WHAT IS CIVILISATION?

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4016, 23 February 1938, Page 2

WHAT IS CIVILISATION?

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE. “In what, after all, does civilisation consist?” asked Viscount Samuel in his presidential address on “Civilisation” to the British Institute of Philosophy in London. “If Japanese aggression in China were successful would it bring to the Chinese a higher civilisation or subject them to a lower? Sidney and Beatrice Webb entitled their spacious survey of presentday Russia “Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?” with a query at the end. In a postscript to that book they give reasons why they think that query may be omitted. But Hitler, Mussolini and Franco assert that Communism is not a civilisation at all, but an embodiment of the forces of destruction, to be resisted at all costs and to the death. “The philosophy which a nation receives,” wrote Emerson, “rules its religion, poetry, politics, arts, trades and whole history. But the nations of to-day did not receive, or at all events did not accept, any coherent philosophy of any kind. The reason obviously came from the disagreements among philosophers. “But where is philosophy to find its title to dominate? Fox* my own part I feel convinced that we shall find firm ground, that we shall be able to make a fresh start with any hope of success only if philosophy, with full deliberation, accepts science as its basis. Premises for philosophy, I firmly believe, can be found nowhere but in the conclusions of science. The civilisation that may come cannot be materialist. It. will not lay too much emphasis on “things.” Let each nation do honour to those of its members who are engaged in material production, but I cannot imagine a really great civilisation being content to take as its symbol the tools of industry and agriculture, the hammer and the sickle, or spending for long its chief enthusiasm upon factories and tractors. When the “fictional abstractions,” as Vaihinger calls them, have disappeared the individual man will be left clear cut against the sky, no longer enshrouded by metaphysical mists. State, nation, industrial corporations,* and the like, will see for what they are, nothing more than groupings of patterns of men and women. Then may be ended the domination of political myths; peoples will no longer be willing to surrender the right to think for themselves. Among the truisms, among the things that are obvious, is the infinite mischief done by the two great evils of the modern world —war and poverty. Mankind will come to see that by far the greatest danger to its own welfare is the existence of States which combine technical strength with moral weakness, the possession of great means with indifference to good ends. Nor will the future be likely to tolerate that mingling of splendour and squalor which the twentieth century has inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth —a brilliant garment on a body dirty and diseased. We see that the movement towards such ends as these has already succeeded in setting a fresh value on simplicity. Ari follows, as always, the predominant trend of thought. We see it now no longer creating ornament for ornament’s sake; catering less for private luxury and more for ordinary things. We cannot doubt that that tendency will develop. It is easy to stress the evils of-the civilisation that is now around us. We may easily come to think that it offers little else than evils. Yet the men of the Middle Ages, could they re-appear, would envy us our freedom from the more constant wars, the more desperate poverty, the widespread ignorance, the unchecked diseases and constant epidemics from which they suffered. The study of the conditions of the past is often the best cure for pessimism about the present. “All the great ages have had confidence in themselves and in the future, have been forward looking, not critical merely and parasitical upon the past. So philosophy coming out, of its phase of classicism, science coming out of its phase of materialism, and religion from its servitude to dogmas that are outworn may join in constructing a spiritual and intellectual framework for the future. They may give to mankind clear-cut ideas, simple, easily grasped, alive in the mind and powerful to guide conduct. “Melliorism” may become a key word —the discard, that is to say, of both optimism and pessimism, with emphasis on the need and the hopefulness of effort to make things better.