Wells mentions waste and raw materials, and attributes Theodore Roosevelt with noticing these things. Wells skips over the Great War and depression. He does not mention the aesthetic nullity of the Jewish influence, making their environment hideous and depressing, an attraction to Jews. I doubt whether any part of Europe had towns uglier.
Wells is scathing about universities around the world, and regards the collective US mind as at the level of a horse. He has a spirited argument with an imaginary American critic. It's amusing but inconclusive.
At each point in his reasoning, Wells accepts what could be called the 'Mainstream' interpretation. With the Internet age, people have a wider pool of information to fish in, so there's some possibility of avoiding the media mental straitjacketing. Wells considered the USA the most educated of all countries—books expensive, as in other huge countries, but this problem overcome, he thought, by public libraries and universities. But he clearly had enormous doubts.
Wells, all his life, understandably thought of authors as standalone authorities; he was uneasy with anonymous, regularly paid, career hack writers of the media and church and 'public information' type, though I don't think he ever assembled a full critique of them.
Raeto West 7 Jan 2024
FINALLY, IN THIS STOCKTAKING of human forces, we come to
the countries more directly affected by the American and
French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, the
countries in which, beyond the shadow of the British oligarchy,
radical and liberal and democratic ideas have had a maximum
freedom of expression. Chief of these, and charged now, it
would seem, with the main burthen of their common destiny,
is that third great mass of human beings with any sort of
solidarity, the United States of America, China, Russia,
North America; these vast countries make more than a third
and nearly a half of humanity; they occupy most of the north
temperate zone, which is the zone of maximum human
energy, and with the British Empire they constitute the greater
part of mankind. They are all fermenting with change. And
the most free-spoken, active, perplexing and various of all
these great vats of destiny is the United States.
The United States is of primary significance in world affairs
for a number of reasons. In the first place its population is
almost entirely literate, that is to say, it can read. How it
reads and what it reads is another matter. There are no cheap
books in America such as there are in Great Britain and
France; most books worth reading can be got in England for
sixpence, while in America they cost from ten times as much
upwards; and outside a limited world even prosperous people
hear very little of any but those best sellers which follow each
other like epidemics across the continent. But the newspaper
Sunday Supplements and the public libraries largely compensate for these present imperfections of the book supply. So the
American public as a whole, over the vast areas it covers, is
simultaneously accessible, if need be, to new ideas, and that
accessibility is greatly enhanced by the nation-wide distribution of the cinema and the radio. And next it has a tradition
of free discussion. The American says what he thinks, and
even when he doesn’t think he is apt to say it. You can always
contradict him, and there is no handicap to help any opinion
to win.
Education is in the hands of the forty-eight state governments of the Union, and varies widely in its standards and
organisation from state to state; schools, colleges and universities are scattered abundantly over the land; they range from
sheer imposture upward, and the best of them are as good as or
better than anything else in the world. There are great endowments for education and for educational enterprises.
There are probably more highly educated people in the
United States than in any other single country whatever, and
when it comes to what we may call the half-educated, people
whose minds, already loosely furnished, could easily be
quickened, there is no comparison. In one or two backward
states, modern scientific teaching—of evolution, for example—
is prohibited in the state schools, and discriminatory obstacles
are put in the way of the education of coloured people. These
are exceptions to a general freedom. The intellectual possibilities of this vast country are unlikely to be seriously threatened
by invasion, extreme war stresses or civil convulsions for some
time. They are threatened just enough to stimulate them and
prevent their becoming lethargic.
Like all the rest of the world, the Union has felt the impact
of the new conditions of human life, the progressive abolition
of distance, the immense increase of material power and the
ensuing dislocations of economic and social order, but less
confusedly and with more time and elbow-room for consideration than any other country. It has been able to look and
see; it has been able to think more plainly about the change
that has come upon us all. It has only realised in the last
decade that it has an accumulating surplus of unemployed.
