The Small Boy's Birthday

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 74, 22 November 1940, Page 4

The Small Boy's Birthday

ITHOUT printing it is difficult to imagine ships or motor cars; radios, aeroplanes, or hydro-electricity. The age of industry might have arrived without Gutenberg, but it could never have come so quickly. As a contributor claims on Page 8 of this issue, printing is man’s most important invention. And it is more than that. It is man’s most dangerous invention. Man’s ingenuity has always outdistanced his intelligence. Printing gave facility a start from which felicity has never quite recovered. It empowered the crank at the expense of the philosopher, just as the ‘aeroplane empowers the maniac at the expense of the masses, and the radio empowers the propagandist at the expense of human integrity. It has united men in units huge beyond man’s power of social organisation. For every Socrates whose work it has preserved it has discovered a million prosecutors to offer the cup of hemlock. It is the ally of distortion and perversion. Where there is one truth, printing circulates one hundred lies. It deals dangerously in dangerous material; the queer incaleulable stuff of which men’s minds are made. And yet, for all the penny-dreadfuls that moulder in dead places, there are those few good books that men still cherish, as the libraries will show us this month when they celebrate the 500th anniversary of printing. When the aeroplane drops bombs, we are apt in these times to remember the horror and forget the machine marvel that carries it. When the radio cries havoc, it is easy to forget that it also makes music. When the presses deliver stupidity, we cannot easily look back to Shakespeare through the mask of our despair for man. But these hopes that appear through our fears are the beacons on which we must keep our eyes. History keeps them burning, and the future will light more. We must see them through the darkness of the present and remember always that mankind is not very much older than the invention he is celebrating next week,