who isn't a master and isn't a fellow, but just ruins your horse. And so we -- we suffer today from this complete lack of craftsmanship. They are all semi-skilled, and more semi- than skilled.

What is the tension between the craftsmen, gentlemen, these craftsmen, and -- who compare here to our peasant, and to our worker, and who do the repetitive work, who do the same thing, more or less, day by day -- bricklaying, you see, building bridges, building roads, tailoring, shoeing horses? The identical thing. Well, it is the artist, it is the sculptor, it's the mason. You all know about Free Masons. The way the -- the tradition of the Middle Ages is kept to a certain extent in this country through the rigmarole, the ritual -- of the Free Masons. And many of you must have parents and fathers who are Masons. Well, gentlemen, the "mason" is the most general term for what the Italians however called artista, the artist out of which you have Michelangelo, and Dante and -- and -- and Raphael, and -- and {Murachio} and -- Pal- -- Palladio as the great people who were at the same time architects, painters, sculptors, you see, and craftsmen.

Now the artista, gentlemen, is the individual performer of all this, what

the craftsmen, and the guilds and crafts do in organized division of labor. To give you an example, the progress from 1100 -- from 1000, from the peasant to a city craft, can be demonstrated best by the one figure. It took 185 different -- crafts to build one knight's armor. That's very similar to Pratt & Whitney. Ja. And don't think therefore that the division of labor of -- as of modern days, these technicalities are something so utterly new. If it takes 185 different craftsmen, you see, to build one armor for a knight, including everything, you see, the laces and the -- the -- the ga- -- lining, and -- because otherwise he would of course be hurt by the -- by the -- by the steel, and so on, you can see that these people had quite a problem of organizing the economy. And one thing that is terrible in our textbooks of economy is this contempt heaped on -- heaped on feudalism, gentlemen. If we had only a good order as feudalism was, you would be surprised how much better the economy of today would be run. It is ridiculous to heap -- to heap contempt on something that -- that at one time was a miracle of the world.

Hundred and eighty-five crafts building one knight's armor. Well, take a jet plane, or take a tank. It is very much the same proposition today, you see. You have to have so many crafts contributing to this one outfit, you see. One does the seal plates, and the other does the motor, and the other does a {seal}, and the other the shooting, and the other the observation -- the instruments for observation, the wheels, and everything. We have the same problem today very much.

So gentlemen, all these guilds and crafts -- you can use guilds and crafts both -- looked up to the artist as the man, for example, who planned the cathedral. As you know, in the Mid- -- med- -- in the medieval city, the great center was the stone cathedral -- the Gothic cathedral you may say, as it was described in the Henry Adams in his --

(Education?)

No, there it isn't described. But what is the other book by s- -- Henry Adams?

(St. Chartres.)

Yes. Saint Michel and Chartres. And well, if you look at these terrible imitations at Yale, or in -- in -- in -- in Washington, where they built this funny cathedral, and in St. John the -- in New York, you know what these cathedrals looked like when they really were invented, and discovered for the first time. Nobody had seen a cathedral before -- 1145, as you know. That's something utterly new. That was his sculptor, the artista, and I like you to use this term

"artist," because out of it I mean, all -- our whole respect for arts and sciences has sprung, you see. The artist is the inventor of the universal building that symbolizes the new professionalism of the arts and crafts. As we still -- speak of the faculty of the arts and sciences, as you still s- -- claim to be in an arts -- a liberal arts college. I wonder if it is still true. No genius here. And no guild, and no craft.

Now gentlemen, there are -- is the lord {law?} of the -- of the city, you see, or the lord {law} of the knights who are -- for whom all these process is set in motion, because they have to be armed. And of course, the fight is against the old peasantry, against the old -- well, pre-feudal order, if you may say. We have -- it is very hard for you to understand, how much the feudalists felt they outranked the hermit, and the monks, and the peasantry, you see. The pre-professional era, you see, of the peasantry.

