The Shape of Things to Come, page 7
In the briefer studies of human innovations that preceded his more important contributions to human history Maxwell Brown has shown how for the past ten thousand years at least, since the Cro-Magnards5 stamped their leather robes and tents, the art of printing reappeared and disappeared again and again, never culminating in the printed book and all its consequences, never obtaining a primary importance in human doings, until the fifteenth century (CE); he has assembled the evidence for man’s repeated abortive essays in flying, from the fourth dynasty gliders recently found at Bedrashen, the shattered Yu-chow machine and the interesting wreckage, ornaments and human remains found last year in Mirabella Bay. (These last were first remarked in 2104 CE after an earthquake in the deep-sea photographs of the survey aeroplane Crawford, and they were subsequently sought and recovered by the divers of the submarine Salvemini belonging to the Naples Biological Station. They have now been identified by Professor Giulio Marinetti as the remains of the legendary glider of Daedalus and Icarus.6) Maxwell Brown has also traced the perpetual discovery and rediscovery of America from the days of the Aalesund tablets and the early Chinese inscriptions in the caves near Bahia Coqui to the final establishment of uninterrupted communications across the Atlantic by the Western Europeans in the fifteenth century CE. In all there are sixteen separate ineffectual discoveries of America either from the east or from the west now on record, and there may have been many others that left no trace behind them.
These earlier cases of human enterprise and inadequacy help us to understand the long struggle of the Age of Frustration and the difficulty our ancestors found in achieving what is now so obviously the only sane arrangement of human affairs upon this planet.
The fruitlessness of all these premature inventions is very easily explained. First in the case of the transatlantic passage; either the earlier navigators who got to America never got back, or, if they did get back, they were unable to find the necessary support and means to go again before they died, or they had had enough of hardship, or they perished in a second attempt. Their stories were distorted into fantastic legends and substantially disbelieved. It was, indeed, a quite futile adventure to get to America until the keeled sailing ship, the science of navigation, and the mariner’s compass had been added to human resources.
Then again, in the matter of printing, it was only when the Chinese had developed the systematic manufacture of abundant cheap paper sheets in standard sizes that the printed book -and its consequent release of knowledge – became practically possible. Finally the delay in the attainment of flying was inevitable because before men could progress beyond precarious gliding it was necessary for metallurgy to reach a point at which the internal combustion engine could be made. Until then they could build nothing strong enough and light enough to battle with the eddies of the air.
In an exactly parallel manner, the conception of one single human community organized for collective service to the common weal had to wait until the rapid evolution of the means of communication could arrest and promise to defeat the disintegrative influence of geographical separation. That rapid evolution came at last in the nineteenth century, and it has been described already in a preceding chapter of this world history. [Not recorded by Raven. … Ed .] Steam power, oil power, electric power, the railway, the steamship, the aeroplane, transmission by wire and aerial transmission followed each other very rapidly. They knit together the human species as it had never been knit before. Insensibly, in less than a century, the utterly impracticable became not merely a possible adjustment but an urgently necessary adjustment if civilization was to continue.
Now the cardinal prominence of the Great War in history lies in this, that it demonstrated the necessity of that adjustment. It was never considered to be necessary before. Recognition lagged behind accomplishment. None of the pre-war World-State Prophets betrays any sense of necessity. They make their polite and timid gestures towards human unity as something nice and desirable indeed but anything but imperative. The clearest demand for world-wide cooperation before the war came from the Second International.7 And even after the war, and after the vague and vacillating adumbration of a federal super-state by the League of Nations at Geneva, most of even the most advanced writers seem to have been still under the impression that the utmost adjustment needed was some patching up of the current system so as to prevent or mitigate war and restrain the insurrectionary urge of the unprosperous.
Even the communist movement, which, as we had told already, had been able by a conspiracy of accidents to seize upon Russia and demonstrate the value of its theories there, lapsed from, rather than advanced towards, cosmopolitan socialism. Its theories, as we have shown, were hopelessly inadequate for its practical needs. The development of its ideology was greatly hampered by the conservative dogmatism imposed upon it by the incurable egotism of Marx.8 His intolerance, his innate bad manners, his vain insistence that he had produced a final doctrine to put beside Darwinism,9 cast a long shadow of impatience and obduracy upon the subsequent development of communism.10 He was bitterly jealous of the Utopian school of socialism,11 and so, until Lenin faced the urgencies of power, the ‘orthodox’ Marxist took a quite idiotic pride in a planless outlook. ‘Overthrow capitalism,’ he said, and what could happen but millennial bliss? Communism insisted indeed upon the necessity of economic socialization, but … until it attained power in Russia … without a glance at its technical difficulties. It produced its belated and ill-proportioned Five Year Plan only in 1928 CE,12 eleven years after its accession to power. Until then it had no comprehensive working scheme whatever for the realization of socialism. Thrown back on experiment, it was forced to such desperately urgent manoeuvres, improvisations and changes of front, and defended by such tawdry and transparent apologetics, that the general world movement passed out of its ken.
