Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski.

  • Bronisław Malinowski
Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    its execution and the distribution of results. Here perhaps we find the most essential problem of freedom. The more fully and concretely we study the nature of human action, the more we find that integrally it opens up ever-increas¬ ing vistas of possibilities, of efficiencies, of controls. Thus it gives integral freedom. At the same time, the very essence of action lies in the submission of all actors to the constraints of knowledge, of skill, of co-operation, of joint response and joint claims to the goods, values and enjoyments produced. In this we see that the constraint may turn in two ways against human beings, and exact too high a price in individual or in group restrictions for any benefits given. The first types of danger from machine turning on man are when man’s mechanisms become an end in themselves. The speed in modern means of locomotion, with all the toll in human life and limb, with the senseless distortion of time tables in human existence, and the useless wastage of energies and purposes which do not very often lead to any appreciable end, is an example of machine oppressing man. I do not know whether a sociological analysis in terms of value obtained for time wasted has ever been made. Such a study would be a real inquiry into freedom as a concrete factor in our civilization. Machines and mass production methods as factors in the stand¬ ardization of taste, desire, appetite and ambition, produced through the syndicated standardized agencies of public opinion, the newspapers, the radio and the advertisement, raise also the question how far the control of means within a big organization can enslave the ends of individual decision. All this, as has been pointed out already, is a question of the organization of power within a community, especially within a democratic community. The second great problem in the relation of man to machine is the very specific organization of violence which we have pro-
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