The Salvaging of CivilizationWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
The Salvaging of Civilization
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization, Modern -- 20th century; Education
Our young citizen will choose some sort of interesting work--perhaps
creative work. And he will be free to travel about the whole world
without a passport or visa, without a change of money; everywhere will
be his country; he will find people everywhere who will be endlessly
different, but none suspicious or hostile. Everywhere he will find
beautiful and distinctive cities, freely expressive of the spirit of the
land in which they have arisen. Strange and yet friendly cities.
The world will be a far healthier place than it is now--for mankind as a
whole will still carry on organized wars--no longer wars of men against
men, but of men against malarias and diseases and infections. Probably
he will never know what a cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go
through the great forests of the tropics without shivering with fever
and without saturating himself with preventive drugs. He will go freely
among great mountains; he will fly to the Poles of the earth if he
chooses, and dive into the cold, now hidden, deep places of the sea.
But it is very difficult to fill in the picture of his adult life so
that it will seem real to our experience. It is hard to conceive and
still more difficult to convey. We live in this congested, bickering,
elbowing, shoving world, and it has soaked into our natures and made us
a part of itself. Hardly any of us know what it is to be properly
educated, and hardly any what it is to be in constant general good
health.
To talk of what the world may be to most of us is like talking of baths
and leisure and happy things to some poor hopeless, gin-soaked drudge in
a slum. The creature is so devitalized; the dirt is so ingrained, so
much a second nature, that a bath really isn't attractive. Clean and
beautiful clothes sound like a mockery or priggishness. To talk of
spacious and beautiful places only arouses a violent desire in the poor
thing to get away somewhere and hide. In squalor and misery, quarrelling
and fighting make a sort of nervous relief. To multitudes of slum-bred
people the prospect of no more fighting is a disagreeable prospect, a
dull outlook.
Well, all this world of ours may seem a slum to the people of a happier
age. They will feel about our world just as we feel about the ninth or
tenth century, when we read of its brigands and its insecurities, its
pestilences, its miserable housing, its abstinence from ablutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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