H G Wells

The Salvaging Of Civilization H G Wells

The present outlook of human affairs is one that admits of broad generalizations and that seems torequire broad generalizations. We are in one of those phases of experience which become cardinal inhistory. A series of immense and tragic events have shattered the self-complacency and challengedthe will and intelligence of mankind. That easy general forward movement of human affairs whichfor several generations had seemed to justify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible progress, progress towards greater powers, greater happiness, and a continual enlargement of life, has beenchecked violently and perhaps arrested altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of the Great War hasrevealed an accumulation of destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous society, of which few ofus had dreamt; and it has also revealed a profound incapacity to deal with and restrain these forces. The two years of want, confusion, and indecision that have followed the Great War in Europe andAsia, and the uncertainties that have disturbed life even in the comparatively untouched Americanworld, seem to many watchful minds even more ominous to our social order than the war itself. What is happening to our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and confident hopes with which thetwentieth century opened, mark nothing more than a culmination of fortuitous good luck? Has thecycle of prosperity and progress closed? To what will this staggering and blundering, the hatreds andmischievous adventures of the present time, bring us? Is the world in the opening of long centuriesof confusion and disaster such as ended the Western Roman Empire in Europe or the Hanprosperity in China? And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or is the American (andPacific?) system still sufficiently removed and still sufficiently autonomous to maintain a progressivemovement of its own if the Old World collapse?Some sort of answer to these questions, vast and vague though they are, we must each one of ushave before we can take an intelligent interest or cast an effective vote in foreign affairs. Eventhough a man formulate no definite answer, he must still have an implicit persuasion before he canact in these matters. If he have no clear conclusions openly arrived at, then he must act uponsubconscious conclusions instinctively arrived at. Far better is it that he should bring them into theopen light of thought