You speak as if all this activity - this making and selling and buying and possessing of useful articles - were an end in itself and not merely a means to an end. It is good that we should all have as many bowls and ashtrays as we need. But it is not of the highest importance. It is not important at all.

Civilisation is something more than producing and owning things....I have an ashtray. Good! I have four ashtrays. Still better, for my friends may come to see me. But do I want fifty ashtrays? No. And above all I do not want fifty ashtrays and no friends, eh?

We must be certain what civilisation is. To me it seems an affair of the mind and the spirit. Where the mind is growing in knowledge and wisdom and the spirit is like a clear flame, there is civilisation.

Man is certainly a maker and user of things, but if he is no more than that he is still only man and not yet civilised man. So we must ask ourselves if all this activity and ingenuity of yours is helping the mind to grow in wisdom and the spirit to burn like a clear flame.

And here I may remind you that the social insects, the bees and ants and termites whose communities have existed unchanged for more than a hundred million years, we are told, appear to have solved their problems of production and consumption and have nothing to learn from our economists.

We do not know how existence appears to an ant or a termite, which may enjoy ecstasies quite unknown to us, but we cannot help feeling that their failure, as a species, is complete, that the world spirit lost interest in them millions and millions of years ago, whereas there is still a chance, just a chance, for ourselves.

Now among the ends, which seem to us to justify our lower activities, are the creation and the appreciation of music, to which the making and selling of bowls and ash-trays, no matter how ingeniously produced, must serve merely as a means. Music nourishes the mind and the spirit. It is the expression of the struggling deity within us.

Here in this town the people are fortunate enough to possess a large and well-constructed hall of their own, where they can create and enjoy the noble art of music. But I have been told that you wish to take this hall away from them, to use it as a means of selling more bowls and ash-trays.

If that is true, then civilisation here in Dunbury is not moving forward but going backward, returning to a new kind of barbarism, filled with machines and swift transport, synthetic bowls and ash-trays, but nevertheless a barbarism.

You may tell me that the people have stopped using the Hall. And it may be true that they're not as keen on music as they used to be. But why? Because your world, with its clamorous and exacting machines and its organisation of mechanical little tasks, is draining away their spirit of initiative, making them passive in their leisure instead of active and creative.

They drift from the work factory to the amusement factory. Instead of music there is now the strange horrible sound of the cinema organ or the barbaric din of the jazz bands, both of which play on the nerves and do nothing for the heart, the mind, the spirit.

You may also tell me that the choice is between this and a museum for a set of West Dunbury snobs and that it's better for everybody that the old hall should be advertising your goods and serving a useful purpose. With that I might agree. There is nothing wrong with museums in their place. But no museum is necessary here. Too much of England is a museum. A life divided between museums and factories is not good. But that is not the choice.

At the back of your minds is still the old economic heresy, the idea that men are primarily producers and consumers, and are only real human beings in what you call their spare time. You do not believe that of everybody. Nobody ever did. You believe it of those you employ but not of those who employ you.

The great, the privileged, the wealthy have never seen themselves as part of economic man. That is why so many of them cling to medieval trappings, to show that they still move in the feudal, pre-economic world. They insist upon living on another level.

First to some extent in America and now in Russia, they thought to bring justice and equality into the world by removing this class, by making all men the economic man of the theorists. But it is equity in the wrong direction. It is bolting the door on the outside. We should aim at making all men great, privileged, and wealthy, raising them all to the level of the richest.

And I am not thinking in terms of goods and services. I am thinking of the inward style of life, of how a man thinks of himself. I am not only putting the smokers before the ash-trays in importance, but I am thinking of what it is that brings the smokers together. And in the world of the mind and the spirit it is possible for all to be great, privileged, and wealthy.

If you enjoy a Beethoven symphony you do not take away from but add to my enjoyment of it. And life on this level is not something to be tolerated if there happens to be time for it after the serious business of the world has been done. It is the serious business of the world - this life of beauty, wisdom and love - and we only make things and buy and sell them in order to sustain the real life. All men know this deep in their heart.

The coarsest sailor, hurrying ashore to get drunk in the lowest brothel, is still hungering for beauty, wisdom and love. All men know this deep in their hearts, and when those who refuse to listen to what is deep in their hearts, those with busy metallic little brains, tell them it is not so, then men cannot help feeling frustrated and in despair, and in their frustration and despair they become violent and cruel.

And that is why the world you have made is horrible now with violence and cruelty. Its roots are frustration and despair. Its fruits are violence, cruelty and anguish.

And the bowls and cups you sell - the bowls and cups for whose sake you would destroy music and liberty and happiness of the common people - may soon be running with blood and tears.

J.B.Priestley (1939)

Professor Ernst Kronak's plea to the United Plastics board in East Dunbury in 'Let The People Sing' (pps 189-199)

Let The People Sing

What's The Big Idea?

Is It Allowed?

How Does It Work?

Is It A Good Idea?

What Will Others Say?