The Shape Of Things To Come

Southland Times, Issue 23716, 14 January 1939, Page 4

The Shape Of Things To Come

Mr H. G. Wells, who has never shirked the ultimate conclusions of his theories, drew a melancholy | picture of the future in an address to the Science Congress, reported this morning in a cable message from Canberra. Unless mankind made “a mighty e^ol j of adjustment,” he said, 1 it could not escape either self-destruction as a species or modification into a more wary, combative, malignant type, tough and hard-hearted enough to maintain itself for a longer or a shorter age on a wardevastated planet.” This is almost the picture of a new kind of ice-age, except that man would be retreating, not from the creeping ice packs, but from the gas fumes and the shocks of a long bombardment. It is a picture, too, which many people accept in their more anxious meditations as a possible shape of things to come. But the vision of those who attempt to penetrate the future is too often concerned exclusively with the material aspects of civilization. Artists and writers depict a world of shining towers, fiUed with steel monsters, and inhabited by colourless’ people whose lives appear to be conditioned by the needs of the machines rather than by merely human impulses. Perhaps the best way of balancing the picture is by glancing into the past, where evidence can be found that there has always been some part of the human race that could be described as “wary, combative, malignant and hard-hearted,” and that there have been periods in history when almost all mankind seemed to have relapsed into a hopeless barbarism. Even at. the best of times man is a curious mixture of good and evil. But the central anomaly of the present age is the existence, in the same mental climate, of a remarkable technical skill and an undoubted moral backwardness. The latent barbarism which lurks in every civilization becomes specially dangerous when it can make use of weapons potentially more destructive than any that the world has known in previous times. And to make matters worse, the emphasis of public approval is falling on power rather than intellect, so that millions of people are passionately loyal to leaders who expound racial and ? philosophical theories of an unexampled triviality, and the mere intellectual is everywhere losing caste. These are ominous symptoms. But they have appeared before, and no doubt will appear again when future generations look back with an amused contempt on the rival ideologies of fascism and communism, which to them may seem as indistinguishable as certain rival theological creeds which differed only in the ways of spelling a single word now seem to the ' historians of this age. Mankind enters perilous paths, and fights for strange reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. But the pendulum swings back, and there is a saving grace in humanity which will not allow it to cease the struggle against its own folly and weakness. If a day came when men no longer gave up their years and strength to the search for truth, then indeed it would be time for them to seek out their caves and await the coming of a new and more adaptable species.