The reader of this world history knows already how the moral and intellectual force of the Communist Party proved unequal, after the death of Lenin, to control or resist the dictatorship of that forcible, worthy, devoted and limited man, the Georgian, Stalin.13 The premature death of the creative and adaptable Lenin and the impatient suppression by Stalin of such intelligent, troublesome, but necessary types as Trotsky14 … a man who, but for lack of tact and essential dignity, might well have been Lenin’s successor … crippled whatever hope there may have been that the Modern State would first emerge in Russia. Terrible are the faithful disciples of creative men. Lenin relaxed and reversed the dogmatism of Marx, Stalin made what he imagined to be Leninism into a new and stiffer dogmatism. Thereafter the political doctrinaire dominated and crippled the technician in a struggle that cried aloud for technical competence. Just as theological disputes impoverished and devastated Europe through the long centuries of Christendom, and reduced the benefits of its unifying influence to zero, so in Russia efficiency of organization was prevented by the pedantries of political theorists. The young were trained to a conceit and a xenophobia, indistinguishable in its practical effects from the gross patriotism of such countries as France, Germany, Italy or Scotland.
Because of this subordination of its mental development to politics, Russia passed into a political and social phase comparable, as Rostovtzeff pointed out at the time in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire,15 in its universal impoverishment and its lack of any critical vigour to the well-meaning but devitalizing autocracy of the Emperor Diocletian.16 From its very start the Russian revolution failed in its ambition to lead mankind. Its cosmopolitanism lasted hardly longer than the cosmopolitanism of the great French revolution17 a dozen decades earlier.
This almost inevitable lag of the constructive movement in Russia behind Western developments was foreseen by the shrewd and penetrating brain of Lenin even in the phase of its apparent leadership (see No. 3090 in the thirteenth series of the Historical Documents Collection, Left Wing Communism).18 But his observation found little or no echo in the incurably illiberal thought of the Marxian tradition.
It was in Western Europe especially that the conception of the organized and disciplined World-State as a revolutionary objective ultimately grew to its full proportions. At first it grew obscurely. In 1933 any observer might have been misled by the fact of the fascist regime in Italy,19 by the tumult of the Nazi Party in Germany,20 by similar national-socialist movements in other countries, and by the increase in tariff barriers and other restraints upon trade everywhere, to conclude that the cosmopolitan idea was everywhere in retreat before the obsessions of race, creed and nationalism. Yet all the while the germs of the Modern State were growing, everywhere its votaries were learning and assembling force.
It needed the financial storm of the years 1928 and 1929 CE 21 and the steadily progressive collapse of the whole world’s economic life, of which this storm was the prelude, to give the World-State prophets the courage of their convictions. Then indeed they began to speak out. Instead of the restrained, partial and inconclusive criticism of public affairs which had hitherto contented them, they now insisted plainly upon the need of a world-wide reconstruction, that is to say of a world revolution … though ‘revolution’ was still a word they shirked. The way in which this increased definition of aim and will came about is characteristic of the changing quality of social life. It was not that one or two outstanding men suddenly became audible and conspicuous as leaders in this awakening. There were no leaders. It was a widespread movement in human thought.
In a second huge supplementary volume Maxwell Brown has assembled the substance of a precise study of fifty typical writers and speakers in Europe and America, and he gives a list of nearly two thousand who yield parallel results which remain filed for reference in the Encyclopaedia Library. In each case, guarded, limited and tentative suggestions give place to more and more outspoken and lucid statements of the world situation. For ten years from 1917 onward these typical people are saying mildly what might be done; then suddenly they begin to say more and more plainly what had to be done. It was a general movement of opinion affecting all the more intelligent people in the world. Whatever interchange of ideas occurred is now untraceable. The development was too rapid to establish priorities. Opinion appears now to have moved in line abreast.
The conclusions upon which all these intelligent people were converging may be briefly stated. They had arrived at the realization that human society had become one indivisible economic system with novel and enormous potentialities of well-being. By 1931 CE this conception becomes visible even in the obstinately intellectualist mind of France … for example, in the parting speech to America of an obscure and transitory French Prime Minister, Laval,22 who crossed the Atlantic on some now undis-coverable mission in that year; and we find it promptly echoed by such prominent loud speakers as President Hoover of America23 and Mr Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister.24
That idea at any rate had already become sufficiently popular for the politicians to render it lip service. But it was still only the intelligent minority who went on to the logical consequences of its realization; that is to say, the necessity of disavowing the sovereignty of contemporary governments, of setting up authoritative central controls to supplement or supersede them, and of putting the production of armaments, the production of the main economic staples, and the protection of workers from destructive under-payment beyond the reach of profit-seeking manipulation.
