Part 3

When the printing press arose, priests, no doubt, preserved their self-assurance by reliance upon the peculiar efficiency of the spoken word. They clung to the sermon and scorned the weapon of the pamphleteers. When comparing themselves with the Correspondence Colleges, the Universities resort to a similar argument. One day, however, the Correspondence Colleges will realize the possibilities in wireless as an adjunct to their methods.

When with the assistance of its influential board of directors some national broadcasting company finally secures its charter, the following situation will arise. Phenomenal salaries will attract the most distinguished exponents of the various arts and sciences to the central broadcasting stations. District Colleges staffed by automatic invigilators will call the roll of students at the various lectures. These will be delivered by a loud speaker synchronized with a televisual cinema projecting the lecturer’s blackboard and other illustrative material.

The economy effected by conducting classes of say half a million or equally easily ten million students will enable anyone to follow courses by all the most distinguished exponents of his subject. European students in psychology, for example, will attend say at 9 a.m. for Professor Stout, followed at 10 by Dr Sigmund Freud, and at 11 by Professor G. E. Moore. Nor need these distinguished men repeat their lectures until they have something new to say, for dictaphones will be included among the listeners-in, and another relay of undergraduates will acquire their wisdom from the broadcast-phonograph.

Such a soulless business organization, it will be objected, could never replace our present establishments of culture. But here, again, I feel the objection is of purely transitory force. Progressive differentiation which I have mentioned as an important aspect of evolution has produced the antithesis of commerce and cultured life. Differentiation, however, is to a great extent counterbalanced by processes of integration; and such integration we can see in progress in the business world.

The commercial applications of art besides influencing the dividends of our railway companies must be exercising a cultural effect upon their boards of directors; and culture filters through in many ways. The justly renowned polish of the Oxford graduate is finding a lucrative field of expression in modern salesmanship. An up-to-date salesman now-a-days speaks considerably better English than his customer, and the average waiter is better mannered than the proprietor of the hôtel. It is inconceivable that the employer will continue to be quite uninfluenced by his cultured and refined subordinates. Perhaps this is the secret of the growth of those Learned Societies the purport of which we understand is to supply that liberal education demanded now by busy business men. When the captains of industry have mastered this business of being cultured and have seen its possibilities in practical affairs their own peculiar talents will be applied in ever wider spheres; of which education will probably be the first.

V

Dr Schiller is of the opinion[8] that the evolutionary impetus is spent, and biologically at least we have seen the end of change. I wonder. And supposing he were right? The process might begin again; this time with the men of science at the helm.

[8] _Tantalus._

The vast and powerful machinery developed to meet the needs of Scientific Management in industry, government, and education may make it possible to initiate and control the operation of the natural laws of change. Side by side with the direct control of character, belief, and action, large-scale experiments in eugenics may proceed. Such experiments would not demand the clumsy expedient of the Act of Parliament. The triple control will provide adequate means for eliminating the intractable factors in the situation. Perhaps the constitution of the United States of America provides the most promising machinery at present for large-scale sociological experiment. These States, moreover, are fortunate in the character of their population. But whether by education or by eugenic control man himself will change. Physically, by a process of atrophy (at which Dr Schiller will not, I trust, demur), he may consist chiefly in a head from which will depend a mass of atrophied limbs. He will presumably be more or less permanently mounted upon a compact automobile, travelling by road or by air. No doubt a submarine attachment will be available to facilitate his morning bath.[9] But it is not with his appearance that we are here concerned. What is the future of his mind?

[9] But on all questions relating to our mechanical future I must refer the reader to Professor A. M. Low, to whose works _The Future_ and _Wireless Possibilities_ I myself am chiefly indebted in this respect.

There are interesting possibilities in the sphere of sense alone. Some of our present senses, such as taste or smell, may disappear altogether. More and more we seem to depend upon purely visual cues. On the other hand, vision and hearing may be considerably augmented. Even though they be supplemented by microphones and microscopes, we always strive to see and hear a little more than the best of instruments allows. If, after all, the biological vitalists are right, so long as we are interested in the constitution of matter there is a motive for further variation. But, as Professor Low points out, our æsthetic susceptibilities will have to be modified on the way. When we first begin to perceive the fauna in the cheese and the microbes on our walls, and when, like the birds, we go into the country to listen to the worms, we shall have to revise our values. Our poets, too, will find new themes to sing.

Memory, even more than sense, suggests many possibilities of development. By hypnotism, or by the natural working of the unconscious mind, it is said that we can recall even the earliest events of life. Soon, perhaps, this power will be under conscious control, and the autobiographers will have their millennium too. But, quite apart from this, new methods of education and a little Scientific Management would enable us, even now, to do much more with our memories through the powers we already possess.

