The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
Teaching then is the initial and decisive factor in the future of
mankind, and the first duty of everyone who has the ability and
opportunity, is to teach, or to subserve the teaching of, the true
history of mankind and of the possibilities of this vision of a single
world state that history opens out to us. Men and women can help the
spread of the saving doctrine in a thousand various ways; for it is not
only in homes and schools that minds are shaped. They can print and
publish books, endow schools and teaching, organize the distribution of
literature, insist upon the proper instruction of children in world wide
charity and fellowship, fight against every sort of suppression or
restrictive control of right education, bring pressure through political
and social channels upon every teaching organization to teach history
aright, sustain missions and a new sort of missionary, the missionaries
to all mankind of knowledge and the idea of one world civilization and
one world community; they can promote and help the progress of
historical and ethnological and political science, they can set their
faces against every campaign of hate, racial suspicion, and patriotic
falsehood, they can refuse, they are bound to refuse, obedience to any
public authority which oppresses and embitters class against class, race
against race, and people against people. A belligerent government as
such, they can refuse to obey; and they can refuse to help or suffer any
military preparations that are not directed wholly and plainly to
preserving the peace of the world. This is the plain duty of every
honest man to-day, to judge his magistrate before he obeys him, and to
render unto Cæsar nothing that he owes to God and mankind. And those who
are awakened to the full significance of the vast creative effort now
before mankind will set themselves particularly to revise the common
moral judgment upon many acts and methods of living that obstruct the
way of the world state. Blatant, aggressive patriotism and the
incitements against foreign peoples that usually go with it, are just as
criminal and far more injurious to our race than, for example, indecent
provocations and open incitements to sexual vice; they produce a much
beastlier and crueller state of mind, and they deserve at least an equal
condemnation. Yet you will find even priests and clergymen to-day
rousing the war passions of their flocks and preaching conflict from the
very steps of the altar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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