When I first came to this country ten years ago, I had the greatest difficulty to find means for my basic research. People asked me, what are you doing, what is it good for? I had to say, it is no good at all. Then they asked, then exactly what are you going to do? I had to answer, I don’t know, that is why it is research. So the next question was, how do you expect us to waste money on you when you don’t know what you do or why you do it? This question I could not answer.
Such questions are not asked as often any more. All the same, there is plenty of room for improvement.
From the biological and chemical worlds, let us pass to the human world. In the field of psychopharmacology we shall probably see extraordinary developments as the result of research in basic metabolism, with the creation of a better environment for the central nervous system and the consequent elimination of a great many mental disorders and psychophysical diseases. We may also see the kind of scientific application which the eminent geneticist Professor Hermann Muller speaks about—the application of eugenic methods to the improvement of the human stock. Muller speculates about what he calls ‘foster parenthood’ and the possibility of the creation of a new kind of morality, by which people would think it more important to bear children who were the best possible in the field of nature rather than children who exactly reproduce their parents’ idiosyncrasies and weaknesses.
This would be possible through foster parenthood of children conceived by the union of reproductive cells derived from stocks representing the parents’ highest ideal. Sooner or later eugenics will be practised, although it is certainly going to take a tremendous revolution in our present ethical ideas on the subject. It may be added that the first nation that does practise such eugenic methods as Professor Muller advocates will in a few decades be enormously superior to all its rivals—which seems to me yet another reason why we should, as quickly as possible, by hook or by crook, achieve the ‘one world’ ideal; in the context of nationalism eugenics could become an instrument of extraordinary power and extraordinary danger.
Then we come to purely psychological processes. Psychology is, quite obviously, still in its infancy, and we can foresee remarkable developments. It may become possible within two or three generations to understand the processes of creative thinking, to find out how these processes can be systematized, how they can be taught, how human beings can be educated so as to live to the height of their potential instead of using only a small part of their capacity. Such purely psychological advances, added to those in the field of psychopharmacology, will probably greatly improve the performance of human beings. If these are conjoined with eugenic procedures, we can foresee with considerable confidence a remarkable improvement in the human creature. What Emerson said long ago, that all men plume themselves on the improvement of society but no man improves, will cease to be true. It may even be possible now to get men to improve and thus to improve society. Though no one knows whether this will be accomplished or not, we are perfectly justified in saying that it can be accomplished now.
Let us very briefly talk about mechanical advances. Probably the most important of these will be connected with the great electronic computing machines, which will enable us to perform feats of thinking and problem-solving of which we were never capable before, and which will, therefore, open up to rational action areas in which it was quite impossible in the past. It may be possible even to conceive of making rational policy decisions—knowing what all the possibilities in a field are and choosing the best. Such decisions have been left entirely to the intuition of politicians in the past, but they now may come under the control of fact and of reason based upon fact.
I was reading just the other day in a recent number of Harper’s magazine about a fascinating new electronic device used for doing research in the back numbers of scientific periodicals. This is an appalling job at present; there are many thousands of papers published every year, there is a backlog of literally millions of them, and it is incredibly difficult to discover what has, in fact, been done in this jungle of material. Now a machine has been developed into which you can put magnetic tape to which the subject matter of the papers has been transferred, and in a very short time the machine will tell you where you can find out what you wish.
And we mustn’t forget our friends the Sputniks and satellites. These will be exceedingly useful, not so much in regard to outer space as in regard to the earth. They will give us extremely good information about weather. (I was appalled to read a statement from Dr Werner von Braun the other day saying that satellites will be sent up and a number of them connected together by radio into a kind of electric relay which will permit TV programmes to be globally transmitted at any moment. This is a grave menace, but there it is!)
In conclusion, it seems quite clear that enormous possibilities lie open to us, that we are on the threshold of profound discoveries within our own nature and in external nature. If we can solve the basic political and demographic problems, we could produce a world of the most incalculably superior nature. Whether we shall do so or not, I don’t know, but it is very important to realize that the immediate future is probably immensely important in regard to these possibilities. Harrison Brown has summed it up by saying that the next hundred years will undoubtedly prove to be more critical than any that mankind as a whole has been called upon to face. This is a very sobering prospect, but I think it is perfectly true.
More than fifty years ago Tolstoy said that in a society which is badly organized, as ours is, where a small minority rules over the majority, every scientific advance and conquest of nature strengthens the hand of the minority against the majority. It is up to us to decide now whether these conquests of nature and accessions of knowledge are to be used for frightful and inhuman ends, or whether they are to be used to create the kind of progress of which we have dreamed—and, indeed, the kind of progress of which nobody has ever dreamed, because the potentialities which are now opening up before us have never been present in the history of the world before.
The End
