WORLD PROBLEMS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4724, 14 July 1924, Page 4

WORLD PROBLEMS.

TOO MUCH BENEVOLENCE. CIVILISATION’S REAL PERIL. Professor McDougall has given the world in “Ethics and Some Modern World,Problems” a most notable book, which will, doubtlessly, be furiously denounced by the “highbrows.” The book is a warning that misguided philanthropy is preparing the doom of the highest races :

“The tragedy of our situation is that the greatest danger threatening our civilisation arises from the working within us of the altruistic o’ benevolent impulse. For the altruistic impulse prompts us to desire that every human being shall be free to exercise and satisfy every strong impulse proper to the human species. Yet it is one of the ultimate and ineradicable disharmonies of human life (and the fact cannot be too strongly insisted upon at the present time) that such exercise and satisfaction are not compatible with the maintenance and progress of any civilisation of a higher type.” He believes that pride in nationality and patriotism are vital to the progress of the race, and that a Europe “unified” .would have rotted at the core :

“European culture, untroubled by P the series of national wars that make J and mar so much of the history of I Europe, might have bloomed as rapjdL ly and as brilliantly as the culture of j the Moslem world; and possibly its decline would have been equally rapid.” s RACE EQUALITY. ; If for the next century the doctrine I that all men are equal and all races ! are equal were unflinchingly applied, ’ the consequences would be “the practical extinction of the white race in all of the two Americas, and in Africa, Australia and Asia, .the dwindling remnant being absorbed wholly in the flood of coloured peoples. It is probable that in Europe descendants of the present .populations would survive for a longer period ; but there also they would be but a dwindling remnant. . . Europe would feel severely the economic competition of untold millions of lower culture and lower standards of living organised in vast industrial armies in all other parts of ' the world." . Coolies would swarm into Eunopean countries to undertake unskilled “jobs,” for then there would be no race prejudice to exclude them, and the collapse would be swift. Within the highest races there is further a danger arising from “the destruction of all those prerogatives which brainworkers have enjoyed, in every flourishing civilisation, and which are essential to such flourishing.” | It threatens ■: to bring steady de--1 terioration, and produce throughout ’J the world a population that would J spend all of its leisure jigging to the S jolly strains of jazz bands, gazing at -i sensational,- trivial “movies,” and ap- ’ plauding the herpes of the milder

forms of gladiatorjal combat. After a brief space of time the Fatty. Arbuckles, the Charlie Chaplins, the Babe Ruths, and the Queens of the Musical Revue would reign supreme. - A NEW PRINCIPLE. Mr McDougall warm us that we are “nearing the close of a great and unique period” in world-history. The tremendous advance of science is reaching its term : “Mankind has now to return and adjust its customs to something like the old order of things, namely, an approximately stationary population.” The new stagnation is being accelerated when, as in the United States, bacteriologists become bricklayers, because the rewards of brain work are so miserably inadequate. He has a special thrust at Mr Wells’ paradises and tells Mr Wells that in them “consumption would soon vastly outstrip production” (which means starvation for all, as in Russia). Finally, he gives this new principle, Which mankind should strive to realise in the nation —not the greatest happiness of the living generation, but “the highest happiness of the greatest number enduring through an indefinitely prolonged future.” This, he says, is the goal—this and not what he calls “ultra-democracy.”