Overview

How do people actually experience God, Jesus Christ, the Kingdom and the Church? Does this experience affect their awareness of capitalism, socialism, competition, the relationship of markets to men, and their participation in politics? Does modern man have an ethical concern? First published in 1970, Ethics of Industrial Man explores the interrelationship between people’s experience of a deeper reality of life, their awareness of society and their participation in it. It is usually assumed that religion has lost its impact on the daily life of man. This is true, inasmuch as most people live their working lives divorced from religiously grounded ethics. But the author shows that it ceases to be true if we explore the significance of the universal ground in which all religious awareness and every social order is rooted. Using intensive interviews in Great Britain and the United States over a number of years, the author gives empirical evidence that the ethical impulse is not absent but is thwarted by the absence of bridges between the socio-economic sphere of life and people’s ethical awareness. Decisive in this connection is the confusion between what is universal and what is historically specific. This confusion, the author believes, underlies the apathy, the sense of powerlessness, the prevalence of a false consciousness, the decline of traditional religious forms. It is, he concludes, the core of the ethical corrosion of our time.

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9781032914701

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Reviews

Review of the first publication: ‘I recommend this book for a variety of reasons. For the field anthropologist it suggests lines of enquiry going beyond the apparent unanimity of judgements and reality. It provides excellent insights into such judgements in our own society. For those students of social anthropology who are obscurely perplexed by a lack of vocation where they most expected to find it this work should provide an arena for critical debate.’ — D. F. Pocock, Man, New Series

Author Information

Fred Blum was an American social scientist and the founder of The New Era Centre. He was born in Germany in 1914, emigrated to the US in 1938 where he became an American citizen and came to Britain in 1959 on behalf of the Society of Friends (Quakers) to study new developments in mental health and religion with special reference to the organization of industry. Fred taught economics at Howard University in Washington DC and was a professor of social sciences in Michigan and Minnesota. The US Senate appointed Fred advisor to the Labor and Welfare Committee, and he worked as a consultant for the young Senator John F Kennedy.

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