CIVILISATION A NUISANCE.

Shannon News, 7 December 1923, Page 4

CIVILISATION A NUISANCE.

G.B.S. QUESTIONS ITS NEED. Is civilisation decaying ? This question is to be answered by six of the cunctators of the Fabian Society at a series of lectures to be given in the Kang’s Hall next month. Five of them—-Mr. Sidney Webb, M.P., Mr. H. J. Laski, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, ... Mr. , St.' John Ervine, and Mr. R. H. Tawney—answer in the affirmative. 1 But the sixth, Mr Bernard Shaw, winds up with another question: “Is civilisation desirable ? ” Here are some of the heads of his discourse: —

“ The promptitude with which this question is answered in the affirmative is always in the inverse ratio to the sensitiveness, intelligence, culture, and experience of the person answering it. “ Civilisation is mainly a device for establishing and securing . individual property; and individual property, outside very narrow limits, is a nuisance.

“ Nine-tenths of our people' are wasting their lives in a hopeless attempt to acquire more property than they need; the remaining tenth waste theirs in lpoking aftpr and increasing the superfluous property they already possess. “ Life in poor countries is visibly easier than in rich ones. “ Comfort is civilisation; and comfort, like property, is a nuisanae. “ Nothing is more certain than that hardship is necessary to health, and that preoccupation with comfort is the deadliest sort of hypochondria. “ The supercomfortable are the natural prey of the operating surgeons; while the Esquimaux, who do not know what comfort is, are apparently the only happy and healthy people now in existence. ' “ Civilisation is also an imposition of clothing, housing, and cleanliness.

The right to sleep out and to be reasonably dirty is championed only by tramps and beachcombers. “ The benighted bourgeois bars, the way to his. own salvation, in the name of what he calls alls the decencies of life.” j ,