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
And the development of the human mind proceeds apace. It will be
even more difficult for the ordinary cultured man of a hundred years
hence to form any full conception of our ideas than it is for us to
appraise the mental attitude of the men of the eighteenth century. To
take a single example: the humanest warrior of the Napoleonic wars
appears a monster of cruelty if compared with the sternest of modern
generals. Napoleon devastated provinces without a word of censure
from competent critics of the art of war. A howl of execration went
up, not from continental Europe alone, at the measures--seriously
embarrassing to our military operations, and enormously helpful to
our enemy--which the British generals took in order to diminish the
sufferings of the non-combatant population of the Transvaal; camps
of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel in comfort the
hospitals of our own wounded! And there is a section of the Press in
this country which still occasionally remembers, to complain of it,
the fact that our generals found it necessary, for military reasons,
to burn farm-houses. I should not like to attempt the conjecture,
what Wellington would have said in answer to such a complaint, or
what he would have done to a self-appointed emissary who visited
his camps for the purpose of criticising his action! It would have
been no more impossible for him to foresee the day of such things,
however, than it is for us to predict the moral sense of the year
2000. The fact is that we have greatly deteriorated in war, although,
or rather because, we have even more greatly improved in morals and
feeling. William Morris conceived of man in the coming time as a
sort of recreated mediæval. Mr Wells conceives him as practically a
nineteenth-century man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new material
conditions. Bellamy described him in terms of a being inconceivable
by any sort of reason. No one appears to have seen that his moral
nature will have been not merely revolutionised, but recreated, just
as our own morality has been recreated during the last hundred years,
not so much by the influence of material environment or the march of
invention, as by the regeneration of human conscience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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