WELLS' ATTACK.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 19, 24 January 1939, Page 5

WELLS' ATTACK.

"POISON HISTORY." . r ARTIFICIAL NATIONALISM, j SCIENTISTS SCOXH IDEAS. ] _____ ( I Tram Out Owa Correspondent.) SYDNEY, January 10. j Brief indications, rather than Reports, of sectional papers at the Science Con- , gress at Canberra gave place to big dis- < plays in Sydney newspapers of Mr. H. G. Wells' expectantly awaited paper on "The Poison Called History." "The world is being torn to pieces by old ideas armed with new and spiteful weapons," said Mr. Wells. "You see conceptions of national conquest, ascendancy, glory, revengeances and sentimental releases. Old-fashioned conceptions all of them, equipped with destructive power beyond all previous times. "None of these ideas is an innate Idea. They have been 'taught' to people. They have been imposed upon them. If you changed at birth all the babies of one country for those of another, they would grow up patriots of their land of education. They would fight, only they would fight the other way round. "Nationalism, plainly, Is the purest artificiality. It is made by the teaching of history—by parents, friends, flags, ceremonies—by the persistent pressure of the school, Jrnt mainly in the school. XVew History. "There are two sorts of history—an. old traditional history, which is out of date and decaying and becoming more and more poisonous, and a new sort of history, which is essentially human biology and which arises naturally and necessarily out of the mighty revolution in biological thought that has happened in the past hundred years, and which has also been tremendously assisted in development in the last 40 years and men by archaeological work.

"If we want the world to become a consistent whole, we must think of l it as a whole, and it must think of v itself as a whole. We must cease to 1 deal with States, nations, and empires i as primary things which have to be i reconciled and welded together; we i must deal with them as secondary j things which have appeared and disappeared almost incidentally in the course of a larger and longer biological adventure. Education, I insist, which made i these boundaries, can wipe them out 1 completely. • "I propose that the present division J of historical teaching into the chiefly political history' of localities, of countries, of selected peoples, of periods, 1 should be absolutely and completely 1 scrapped. I propose that the teaching of ' Greek history, Latin history, Jewish, or ' Bible history, English history, French J •history, medieval history, German \ history, our Island Story, the Empire, and so on and so on, as separate subjects, shall be entirely abandoned. • "And, instead, I suggest that in teach- | ing the history of mankind, we approach ( the story from the biological side. We begin with the conception of small subhuman family groups scattered about the world, almost completely unaware of ( other." We trace the development of speech, of gesture, of drawing, and we show how these beginnings of com- , munication and understanding , led inevitably to larger communities. Healthy Food. , "The history of communication, the ■ historv of implements, and the intelli- , gent study of the consequences of this ■ progress and extension of human mentality is infinitely simpler and truer than ; any of the old history. It's healthy food, ' whereas your race-and-nation stuff is poison food. Children like it better; it is the primary shape of history. "My conviction of the extraordinary uselessness of the old history in our treatment of modern problems has been i very much quickened in the last few f years by my excitement over two pars ticular questions. One of these is the f continuing steady ill-will of large sec- • tions of the American community to--1 wards Britain and of influential sections - of th® British community towards - America. The other question is the far 1 more moving and tragic situation of the - Jew in the modern world. _ Both these 9 questions-concern the establishment and ;. growth of alegsad. I

"In the United States of America you have a vast population of the most varied origins. Only a very small element had even a single ancestor on either side in the War of Independence, but you will meet American citizens still epeak- ] ing with a strong German accent who glory in their victory at Bunker Hill. "Christian Mythology." "But the greatest and most astounding •story masked and hidden beneath the misrepresentations of the old history 1 is the Judaea Christian mythology that has set the Jewish people apart from the rest of mankind. "I can imagine no more dreadful position in the world to-day than to be an intelligent Jew with a clear sense of reality. However great his gifts, he j is going to be more or less frustrated. He is a marked man. It is not good his claiming to be a citizen of the world. i The Gentile world will not have it. It will say, 'No, you are a Jew,' and the Jewish world will not have it. It will say, 'Remember, you are a Jew. Stick to your own people.' Never has this dilemma had such long and sharp horns as it has to-day. "Until we have had a strenuous cleaning up of history teaching in both Christian and Jewish education, this miserable and tragic discord will enfeeble the intellectual processes of mankind hikl spoil the lives of innumerable people. "1 cite the Jewish question as a particularly bad instance of the distortion of human life by the poison called ! history. You are not going to do anv- ' thing to turn the world from its evil 1 course by assembling all these poisoned ' histories, sewing them together with 1 that weak, rotten string, the League of » Nations, and imagining they will act ' as* antidotes to each other. "They have outlived their use; they decay; they become poisonous. If the r young ■ Hercules of a new world is to r live, its first feat must be to strangle l the tangled coil of poisonous old hisr tories in its cradle." The discussion next day on Mr. Wells' s paper was very disappointing. It - seemed that he had come 12.000 miles - only to find Australia's scientific leaders a still living in the Victorian age, which she left behind «0 years ago. For they r scorned his ideas and appeared like b Browning to be convinced that despite e Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, 1 Spain and China—all's right with the world. _ ...