The peasant in a village under the monks had to be either a tanner, or a miller, or a blacksmith on the side. As you still have in the pioneering days here, you had your land, but on the side everyone had a little craft, you see. But he couldn't devote him- -- his whole time to it, and he did it on the side, and as you know, he did it very coarsely and very crudely. Many of you must still have met these old-timers who on the side did something second and had their farm, too. Now the -- the -- the craftsmen looked down on these -- pre-professionalism, or where the men -- the peasant just had to do the important things: of building, of tailoring, of shoeing on the side, as repair work, you see, like cobblers. So that's why they were so proud of their organization, and that's why they wanted everybody, like our modern unions to be unionized, they wanted everybody to be a member of the guild and the craft. If you weren't you were just no good, and you were a quack. And they tried to drive out all quackery. Everybody had to be perfect in his job, so the second cross of reality, gentlemen, increases the division of labor...

[tape interruption]

...is a favor of...

[tape interruption]

...in the division of labor. Three steps in the division of labor. Each time, we have a leader who goes into the unknown and does something nobody has ever believed could be done. That is the artist who plans the cathedral. That is the hermit who gives up the dense forest around every one settlement, which seemed to be in- -- indispensable for the security of the people against the wild animals, the wild beasts of the forest, the wolf, for example. And the -- we have

today the engineer, who teaches us to go -- dive into the s- -- deep sea, teaches us how to go up into the air, teaches us how to use the f- -- scythes in the ground, like -- like iron and steel, things, you see, which seemed in the same way inaccessible to -- 150 years ago as the bush was inaccessible 1500 years ago. It's only by degrees, you see, that man has allowed himself to enter upon this marriage with his cosmic environment. But today we speak of cosmic rays.

But gentlemen, when the hermit put his hand into the mouth of the bear, and the -- bear knelt down and didn't kill the man -- as animals, you know, just don't do this so easily. It takes quite a lot. You have to be very nasty before they will do you the pleasure -- give you the pleasure in killing you. This was the same engagement with the forces of nature as you have it today when a man suddenly discovers that 2,000 meters, or 6,000 feet below the soil, you still can have a mine and produce there, you see, by pumping air into the shaft. It seemed just as impossible in those days to do just this, to live peacefully with the wolf and the bear.

The important thing is, gentlemen, that the freedom of the artist, his lawlessness, is -- unbound by precedent. It's very much the same as it was for the hermit and for the -- it was for the modern inventor. That the two words, "peasant," "worker," and "craftsman," in your language, unfortunately, in AngloSaxon, are rather exaggerated. But if you go into German for example, where it is Bauer, the builder for the peasant, you see, the man who -- who works with his hands, and if you call -- take the word "handicraft," Handwerker in German, for the medieval city-dweller, craftsman, the -- the craftsman, and the modern word "worker," you see that they are just three times exactly the same problem: the man who does the manual work, under the guidance of a spirited, inspired, you see, professional leader.

So unfortunately, as I said, the word "peasant" makes it difficult for you to see the identity between the problems of a peasant in 800 under Charlemagne, or Alfred in England, and the problem of a worker today in Detroit. All I can say -- is -- appeal to your imagination and say, "This man thought of himself as doing the work, and felt it was an honor, because he didn't have to go to war. So he disarmed." He didn't have to -- to have -- be -- mobilize, you see, for 25 years, because of the Korean incident. But he was allowed to go home and settle with his wife, and children, and do a good job on his land. And therefore, he felt he was doing the work. That's the meaning of "peasant" in the -- in -- in Europe, the man who is able to devote himself to peaceful production all his life, without interrup- -- perhaps later serving once in the army. But not permanently, not being called out every -- every minute.

And the craftsman, of course, it was handicraft, as you know. You have

still this word "handicraft" in which the word "hand" is still there, and "manual" comes from manus, in Latin, the hand. So when you speak today of "manual work" or "manual labor," you of course appeal to the same association as with handicraft. And there again you should see the brotherhood between the handiwork of the Middle Ages, of the thousands of people who had to carry the stones for building these cathedrals, or these dams, or these stone bridges. London Bridge. By whom was it built, you see? By people who had just to do manual labor. Who invented it? One of the bright boys of course, you see, not of a brain trust, but an artista. A man who went ahead and did something which in his guild and craft had never been done before. The building of London Bridge in 1130 of our era was a very great event. It's the time in which for the first time stone bridges over rivers were built again in Europe.

