Particularly poignant is the view expressed by William Godwin, the Utilitarian political philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning Political justice, published in 1793, is taken by many as one of the principal intellectual foundations upon which to build opposition to governmental power and its abuse:

Wealth was at one period almost the single object of pursuit that presented itself to the gross and uncultivated mind. Various objects will hereafter divide men's attention, the love of liberty, the love of equality, the pursuits of art and the desire of knowledge. These objects will not, as now, be confined to a few, but will gradually be laid open to all. The love of liberty obviously leads to a sentiment of union, and a disposition to sympathize in the concerns of others. The general diffusion of truth will be productive of general improvement; and men will daily approximate towards those views according to which every object will be appreciated at its true value. Add to which, that the improvement of which we speak is public, and not individual. The progress is the progress of all. Each man will find his sentiments of justice and rectitude echoed by the sentiments of his neighbours. Apostasy will be made eminently improbable, because the apostate will incur, not only his own censure, but the censure of every beholder.

A century later, Leo Tolstoy, who spent the second half of his life close to despair over the state of society but whose world-wide influence and fame as a moral thinker is now largely forgotten, wrote the following:

‘One trembles before the present horrible condition of human life: taxes, clergy, great landed properties, prisons, guillotines, cannon, dynamite, millionaires and beggars. In reality all these horrors are the result of our own acts. Not only can they disappear, but they must disappear, in conformity with the new conscience of humanity. Christ said that He had conquered the world; and in fact He has conquered it. Dreadful as it may be, the evil no longer really exists because it is disappearing from the consciences of men.
   ‘Today humanity is passing through a transitory phase. Everything is ready for passing from one state of the human condition to another; it needs only a slight push to set it off and it can take place at any minute.
   ‘The social conscience of humanity already condemns the former way of life and is ready to adopt the new. The whole world feels it, and is convinced of it. But inertia and fear of the unknown retards the application in practice of what has for a long time been realized in theory. In such cases it sometimes needs only one word to make the force called public opinion change the whole order of things at once, and do it without struggle or violence.   ‘The freeing of men from servitude, from ignorance, can not be obtained by revolution, syndicates, peace congresses, etc., but simply by the conscience of each one of us forbidding us to participate in violence and asking us in amazement: Why are you doing that?
   ‘It is enough for us to emerge from the hypnosis that hides our true mission from us, for us to ask with dread and indignation how any one can insist upon our committing such horrible crimes. And this awakening can take place at any instant.’
   This is what I wrote fifteen years ago, and 1 repeat today with conviction that this awakening is about to take place.
   Certainly 1 shall not be there to take part in it, I, an old man, more than eighty years of age; but 1 know with the same certainty as I see spring follow winter and night day, that this hour has already come in the life of Christian humanity.¹

In 1921 R. H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society was published. In its final paragraph Tawney states its principal conclusions and predicts the disappearance from society of purely economic preoccupations with a confidence beginning to sound rather familiar:

The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired.
   That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound and turns every trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organize its industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on.

Many of those writing in more recent times, particularly perhaps in the United States, tend to combine the bleakest views of the past and present with an optimistic trust in youth to put matters right. Paul Goodman, for example, saw in the attitudes of the 'beat generation' and the 'angry young men' of the 1950s hope that the tide might be turning:

1 think that the existential reality of Beat, Angry, and Delinquent behaviour is indicated by the fact that other, earnest, young fellows who are not themselves disaffected and who are not phony, are eager to hear about them, and respect them. One cannot visit a university without being asked a hundred questions about them.
   Finally, some of these groups are achieving a simpler fraternity, animality, and sexuality than we have had, at least in America, in a long, long time.
   This valuable program is in direct contrast to the mores of what we have in this book been calling 'the organized system', its role playing, its competitiveness, its canned culture, its public relations, and its avoidance of risk and self-exposure. That system and its mores are death to the spirit, and any rebellious group will naturally raise a contrasting banner.
   Now the organized system is very powerful and in its full tide of success, apparently sweeping everything before it in science, education, community planning, labor, the arts, not to speak of business and politics where it is indigenous. Let me say that we of the previous generation who have been sickened and enraged to see earnest and honest effort and humane culture swamped by this muck, are heartened by the crazy young allies, and we think that perhaps the future may make more sense than we dared hope.²

Only a few years later Lewis Mumford's almost savagely revealing analysis of the evils wrought on society by the impersonal violence of a technology of power is unexpectedly and almost incongruously muted by views such as the following:

The yearning for a primitive counter-culture, defying the rigidly organized and depersonalized forms of Western civilization, began to float into the Western mind in the original expressions of Romanticism among the intellectual classes. That desire to return to a more primeval state took a folksy if less articulate form, in the elemental rhythms of jazz, more than half a century ago. What made this idea suddenly erupt again, with almost volcanic power, into Western society was its incarnation in the Beatles. It was not just the sudden success of the Beatles' musical records that indicated that a profound change was taking place in the minds of the young: it was their new personality, as expressed in their long, neo-mediaeval haircut, their unabashed sentimentality, their nonchalant posture, and their dreamlike spontaneity that opened up for the post-nuclear generation the possibility of an immediate escape from mega-technic society. In the Beatles all their repressions, and all their resentments of repression were released: by hairdo, costume, ritual, and song, all changes depending upon purely personal choice, the new counter-ideas that bound the younger generation together were at once clarified and magnified. Impulses that were still too dumbly felt for words, spread like wildfire through incarnation and imitation.³

What strikes a chill in the contemporary reader's heart about such passages as these (which fell easily to hand - 1 did not have to comb libraries to unearth them) is that their future has now come, and perhaps even gone, with none of the expected improvement. What possibilities Godwin saw in an understanding of the nature of 'happiness', his faith in the good will of those with the power to reason, have been mercilessly betrayed in the pursuit of interest. Tolstoy's intimation of a revival of Christian ethics wouldvsurely have been sadly extinguished by now. Tawney's was no doubt a longer view, but even in this case one wonders whether he would have been so sanguine could he have witnessed the speed with which the more caring society for which he worked so hard is currently being dismantled. And we have now had the chance to observe for ourselves the growing up of the beats, the angry young men and the Beatles: all securely locked within the deadly serious world of the market, privately preoccupied with success or survival, some dead and some assassinated.

1. L. Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, Anthony Blond, 1970.
2. P. Goodman. Growing Up Absurd, Vintage Books, 1956.
3. L. Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, Secker and Warburg, 1971.

Taking Care