There is a vast elementariness about the past hundred and
fifty years in America. It is as if social and political life in the
United States was simplified and made plain for demonstration purposes to all the rest of the world. We have there in
unqualified contrast the East and the West, the North and the
South, White and Black; no petty nationalisms, no traditional hatreds, no language difficulties, no localised religions
obscure the broad issues. The War of Independence left the
country a democracy, democracy at its first stage, the state of
political equality and individual liberty. The extension of the
democratic idea to include socialism, educational equality and
universally accessible information, which we have traced in §6 [WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?],
scarcely affected America until the close of the nineteenth
century. Throughout all that century she worked out the
possibilities for good and evil of a hard individualistic democracy. The Civil War, though it arose out of a number of
economic and political stresses, simplified out at last to a
logical completion of the equalitarian idea by the abolition
of slavery and the enfranchisement of the liberated slaves.
Life throughout that period resolved itself into a scramble
for wealth. The whole nation thought dollars, talked dollars.
For several generations it was a distinctly exhilarating scramble.
There were so much unexploited land, such reserves of natural
wealth available, that it was possible to accumulate vast
fortunes and still find fresh employment for everyone who chose
to work. After the Civil War came a great development and
organisation of industry. American invention, American
enterprise, soon led the world in the expansion of big business
and the mechanisation of life. For a time it was not realised
that this march of Triumphant Democracy [Footnote: Andrew Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy (1886)] was essentially
the rape of virgin resources that could never be replaced.
Triumphant Democracy poured across the continent, destroying
the forests and so changing the climate for the worse, ploughing up pasture that presently became sandy desert, exterminating animal species, using up coal, oil, mineral wealth as though
there was no end to any of these things.
It was only as the “Wonderful Century” drew to its end
that the immensity and the menace of Waste dawned upon
people’s minds. Everyone was so keen to get dollars that many
of them forgot to get children, but the supply of labour for
all that vast ploughing-up, cutting-down and tearing-out was
sustained by a tremendous immigration. In 1906 a million
immigrants poured into America, mostly people who knew no
English and had a far lower standard of life than the native
worker. They were divided among themselves at first by their
special ignorances; they supplied a far more manageable type
of labour from the point of view of the exploiting employer. [Footnote: See my The Future in America (1906); Two Studies in Disappointment]
The home-grown strain hoped to save money, get on, escape
from employment, and so it was slow to develop any class
solidarity until it realised that every door to hopeful competition was being closed upon it. Labour legislation in America
therefore fell far behind that of Great Britain. Not only was
the immediate real wealth of America being turned to dollars;
a rapid deterioration of the common life was also going on.
Very reluctantly would America admit that the great uprush
was over. Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for Conservation was the first practical recognition in America that Americanism had gone too far.
This is not a history, but a survey of existing possibilities,
and we will say nothing here of the events that exalted and
depressed American life for the next third of a century, the
War, the boom, the collapse, until we come to that nation-wide
realisation of crisis and panic that brought Franklin Roosevelt
in as the saviour of a staggering social system.
Sometimes a work of art can do more to present reality
than a whole library of reports and statistics, and that tremendous genius, John Steinbeck, in his Grapes of Wrath (1939),
has given an unforgettable picture of the last stage in that
process of material and moral destruction and disillusionment
with which the story of sturdy individualism in America
concludes. He gives it all, from the exhausted soil dribbling
down to dust, to the broken pride, the hopeless revolt and the
black despair of the human victims, without rhetoric, without
argument, but with an irresistible effect of fundamental truth.
The crisis discovered a great man in Franklin Roosevelt.
As I have written elsewhere, [Footnote: Experiment in Autobiography, Chapter IX, §9, and World Brain, The Fall in America, 1937] he is a “patrician” rather in
the vein of Lord Grey and Arthur Balfour than a typical
American politician. He is rich and his peculiar health
makes him float rather above the level of everyday temptations. He has the boldness of imagination needed to meet the
challenges of the time, but he has the great gentleman’s disposition to look to subordinates for the detailed execution of
is designs. None too soon he has carried America forward
to the second stage of democratic realisation. His New Deal
involves such collective controls of the national business that
it would be absurd to call it anything but socialism were it
not for a prejudice lingering on from the old individualist
days against that word.
At the beginning there was much talk of the Brain Trust,
which he had gathered about him to realise the vast changeover of American affairs he had in hand. I was tremendously
excited by this Brain Trust idea, and I went off to America,
as my Experiment in Autobiography relates, to have a good look
at it. He had imagined that the universities could and would
give him men of exhaustive knowledge and capacity in sufficient amount to create, on the spur of the moment, a civil
service competent to meet the huge demands of this great transition he was so gallantly attempting. These Brain
Trusters were what the universities produced for him. My
wits were not quick enough to size them up at once. They
seemed to be an extremely interesting and miscellaneous set
of men, but I had a feeling from the outset that they were not
going to justify the President’s expectations. He was under an
easy delusion about the American universities. He thought
they were untapped reservoirs of wisdom. They are not.
