HERITAGE THREATENED

Taranaki Daily News, 7 November 1935, Page 4

HERITAGE THREATENED

FASCISM AND DISTRUST PERIL FACING LIBERALISM. PROFESSOR SEWELL’S OPINIONS. ECONOMIC SYSTEM NOT WORKING The heritage of liberalism and scepticism bequeathed to humanity by the nineteenth century is to-day. threatened politically by Fascism and spiritually by the growing belief that science is defeating the soul of man. Capitalism as an economic system is outworn in that, to protect itself, it must fortify scarcity. If civilisation is to progress man must regain his liberty and correlate the substance of his knowledge with the nature of his emotional being. These were the salient points of an address given by Professor W. A. Sewell, professor of English at Auckland University College, to the New Plymouth Round Table Club yesterday. Tracing historically _the cause of the social and economic ills preoccupying Western civilisation to-day, Professor Sewell described the nineteenth century as an age of tremendcjs geographical expansion and of exploitation of nature by man’s ingenuity. The expansiveness of its economic trend had been paralleled by its expansiveness of spirit and a bouncing optimism epitomised in the work of its poets and philosophers. Yet the two great spiritual qualities bequeathed by this age of progress were now being threatened by the exigencies of a social order that had evolved to meet conditions differing widely from the conditions of to-day. The basis of 19th. century progress had been mobility and laissez-faire. From these had evolved the ideal of liberty and the spirit of scientific inquiry. But the world had been checked in its expansiveness because geographical expansion was no longer possible and because the policy of economic freedom and laissez-faire had proved insufficient to meet the peculiar conditions of mankind’s tremendously increased productive power. This necessity for change did not, however, damage the integrity of spiritual freedom. SCEPTICISM VALUABLE ASSET. Scepticism—the scientific outlook—was almost as valuable a spiritual asset to mankind as was liberty, declared Professor Sewell. The scientific outlook was, indeed, a corollarj' of freedom, a basic thing in man’s mastery of nature. “Whatever quack remedy may be devised to cure the social ills of the world to-day,” he said, “the fact remains that the economic system itself is not working. It is not only rotten, it is a danger to society, and its mere resilience to support 2,000,000 unemployed in Britain and 10,000,000 in U.S.A, is no proo.' that it is sound.”

Expansion had ceased, Professor Sewell continued, because the world had yielded up all its riches. Man knew as much technologically and geographically to make men as happy as they could well be. In social evolution, he implied, there had been a lag. This lag, indeed, was the reason why neither America nor England nor any country in the world to-day, barring alone Russia, could afford to buy the latest development of machine-making machinery. The fact that so much work of the world could now be done by the product of the technician’s brain embarrassed the capitalistic order since Capitalism was based on the principle of organising and fortifying scarcity. Again with the exception of Russia, the Governments of the world to-day were frantically engaged in that same fortification of scarcity. Having encouraged nature to yield up its riches they must now constrict and continue to constrict.

The corollary of all these symptoms in the world of the spirit ( was the threat to liberty and scepticism, as epitomised by Fascism. Britain and the Empire, generally speaking, had as yet escaped the stifling restrictions that Italy and Germany and, to a lesser extent, Russia, had endured in the last few years. Even so grave attempts to stifle British liberty had been made, notably in the Seditious Practices Bill which had been modified only after a magnificent public protest. “Even worse,” said Professor Sewell,"“there is a kind of uncertainty in men’s minds that makes them distrust liberty—a threat to scientific outlook and reason. Men have turned their backs on science. Look what has happened in Germany to-day, where science has been prostituted only to supply more efficient instruments of destruction!” Yet another spiritual effect of economic maladjustment was a growing distrust of science, even by scientists, themselves, so tragically shown by Bertrand Russell in his book, “The Scientific Outlook,” and by Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World.” There was evidence of this escape from reason even in the dissenting churches. Expansiveness, economically and spiritually, could only come again when the workers had freed themselves and freed themselves resolutely from the outworn and unsound system that had produced such tragic results.