Robots and Democracy

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George Orwell and Karel Čapek

Karel Čapek’s name appears only a few times in the writings of George Orwell, but each time Orwell’s reference is favourable. In 1937, in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell singled him out for his critique of mechanical production:

… the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion. This idea is implicit in, for instance, most of the propagandist stuff that is written about the rapid mechanical advance in Soviet Russia (the Dneiper dam, tractors, etc., etc.). Karel Čapek hits it off well enough in the horrible ending of R.U.R., when the Robots, having slaughtered the last human being, announce their intention to ‘build many houses’ (just for the sake of building houses, you see).

During the war years when he was producer at the BBC he commissioned a talk from W J Turner on Čapek and his play in a series as one of the Great Dramatists. About the same time he referred to Čapek indirectly in his essay on “Rudyard Kipling”:

It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as “robots”, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him.

The appearance of a new translation of R.U.R. along with a collection of essays specifically looking at the implications of the play for modern science and technology, R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life, edited by Jitka Čejková, is a chance to consider how Orwell and Čapek viewed the world. Although Orwell’s name does not appear in the index to the book, his thought is relevant to many of the subjects raised.

In the first of the essays, “Robots and the Precocious Birth of Synethetic Biology”, Julyan Cartwright quotes from an article written by Čapek for the Evening Standard (London) as early as 1924 in which the playwright described robots as “humans capable of work but not thinking”. The play had been performed as early as 1920 in Czechoslovakia, and was published in an English translation in 1922, but not performed on the London stage until 1923. A radio production was broadcast in May 1927. As Orwell was already in Burma in 1923, only returning in August 1927, he could not have seen or heard these productions – it was written accounts that first moved him. He read Čapek closely, though: one feature of the robots of the play is that they are human-like and constructed of flesh, not mechanical automatons. Consequently, when Orwell in his journalism described the robots he saw in boys’ weeklies and American comics he explicitly and repeatedly used the phrase steel robots, making it clear that they were not Čapek’s.

Cartwright goes on to point out that Čapek was parodying “scientific management” as promoted by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism), which had lead Henry Ford to build his production line factories. At the same time, the marine engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing his dystopian novel We. Cartwright points out that “Zamyatin had experienced Taylorian mass production of ships in the UK during 1916-1917, spending two years supervising the building of icebreakers in the shipywards of Newcastle-upon-Tyne”. It was not until 1945 that Orwell heard of We and hunted down a copy.

A human being is measured by nothing but the number defining his output! I don’t know if America really lives under this watchword’s whip-crack but it’s a watchword offered to us by Americanised Europeans as a programme for the progress and reconstruction of Europe.

Thus Čapek wrote for a New York newspaper in 1926. Orwell never names Taylor, but he does name one of his rivals, one of those Americanised Europeans that Čapek mentioned – Charles Bedaux, implementation of whose methods had lead to protests and the London Bus Strike of 1937 that restricted the Coronation celebrations of the capital. In his essay “Inside The Whale” (1940) Orwell put the work of Bedaux on the same level as concentration camps and rubber truncheons.

Rossum’s robots seem to have been so popular that they put the world out of work. Julie Nováková explores this in “It Wasn’t Wrong To Dream: The paradise or hell of our jobless future”, the fifth essay in the collection. She reports that nearly half of all employment in the United States, true for most of the developed world, is at high risk of replacement by automation. Čapek’s projection was seemingly correct. One solution would be, she suggests, universal basic income (UBI). She looks at how this has been explored in science fiction – Star Trek seems to show it working, but the TV series The Expanse is much more bleak. Orwell, remember, looked to reality, and asked what a job might be. In Down and Out in Paris and London he wrote:

…if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout —in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

But we see the problem, as Nováková describes: “The Expanse illustrates the possibility that poverty won’t be eliminated by giving people what they need to survive”. Orwell had realised the same thing, long before. He continued:

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.

And notice in there, the buried reference to Taylorism, “efficiency”.

By the time that Karel Čapek died in 1938 many of his books were available in English. In addition, and possibly the reason why Orwell linked his name to democracy, was that he had published two biographies of Tomas Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia, based on conversations with the elderly leader. Masaryk had left Austria-Hungary during the First World War to campaign among the Allies for the independence of Bohemia and Slovakia (the basis of post-war Czechoslovakia). He was in Moscow during the October Revolution but avoided taking sides, instead working to take all Czech prisoners-of-war of the Russians out of the country so that they could fight the Germans alongside the French forces (the Czech Legion, or Legions), which meant that he had to maintain good relations with Lenin’s government, though his memoir has little good to say about the Bolsheviks. Čapek meanwhile was a young academic in Bohemia, whose frozen spine made him medically unfit for conscription. In 1924, after a Czech language newspaper was established, he wrote “Why am I not a Communist?”. He later found that Czech Marxist critics, and they existed, found little to praise in his work even when it did not deal with politics. Perhaps if Orwell – then Eric Blair – had been able to travel with Masaryk he and his schoolboy colleagues would not have rated Lenin one of the ten greatest men then alive, as they did in 1920.

From the dust-jacket to a 1939 edition of Karel Capek’s Travels in the North

Čapek died on December 25^th 1938, nominally of pneumonia, but his friends felt it was exacerbated by his depression over the calamity of Munich, when the Allies failed to stand up to Hitler and gave him the Sudetenland. As Orwell wrote in 1940:

For just twenty years the Czechoslovakian Republic was one of the best-governed as well as one of the most democratic states in Europe. Nevertheless, the very moment the Germans again felt strong enough to fight, it went down into a worse bondage than that of the Habsburgs.

Orwell went on to say of Beneš, Masaryk’s successor:

As he is still comparatively young, it is not too much to hope that he may get another chance when the present war is over.

Tomas Masaryk had died before Čapek. His son Jan Masaryk died in mysterious circumstances in 1948 – the Stalinist takeover of Czechoslovakia began. Josef Čapek, Karel’s brother, who had given him the word “robot”, after seven years in a Nazi concentration camp was murdered in 1945. When the Second World War broke out much of Čapek’s work, despite his books, existed only in the ephemeral form of newspaper and magazine articles, but fortunately Miroslav Halik worked in secret to collate and keep this material. We are still reading it today, and as R.U.R and the Vision of Artificial Life shows, finding new significance in everything that emerged from minds such as Orwell’s and Čapek’s.

References:

R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life, edited by Jitka Čejková (MIT Press, 2024). (R.U.R., trans. Štĕpán Šimek)

Believe in People: The Essential Karel Capek, edited by Šárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová (Faber, 2010)

Note: in the Complete Works of George Orwell Karel Čapek’s name also appears as Karel Capek.