FLYING BEFORE WE WALK: SUPERMEN AND SUBMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 140, 27 February 1942, Page 10

FLYING BEFORE WE WALK:

SUPERMEN AND SUBMEN

The Prospects of Civilisation

(Abridgement of a talk by PROF.

C. E.

M. JOAD

broadcast from the BBC)

about our civilisation is the disparity between our power and our wisdom, between, if you like to put it like that, our mastery of the means to a good life and our knowledge of how to live it, or to put it in still another way, between our science on the one hand and our ethics, which is concerned with a good life for individual men and women, and our politics, which is concerned with a good life for communities of men and women, on the other. In respect of our power, the power which science has given us to tap the hidden forces of nature and harness them to our use, we’ve outstripped. all our predecessors. In respect of our wisdom, of our knowledge of how to use our power, of our knowledge, that is to say, of how to live, we are no further really distinctive thing

forward, in fact in some respects we are not so far advanced, as the ancient Athenians. Science has given us powers fit for the Gods, and to their use we bring the mentality of schoolboys or savages, Take an example of my own experience just before the war. Here am I sitting in the library of a small house in the country — just come in from riding a horse on our Sussex downs. I am disturbed, profoundly apprehensive, at the course of events, so disturbed that instead of going out to pick some peas. which is what I had intended to do, I turn on the radio to listen to the news. But instead of being, six o'clock, when we get our first evening broadcast of the news, it is only half past five. So instead of news what do I hear? What does this miraculous voice say? "Ladies and gentlemen, Syd Hambone will now sing ‘Tripe and Onions’". If I had been in the United States I suppose it would have recounted to me

the virtues of a toothpaste or chewing gum. That voice exemplifies the contrast on which I want to work, the contrast between the marvel of our powers and the imbecility of the use to which we put them. A Tragic Example Have I taken a trivial example? Let me take a tragic one. Let us consider the case of the aeroplane. Think of the knowledge that went into the making of a machine which, heavier than air, would yet remain in the air, The knowledge of dynamics, of mechanics, of electricity and internal combustion. Think of the ingenuity in application of that knowledge, the skill in the workings of woods and metals, the power to tap the hidden forces of our planet involved in the production of oil, and the generation of electricity required in the working of the internal combustion engine. Such knowledge would suggest that the inventors of the aeroplane were supermen, Take too the intrepidity and the resolution that were shown by the early flying men who were prepared to trust their bodies to these hazardous machines. They were positive heroes. Now consider the purposes for which the aeroplane has been used in the past and seems increasingly likely to be used in the future-to drop bombs~and shatter and burn and dismember and mutilate totally defenceless people. So that, as a woman novelist said to me a week or two ago, and I thought it a good description of modern war from a woman’s point of view, "Modern art is a running away with one’s children, and not being able to run fast enough." Supermen and Submen Those, you would sa¥, were the qualities not of angels: but of devils. Mr. H. G. Wells put it in one of his inspired pages, "the superman made the aeroplane and the subman has got hold of it." The case of the radio and the case of the aeroplane I take to be typical -typical of the powers which science has given us and the way in which we use them. We can talk across continents and oceans, or install television sets in the home, ride above and beneath the surface of the earth and the sea, and we English can go to the middle of Australia and there we can listen to Big Ben striking. Liners have swimming baths, photographs speak and sing, Xrays are the windows through which we can look at and photograph our insides, shops are lighted by electricity, murderers tracked down by radio, roads are made of rubber, and so on. Yet take an example from the debit side of the account. We can’t in the midst of our enormous cities afford a little space where poor children can play in safety, with the result that in our craving for speed we kill them off in this (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) country alone at the rate of six thousand a year, and injure them to the tune of some 250,000. Now all that leads me to a general reflection on science in its place in modern civilisation. Science is in a sense the good fairy of our world. In a thousand ways it has brightened and ennobled human life. It has given us warmth and light, cheap clothes, and paved streets. It has lessened our toil and relieved our pain, so that we have come to worship science as a sort of god, thinking of it as an unmixed good and blessing. Yet science in itself is neither a good thing nor a bad. In point of fact’ it is ethically neutral. What science does is to enable human beings to satisfy their desires and to further their purposes. If their desires and purposes are on the whole good and make for human welfare, this added power of satisfying, this increased ability to further that science has given us, is correspondingly good. If they are on the whole harmful and make for human misery, then the _ increased ability to satisfy, the added power cf furtherance is correspondingly evil. What Science Does to States Now, though individual men and women are neither particularly good nor particularly bad, but mixed, nevertheless by some miracle, a mystery that none of us could claim to understand, those communities of individuals that we call states, seem in the main (if we can judge from history) to have been predominantly bad, in the sense that the desires by which they have been inspired have made on the whole for human misery. They have been desires for the conquest of rival powers, the humiliation and enslavement of weaker peoples, desires inspired by greed and lust of power. So what science has in fact done has been to give to human nature an enormously greater desire than it ever had before of throwing its weight about, of in fact doing its stuff, with the result that our civilisation is

hanging on the verge of destruction through the sheer inability to control the powers which science has so embarrassingly placed at our disposal. I-once sat next to an Indian philosopher at a public function. I looked at my Indian. What on earth, I thought, am I going to talk to him about. I didn’t exactly fall so low as to cash in on the weather. What I did do was to fall back on the morning paper which that day had reported some new marvel of our civilisation. I forget what it was. Somebody, I think, had just succeeded in flying an ~eroplane in 24 hours from Moscow to New York, or was it 24 days? I really don’t remember, but anyway very, very fast. There was a tremendous fuss about it in the papers, and I, in conventional talk as one does, fell back upon the morning papers and echoed their wonder. "What an astonishing feat,".I said. "Wasn’t it wonderful?" He turned to me, looked me quietly in the eyes. "Yes," he said, "it is wonderful, and yours is a wonderful civilisation. You can fly in the air like birds and you can swim in the sea like fishes, but how to walk upon the earth you don’t yet know." .