Hard Times

Certainly the infrastructure of our own marvelous world, including even the computer, is unimaginable without the foundational wealth flowing from the steam engine-the equivalent for us of the Greeks` Pandora`s box, the opening of which led to endless problems.

The news which inundates us twenty-four hours a day is replete with horror stories of ecological problems which beset us, just as the earliest industrial city populations suffered from poisonous industrial wastes.

With the populations of natural paradise areas like Los Angeles smothering from smog, with the employees of our Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington being made sick by their "sick" building, and with the desolation of our inner cities, we cannot claim that we have solved the problems which Charles Dickens depicted so graphically 150 years ago in his searing novel of social and political criticism, Hard Times.

That Britain escaped the revolution, which Dickens warned was possible, seems to be due in part to the social-political criticism he and other writers made and partly to a remarkable influence of religion.

In Hard Times, originally a weekly serial, Dickens wrote of a city he called "Coketown."

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.

"It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

"It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye."

Dickens` description of the home of a Coketown mill worker is a classic. (I have kept Dickens` punctuation but have broken his long paragraph into sections.)

"In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in;

"At the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts upon courts, and close streets upon close streets, which had come into existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man`s purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering and trampling, and pressing one another to death;

"In the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draft, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might expect to be born in it;

"Among the multitude of Coketown, generically called the `Hands`-a race who would have found more favor with some people if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs-lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age."

Josiah Bounderby, Coketown`s leading banker, undismayed or perhaps just unaware of these horrors, was a one-man Chamber of Commerce. Addressing a visitor, Bounderby observed that "First of all, you see our smoke. That`s meat and drink to us. It`s the healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the lungs."

He further declaimed that although "It`s the pleasantest and lightest work there is, the hands still want to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon."

Dickens did not miss much.

Just as tens of thousands of Americans have deserted our cities for rural areas, so Josiah Bounderby "took possession of a house and grounds about fifteen miles from town" where the industry-desecrated countryside "mellowed into a rustic landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of the year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summertime."

Dickens understood that people living and working in such circumstances might one day strike out blindly against a society which consigned them to so bare an existence.

He warned the upper classes to "cultivate in them while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections to adorn their lives so much in need of adornment; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, reality will take a wolfish turn and make an end of you."

Dickens deserves some credit for Britain`s escape from revolution but the Church deserves more. From the Middle Ages forward, the Church had fostered the idea that the powerful nobles had a sacred obligation to look after the powerless poor.

This idea survived in England into the 19th century as Tory Democracy. In tragic contrast, the Russian nobility refused all change with the result that the Russian masses literally made an end of their oppressors.

The United States, like Britain, has escaped the kind of revolution Dickens warned against but the reasons for this similarity differ somewhat.

The United States, at the turn from the 19th to the 20sth century, had more than a decade of sharp, clever, sometimes amusing social-political criticism. If not for the label, "Muckrakers," which Teddy Roosevelt gave the critics, the leaders of the social gospel movement should be included.

Despite the work of the social gospel people, religion probably played a smaller role in modernization here than in Britain. It is not easy to explain-and perhaps impossible to justify-the relative lack of religious influence.

Perhaps an explanation should begin with the fact that, in this vast and virgin land, we had neither an established nobility nor a nationally established church.

The gradual emergence of a wealthy class (plutocrats) was our substitute for the British nobility. Our problem was that this new, powerful nobility had not been imbued with the European idea that they had a sacred obligation to serve the needs of the powerless poor. In Britain, as on the Continent, this obligation was called noblesse oblige. Our historians have, therefore, called our captains of industry and finance a "nobility without noblesse."

Why was the influence of religion not more significant?

On the frontier, each man and each community had to proceed rather on their own. The lack of established customs and the difficulty of communication in this vast new land dictated a degree of anarchy in comparison with the old and orderly society of Britain.

This confident disorderly individualism resulted in the denominational splits which have given us literally hundreds of differing religious groupings-nearly all calling themselves Christians.

Since we had no dominant national religious entity, able to speak with real power, but only a multitude of discordant voices, each local religious leader was so dependent upon the local nobility (without noblesse) that the wealthy powerful could and did exploit the poor without significant rebuke from religion.

The situation in the South is only the most obvious and regrettable example of this weakness of religious witness on social-political problems.

Thus, Jim Crow was dominant in the South until the unrest of the fifties and sixties finally issued in the Civil Rights Acts.

Since then-and not surprisingly-many have concluded that economic concerns and university ambitions for success in athletics have been more effective than religion in promoting racial tolerance.

If this brief account has reasonable validity, it seems that both the British and the Americans, to some degree, owe their happy history to their patriotic writers of social-political criticism.

But the influence of religion in Britain seems more significant than in the United States-except for one consideration.

The African-American population in the United States has displayed, on the whole, a remarkably forgiving attitude toward their white oppressors-which the dominant whites have only inadequately acknowledged.