NEXT CIVILISATION

Evening Star, Issue 20118, 7 March 1929, Page 1

NEXT CIVILISATION

MAY BE NEGRO OR CHINESE GROWTH fi. BERNARD SHAW'S VIEWS. Winding up the course of six 1-abian lectures on Western civilisation by discusssng ite future, Bernard Shaw said recently he did not know whether it augured well for the future of civilisation that Lx men and women had been talking about a subject ou which they could not. possibly know imy* thing. Civilisations pas.-:ed away, and he was not at all sure that the next growth would be an English or even a Western one; it might' bo a negro or Chinese growth. 4, lengthy protest followed against Bertrand Russell’s and J. B. S. Haldane’s glorification of what they called the “ scientific man.” and his methods, and their generalisation that the next age would be called a “scientific age.” Mr Haldane (according to Mr Shawl denied the term scientific man to one who. only generally believed ana acted on,evidence: the evidence must be manufactured, and manufactured in a laboratory. -non no had something- to say about professionalism. He. declared; "The. professions, speaking quite roughly, at the present tune are all humbug.” Ha deplored (hat it. was only under the stress and strain of war that some needed s-eforms could be- achieved—such as summer tune. For instance, how many wars would be required to combine the advantage of the decimal notation with a duodecimal measure of commodities? The difficulty with 10 was that while it could be halved it could not be quartered,- while with 12 we could have half, quarter, third, etc. AH that, was necessary, as Heibert Spencer pointed out, was to put in two additional numbers l>efore 10. He bojved that the trend* - *)?- civilisation would be to increase self-sufficiency. "And (ben,” ho concluded, "everybody will be like me.’ In this connection Mr Shaw indulged in an illuminating piece of autobiography: ” I have often thought of' what has been my lot in life. I have walked through the ■streets of London as a young man, and I have seen all the tremendous display of wealth of every kind, of sport and luxury; and I could not buy a single farthing's worth of it. If there had been a Woolworth’s' store at that time I could not have gone in, because I had not got literally a penny. I could not go to a. theatre because I could not afford the price of a gallery seat. * ■‘Later on in life, by a chapter of accidents. there came about a time when I walked about the streets of London, and I had money enough to buy any of those things, from a box at the opera to a RollsRoyce motor car, without imposing any sensible privation-on myself; and, curiously, the result was exactly the same. I went home. There was nothing that.l wanted.”