A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an OptimistRussell, T. Baron
Philosophy
A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist
Russell, T. Baron
Forecasting; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
from the opprobrium brought upon the name of anarchists by quite a
different set of thinkers--perceive that to endow with power any sort
of machinery resting on the shifting will of a majority tends very
little towards freedom and not at all towards stability--the latter
even more important in some respects than the former. In proportion
to the development of education (in nature even more than in extent),
it is likely that the present blind faith of the public in the ability
of the State to do almost anything, and the still blinder tendency
of the public to require the State to do all sorts of things which
could be better accomplished otherwise, will diminish, and we shall
perceive the enormous educational disadvantage of allowing the citizen
to lean too heavily on the State. A public properly and sufficiently
educated will, with enormous difficulty (because there is nothing
so hard to get rid of as a bad habit of dependency), gradually
undertake the task of doing for itself by free combination what at
present we try to get done for us by governmental machinery. One
sees how this sort of thing is gradually evolving, in spite of the
violent efforts of politicians to shove the world backwards and
keep us walking on crutches instead of strengthening us to walk
alone. Statutes determining the wages of labourers and the price
of commodities are laughed at as examples of mediæval foolishness,
though (what is exactly the same thing in principle) Government still
interferes with the freights charged by railway companies, and indeed
is obliged thus to interfere because it has already gone out of the
right way by the powers it has granted to railway companies. The new
education--the education which builds character instead of merely
diffusing information (generally useless)--will teach us the far
greater advantages attaching to results attained by free combination,
and the State will be relieved of many functions at present regarded
as essential to it, and often sought to be increased.
Now the working of free combination for the attainment of these
results would be almost impossible without the constant interchange
of views which newspapers subserve, and without careful newsgathering
as to the progress in detail of various schemes and of public opinion
concerning them.
To say that this kind of thing will constitute the most important class
of news is not to imply that the public will develop an unintelligent
indifference to news of other kind, though it is allowable to hope that
it will develop an intelligent indifference to the trivialities at
present solemnly chronicled by the popular papers. It may be doubted
whether, even now, the public is quite so passionately interested in
the minutiæ of murder trials as editors imagine: but with invention
steadily moving on, and its consequences habitually developing in
unexpected ways, there will be plenty of "news" to chronicle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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