They were quite unable to give him the knowledge, understanding and responsive imaginations necessary to convert
his magnificent gestures of social and economic reconstruction
into a working reality.
I went, a travelling note of interrogation, from him to Stalin,
because I realised that the same insufficiency of mental resources and support which was baffling the American President, the lack of any adequate mass and structure of
administrative knowledge in the state, must also be crippling
the socialist thrust in Russia. Was Russia meeting or attempting to meet that difficulty? In some way of its own? And
in Russia I found Gorky in a dream of Russia’s greatness,
unfolding the plans of non-existent universities to my incredulous eyes, and nothing else but intolerant dogmatists
and intriguing commissars.
Both Roosevelt and Stalin were attempting to produce a
huge, modern, scientifically organised socialist state, the one
out of a warning crisis and the other out of a chaos, and the
lack of a brain organisation to give that state consciousness
and coherence was a difference not in nature, but degree.
The brain organisation of the United States is not up to its
new job. It needs to be revised, expanded, turned round to
face the future. I have compared the head structure of the
Russian giant to the brain of a newt. To carry on the
biological analogy, the knowledge and will structures of the
United States seem to be somewhere about the level of a
horse. It has a cerebrum all right; it remembers almost too
well within a limited range, it shies at shadows, stampedes
very readily, and has no particular zeal for learning new
things. Something very much better than that is demanded.
For the great, closely-organised human community that
socialism contemplates, a World Brain is essential. The third
aspect of a complete democracy is a tremendous educational
expansion, that not only opens the way to the White House to
Everyman but gives him the necessary mental equipment, if
he can use it, to get there. Such an educational organisation
has been latent in America for a century and a half. The
fathers of the Republic were not unmindful of it. In every
state, land was set aside to supply the endowment for a state
university, and sometimes that turned out well, and sometimes
it did not. In addition, there were older endowments of the
British type, and fresh benefactions expanded these and added
to their number. The whole community was concentrated
upon that fascinating dollar hunt, but when one of the winners
felt public-spirited and generous, it seemed a fine thing to him
to get some more knowledge and education for the people.
And being essentially a business man, he went and bought
the stuff; he bought the best in the market; and it did not
occur to him—and why should it—that America might be
in need of something at least as new and distinctive of her as
the great business plants and concentrations that he and his
fellow-magnates were, with such vivid immediate success and
such ultimate bad consequences, making. So that the extensive and complicated university system of America remained
essentially European, first upon the British pattern and then
with an increasing German influence. To this day it clings
to the medieval cap and gown, the degree-giving and medieval
lecturing of the old world.
Dollar preoccupation was almost as effective in leaving
unchallenged the ascendancy of Europe and European
patterns in the world of thought and artistic creation. Boston,
which had played a vigorous part in British intellectual life
in colonial days, resented this acceptance of inferiority, but
until well into the latter quarter of the nineteenth century
the European ascendancy was tacitly admitted in the rest
of America. Lowell might complain of a “certain air of
condescension” in the visiting English of his time. This air
of condescension had this much justification that in many
strata of the American world it was accepted. There were
insurgent spirits and many protests indeed, but the War of
Independence only reached the realm of literary criticism
towards the turn of the century, and then it came as a great
shock to the British writers of my generation, who had taken
the American tribute for granted. To-day no young American
writer would dream of sedulously imitating or indeed resembling
a British model. And in many fields of thought, the new
history and sociological speculation for example, individual
minds broke into distinctive American methods. Some thirty-odd years ago the American climate, by way of a protest,
killed all the cherished ivy on those red-brick colleges, but it
did nothing further in the matter. To this day the shape of
the knowledge organisation and education, and particularly
of the higher education, remains in precisely the same state
of picturesque headlessness and material ineffectiveness as
the older, natural-grown European disorder of institutions.
The erection of facsimile buildings, Magdalen Tower in
Chicago, for example, is merely the extreme expression of
this reverential attitude.