Yet by 1932 – 33 this understanding minority was speaking very plainly. These immense changes were no longer being presented as merely desirable things; they were presented as urgently necessary things if civilization was to be saved from an immense catastrophe. And not merely saved. The alternative to disaster, they saw even then, was not just a bleak and terrified security. That was the last thing possible. There was no alternative to disorder and wretchedness, but ‘such an abundance, such a prosperity and richness of opportunity,’ as man had never known before. (These words are quoted from a Scottish newspaper of the year 1929.) Enlightened people in 1932 CE were as assured of the possibility of world order, universal sufficiency and ever increasing human vitality as are we who live today in ample possession of our lives amidst the practical realization of that possibility.
Clearness of vision did not make for the happiness of the enlightened. Their minds were tormented not simply by contemporary fears and miseries, but by the sure knowledge of a possible world of free activity within the reach of man and, as it were, magically withheld. They saw hundreds of millions of lives cramped and crippled, meagrely lived, sacrificed untimely, and they could not see any primary necessity for this blighting and starvation of human life. They saw youthful millions drifting to lives of violence, mutilation and premature and hideous deaths. And beyond was our security, our eventfulness and our freedom.
Maxwell Brown, in a chapter called ‘Tantalus 1932’, cites forty instances of these realizations. But the legendary Tantalus25 was put within apparent reach of the unattainable by the inexorable decrees of the gods. Mankind was under no such pitiless destiny. The world-wide Modern State shone bright upon the living imaginations of our race within a decade of the Great War, absurdly near, fantastically out of reach. For a century of passionate confusion and disorder that Modern State was not to be released from potentiality into actuality.
It is to the story of these battling, lost and suffering generations, the ‘generations of the half-light’, that we must now proceed.
For the first time in history the mind of man was really attempting to control his destiny. Hitherto usage, tradition, external necessity, accident, had furnished the unchallenged framework within which he had devised his explanations and his consolations. He had resisted any clear knowledge of his own nature and romanced about his destiny. He had evaded responsibility for his stresses and disasters by putting his faith in over-ruling gods; he had clung to arbitrary rules of conduct against all reason, and he had persecuted and sought to destroy every sceptical thinker, every heretical experimentalist in conduct, who disturbed the equanimity of his submission. He preferred familiar miseries to the mental torture of novel effort. Now through a complex of enlightening accidents, and especially through the jumbling together of a hundred different and discordant cultures in one world-wide mutuality of discredit and destruction, the vision of reality was forcing itself upon him. And with an ever-widening sweep of change even his mean submissiveness gave him no sense of security any more. Effort was before him and the goad behind. He was compelled to ask in spite of himself what indeed he was, and with that, in spite of his deep conservatism, he began to realize all that he might be.
When now we look back to the scattered and diverse individuals who first give expression to this idea of the modern World-State which was dawning upon the human intelligence, when we appraise their first general efforts towards its realization, we need, before we can do them anything like justice, to attempt some measure of the ignorances, prejudices and other inertias, the habits of concession and association, the herd love and the herd fear, with which they had to struggle not only in the society in which they found themselves, but within themselves. It is not a conflict of light and darkness we have to describe; it is the struggle of the purblind among the blind. We have to realize that for all that they were haunted by a vision of the civilized world of today, they still belonged not to our age but to their own. The thing imagined in their minds was something quite distinct from their present reality. Maxwell Brown has devoted several chapters, and a third great supplementary volume, to a special selection of early Modern State Prophets who followed public careers. He showed conclusively that in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century (CE) there was a rapidly increasing number of men and women with a clear general conception of the possibilities of the modern world. He gives their written and spoken words, often astound-ingly prescient and explicit. And then he traces out the tenor of their lives subsequent to these utterances. The discrepancy of belief and effort is a useful and indeed a startling reminder of the conditioned nature of the individual life.
As he writes: ‘In the security and serenity of the study, these men and women could see plainly. In those hours of withdrawal, the fragile delicate brain matter could escape from immediacy, apprehend causation in four dimensions, reach forward to the permanent values of social events in the space–time framework. But even to the study there penetrated the rumble of the outer disorder. And directly the door was opened, forthwith the uproar of contemporary existence, the carnival, the riot, the war and the market, beat in triumphantly. The raging question of what had to be done that day scattered the fine thought of our common destiny to the four winds of heaven.’
Maxwell Brown adds a vivid illustration to this passage. It is the facsimile of the first draft by Peter Raut, the American progressive leader, of the Revolutionary Manifesto of 1937. It was indisputably a very inspiring document in its time, and Raut gave the last proof of loyalty to the best in his mind by a courageous martyrdom. But in the margin of this draft one’s attention is caught by a maze of little figures; little sums in multiplication and addition. By his almost inspired gift for evidence and through the industry of his group of research assistants, Maxwell Brown has been able to demonstrate exactly what these sums were. They show that even while Raut, so far as his foresight permitted, was planning our new world, his thoughts were not wholly fixed on that end. They wandered. For a time the manifesto was neglected while he did these sums. He was gambling in industrial equities, and a large and active portion of his brain was considering whether the time had arrived to sell.
A more illuminating instance of what social psychologists have called the ‘divided mind’ of the intellectuals in the twentieth century of the Christian Era could scarcely be imagined.
