MUST WE PROGRESS?

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 150, 26 June 1937, Page 26 (Supplement)

MUST WE PROGRESS?

CIVILISATION'S DANGERS TO-DAT. i AN ARCHAEOLOGIST'S BOOK. i Is civilisation to-day on the up grade or on the down grade? The question occurs to many with increasing frequency as they learn from time to time of new mechanical inventions, or new developments of old ones, and learn also of how these inventions are being perverted to destructive purposes. Another war, against which all nations prepare and arm themselves, would, so we are told, "mean the end of civilisation." What does the phrase mean? What is "civilisation," and what is "progress"? These are questions upon which a distinguished British archaeologist, Mr. Herbert Casson, has been reflecting, and the product of his reflections is a book called "Progress and Catastrophe" (Hamieh Hamilton), a remarkable, disquieting but also a stimulating book.

As an archaeologist Mr. Casson thinks of centuries as the ordinary man thinks of decades, and he is able to look back into pre-history, to the dawn of civilisation in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. This he does in order to examine the sources and to trace the subsequent courses of human activity, to learn, if possible, the secrets of "this mysterious process of advancement which we call Progress," to find out "whether the advance of one period is ever really indebted to the progressive discoveries of that which preceded it, whether we advance only to retire, or advance five steps to slide back only three." IVaw of Mutual Aid. Archaeological studies have convinced Mr. Casson that implicit in the principle of the evolution of species there is besides the law of self-preservation,, the law of mutual aid; that within a species there is a deeply ingrained tendency to •"'stick together" against external danger. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he thinks, emphasised the former law and minimised or even omitted to consider the latter. The idea expressed in the phrase "collective security" is not a new one, but one of the very oldest. "Civilisation has always two dangers confronting it —the first is when its material development strides far ahead of its moral and intellectual endowment; the second is when its moral and spiritual advance exceeds its material equipment." And civilisation has suffered two great collapses, the first occurring 12 centuries before Christ, the second about 500 A.D. In connection with the latter, Mr. Casson quotes from the letters of Sidonius, who lived from about 431 to 489. He was a typical Roman country gentleman, and his letters reflect his growing uneasiness at the changes going on about him.

"What had happened was that standards had fallen. Element* wholly alien to Roman rule and. Roman freedom had emerged. In v the letters of Sidoniue we hear of censorship, of political murder disguised as accident, of bribery and corruption in high places, and even of persecution of the .Tews." Mr. Casson also gives a vivid description' of what happened in Britain when the Romans withdrew.

"Barbarism Here Among Us.* But what bearing has all this (briefly, and inadequately summarised) on the state of the world to-day? A great deal, Mr. Casson is convinced. He sees raging in Europe "that most venomous of all the diseases of humanity, the splitting up of a homogeneous whole into warring parts." "Barbarism, the ancient and perpetual foe of progress, is here among us, no longer on the outskirts. . . . What passes now as Justice and Freedom in a Fascist State is nothing more thap a label attached to a corpse. We are living, like Sklonius, in an age when caricatures of the main elements of civilisation masquerade before deluded peoples as a Xew Age, a Renaissance of the nations." Worst of all is the idea fostered by dictatorships that a people may he regenerated by war. "They are using that ancient defence of civilisation as a prevention of external collapse. Instead of using war to prevent barbaric intrusions or barbaric internal dissensions, the barbarians themselves have decided that war is to cure them of their barbarism. Lunacy could devise nothing more fantastic." The main purpose of the book is to provide reflection, "for from reflection comes new invention and fresh hope." The ordinary reader may find its conclusions depressing, but not more than some of the day-to-day events reported in the cables. Even if he rejects the conclusions as unwarranted he will gain from Mr. Casson's admirably lucid survey of the past a fuller appreciation of the nature of the problems of the present.