The United States, let alone the world, cannot carry on
now with an unorganised mentality, a scattered higher
education that has no power over the press or the common
schools or political consciences. It produces no adequate
civil service, no well-informed and easily co-operative administrators. It cannot compass any of the major problems before
the nation. The resort of the undergraduate world to the
realities of the playing-fields is a sure indication of the unattractiveness of its array of subjects. They yell. Every
university has a yell. And well may they yell and go wild
and frantic in their stadiums, for their lives and their powers
are being largely wasted.
Yet it is in America now that the clearest hope for a beginning of that World Brain resides. A country habituated
to the rapid development of vast commercial and industrial
enterprises must surely be capable of attempting an intellectual and educational enterprise beyond the imagination
of men bred in smaller and more tradition-ridden communities. So far it has been impossible to awaken any
influential and resourceful people to this patent, if unprecedented, necessity. It is unhappily so novel that they seem
afraid to realise how obvious it is and unavoidable. There
is no time to lose about it. It is hard to guess what may
happen when this abnormal phase of personal government
by one inspired, insufficiently able man of genius comes to
an end. There is no one to replace him and nothing to
replace him. Nothing is being prepared. America may
relapse in quite a little time into something as acephalous
and incalculable as Russia.
And so I return to my refrain: “We need a World
Brain,” and to my insistence that the creation of a greater
mental superstructure to reorient the mind of the world is
an entirely practicable proposal.
At this point I imagine an angry critic interrupts. He has
been skimming through this book—he wouldn’t deign to
read it or mark the course of its argument—looking for
occasion for offence. And now he cries: “Who are you,
Mr. Know-all, to tell us that all these splendid institutions,
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Johns Hopkins
and a multitude of others, and abroad Oxford, Cambridge,
Paris, London, Coimbra, Upsala, Tokio—one could count a
thousand galaxies of clustering colleges and dreaming spires
—and all these wise and good men, thousands of them, men of
eminent learning, men of distinguished character, doctors,
teachers, investigators, scholars, not one who is not in every
respect a far better man than yourself, that all together they
amount to nothing! that this I great constellation, this veritable shining skyful of gifts and powers is not sufficient for
the needs of the world to-day! that altogether it amounts
to no more, scale for scale—what did you say?—than the
brain of a horse! that it needs something far more powerful,
some far vaster embodiment of knowledge and purpose—
some queer fad of yours?”
To which I answer: What are they doing now? So far
from lighting the world, the skies are so overcast that these
starry constellations seem scarcely to be shining.
And far from being “Mr. Know-all”, I am helpless
ignorance, in a sea of unconscious ignorance. There is one
thing, and one thing only, I know that you do not seem to
know, and that is this—that neither you nor I know enough,
nor know the little that we do know well enough, to meet
the needs of the world’s occasions.. Unless we do something
about this ignorance of ours, this universal blinkered ignorance,
we shall be overwhelmed, we shall destroy one another.
If only some small fraction of the still considerable wealth
and energy of America could be turned not merely to a
campaign against the ignorance of others but against its own
far more dangerous ignorance; if only this absolute necessity
for an organised World Brain, a gigantic but still possible
super-university, set above all these admirable but ineffective
scattered foundations to utilise and consolidate them, if only
that could fire the imagination of a few energetic spirits;
then the whole outlook of the human species might still be
changed.
There is a last possibility to consider in this survey. Some
such appeal as I am making may presently gather force, attract a measure, but an insufficient measure, of support
and not enough critical attention. The thing may be tried,
the effort may be made, and, as people say, it may fall into
the wrong hands. Instead of a living World Brain we may
have a sham World Brain. The effort may be made. Money
may be forthcoming; the demand may grow. Something
to look like a world encyclopedic organisation may be
brought into being, good enough to pacify most of the
clamour, good enough for those people who say you cannot
have everything at once—you must have a beginning. When
embryonic tissue cannot build an organ it can still produce
a cancer. We may have some large and plausible organisation of platitudes, irrelevances and compromises, as adequate
as an organisation of knowledge as the old League of Nations
was of world peace. There may be great academic comings
and goings, ceremonies and solemn consecrations. And at
last something in the nature of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler
and President Grover Whalen will appear enthroned, side
by side, organisers of the World Brain triumphant, the World
Brain of To-morrow, brooding profoundly over the unmitigated destiny of mankind. [Footnote: Cp. The Columbia Encyclopedia.]
