THE FAITH OF A REVOLUTIONARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 198, 9 April 1943, Page 6

THE FAITH OF A REVOLUTIONARY

More Phosphorus And Less Fear

(From a BBC talk by

H. G.

WELLS

FEW weeks ago, the BBC arranged for a series of talks by acknowledged authorities on the reshaping of man’s heritage through science, © Twelve talks on the place of biology in the scheme were compéred by H. G, Wells. Here, slightly abridged, is his introductory address:

who. considers the doctrines of the Communist Party, as you get them for example in the Daily Worker, 50 years behind the times. I don’t ask you to prepare for a new world, because I realise that a New World is here now. The question is whether our species, we, our children and our children’s children, can adapt ourselves and conquer the new world, or whether we are going to spin down this vortex to extinction: extinction which has been the fate of all the mighty races of animals that have lorded it over the world in the past. What, briefly, is this New World, this new state of affairs that confronts mankind? It has a three-fold aspect. First, there is what is called the abolition of distance. Things have become simultaneous throughout the earth. Thirty years ago, to think of one super government throughout the world was an impossible dream. Now it is an imperative necessity. Next comes the enormous increase of available power, which at present is used mainly for destruction. All the mechanical-power, wind-power, horse-power, water-power, used in the England of Queen Elizabeth for a week, would not equal that released in a moment by one 8,000-Ib. bomb. Thirdly, the unskilled work of slaves and such-like toilers can be and is being largely superseded by powerdriven mechanism. The old social pyramid has vanished. Mankind has no further use for serfs and slaves. The New World ahead must therefore be an equalitarian society. . Not Opinions, But Facts! These are not views I am stating, but manifest facts. For 10 or 12 thousand years, not more, since men took to agriculture and organised warfare, there has been no real human community. There has been a world of masters and men, what Disraeli called the Two Nations. Now for these three reasons I have stated, there is no choice before mankind but a world-wide control of power and production-world-wide, no lessand a world-wide scrapping of our inheritance of hates and aggressions that began less than a thousand generations ago, when wars began. We have to nerve ourselves for that, and there is no other way for us, : Obviously this world control must be something over and above the patchwork of governments we inherit, They arose from militant necessities; they remain militant and competitive. But plainly it is the commonsense of the world situation that, over and above these old divisions, a group of commissions to rehabilitate our disordered world should be established as soon as possible by the victors in the present J AM an extreme revolutionary

struggle, To these commissions all the governments of the world must surrender their sovereign rights to practise economic and political aggression against one another, That has been done already within the U.S.A., within the U-.S.S.R., and in Great Britain and some, but not all, of the Dominions which have replaced the old British Empire, where people of the most varied creeds, cultures, and languages live in free and open co-operation. It has to be done, and done still more completely, throughout the world, Life is Phosphates Professor Armstrong used to take my Socialistic optimism down a peg by pointing out that human productivity depends upon the supply of phosphates in the world, and that is ‘a limited and dwindling quantity. Sir Frederick Keeble has been discussing this recently. So far as our present methods of conducting human affairs go, the process is as follows. Every year, a certain limited amount of phosphates is dissolved out of disintegrating rocks, brought to the surface and made available for plants. Flood and stream bear much of it directly to the sea, but some is intercepted, forest and pasture flourish, and animal life consuming this green stuff increases until it outruns the supply. Then the vitality of the land diminishes: Long before winter, pasture, gardens, trees go brown, feed for the cattle diminishes, milk decreases. The soluble phosphates have found their way into the sea. We Must Dig Deep Human life is an incident in the passage of phosphorus from the at present inaccessible rocks, lying below those in the geological series, to the abyss. In a fragmentary way, we supplement the supply by the use of such natural fertilisers as Chilean guano, now almost exhausted, phosphates which have been snatched back for us at the last moment by fish-eating sea fowl, or we resort to basic slag and kindred foundry products to enrich our fields. A good farmer heartens his ground in this way; his neighbour may ar may not do the same. But directly we turn our minds to the possibilities of a collective world control of Nature, we realise that the meagre supplies of soluble phosphates from decaying rocks, volcanic upheaval and the like, upon which all life-all lifehitherto, has subsisted, may be enormously increased and replaced by an immeasurably vaster abundance. It is only a question of going deep. We can imagine a united, empowered, and altogether more intelligent New World driving shafts deep into the earth, pursuing the lurking phosphates into those depths from which they now emerge so meagrely and reluctantly; we can imagine a smiling succession of fertili-

