Canaille / The Masses

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part thirteen

Multitudes.

The multitudes are like droppings of birds, like dung of sea-fowl that
    have flown away,
Oh they are grist for the mills of God, their bones ground down
to fertilise the roots of unknown men who are still to come
in fresh fields.¹

This chapter is directly related to the previous chapter and the next chapter: the preceding chapter dealt with modern humans in general, this chapter deals with mass man and mass formations, and the following chapter deals in more detail with modern man as such, namely the robot. A term that Lawrence was fond of calling the masses is the canaille, which is a colorful and pejorative word meaning the lowest mass members of society. The mass is always less than any individual. Most moderns have no lives of their own; attaining their limited fulfilment only through their function as part of the mass human hordes. There are, however, new men, sun-men, who may yet arise to liberate our world from the canaille. In this day and age, where even the staunchest individual is little more than a cog in a machine, a true individual is to be welcome, even if that individual is a vagrant or a bandit. Lawrence writes:

I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, perhaps it is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw. All my work is a shot at their very innermost strength, these banded people of today. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people.²

As Lawrence makes clear, the war that is to be waged is not to be waged with the tools of the mass of men, namely bombs and guns and poison gases, but with words that cut one deeply in the soul. It is a common saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, but it is true. A sword can kill the body, but has no effect upon the soul, whereas words can awaken even the deadest individual. Technology doesn’t change the soul, as such, but it does place a veil over it, such that one sees with their third eye closed. The more technology there is, the more it places people into systems, and at the same time, the more people are part of the technological system, the more they group into mass formations. Thomas Merton described the phenomenon:

If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation. Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason (quality=value=relation of means to authentic human ends). It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, becomes quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass—mass man—whose only function is to enter anonymously into the process of production and consumption. He becomes on one side an implement, a “hand,” or better, a “biophysical link” between machines: on the other side he is a mouth, a digestive system, and an anus, something through which pass the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment. The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on “mother nature” (such a dependence would be partly tolerable and human) but on the pseudonature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.³