That may be. The history of most religions supports this
possibility. There is nothing whatever between the stars and
the atoms to show why the end of Homo sapiens should not be
absurd as well as tragic. The price of human salvation is
eternal vigilance, incessant fearless criticism and unrestricted
wit. How can one tell beforehand whether that price will be
forthcoming? Without unrestrained free speech and irreverence, how can we defeat the universal human tendency
to be satisfied with and tolerant towards plausible, pretentious
things? There can be no rest, no tactful acquiescences, no
mental toleration, no enfeebling politeness, in the kulturkampf ahead, if man is to escape the evils that close in upon
him.
In the design of this book three primary themes interlace
and pursue and develop each other. There is first, that
invention and science have completely altered the material
environment of human life. Next, that the disruptive driving-force of an excess of bored and unemployed young men, which
must in some manner find relief, will probably shatter life
altogether under the new conditions. And thirdly, that the
existing mental organisation of our species is entirely insufficient to control the present situation, which nevertheless
might, with an adequate effort, be controlled. These are
the Change of Scale theme, the Youth Pressure theme and
the World Brain theme. The first two create the problem to
which the third indicates the only possible solution.
About the role of those young men; its cardinal importance
is still not recognised plainly by sociologists, historians and
writers of contemporary history. In practice, however, it is
plainly apprehended, and a very considerable amount of
propaganda to capture the imagination of this vital stratum
is carried on, and particularly by the more aggressive contemporary states. They pursue their co-nationals abroad,
and make strenuous efforts to win over opinion in neutral
states and bring local conditions into parallelism with their
own. Nazi patterns are being studied in South Africa, for
example, and we have noted the Fascist disposition of General
Chiang Kai Shek. There is a great totalitarian propaganda,
and now, awakening and responding to it, there is counter-propaganda.
On the whole the totalitarians make the more exciting and
attractive promises and give the brooding young man the
most immediate prospect of authorised masterful activities.
Official Great Britain pays the dole and encourages no presumptuous hopes. But in America and elsewhere there
is a definitely anti-Fascist organisation called the World
Youth Movement. This is a brotherhood and fundamentally
a pacifist organisation, a combination of a great number of
more specialised associations, which attempts to bring the
opinions and demands of the young for security from massacre
and for employment, training, adult education, health culture
and so forth, to bear upon governing and administrative
bodies, and exert a critical, helpful and mediatory influence
upon their social welfare work. It has the open support of
both the President and his wife, more particularly of Mrs.
Roosevelt, and it extends its liaison work into most of the so-called democracies—and Russia. Its activities vary with the
country and occasion, but its general objective is to keep its
young people busy with work of public importance, developing their capacity with use aad experience. This World
Youth Movement claims to represent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total of forty million adherents—
under the age of thirty. Of these, twelve million are credited
to Russia, though I cannot imagine how these figures are checked. It includes also a number of War Resisters whose
ideas stop short at a repudiation of war. They will have
nothing to do with war, but how human affairs are to be
carried on in a warless world they do not trouble to think.
Anyone else can bother about that, it seems, not they. They
carry passive resistance to the pitch of know-nothingness.
With a certain disapproval they offer us their bodies to be
protected and their mouths to be fed
I mention the World Youth Movement here, but I am quite
unable to estimate its possibilities. It may fade out. It may
play an important and increasing role in the consolidation
of a new world order.
The President and Mrs. Roosevelt, though they seem
acutely aware that a developing Youth Movement may play
an important part in the political drama of to-morrow, have
neither of them betrayed any consciousness of the immense
intellectual reorientation of which the world is now in. such
urgent need. Their circumstances have never directed their
attention to that. I doubt if these two fine, active minds have
ever enquired how it is they know what they know and think
as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might
have been if they had grown up in an entirely different
culture. They have the disposition of all politicians the world
over to deal only with made opinion. They have never
enquired how it is that opinion is made.
The only representatives of Youth I have ever met who
seemed to be aware that they were under-educated and
improperly educated were some Burmans I met in Rangoon.
“We are taught to be clerks in European-owned factories,”
they complained. “What we want is technical knowledge
and the science of our own country and circumstances so as
to give us a clear conception of our role in the world. ... ”
Now that was saying something.