Ethics of Industrial Man: An Empirical Study of Religious Awareness and the Experience of Society

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.

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.