No fortune teller of our acquaintance has ever made a fortune by telling fortunes, but no insurance company has ever gone bankrupt. The reason is that the insurance company foretells the future for millions, and therefore can always be sure of making a profit, whereas the fortune teller tells a fortune for only one person and is likely to be much more often wrong than right. The same is true in regard to forecasts over great periods of time. The ups and downs tend to level themselves out and a general line may perhaps be projected into the future.
Sir Charles Darwin’s view is simply that man is a wild species—he has not been domesticated. A domestic animal is one which has a master who teaches it tricks and controls its breeding, either by sterilizing it or crossing it with certain definite types, and therefore makes sure that future generations follow a particular pattern. But man has no master, and even his attempts at self-domestication are doomed to frustration inasmuch as the ruling minority which does the domestication itself remains a wild species. For this reason, in Darwin’s opinion, man will never transcend the limitations imposed upon a wild species.
Whatever may happen in short periods of history, in the long run the human species, like all other wild species, will live up to the very limits of its food supply with a large proportion in a state of semi-starvation all the time. This will go on, with ups and downs, Golden Ages and Iron Ages, during the ten thousand centuries he is envisaging. After a million years we may expect the species either to be extinct or to have evolved into quite a different species.
This is rather a gloomy point of view, and I don’t think it is entirely justified. Sir Charles Darwin does not give credit to the human race for the extraordinary amount of ingenuity it has and its ability to get out of the extremely tight corners which it gets itself into, and perhaps he does not give credit to the human race for its exceptional toughness. The human species is probably the toughest species of all animals. It can exist in every conceivable kind of environment, and it can stand the most appalling strains and stresses, apparently better than almost any other species. Therefore, it may be that this long-range view, which has certain philosophical justifications, may prove to be wrong, owing to the remarkable capacity of man to spring surprises.
Meanwhile, we have to consider the short range, which is more interesting to us. What are our short-range prospects? Let us begin with the military and political prospects immediately confronting us. These were discussed a few years ago by Bertrand Russell, and it seems to me that his conclusions are extremely realistic and sensible. He says that there are three possibilities. First of all, if we get into a nuclear war, there is the possibility of the complete extinction of the species—and perhaps of all life upon earth if the nuclear war is sufficiently prolonged and waged with sufficiently deadly weapons. This is improbable, however, in the present state of technology.
The second possibility is that the nuclear war would result in a return to barbarism. Under present circumstances, this second alternative seems to have a good deal of probability, for the reason that a complex industrial system such as we depend upon now has very close analogies to an ecological system in nature. In nature, if we disturb one element in an ecological system, we throw the entire system out of gear. Analogously, if we were to destroy pretty thoroughly even one or a few elements in the complex industrial system, and if there were to be, for any reason, high mortality among the specially trained personnel on whom we depend for the functioning of the system, then it seems extremely probable that the whole industrial system would break down—it would be virtually impossible to run without one or another part of it—and the result would probably be a return of barbarism.
For what we must remember is that the present enormous populations of the world are enabled to live solely in virtue of possessing this very complicated industrial and communications system. If it were to break down, enormous numbers of people would probably die of starvation and the survivors would naturally indulge in civil wars in order to get the few resources remaining. The very great number of deaths immediately following the explosion of the H-bomb would thus be followed by an even greater number of deaths and an immense chaos.
It would also be extremely difficult ever to rebuild the system because, after a serious atomic war, mankind would not start from scratch, it would start several hundred years behind scratch. When the system was originally built, with rather primitive machinery and tools, resources were plentiful. Metallic ores were extremely rich and quite easy to get at. Today, after one hundred and fifty years of exploitation, this is not at all true. It would be very difficult for any people which had been reduced to a primitive level to rebuild a complex civilization on the basis of the rather impoverished resources left, particularly in those countries which have been highly developed up to now. You would have the paradox that it would be easier to rebuild an industrial civilization in those parts of the world which had not been previously industrialized and more difficult to rebuild it in those parts of the world which had been previously industrialized and which had greatly reduced their resources of ores.
The third alternative which Lord Russell looks forward to is the creation of a single world state, which could occur in one of two ways: by force, as the result of one power being victorious in a nuclear war—that is to say, if one power could ever be victorious—which in fact is the way that previous empires have always been built up; or under the threat of force, under the fear of what might happen, and as the result of reason and considered enlightened self-interest and humane ideals. This, naturally, would be the desirable way of creating what Wendell Willkie called ‘one world’; but it must be confessed that the historical precedents are not very encouraging. Take the case of Italy. From the time of Dante onward, every intelligent Italian saw that it was absolutely essential to have a united Italy, but Italy was not in fact united until 1870, and then it was united only by military force, by the Piedmontese.
And to this day you can meet Italians in Southern Italy or Sicilians who will speak rather bitterly of the time when the Piedmontese descended upon Italy and forcibly drew it together into a single country. The same thing is true of Germany. The final unification of Germany came after the Franco-Prussian war and was essentially an act of force. One sees the same thing in the building up of a unified France through the use of force and cunning by Richelieu in the seventeenth century. If there is a unification by conquest in the future I would say that, should the West win, we should see a kind of very superior, up-to-date Roman Empire as it was at the time of the Antonines; if the East should win, we would see a very much more unpleasant kind of empire, in which Western people would find themselves living on the wrong side of the tracks and thoroughly discriminated against.
Can we expect the coming together of the nations into a single world government, which is obviously infinitely desirable? And can we expect it to happen by democratic means? Can one expect a course of action which is manifestly good for everybody in the long run, but which in the short run causes discomfort or even suffering to a good many people, to be taken by a democratic society in time of peace? It seems to me rather dubious that this should be the case because there are enormous vested interests involved—and not merely the vested interests of the rulers, although rulers of a sovereign state do not wish to become merely officials in a province.
Similarly, the owners of factories do not want to subordinate the interests which flourish under a tariff system or to subordinate themselves to the interests of a much larger unit outside the present borders of the country, where there will be more efficient factories which will throw their own out of business. There are the vested interests of many workers, who might be displaced from their work or thrown out of employment altogether and forced to migrate to other parts of the country. There are also the vested interests of intellectuals, who don’t wish to change their ideas, and indeed the vested interests of everybody—no one wants to alter the conditioning which he has had in childhood.
In general, one can say that it is only when human beings are threatened by somebody else that they are ready to unite and to accept short-range privations for long-range goods; they are ready to unite under the threat of war and catastrophe. Undoubtedly, the best thing for world government under law would be an invasion from Mars. Unfortunately, this is rather unlikely to take place. But is it possible to persuade ourselves that after all human beings are their own Martians, that with over-population and over-organization and over-technicalization, we are committing immense aggressions against ourselves? Can we unite against
