H G Wells Omnibus, page 308
‘We three sit here—lucky ones—we’ve got a sort of foothold. We seem comparatively safe. We’ve fixed up things for ourselves apparently. We may not feel quite so secure as we might have felt in Harley Street twenty-five years ago, but still we feel pretty secure. We are part of the intellectual cream of the world. And how much, I ask you, is it our world? How far dare we go out of this room and speak our minds about the things that are happening in the world now? How far dare we go even into the back corners of our own minds—with a bright light, with ruthless questions? Even you and I, Holdman Stedding, have been extremely discreet—and we are going on being extremely discreet—about this Martian business. We have our reputations to consider. We mustn’t be extravagant. And so on. We are discreet even with ourselves. Do we let out what we really think about politics now, about all this bawling patriotism, about all this clammy, stale canting religiosity, about such institutions as the monarchy? Although we live here in a free country! A free country! So we are told. No concentration camps here, no inquisition, no exile, no martyrs. No visible means of restraint—and yet we are restrained. How far is our intellectual freedom here still ours, only because, as a matter of fact, we are too discreet to exercise it? Have we intellectuals here or anywhere any influence, any voice to arrest, divert, or guide this stampeding of crowds which we call the course of history—?’
‘Eh?’ said Davis.
‘These stampedes of crowds which we call the course of history.’
‘Go on,‘said Davis.
‘Suppose we went out, to as public a position as possible, and said plainly what we think of human affairs today?’
‘I suppose,’ said Dr. Holdman Stedding, ‘they’d begin by smashing our windows.’
He reflected. ‘The British Broadcasting Company would probably let a leash of babbling bishops loose at you. And then your students would make trouble. Your back-bench students… . I’m rather in a different position. My professional gifts give me a kind of Rasputin hold on one or two exalted families.’
3.
‘I have been thinking lately,’ began Davis, and halted. He had the phraseological unreadiness of the habitual writer.
‘You spoke just now of stale religion,’ he went on. ‘Such a lot of things in life now are stale. Out of date… . I agree… .’
He felt his way forward with his argument. ‘I suppose—I suppose all the main working ideas that have held people together in communities have been getting out of date pretty rapidly in the last hundred years. Strange new influences have been at work—as we three at least are beginning to understand. But because human society is a going concern, the main working ideas have never been replaced. There never came a definite time to replace them. They have been used in new senses, made ambiguous, expanded, attenuated. Replacement was something too heroic altogether. But each time there was a patch-up there had to be fresh strains and fresh distortions. Old things got used for new purposes, and they did not stand the wear. So that—what shall I call it?—the social ideology—the social ideology has become a terrific accumulation of old clutter which now, simply through the wear and tear of terms misused, has come to mean anything or nothing. And to work less and less surely and safely… . Do I make myself plain, Keppel?’
‘You put what I think better than I could myself.’
‘I’m in entire agreement,’ said the doctor. ‘Go on.’
Mr. Davis pushed back his plate and folded his arms on the table, after the manner of Keppel. He spoke with care. He held on carefully to his argument and both men watched him.
‘And you see, there is a vast number of reasonable practical people who—the more they realize the unsoundness, the rottenness, to put it brutally, of their ideological framework—the more they are, as one says, disillusioned, the more they are terrified at what may happen if this vast complex collapses… .
‘I have been,’ he added after a momentary pause.
‘Practically,’ he amplified, ‘My life work so far has been bolstering up what I thought were still sound working ideas. I began to see clearly through my own motives—for the first time… .’
Keppel sat back and put his hands in his pockets. It was plain he liked what Davis had said. ‘Here we are,’ he said, ‘in the palace of truth. And we find ourselves in virtual agreement that this world is as it were floating on a raft of rotting ideas, no longer firmly bound together, an accumulation of once sustaining institutions, customs, moral codes, loyalties, sapping one another, all so badly decayed and eaten away that in the aggregate they no longer amount to anything much better than a vast accumulation of driftwood—floating debris.’
