OUR TERRIBLE INCOMPETENCE.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14220, 18 February 1914, Page 6

OUR TERRIBLE INCOMPETENCE.

MR. SHAW SAYS NATURE MAY GIVE MAN THE “SACK.”

According to Mr G. 13. Shaw, man is too appallingly incompetent to run the earth as it ought to be rim, and if wc do not wake up- to our responsibilities Mature may try something else in the role of Lord of Creation. Man, he implies, is threatened with the “sack.” Mr Shaw was presiding in December at a lecture given at the Et.sex Hall by Dr. George lirandes, the famous Danish author and critic. He opened by saying that the meeting, like all other meetings of the same kind in England, was held just about thirty years too late. It was very curious, he said, luyv punctual we were in our lateness—always a quarter of a century or so behind. We w'crc now beginning to know what we ought to know about the teachings of Nietzsche, about twenty-five or thirty years after they wane launched upon the world. It was really a great pity that ivo could not bo a little more up to time. In this instance it was partly due to the fact that we arc not able to take on more than ono idea at a time. Thirty years ago wc ought to have been discussing the ideals of Nietzsche, when we were busy over the ideas of Darwin. What Darwin did was to make ns familiar with the conception of man as a super-monkey, and it was Nietzsche who pointed out that the supermonkey was pretty certain in the long run to become the super-man. Now we had become familiar with the idea of what wc call a super-man, although Nietzsche was not the only ono responsible for the name. (Laughter.) “lint the more I look round,” Mr Shaw continued, and see the appalling incompetence of men to deal with the problems of the world, the more I see the way in which the capacity of men is being beaten by the political, the social, the religious pdoblonu 1 forced upon us by our own species, the more I begin to wonder whether what will set ns right will be . a super-mau at ail. For evolution docs not proceed endlessly on the same line of experiments. It began with fishes and ended b ymaking some very decent fishes—and by making some very decent fishes—and

.NATURE MAY PROVIDE A SUBSTITUTE. “It tried birds, and afterwards went on with something else. Do not let your conceit as super-monkeys carry you away, for I am beginning to think that, if we do not waken up. Nature will try something else than man, and that the improvement in mam may not be a superman, but something ol which we have no conception, .which will wipe us-out—and serve us right." (Laughter.) In introducing Dr. Brandos, Mr Shaw said: “If he were a nobody it would not be necessary for me to introduce him to you. (Laughter.) I should be able to say that he needed no introduction. As a matter of fact. Dr. Braudes has been known as one of the most distinguished critics in Europe, and therefore under ordinary circumstances wo might presume that an ordinary British audience lias never heard of him. (Laughter.) But 1 may aesumc that some of you have heard of him before. His real distinction is not that he has a profound knowledge of the literature of Europe, not that he* \s a very learned man, but that he is a great critic and recognises a man of genius instinctively. And that is where all our own critics fail. “When Wagner came all our critics informed ns that his was not music at all, aud that he was only'a perverse charlatan. You will remember the mess they made of Ibsen—l will not speak of later' men of genius. (Laughter.) Some of them have had their share of misfortunes. The real distinction wTlich Dr. Braudes has. and which all the redt of. Iho critics have not—is that he knows a man of genius as soon as he sees him.”