Therefore, although there has been quite clearly a line of progress within the line of evolution, it cannot be said that the theory of evolution, when applied specifically to human beings, justifies neither pessimism nor optimism.
The prevailing interpretation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was optimistic. There were pessimists, such as Eduard von Hartmann, but they were much less influential than someone like Herbert Spencer, who developed a most elaborate and essentially optimistic evolutionary philosophy. The inevitability of progress seemed almost self-evident to Spencer; he regarded it as a law of equal validity with Newton’s law of gravitation. (Unfortunately, his whole theory assumed as its basis the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which we now have every reason for believing to be untrue.) There is no question that Herbert Spencer did exercise a prodigious influence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that there was generally an extremely optimistic view of the future, a belief that progress was happening all the time and would almost certainly go on happening. I remember the golden glow of this optimistic theory when I was a child, the notion that we, who were fortunate enough to live in the more civilized parts of the world, were really incapable of doing the sorts of things that people had done in the remote past or that people were doing in the uncivilized parts of the world.
If somebody had asked me as a child, or my parents, if they thought that within my lifetime we should see large-scale revival of slavery, of torture, of persecution for heretical opinions, of mass deportations, we would have said, ‘It is absolutely impossible!’ Nevertheless, we have seen these dreadful things, and our hope in regard to the inevitability of progress has been very much shaken. We are convinced that we live in a world of incessant change, but we are not at all convinced now that this change must necessarily be in the direction which our system of values would regard as excellent. If we use enough intelligence and goodwill, we probably can achieve a high degree of progress, but it is up to us to see that this happens, and there is nothing in the processes of change themselves which is going to compel it to happen.
This tempered optimism is the most prominent view of the future, but another interesting fact is that with the coming of the hydrogen bomb human technology has reintroduced into the thinking of the West the old eschatological idea of the end of the world. The sudden and catastrophic ending of the world about which the Apocalyptic literature talks—a notion we had come to regard as untenable and absurd—has become once more a real possibility. Again, whether there shall be an indefinite future or whether there shall not is up to us.
Let us now consider, from our present viewpoint, what is likely to happen in the future. We begin with the very long-range view taken about four or five years ago by Sir Charles Darwin, the grandson of the naturalist, who is himself a physicist, in an interesting little book called The Next Million Years. It would seem at first glance that it is quite impossible to foresee what is likely to happen within a million years; and yet, in a certain paradoxical way, it is easier to make prophecies about very long spans of time than about shorter ones. The reason is quite obvious. When we deal with great spans of time we deal with huge numbers, and the average behaviour of great numbers of things or persons or events is more predictable than the behaviour of small numbers or of individual events. We see evidence for this everywhere around us.
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,
