Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
the future, even if moral reprobation and minor social inconveniences do
still attach to certain sorts of status, it will probably be
increasingly difficult to determine the status of people who wish to
conceal it for any but criminal ends.
In another direction there must be a movement towards the relaxation of
the marriage law and of divorce that will complicate status very
confusingly. In the past it has been possible to sustain several
contrasting moral systems in each of the practically autonomous states
of the world, but with a development and cheapening of travel and
migration that is as yet only in its opening phase, an increasing
conflict between dissimilar moral restrictions must appear. Even at
present, with only the most prosperous classes of the American and
Western European countries migrating at all freely, there is a growing
amount of inconvenience arising out of these--from the point of view of
social physiology--quite arbitrary differences. A man or woman may, for
example, have been the injured party in some conjugal complication, may
have established a domicile and divorced the erring spouse in certain
of the United States, may have married again there with absolute local
propriety, and may be a bigamist and a criminal in England. A child may
be a legal child in Denmark or Australia, and a bastard in this austerer
climate. These things are, however, only the first intimations of much
more profound reactions. Almost all the great European Powers, and the
United States also, are extending their boundaries to include great
masses of non-Christian polygamous peoples, and they are permeating
these peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants of
our present state. With the spread of these conveniences there is no
corresponding spread of Christianity. These people will not always
remain in the ring fence of their present regions; their superseded
princes, and rulers, and public masters, and managers, will presently
come to swell the shareholding mass of the appropriating Empire.
Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into these districts, and under
the influence of their customs, intermarriages and interracial reaction
will increase; in a world which is steadily abolishing locality, the
compromise of local concessions, of localized recognition of the "custom
of the country," cannot permanently avail. Statesmen will have to face
the alternative of either widening the permissible variations of the
marriage contract, or of acute racial and religious stresses, of a vast
variety of possible legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body of
self-respecting people, outside the law and public respect, a body that
will confer a touch of credit upon, because it will share the stigma of,
the deliberately dissolute and criminal. And whether the moral law
shrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness--as in religious matters the
Church of England, for example, has shrivelled to the proportions of a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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