Authority and the Individual by Bertrand Russell

Author:Bertrand Russell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Postscript

An interesting and painful example of the decay of quality through modern machine methods is afforded by the Scottish tweed industry. Hand-woven tweeds, universally acknowledged to be of superlative excellence, have long been produced in the Highlands, the Hebrides and the Orkney and Shetland Islands, but the competition of machine-woven tweeds has hit the hand-weavers very hard, and the purchase tax, according to debates in both Houses of Parliament, is giving them their coup de grâce. The result is that those who can no longer make a living by exercising their craft are compelled to leave the islands and Highlands to live in cities or even to emigrate.

Against the short-term economic gain of a purchase tax which brings in from £1,000,000 to £1,500,000 a year must be placed long-term losses which are hardly calculable.

First, there is the loss, added to those we have already suffered in the blind and greedy heyday of the Industrial Revolution, of one more local and traditional skill, which has brought to those who exercised it the joy of craftsmanship and a way of life which, though hard, gave pride and self-respect and the joy of achievement, through ingenuity and effort, in circumstances of difficulty and risk.

Secondly, there is the diminution in the intrinsic excellence of the product, both aesthetic and utilitarian.

Thirdly, this murder of a local industry aggravates the tendency to uncontrollable growth of cities, which we are attempting in our national town planning to avoid. The independent weavers become units in a vast, hideous and unhealthy human ant-hill. Their economic security is no longer dependent on their own skill and upon the forces of nature. It is lost in a few large organisations, in which if one fails all fail, and the causes of failure cannot be understood.

Two factors make this process—a microcosm of the Industrial Revolution—inexcusable at this date. On the one hand, unlike the early industrialists, who could not see the consequences of their own acts, we know the resultant evils all too well. On the other hand, these evils are no longer necessary for the increase of production, or for the raising of the material standards of living of the worker. Electricity and motor-transport have made small units of industry not only economically permissible but even desirable, for they obviate immense expenditure on transportation and organisation. Where a rural industry still flourishes, it should be gradually mechanised, but be left in situ and in small units.

In those parts of the world in which industrialism is still young, the possibility of avoiding the horrors we have experienced still exists. India, for example, is traditionally a land of village communities. It would be a tragedy if this traditional way of life with all its evils were to be suddenly and violently exchanged for the greater evils of urban industrialism, as they would apply to people whose standard of living is already pitifully low. Gandhi, realizing these dangers, attempted to put the clock back by reviving hand-loom weaving throughout the continent. He was half

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.