‘We all seem to be agreed on that. And now these new creatures from outside, these creatures we call Martians, are coming aboard our drifting system. With their hard, clear minds and their penetrating, unrelenting questions stinging our darkness as the stars sting the sky. Are they going to salvage us? Shall we let them even if they can? And if not what is going to happen to them and this mental raft of a world?’
4.
‘Mental raft of a world,’ said Dr. Holdman Stedding, trying over the doubtful phrase. ‘Mental raft of a world!’ Keppel looked at his friend with an expression in his twisted dissimilar eyes, half defensive and half affectionate. ‘Well, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ said the doctor. ‘Don’t answer me: “Everything.” Be specific. What’s wrong with the raft? What’s your case, Keppel? I’d like to have it clearer.’
‘Well,’ said Keppel, and gathered his forces. ‘It’s a half-born mind as yet. Yes—yours, mine, and everybody’s. Half bom like a very young foal, encumbered by the foetal membranes it can’t shake off yet. It is blundering about, half blinded and squinting. All our philosophies, the best, are no better than that. Especially—’
‘Especially?’
‘There is this secondary world which has worked its way into the language everywhere, a sort of fold in the membrane that has established itself in a thousand metaphors, got itself most unwarrantably taken for granted by nearly everybody. Other worldliness, the idea of a ghost world, a spirit world, side by side with actuality. It overlaps and lies beside reality, like it and yet different; a parody of it done in phantoms; a sort of fuddled overlap; a universe of imaginary emanations, the consequence of congenital squint. Beside every man we see his spirit—which is not really there—beside the universe we imagine a Great Spirit. Whenever the mental going is a bit hard, whenever our intellectual eyes feel the glare of truth, we lose focus and slither off into Ghostland. Ghostland is halfway to dreamland, where all rational checks are lost. In Ghostland, that world of the spirit, you can find unlimited justifications for your impulses; unlimited evasions from rational obligation. Thafs my main charge against the human mind; this persistent confusing dualism. The last achievement of the human mind is to see life simply and see it whole,’
(‘That boy at Gorpel,’ reflected Davis.)
‘But we’re getting it straighter now,’ said the doctor,
‘We’ve got new influences coming in,’ said Davis.
‘But that isn’t all,’ said Keppel, ignoring those new influences. ‘There are other things wrong with the silly creature.’
‘Homo sapiens,’ whispered the doctor.
‘Homo superbus, I suggest’
‘Let’s have the full indictment.’
‘The creature hardly ever becomes adult. Hardly any of us grow up fully. Particularly do we dread and shirk complete personal responsibility—which is what being adult means. Man is the boy who won’t grow up, but he grows monstrous clumsy and heavy at times all the same, a Goering monster, a Mussolini—the bouncing boys of Europe. Most of us to the very end of our lives are obsessed by infantile cravings for protection and direction, and out of these cravings come all these impulses towards slavish subjection to gods, kings, leaders, heroes, bosses, mystical personifications like the People, My Country Right or Wrong, the Church, the Party, the Masses, the Proletariat, Our imaginations hang on to some such Big Brother idea almost to the end. We will accept almost any self-abasement rather than step out of the crowd and be full-grown individuals. And like all cubs and puppies and larval things, we are full of fear. What is the Sense of Sin but the instinctive fear of an immature animal? Oh, we are doing wrong! We are going to be punished for it! We are full of fears, fears of primal curses and mystical sin, masochistic impulses to sacrifice and propitiate and kneel and crawl. It paralyses our happiest impulses. It fills our world with mean, cruel, and crazy acts.