The developments of intellectual life are the most difficult to foresee. But there are a few clues which enable us to guess at their possible nature. What purely intellectual achievements have been made in the past seem to depend upon the development of language and the elaboration of symbolism convenient to thought. Philosophers and scientists have continually expressed dissatisfaction at the modes of expression at their disposal in a language primarily devised to express our emotional and practical demands. Scientists have invented a technical terminology in their nouns. Mathematicians go somewhat further, and have invented more thorough-going systems of symbolism. Philosophers have always found it necessary to invent peculiar manners of speech, and now are seriously beginning to follow the mathematicians. It is possible that quite a new language will arise, probably a variety of purely technical languages――useful for different purposes of thought. The process of differentiation manifests itself here as in other ways. Already people following different pursuits find it almost impossible to converse, at least with anything approaching mutual understanding. And this process of specialization which education and increasing knowledge forces upon us points to another obstacle in the way of the Esperantists and other propagandists for a universal language. By the time this language is adopted, we shall have lost all common interests for the discussion of which it might have been employed. Perhaps our newer universities will inaugurate professorships in small-talk to keep alive an obsolescent art and to correct this serious menace of specialism.

More rapid than changes in the intellectual life will be those of character and of temperament. There are two significant facts in the trend of man’s emotional development, one of special and the other of general interest.

Firstly, there is the curious decay of cruelty and the increased desire to avoid inflicting pain. No one, surely, would deny an enormous change in this respect even in recent centuries. And we are beginning to discover the lengths to which development may go. Even now it often causes a moral man to attribute base motives to himself in doing a kindly act to spare his friend the subtle pain or sense of obligation which occurs in the feeling of gratitude. Modest forms of generosity often have this motive in their modesty.

There is not much further to go before we reach the social life of Henry James’s novels――where the principal characters have exquisite consciences, where good souls are tortured by the regret that they had not expressed their reproaches a shade or so less directly so as more to convey the impression that they had really said nothing at all.

Now-a-days you are afraid to forgive your enemies, lest the pain of remorse you thrust upon them should exceed the discomfort inflicted by a direct retaliation. The finer spirits of the age cannot live up to their own ideals because of the sense of inferiority it would impose upon their less advanced companions. Society in the thirtieth century will assuredly be even more refined.

The second significant fact of the moral history of our age to some extent ameliorates the prospect. We are gradually growing out of our emotions. We are acquiring self-consciousness and becoming habitually introspective, and, as the psychologists tell us, you cannot observe an emotion without decreasing its intensity.

This partly explains what is curious in what is called “modern love”, as practised and expounded by our younger novelists. It is essentially introspective. Every schoolboy knows what is going to happen when he falls in love. He knows about the illusions arising from emotion. The undergraduate cannot make love extravagantly like the Elizabethan poets, or sentimentally like the Victorians. When he feels the passion rising, he informs the provoking cause of it, that he knows quite well that, in spite of it, she is a perfectly ordinary little person with nothing very much to recommend her. They both agree that they are victims of an obsolescent mechanism designed for biological purposes, a mechanism primarily intended for the brutes, but annoyingly persistent in its control over civilized man. They agree, however, to act the performance through, because a rational way of making love is difficult to devise. They agree to make senseless and meaningless remarks. He is prepared to rave about her perfectly beautiful eyes whilst rationally convinced that they show a distinct suspicion of squint. She in her turn will admire his manly form whilst fully conscious that he is rather undersized and remembering that he signally failed to get his Blue. The kind of objective attitude that we are being taught to adopt towards criminals, which the psycho-analysts tell us to adopt towards the libertine, sooner or later we shall have to adopt towards ourselves.

In any attempt to picture to ourselves the life of future man one of the chief of the things which we have to take into account is the entirely remodelled constitution of society. There will be a small upper class――very small because, as all the prophets agree, the decrease of the birthrate in the upper strata will assume for sometime quite alarming proportions. It will be regenerated for a while by the bolder, more adventurous, and more capable of the working-class, who use their wits to escape from the situation into which they were born. Later, of course, this escape will be facilitated by reliable mental, moral, and vocational tests. The working-classes proper will then consist only of those less capable of administrative, organizing, and managemental functions. There will be relatively little unrest because the ruling classes will have learnt the wisdom of making the workers comfortable and happy; and potential agitators by the system of vocational selection will find themselves more lucratively employed in voicing the opinions of the ruling classes at the broadcasting stations. Plato will have come into his own. His criticism of democracy will have become accepted and the philosopher kings――with a difference――will have become established in the seats of power.