ties, and so easy will food-getting become that with the greater part of our planet our kind will make a pleasant garden, a variety of habitations for their varied and expanding lives, Let me turn now to the horrible and tragic waste of human lives that has been going on since, five hundred generations ago, war and subjugation broke upon mankind, This period of five hundred generations, a mere yesterday in the long history of this. globe, was spent for the great majority of human beings in abjection and frustration, Winwood Reade, in his immortal book, has called these 12 or 15 thousand years The Martyrdom of Man, and maybe it was a necessary schooling for our species. I do not recognise the necessity, but anyhow, this ugly interlude in the life of our planet is mounting now to its catastrophic end, and a further question, far more fundamental even than the pfosphate question, is what has to be done with the immense majority who are being emancipated by the New World, a majority from which even the laziest, most inveterately stupid ruling-class minds surely canriot expect a return to subjection, service, and uncritical acquiescence, Re-Education of the World Qur human heritage, indeed, is a devastated estate of undeveloped or distorted possibilities. One can only guess what proportion of human beings in the past missed the slightest chance of selfdevelopment, how many mute inglorious Miltons died in silence, how’ many potential Newtons never learnt to read, The supreme task before our awakening minds is the re-education of the world. Given world unity and world sanity that would now be an easy task. We have in the radio, the film, in the facility for the rapid transport of material and specimens, all that is needed to cover the whole world with schools, and in the multitude of quickened minds this struggle has evoked a supply of men and women who have discovered that by teaching we learn. There are claptrap phrases about backward races and inferior peoples. These are the foolish excuses by which those who still hope to go on at an advantage over their fellow-creatures camouflage their own foolishly base dreams. There are no backward races. (Continued on next page)

MAN’S HERITAGE (Continued from previous page) All over the earth babies start from scratchy full of distinctive and untried possibilities, which the New World will develop eagerly. Here you will find folks with a superlative sense of rhythm like the Negro; here great mechanical genius, like the Australian black fellow; here a genius for system like the French, or an obstinate unteachable originality of thought like the English. If our world educational organisation has its schools everywhere, and nothing but imaginative meanness makes that even seem impossible, instead of that small fraction of people we shall have the majority of mankind inventing, responding, contributing with honour and self-respect to the rehabilitation of our so-nearly-lost inheritance. And what our physically and mentally emancipated race will make of its collective property dazzles and blinds the imagination. I will not venture any suggestions upon the art and particularly the architecture of the possible future. About music and mathematical science I can say nothing, But I do know that there is no field in the vast realm of experimental science where there is not a crying need for multitudes of workers to go into problems for which at present men are lacking.

There.are possible enlargements of individual human faculties with which I have no time to deal now. Then, great as are the achievements of chemistry, of mineralogy, of prospecting and exploration, I believe every research chemist will echo Sir Isaac Newton’s saying that he is as yet merely picking up pebbles on the beach of an unfathomable ocean. Face up to your inheritance, and this ever-growing knowledge, this ever-growing power, will be among the first fruits of your estate. And what stands in the way of these achievements? Fear, When I say fear, I mean fear of life, Great multitudes fear life more than death, Death to many people has presented itself as a form of escape from living. Apart from suicide and self-exposure, there is for most of us, after the early enterprise of healthy youth, a dread of novel problems. We have to be called up to them, forced to face them, and we crave to return to the old conditions as soon as possible. Multitudes of people have their minds deliberately crippled from birth. They are told they must not read; they must not listen. Down the ages there is a long record of book-burning and the persecution of victims who have had no right to reply. The Nazi book-burn-ing was only the last chapter in the black record of intolerance that holds us back from our estate.