‘And what isn’t purely infantile in us is at best early adolescent. Our excess of egotism! We all have it. It is a commonplace to say man is as over-sexed as a cageful of monkeys, but sex is only one manifestation of his stupendous egotism. In every respect he is insanely self-centred—beyond any biological need. No animal, not even a dog, has the acute self-consciousness, the incessant, sore, personal jealousy of a human being. Fear is linked to this—there is no clear boundary here—and so is the hoarding instinct. The love of property for its own sake comes straight out of fear. This terrified, immature thing wants to be safe, invincibly safe, and so, by the most natural transition, fear develops into the craving for possessions and the craving for power. From the escape defensive to the aggressive defensive is a step. He not only fears other beings, he hates them, he flies at them. He fights needlessly. He is cruel. He loves to conquer. He loves to persecute… . Man! What was it Swift said? That such a creature should deal in pride!’
‘Homo superbus, eh?’ said the doctor. ‘But listen, Keppel. Is he really so bad as all this? Just a scared, self-defensive, immature beast squinting at the world because he has never yet learned to look straight? And hopeless at that? You experimental psychologists have been cleaning up our ideas about the human mind very fast in the past thirty or forty years. Very fast You have been making this damaging—well, this salutary—analysis of our motives and errors—our queer little ways. Yes… . You couldn’t have said a word of this forty years ago… . In my profession we say a sound diagnosis is half-way to a cure. Indicating the human mind is like sending a patient to bed for treatment. Maybe the treatment begins at that.’
‘Well?’ said Keppel.
‘Isn’t the time almost ripe for a new education that would clear the stuff from the creature’s eyes, stiffen his backbone, teach him to think straight and grow up? Make a man of him at last?’
Davis shook his head. He spoke rather to himself than to the others. ‘Man is what we’ve got. Humanity is humanity. Starry souls are born not made.’
5.
‘In guessing about these coming people,’ said Keppel, ‘there is one thing we have to keep in mind. A hard, clear mind does not mean what we call a hard individual. What we call a hard man is a stupid man, who specializes in inflexibility to escape perplexity. But a hard, clear mind is a clear crystalline mind; it turns about like a lens, revealing and scrutinizing one aspect after another, one possibility after another, and this and that necessary correlation. But anyhow, let us do our best to imagine how this—this infiltration of intelligence is going to work. No mighty revolutionary conspiracy—no. They will begin to say things, question things, point things out. How will people respond?’
‘Dislike, certainly,’ said the doctor.
‘At first, I think, they will encounter what one might call hostile neglect. They will be said to be indecisive and ineffective. They will, you see, be up against the Common Fool, the Natural Man in either of his chief forms, either dispersed in mob form as the Masses, or concentrated as a Boss. But the new kind of man will be neither, as the phrase goes, leftish nor rightish. Then, to be colloquial, where the hell are they? They won’t be available for either side in the storm of silly wars and civil wars, the new Thirty Years’ War, massacres, revenges, and so on, Pro-Red, Anti-Red, into which we are plainly drifting. They won’t count.’
‘That should give them a spell for getting together,’ said Dr. Holdman Stedding.
‘Not perhaps for very long. People will realize that these neutral things they say, these impartial suggestions they make, have a certain intrinsic power. They will be producing not fighting ideas but working ideas. Next, especially when the Boss side of the Common Man is in the ascendant, will come an attempt to annex their prestige and abilities in the interests of partisan governments. They will be asked to label their ideas for the Boss or against. If they refuse to be annexed, and they will refuse to be annexed, they will be said to be purely destructive, contented with nothing; accused of critical treachery. There are bad times ahead for uncompliant sane men. They will be hated by the right and by the left with an equal intensity.’
‘Then how,’ asked Dr. Holdman Stedding, ‘will they ever gain any sort of control of the world?’
‘How will sanity ever gain any sort of control of the world?’
‘Yes. If you think that is an identical question.’
