fact—with the dynamic effects that Marx had described so well.
Instead of inhabiting a stable world of objects made to last, hu-
man beings found themselves sucked into an accelerating process
of production and consumption.
By the time that Arendt was reflecting on the implications of
automation, this process of production and consumption had
gone far beyond catering for natural needs; indeed the activities,
methods, and consumer goods involved were all highly artificial.
But she points out that this modern artificiality is quite unlike
the stable worldly artifice inhabited by earlier civilizations. Ob-
jects, furniture, houses themselves have become items of con-
sumption, while automatic production processes have taken on a
quasi-natural rhythm to which human beings have had to adjust
themselves. It is, she says, "as though we had forced open the
distinguishing boundaries which protected the world, the human
artifice, from nature, the biological process which goes on in its
very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which sur-
round it, delivering and abandoning to them the always threat-
ened stability of a human world" (p. 126). Elsewhere in The Hu-
man Condition she describes what has happened as an "unnatural
growth of the natural" or a "liberation of the life process," for
modernization has turned out to be extraordinarily good at in-
creasing production, consumption, and procreation, giving rise
to a vastly expanded human race which is producing and con-
suming more than ever before. Her contention is that since these
economic concerns came to be the center of public attention and
public policy (instead of being hidden away in the privacy of the
household as in all previous civilizations), the costs have been
devastation of the world and an ever-increasing tendency for hu-
man beings to conceive of themselves in terms of their desire
to consume.
The implication of her argument is not, however, that all we
need to do is to haul ourselves up out of our immersion in labor
and take action. For this modern hegemony of laboring does not
mean that human beings have ceased to act, to make new begin-
nings, or to start new processes—only that science and technol-
ogy have become the arena for "action into nature." At the very
same time when men were becoming more and more inclined to
XIV