The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
I know that in thus putting all the importance upon educational needs at
the present time I shall seem to many readers to be ignoring quite
excessively the profound racial, social and economic conflicts that are
in progress. I do. I believe we shall never get on with human affairs
until we do ignore them. I offer no suggestion whatever as to what sides
people should take in such an issue as that between France and Germany
or between Sinn Fein and the British Government, or in the class war. I
offer no such suggestion because I believe that all these conflicts and
all such current conflicts are so irrational and destructive that it is
impossible for a sane man who wishes to serve the world to identify
himself with either side in any of them. These conflicts are mere
aspects of the gross and passionate stupidity and ignorance and
sectionalism of our present world. The class war, the push for and the
resistance to some vague reorganization called the Social
Revolution--such things are the natural inevitable result of the sordid
moral and intellectual muddle of our common ideas about property. The
capitalist, the employer, the property-owning class, as a class, have
neither the intelligence nor the conscience to comprehend any moral
limitations, any limitations whatever but the strong arm of the law,
upon what they do with their property. Their black and obstinate
ignorance, the clumsy adventurousness they call private enterprise,
their unconscious insolence to poor people, their stupidly conspicuous
self-indulgence, produce as a necessary result the black hatred of the
employed and the expropriated. On one side we have greed, insensibility
and incapacity, on the other envy and suffering stung to vindictive
revolt: on neither side light nor generosity nor creative will. Neither
side has any power to give us any reality we need. Neither side is more
than a hate and an aggression. How can one take sides between them?
The present system, _unless it can develop a better intelligence and a
better heart_, is manifestly destined to foster fresh wars and to
continue wasting what is left of the substance of mankind, until
absolute social disaster overtakes us all. And manifestly the
revolutionary communist, _at his present level of education_, has
neither the plans nor the capacity to substitute any more efficient
system for this crazy edifice of ill-disciplined private enterprise that
is now blundering to destruction. But at a higher level of intelligence,
at a level at which it is possible to define the limitations of private
property clearly and to ensure a really loyal and effectual co-operation
between individual and state, this issue--this wholly destructive
conflict between the property manipulator and the communist fanatic
which is now rapidly wrecking our world--disappears. It disappears as
completely as the causes of a murderous conflict between two drunken
men will disappear when they are separated and put under a stream of
clear cold water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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