‘I am not a prophet,’ said Keppel. ‘I am discussing probabilities. But given this constant seeping of clearer intelligences into our world, may not this sort of thing happen? May not all these clearer intelligences, confronted with the same world, confronted with the same problems; may they not, without any sort of political or religious organization, arrive at practically identical judgments about them—put similar values on the same things? Without much confabulation among themselves. I cling to the belief that for the human brain, properly working, there is one wisdom and not many. And if it is true, as Davis thinks, that one characteristic of this new type of mind is its resistance to crowd suggestions, crowd loyalties, instinctive mass prejudices, and mere phrases, then, without any political organization or party or movement or anything of the sort, may not these strongminded individualists everywhere begin doing sensible things and refusing to do cruel, monstrous, and foolish things—on their own?
‘We assume they are going to be very capable, self-reliant people, able to do all sorts of things. Quite a large proportion of the scientific, medical, mechanical, administrative positions in the world are likely therefore to fall into their hands as they spread and increase, and their ways of thinking and acting are likely to infect all sorts of subordinates, workers and so on, associated with them. Yes. You have suggested already, Doctor, that one might possibly Martianize even ordinary people by a saner education… .
‘Well, then suppose presently you find an aviator in a bomber to whom it occurs to ask: “Why in the name of blood and brains am I doing this cruel and idotic task? Why don’t I go off home again and drop this on those solemn homicides at G.H.Q.?” And then without further hesitation suiting the action to the thought. And when he comes down, suppose one or two men on the ground agree with him and are not in the least indignant? And in fact stand by him. Even the Roman gladiators had the wit to revolt. The Christian name of the new fighting experts we are training for the air in such quantities may prove to be Spartacus.
‘Suppose again you have a skilled worker doing some very delicate work upon a big gun and it comes quite clearly into his head that it will be better for the world if that gun does not shoot. Will it shoot? Or it is a chemist manufacturing explosives. That sort of thing will certainly become quite a problem as the Martians multiply. Your blustering demagogue or your blustering dictator feels ill and needs an operation, and there is either a disastrous patriotic quack who will make a mess of him anyhow, or some quiet, self-reliant, but incalculable man with knowledge and a needle or scalpel, able to kill or cure. Why should he cure?
‘The dictator will glare his cheap overpowering personality at him as far as his illness permits. Much a Martian will care. He for his part will be entirely unmelodramatic. It is your world against mine, he will say, and he will do what he thinks best for the world, and keep his own counsel. Power would be with the experts already, if only they had enough lucidity to take it. And it needs such a small step forward in lucidity.’
‘But this is—sabotage!’ said Dr. Holdman Stedding.
‘The only reasonably reply to unreasonable compulsion is sabotage.’
‘And you hint even at assassination.’
‘I don’t hint. Hint indeed! I speak plainly of assassination—if shooting mad dogs or rogue elephants is assassination. Assassination is the legitimate assertion of personal dignity in the face of dictatorship. It is not merely a right; it is a duty. A sacred duty. A dictator is an outlaw. He has outlawed himself. He exists and he degrades you by his mere existence. He imposes filthy tasks upon you. He can conscript you. He confronts you with a choice of evils. It is surely better to kill your dictator than let him make you kill other people—directly or indirectly. You can tell him: “You be damned” if you are strong enough; if that stops him, you can be merciful to him; but if you are not strong enough, you must kill. What else can you do? As a law-abiding man?’
‘Awful,’ said the doctor.
‘Plain common sense.’
‘No end of your Martians will get shot—if this is to be their line.’
‘They will be shot to good purpose,’ said Davis.
‘Shooting them will do the old order no good,’ said Keppel, ‘There will always be more of these cool-brained gentlemen now. Trust those cosmic rays now they have begun. Trust the undying intelligence behind our minds. In a fools’ world sane men will have a bad time anyhow; but they can help wind up the world of fools even if they cannot hope to see it out. One sane man will follow another; one sane man will understand another, more and more clearly. A sort of etiquette of the sane will come into operation. They will stand by each other. In spite of bad laws, in spite of foolish authority.’
‘A revolution—without even a revolutionary organization?’
