The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead
Herbert George Wells
9781613107140
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human life. “Human nature” never alters, we are assured; man in the Stone Age, any Stone Age, was exactly what he is now, or rather more so; he felt the same things; he imagined the same things; he travelled the same round; his fears, his hopes were identical. Save for a few superficialities, human life has always been the same and will always be the same, and neither the past nor the future can be allowed to cast a reflection by difference upon our satisfaction with the lives we lead to-day. Life as we know it is, in fact, the cream and the whole of existence. There was nothing very different behind us and there is nothing better ahead. Quite similarly we protect our self-esteem by the persuasion that life under all sorts of circumstances and in all social positions is very much of a muchness. It gratifies our inherent grudgingness to think that life in a palace differs in no essential quality from life in our own cottage, that all the grapes above our heads are sour, and it eases our social conscience to reflect over the fire in the evening that the miner cramped in his seam or the out-of-work on tramp is so attuned to his level of existence that for all practical purposes he has just as much fun and contentment in life as we do. There is no real inequality, we assure ourselves, just as there is no progress. Our lives are as good as any lives can be. “Riches,” we all say, “cannot buy happiness,” and it seems hardly to touch that statement that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the completest enjoyment of existence who would be cripples or dead if they had not been able to command the services of expensive surgeons, undergo costly treatments or take imperative holidays at this or that crisis in their careers. In any other age, under any available conditions, they would be cripples or dead. But it makes us happier to deny that, just as it makes us happier to think that the life of our times will always be regarded with respect by posterity. Our heroes will always be the most heroic of heroes; the great men we have made our symbols will shine as stars of the first magnitude for ever; the art, the literature that delight us will last for “all time.” Our Newton is for ever; our Shakespeare is for ever; Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon are for ever; it is almost as if we were for ever. This sort of consolation is so natural to most of us, so near to being a necessity, that to run over a few of the facts that make it absurd can rob hardly a soul of the pleasure of it. For everyday purposes we believe what we want to believe, and if we do not want to believe the truth, we do generally contrive to dispose of it as a sort of extravaganza. In that spirit most of us contemplate the fact that human life, the tune, the quality, the elements, are changing visibly before our eyes. Human life, as a matter of fact and not as a matter of sentiment, is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different. The scope of it and the feel of it and the spirit of it change. Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided, and comprehensive a process of change as ours to-day. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.
