HORIZON OF TIME

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26777, 21 May 1948, Page 4

HORIZON OF TIME

At this stage of the year, when a fresh generation of graduates is ejected from the sheltered university cloisters, it is the custom for solemn expositions to be given of their manifest duties towards the future. All exhortations of the past notwithstanding, the world still remains unsaved. Yet more than ever, the young man of to-day holds, to use a platitude, the key to the future. That future, as some young men of to-day may view it, may be outlined in three general statements: First, a fairly large proportion of the world’s population will during £he nex t decade or two die premature and unnatural deaths. Second,, the technical and industrial base which Western peoples rest will be gravely disrupted. Third, the system of ideas and incentives—call it Western civilisation—which really sustains us will be replaced by a new system, or an old system iff a new guise. Towards these, three virtually indivisible statements it is possible to adopt one of three attitudes. First, they may be rejected as absurd, in which case an endeavour will be made to lead the life which our present culture holds out as desirable. It is a life which, despite som6 absurdities, contains the seeds of freedom and ultimate decency. There is only one thing the matter with it: unless the evidence is false, we will not be able to live it much longer. Second, the statements may be accepted with resignation or approval, implying a desire to drift along in a sort of mild coma, or the retention of the philosophy of carpe diem—dancing at the foot of a volcano. If approval is indicated, it is evidence of the fact that it is a grave error to believe that all men love freedom. Many have a deep passion for dictatorship, while others have an equal passion for servility. The third approach would be to investigate the statements — the probability of their truth and the methods, in case the degree is found dangerously high, of averting catastrophe. This investigation would, of course, require research into all that has been written about the atom. It would appear from such study that the atomic bomb is less a weapon' of war than a method of genocide. The history of inventions would suggest that it was but one of a series with more lethal weapons to come, and this might be linked with the historically proven fact that improvements in the art of war tend to accompany set-backs to civilisation.

On these thoughts may be based the young man of to-day’s curriculum for advanced studies in survival. It may be that two major conclusions would be reached: That the advent of atomic warfare has entailed, the establishment of a fundamentally new relationship among men, nations, and the physical energy that science has released; and that it is imperative all men should cultivate the ability to think detachedly about the problems of to-day. When the outlook has been broadened to include a conception of the possibility of a major cataclysm, then it will be possible to think intelligently of methods to avert it. If the of thinking becomes great, the scale of actions will become correspondingly great. That the actions of to-day’s graduates must be great and not small, rooted in the future and not in the past, is obvious from the circumstance that our present dilemma is great and not small, unique and not traditional. The world, indeed, lies with the clear-thinking youth of to-day.