I deliberately kept the title of this course as vague and as general as I could, so as not to commit myself too far in advance or to pretend that I know too much. Our business will be to take various aspects of the human situation to see how bridges can be built between facts and values. I shall start with a consideration of man in relation to the planet, for we live on this particular planet and, whether we like it or not, we have to get on with it indefinitely. Unfortunately, I am sorry to say, all the stuff about going to Mars and so on seems to be pretty good nonsense. It is very much more important to see what we can do with Earth, and unfortunately what we are doing with Earth is disastrously bad. I shall try first of all to set forth the facts of what we are doing with our planetary environment and consider what the ethical corollaries of these facts are and what Weltanschauung would help us to remedy them. Then I shall talk about the relationship between the sources that are available now and those that will be available in the future. I will build a slight, hypothetical bridge into the future.
After that I think we shall turn to the strictly biological problems of the human individual and discuss man from the point of view of heredity and from the point of view of environment, and try to establish some kind of balance between these two factors which so profoundly influence our existence. The problem of man in society will follow, and there I shall spend a good deal of time in discussing what seems to me the most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times: the growth of technology and what may be called the technicization of every aspect of human life. Then I will move on to other aspects of the social life, and in due course I hope to get down to the problem of the individual, the problem of human potentialities and what can be done to realize those that at present remain to a large extent latent in a large portion of the people. Needless to say, in this connection there will have to be discussions of art and of the problems of creation and insight.
We shall wander very far afield in this search for bridges. By the time we are at the end we shall have covered a great deal of ground, and we will also be extremely bored with what I have to say, but fortunately I shall then quietly disappear.
The End