So my point is, you -- perhaps you understand why I wanted you to look into this long-d -- far-distant world, that you are shaken up, or shaken free to the reality of modern CIO workers. And as far as we do ourselves depend on this production, we are all in the CIO, in the mentality of the CIO. We can't help being in it, you see. And in this sense, we all support invention. We all support research. If you want to have money and do nothing, you ask a grant for research, today. That's today just the same as when you formally ask money for -- for a charity or, I mean, for -- for -- for a cathedral, I mean. The artista got his money for a big painting. Today you just go and say, "I want to do research," and you live three years happily before they find out that you are no good.

It's a great seasoning -- open seasoning today, research. And there is a deep reason for this. "Research" means searching new ways of producing things in the -- it doesn't quite mean this in the mind of the physicist or the scientist. If I do research, I have not the slightest interest to tell you anything about it. I do it for my own satisfaction and for furthering the truth. But that's very limited part of the story. The real story why society gives me a leave of absence on my sabbatical for research is that the whole wheels of our production depend on re- -- constant re-thinking, you see, on constant re-searching for new -- means of expressing the same thing, because we know by now that everything that is eaten cannot be eaten a second time. And what is drunk cannot be drunk. Then you have to lookout for sat- -- satisfaction of need by other means all the time. We don't live in a pragmatic era, gentlemen. We don't even live in an era where the instruments, the tools mean everything. We live in an era where we have learned that all the tools must be constantly changed. If you discover this, you no longer will believe in pragmatism, or in any of these vagaries of the modern time.

We are in a much more tragic situation. The peasants could believe that if they worked the soil in ro- -- by rotation, they would stay on the soil for 1500

years. And they did. We must be happy if for the next 50 years we are able to supply all our energies constantly by new energies, you see, because we see that these supplies will run out. There is already not enough water in California and Arizona. What are you going to do? No one has yet found it. Well, the only way is probably tapping the sea water, which means a new process of production. Once you are able to tap the sea water, obviously everything will change, because many things will -- will then turn around this problem, you see, to have the factory very near the -- the sea, because we suddenly can tap the sea water. And so on and so forth.

So gentlemen, we are in a much more tragic situation. A man in 1913 -- perhaps you take this down, as a finishing touch -- an economist wrote down a very blunt sentence, which was at that time was ridiculed, and which, especially in this country nobody wanted to listen to. And it ran, "The life on this planet is getting harder and harder. It is more hard to be organized to the hilt as we have to be now in Detroit. The life on this planet is getting -- growing harder from day to day. The speed at which we have to change, the tools and the instruments of producing our livelihood, the speed is incredible." And this is the answer to instrumentalism. That's the answer to the worship of the single invention, gentlemen. This time on which we live has invented invention. it has invented research. It has invented change. It has not invented any one thing. It has not invented the railroad. It has not invented the telegraph. It hasn't invented radio, you see. What it has invented is to invent, which is something very different.

If you don't get the people who can invent, you are lost. That's why I doubt that you can keep up this economy by the -- in the stupidity and the talentlessness of our modern world. What you -- these people whom you represent, gentlemen, you will not be able to run our economy very long. You will use it up. But can you -- have the enthusiasm of people like -- Ralph Wal- -- Waldo Emerson, who believed in all this, this changeability, this perfectibility of the human mind? You don't believe in it. You believe that everybody has an IQ.

