WORLD HAS REACHED END OF SCIENTIFIC TRAIL

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5319, 4 February 1947, Page 7

WORLD HAS REACHED END OF SCIENTIFIC TRAIL

"I do not make events. Events make me." Keep in inind these words Abe Lincoln turned on a flatterer who extolled him as a maker of history.. We shall all need clear insight' into this truth as we grope for new leaders for this Atomic Age, writes Walter B. Pitkin, American author $,nd psychologist in The Rotarian. The old leaders will not do. Events of the pre- Atomic Age made them. They excelled in matters of an era now dead. The best river pilot is not likely to steer a bombing plane well, on short notice. General George Marshall woul^ be the first to disqualify himself as ari expert in the atom-rocket war over the North Pole which General H. H. Arnold so glibly predlcts. Cavalry tactics do not work with ' atom rockets. Before the horse is saddled, the rocket wipes out Chicago!

This symbolises the Atomic Age. : It probes the weaikness of niany a well- \ planned progTamme too. Education i systems, for instance. Dr. F'oster Ken-^ ^ nedy thinks we need more schools. He : has come out for compulsory educa- J tion right up to the age of 60. Every ' five years adults would have to knock off from work to study for six month's. Only thus, argues this noted • New York neurologist, can democracies reach a level of intelligence that will enable them to pidk and follow the right leaders. A good idea — 'but who will teach the millions? Miss Jones, the highschool algebra teacher? Mr. Emmet'hury, the grade-school principal? I am not making fun of these good people. I am merely stating the obvious; teachers of an age now dead cannot, in a twinkling, convert themselves into Atomic Age experts. No, not even by. attending two summer schools'. What of To-morrow. It is a pity — but the old teachers won't do. How ahout the old principles? Back in the pre- Atom Age we used to teach that "a soft answer turneth away wrath." Did it at Munich? And we lived by the rule of "when in doubt, do nothing." Maybe that shrewd old principle worked out in the buying and selling of baled hay, but if, being in doubt, we now do nothing about defence agairtst atomic warfare, we shall one day find oiurselves all neatly reduced to briefly radioactive dust. And so we come back to where we started: bow about to-morrow's leaders. The nuclear physicist who found out how to split the atom has made survival our No. 1 concem. So, our first step is to train physicists and engineers in the new science of the atom-— -to see >us through. We may have to spend the next 20 years at this struggle for mere survival. Then what? Must Scek Cause. If we are intelligent, we seek eauses and by controlling them, control effects. If we cannot control either, then we take steps to soften them. What, now, are the great eauses of our woes? Nearly all our trooibles, save only those caused by viruses and bacteria and insects, spring from ignorance, stupidity, malice, and ego. Vague words, maybe, but they point to people in places doing things from hour to ho'ur. I use the vague words as shorthand. We need at least four kinds of leaders, then one kind for each human evil. They must be scientists and technicians, not money-makers, and not fame seekers. They must be free to spend their lives with their problems. What are these problems I can give only a few samples here. Start with ignorance. What are its eauses?' Many. Our leader investigates each county and each grotip of institutions. He finds, for example, that down to 1943 not a single Australian could learn anything about the history of the United States in any Australian school or college. "Down under" nobody was interested in North America outside of Canada. Our investigator dipping into the past, also finds that a generation ago Ouba used a geography hook showing, in a map, Cuba almost as big as the United States. Capses of of ignorance ? "Wjhat else ? There must be another hundred like them. New Press Freedom. Two centuries ago the Englishspeaking people led the world in a drive for a free Press. To-morrow somebody must' go far beyond that old and glorious campaign and invent techniques of discovering facts and of reporting them continuously, objectively, and repeatedly to the world's people. Radio, as we'know it, will never do the job. Nor will the movies. Perhaps the newspapers may hit on a method. It scares me to think that nobody knows how to inform everybody else even on the simplest matters. We have no efficient device for telling the world wliat events mean. This is the major crisis of the human race in the opening decade of the Atomic Age. Denmarlc showed what a nation can do about ignorance. Som° years ago it started its People's Workers' Schools and in two short generations, illiterate, inpoverished peasants became clear thinkers, world-minded and able to hold their own against the insidious propaganda and tryanny of the Nazis. After Dunkirk the Brtiish knew, to their sorrow, that they must enlighten their soldiers about world affairs. So they started to school almost 4,000,000 men at top speed. While waiting the hour of invasion, these men lea*ned more about all the larger tendencies throoighout the world than most college students learn in a year. They did not become leader of men. They did become men well enough informed to know what kind of leaders they needed. Britain Carries On. Now that the war "isJ over, Britons are working on the best way to carry

on the great enlightenment. One plan oalls ,for a new university for the training of administrative -leaders which would aceept competent students from any land. Ignorance, at any rate, must go. In this Atomic Age the sure fate of the ignorant is to be regimented. The. menace of stupidity baffles us even more. Most of our political ills — was it Bolingbroke who first put the theory into words? — go back to the activities of stupid fellows with the best of intentions. ' But let's not abandon hope. A year or two before the first atomic bomb dazzled New Mexico skies, psychologists began discovering something revolutionary about dull people; a man's I.Q. can be raised by hard mental work over a long time. The mind can add a oubit to its stature by ta'king thought. Then, too," we have the faint beginnings of another attack on the dull mind. It's a medical-chemical attack. How much scientists can improve a mind with vitamins and minerals and endocrine secretions nobody knows. Some scientists go as far as did the great Carrel. They declare they al-i-eady have it in their power to begin (but not to finish) the creating of new types of people. So the Atomic Age coincides with a slowly dawning Eugenic Age. ",Ve need thousands of career men and women here. Who steps forwax-d? Intelligence Factories. In the drive to make eVerybody as intelligent as possible, we dare not look to 'Governments for aid. Too many dull fellows elect too many dull politicians to office. Only private enterprise can turn the trick. And it will. If Carnegie could endow libraries all over the world, somebody will in time bob up with a private project for endowing I.Q. factoiies. Malice, manikind's third major evil, probably cannot be prevented until we shall have enlightened the ignorant and raised the mental level of the dull by the hundreds of millions. Buddha held that malice was a primordial evil. I don't agree. The malice which wells 'up in Nordics who hate Jews, and in one kind of Christians who hate another type, and in ;Russians who hate English, and which thus wrecks thp world, is overwhelmingly a conditioned reflex. S0 training will end it, at least as a world menace. The fourth evil is by far the most dangerous. 'It is ego. Whether all ego is evil is a question we leave to the philosophers. We know that all exaggerated ego is evil and has shattered whole civilisations, and yet we who have grown up in the philsophy of democracy suffer from a profound error regarding over-jealous self-lovers. We believe in individual initiative. So we easily slip into the habit of admirinjg and even defejndtng everybiody who sets out to aehieve wealth and fame and power, n0 matter by what means. We allow the end to juistify the means. And so we help every little Hitler to wrecl: the world in his own little way. How mad we are! We love liberty, so we favour everybody who seeks it. We might as well defend every milk drinker on the grounds that milk is good to dririk! We must find many leaders who will help ns organise against egotists and self-seekers and paranoiacs. Wje must watch and test every rnan and every woman who seeks power over his fellowmen, they must be free to use every device they can get to appraise him. That they owe to themselves and to their children. The larger good must prevail, even if it brings lesser evils. In a sense, all I have been saying reaffirms what many others have said: The Atomic Age will soon end in utter disaster unless we can choose leaders. wko can deal with the eauses of disaster that lie in the nature of man. We have reached the end of the trail in developing -our power over matter. Next we must gain an even greater power over human nature. (From the Rotarian.)