Whilst the masses enjoy their innocent pleasures, the ruling caste will live a life of its own. Judged by the present, one might expect it to be a life of sport, gambling, and house-parties, and there may be a transition-period of this kind. In this no doubt some curious forms of sport will be devised. If the theory is well founded which asserts that our present modes of sport are debased survivals of ancient occupations, the craze of the fortieth century may be the fascinating game of mining. It will be played in specially constructed coal-mines, filled with ingenious traps, blind alleys, and water-hazards. Messrs Pope and Bradley in those days will circularize their clients by provocative letters pointing out that last year’s mining suit is hopelessly out of date, or that the time has now come for replenishing the aerial wardrobe for the forthcoming polar sports. Chemical warfare, conducted with novel forms of laughing-gas, will be a popular institution at Christmas parties.

Various considerations combine, however, to suggest that sport is but a transitory phenomenon in human life.

Firstly, the applications of scientific method to its pursuit is tending to remove its distinctive character. And this tendency for economic reasons is likely to prove irresistible. The old-fashioned sportsman will protest against the newer methods. He may refuse to bring to the golf course wind gauge and slide rule; he may refuse to attend to the lessons of motion study, but in consequence of his stubbornness he will find himself too ridiculously outclassed to appear on the course at all. His will be the fate of the older militarists who protest on similar grounds against chemical warfare.

To those who play the newer game, sport will become a rigorous discipline and a scientific pursuit.

The general public, moreover, will increasingly enjoy its sport by proxy. The televisual cinema, which will then be stereoscopic, will provide a substitute for the football match; and the sporting spectacle will naturally form only an incident in the variety show. Again, the sporting interest will be merged, this time in the interests of general entertainment.

Another important change already far advanced which will radically alter the character of sporting life is man’s recent discovery of his mind. The punch ball and gloves now hang limply on the wall whilst the one time early riser lies comfortably in bed cherishing the formula by which he grows sturdier and more Spartan in every way. Instead of Sandow we have Pelman, and this will spread to the schools. Enterprising teachers graphically plot the progress of their pupils upon the wall. Small boys will exhibit their I.Q.s and scorn a display of biceps. If Alec Waugh continues to write about it, the change may reach the Public Schools. Again, it is the work of the printing press which is at last beginning to tell. Anagrams and intellectual puzzles of all kinds have existed for the few from ages immemorial, but in the cross-word puzzle the principle is finding a wider appeal.

Lastly, the final blow to sport and to our British system of thought built up upon it will come from the industrial field. Industrial psychology will undermine it by eliminating its fundamental function. The forms of sport with which we are most familiar arise chiefly as a reaction against sedentary and ill-planned occupations. Scientifically organized labour of the future will exhibit more variety and give fuller expression to the many-sidedness of man. Excessive specialization of the individual in his work has produced an artificial differentiation in the arrangement of his life, of which the distinction of work and play is the most glaring example.

With the outgrowing of sport, or, more strictly, with the blending of work and play man will apply himself to tasks commensurate with his powers. Dimly we begin to see what these tasks will be. The task of government, complex as it may be, will be less difficult in many respects than it is to-day. The danger of revolution should be only a remote contingency. The stability of a society ultimately depends inversely upon the prevalence of nepotism. A government of the efficient and the talented equipped with scientific knowledge would be impregnable. It matters not that men are mostly irrational so long as the rational have the power to rule. The irrationality of the rest is subject to uniform law, which, understood, can be brought within control. But the temptation to the ruler to hand on the reins of power to the inefficient with whom he has emotional ties of paternity or friendship is almost irresistible. The difficulty, however, is not insuperable. Some form of “Socialism”, which started all at equality and promoted to power according to ability, gauged quasi-mechanically by mental and vocational tests, would be a partial safeguard. Moreover, in a compact ruling class a kind of family moral tradition might emerge. This would be reinforced by the common-sense recognition of the dangers of promoting the inefficient on a large scale over the heads of the competent. The obvious effect of such promotion is, in the long run, revolution; and revolutions will probably be recurrent until the lesson has been learnt.

VI

And will these god-like beings with their infinite wealth and power, in their perfect rationality, be any happier or even morally better creatures than ourselves?

The formula for happiness is a fairly simple one. Its relative components form a vulgar fraction. The denominator is constituted by that towards which we aspire; the numerator is the number of our achievements. There is a law by which these two vary almost in unison. Any augmentation of achievement sends up proportionally the number of our desires, whilst great losses are followed by resignation. It is just for those fleeting moments in which the balance is disturbed that we experience bliss or misery. But the moments are very fleeting, and the normal ratio is restored. Happiness is the carrot before the donkey’s nose. Therein lies the moral of Tantalus, so grievously misinterpreted by Dr Schiller. Tantalus is the symbol of human progress. The only danger is that under Scientific Management man may see through the trick.

And will he be better then than he is to-day? That, however, is a question for the moralists of the future to decide.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.