That is, your generation is very much on the verge of giving up the spirit of constant change, and wants to settle in some permanent form where everything is -- is there. Look at our electric bulbs. Our society is breaking down because it now can afford to make bulbs which last -- a shorter while than they should, you see. That's very serious, gentlemen. That is against the code of our society. The tragedy of society is that we know that the things must bust that they don't last forever. But woe to the man who then exaggerates this insight and says, "Then let's last even shorter than is necessary." That's waste. And this -- this should be pilloried. This man should go to the gallows who does this. I mean it. That is the crime against our society. There's no excuse for this. Not

what- -- whatsoever. That it is legally permissible is the failure of our legislators. This man deserves to be hung. But you don't know that these will be the crimes of the future. But they will be. Your grandchildren will hang such a man, because life is getting harder on the surface of the earth. It is more difficult to feed 2 billion people, you see, in peace, or in -- in organized work in one -- one economy. Terribly difficult. And anybody who allows a bulb to -- to finish its life in half of the time, you know -- we -- we could have these bulbs forever. The invention is made, but it isn't applied. And these will be the crimes of the future, because we become more interdependent all the time.

Well, the point I wanted to make is gentlemen, that since life is becoming harder, you will understand that the manual work of the worker is even -- already more monotonous than the -- work of the craftsman, and the life of the craftsman is -- was already infinitely more monotonous than the life of the peasant. The peasant had all the year around the plowing, and harvesting, and -- and reading, and serving on the manor in the -- in the off-days of the year, you see, as a servant, and learning the ropes there, on his -- { }. And so we come of course to -- go onto more burdensome specializations. And the conveyor belt is the expression of this ultimate, you see, of human specialization.

But now you understand that this cannot be helped, in a way. We have to carry the armor of this new, increased hardship. And therefore you have no reason to look down on this tension, the real tension that keeps our society going in -- in -- the inventors inspire the workers, because the workers carry this burden of insecurity, of being fired, in favor of the increased production. Every inventor has for the worker this double meaning, that "I may lose my job, but more workers will have jobs." Again, as long as you cannot understand this tension in the mind of every one of us, you see, you do not understand why we tolerate this scientific society. After all, it's a terrible hardship. Why don't we throw out all these gadgets? You and I would just be able to live without it, because we have embarked on this venture of changing change, of changing the means of production. That's the new principle of our scientific society.

So gentlemen, equate, please: scientific production means changing production; feudal production means professional production, by guilds and crafts. Farming, agricultural, I mean, monastic production -- ecclesiastic or medieval production meant peacetime production. Gradually then in three stages, man has increased the amount of peace between wars. The monasteries encouraged people to disarm. The cities encourage people to professionalize. The modern production encourages man to keep changing what he produces. And that's the condition of peace, gentlemen. As soon as we don't do this, we go to war. So it's a hard whip -- ja?

(What was the three equations of production again?)

Disarmament, by constant settlement, you see, by taking up all the land, you see, giving up fortification. That's the peasant production. The second is -- and the peasant was the man who produced all the other things, except the -- besides the wine, and the grain, and the -- so on, the side, as I told you. The cobbler. The second is the professionalized production. That is, you get guilds and crafts, fellows and masters. You are trained; you are skilled in your -- what you do. But you do the same thing for hundreds of years. The industrial worker must not try to think of his act of daily work as having to be -- leading to the same product all his life. He cannot. It is impossible. There is no such thing as a constant product, you see. The product itself changes. Gets completely new.

So you get the cathedral, gentlemen, as the Exhibit A of the medieval craftsman under the guidance of the artist. And you get today the Model A as the type of thing to be superseded, constructed by the inventor and discarded by the owner as soon as possible in favor of the next year's car. Can't you see it?

So that's the difference between what Mr. Henry Adams called the conflict between the virgin and the dynamo. It is better to say the cathedral, which it took a hundred years to build, and which is still standing -- and the car, which is the model of one year then has to be discarded. See the difference? Why I -- I prefer the conflict, so it points out to you that we live in a -- in scientific production. And science means change of the means of production. It's the -- it's the content of this word "scientific." And you have heard so much about technology. But I nowhere find that people put their finger on what this means. Technology doesn't mean iron and steel, and it doesn't mean electricity. But it means the freedom of producing one day electricity and the next day atomic energy, which is much harder to understand, that it applies -- that not one raw material, not one energy has any monopoly, you see. It has no right to stay.

Thank you.