Orwell - Road to the Wigan Pier
Finally, however, you will get an answer which is rather more to the point and which runs roughly as follows: “Yes, what you are saying is all very well in is way. No doubt it would be very noble to harden ourselves and do without aspirins and central heating ans so forth. But the point is, you see, that nobody seriously wants it. It would mean going back to an agricultural way of life, which means beastly hard work and isn’t at all the same thing as playing at gardening. I don’t want hard work, you don’t want hard work - nobody wants it who knows what it means. You only talk as you do because you’ve never done a day’s work in your life,’ etc., etc. Now this in a sense is true. It amounts to saying, ‘We’re soft - for God’s sake let’s stay soft!’ which at least is realistic. As I have pointed out already, the machine has got us in its grip and to escape will be immensely difficult. Nevertheless this answer is really an evasion, because it fails to make clear what we man when we say that we ‘want’ this or that. I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don’t ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.