TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT   609
arts voluptuary I couple practices joculary; for the deceiving o£ the senses
is one of the pleasures of the senses.'
If the writer of these prescient words could have revisited the Western
World three and a half centuries after the date at which he had written
them, he might have been surprised to observe how accurately he had
gauged the trend of the spiritual curve in which Western souls had
begun to descend from Heroism towards Frivolity. Mid-way through
the twentieth century of the Christian Era it was notorious—and sig-
nificant—that the United States, where the Western industrial working
class had come nearer than it had come in any European country to-
wards being assimilated to the middle class in its material standard of
living and in its opportunities for material advancement, was also
the Western country hi which, on the cultural, in contrast to the eco-
nomic, plane, the middle class, for its part, had gone farthest down the
descensus Averni which Bacon had foreboded. Yet the same middle class
was slipping down the same steep place1 in other Western countries like-
wise ; and unwarily envious West European spectators of the use to which
'the common man* in the United States was putting his relatively ample
margin of wealth and leisure at this date were apt to betray their own
hankering after the frivolity that they were professedly castigating in an
American whipping-boy when they maliciously described the American
scene as a fun-fair patronized by grown-up children whose main interest
in life was to play with mechanical toys. This caricature was perhaps not
inaccurate as far as it went; for joy-riding could not be more felicitously
described than as a * practice joculary', nor television more felicitously
than as an 'art voluptuary* designed to please the senses by deceiving
them.2 Yet any contemporary American critic of American mores could
silence the carping West European visitor with a crushing *De te fabula
narratur* ;3 for the reality that was being caricatured in some of the
1 Matt. viii. 32; Mark v. 13; Luke viii. 33.
z On the evening of the day on which he had written this sentence in the morning,
the writer received a timely intimation that this might not be the last word that would
have to be said about the cultural effects of the wholesale installation of television in the
United States. That same evening he heard a shrewd American observer of the American
political scene tell an English audience that, if they wished to understand the current
movement of American feeling on international affairs, they must not ignore the effect
of the rapid current spread of the network of an American television service. Television,
he explained, had now made it possible for the American public to see the countenances
and gestures, as well as to hear the voices, of the delegates to the Council and the
Assembly of the United Nations Organization at Lake Success; every owner of a
television set who tuned in to the sessions of these international bodies received a vivid
impression of the contrast in manners, and in the inner £thos that these outward manners
betrayed, between the Russian delegates and their Western colleagues; and this impres-
sion was making a potent effect on American public opinion because the proceedings at
Lake Success had effectively caught and held the interest of American 'viewers'.
When a meeting at Lake Success came on, 'viewers* would tune in to it, even if this
meant their having to break away from looking at a classic boxing-match or at a
popular vaudeville.
This piece of information aptly illustrated two points that had to be taken into account
in any attempt to estimate the Western Civilization's prospects. In the first place
showed that Television was already beginning to play its part in a political unification of
the QikoumenS through a technological 'annihilation of distance* that has been noticed
in XII. D (ii) (6), above. In the second place it showed that a new instrument, which in
the first flush of its novelty had been treated as a toy, might quickly be turned to account
for serving a more serious purpose.
3 Horace: Satires, Book I, Satire i, 1L 69-70.
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