Extracts from H. G . Wells (1) Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy (2) After Democracy (3) The Shape of Things to Come (4) Science and the World Mind; bold emphasis added.
Peter Myers B. A. Hons B. Sc.
14th January 2000
Transcriber's note: H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell are the two highest-profile leaders of the World Government movement this century, aside from Lenin and Trotsky. Wells candidly expressed his views in his non-fiction writings, the most explicit of which is The Open Conspiracy; however, to reach the general public, he used novels, which always had the same moral. Working for the One World cause was, as he put it, his religion. The British Labour Party, under Tony Blair, is very much in the Wells mould, and leading Labour MP Michael Foot has written a new biography of Wells, which mentions all the books discussed here, but omits to mention their advocacy of World Government; nor is this term listed in the index. Foot, like Wells, gives the impression that Wells opposed Soviet Communism, but it would be more accurate to say that he opposed the Stalinist faction. Trotsky he supported, and his Internationalism is really Trotskyism in as disguised form.
Wells was pre-occupied with Plato's visions of philosopher-kings. Although Wells terms his movement the Open Conspiracy, Karl Popper warned in his book on the Open Society that Plato's republic was the blueprint for modern totalitarian states. The messianic fervour, however, comes not from Plato but from the Jewish idea of an earthly utopia. Could some people have confused one with the other? Plato's envisaged his republic as being on a relatively small scale; the idea of a utopia covering the whole world is Jewish - it does not come from Plato.
(1) H. G. Wells, Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy. Faber & Faber, London, 1929.
(p. 18) the outline of history of the last hundred years can be stated as the more or less lucid attempts of all the main sovereign states of the world to secure a world-wide control of the raw materials necessary for the mechanical civilization upon which we have entered. All our modern imperialisms are this: the more or less conscious efforts of once national states to become world-wide And since at one time there can be only one complete world-wide state upon our planet, enormous pressures and rivalries and conflicts exist and intensify. And it seems to me that only two alternatives about the human future can be considered. Either these jostling and mutually incompatible independent sovereign states, which the great change of scale in the economic processes of life is continually forcing towards world dimensions, must fight among themselves until only one survives, or else mankind generally must be made to understand the nature of the (p. 19) present process, to substitute for the time-honoured but now out-of-date traditions of independent national sovereignty a new idea of world organization ... It means a tremendous break with tradition and a fundamental reconstruction of education throughout the world.
(2) H. G . Wells, After Democracy. London, Watts & Co., 1932.
(p. 196) My World Economic Council would make a Twenty Years' Plan for the reorganization of the world's production and distribution. It would not smash down all the tariff walls at once ... but it would set about reducing them methodically, organizing the transport of the world by sea and land and air as one system, assigning types of cultivation and manufacture to the most favourable regions, possib]y shifting workers to new regions of employment, irrigating deserts, and restoring forests. ... We should ... pay very little heed to the old out-of-date political divisions of the world. (p. 197) ... we should try to keep people speaking the same language together because that would be more convenient ... that new mapping for economic convenience is absolutely essential if we are really out to end war. By the end of my Dictatorship everything would be grown where it was most conveniently grown for production and distribution, and I should hope to have not a single custom house left in the world. Goods would be moving as easily and cheaply about our planet, from producer to consumer, as now they shift from one end of a big modern factory to another.
There would have to be one money in the world. ... Almost my first administrative act would be to state the plain fact of the case and declare the world bankrupt. That means ... that debts have to be written down. The only practical way in which a community or a world can make a settlement of excessive debts is to depreciate the currency in which they (p. 198) are reckoned. A bankrupt is bankrupt relatively to the rest of the community. He pays so much in the pound and we discharge him. But what we have to do with here is not a relative bankruptcy but a general bankruptcy. The people of the earth, the industries of the people of the earth, cannot pay their way. And for a whole community which cannot pay its way the only way of writing down its debts is to write down the currency by which those debts are reckoned. In other words, prices have to be put up. Production is being paralyzed by prices too low to yield a profit and pay rent, interest on loans, and wages, and producers are therefore unable to pay debts or consume. So we stagger through distress towards catastrophe.
(p. 199) At the outset of my Dictatorship I should restrict the issue of money to one central world authority; I should fix the exchange value of existing currencies to one another and to this new currency; I should gradually call in the old currencies altogether. And my central monetary authority would see to it that the ratios of the new world money to the old standards of reckoning secured just that inflation of prices and just that diminution of the burthen of debts needed to restore productive activity to the world. A single world currency and a world-controlled credit system, it seems to me, constitute a necessary preliminary to that rationalization of economic life which is thc only sure foundation of world peace and prosperity.
(p.200) Given peace on earth and abundance for all, will there not be a rapid and indeed a frightful increase of population and a great clash of races? ... As World dictator I should see to it that the kind of knowledge which leads to a restriction of population is spread throughout the whole world. That secured, I do not think mankind need fear over-population. Nor do I think the races of mankind are going to devour one another. There is not going to be any great overrunning of peoples. ... Men in the coming future will find that when they are free to move wherever they choose about our planet they will for the most part stay in the habitats congenial to them. When they know how to limit their increases they will limit them. The great migrations of the past have been hunger marches, and (p. 201) my economic controls and my population controls will have put an end to such disturbances.
And how am I going to fix this new world rule of mine so that peace and prosperity will remain when the world is released from my Dictatorship? By an immense reorganization of education. ... My Dictatorship will be essentially an Educational Dictatorship. Every great change in political, social, and economic life demands a corresponding educational change. .. I shall have the young forgetting their old narrow, bloodstained histories and learning of the great adventure of mankind ...
(p. 202) But it may be objected to what I am saying that I am really proposing to push the existing sovereign militant governments of the world aside and providing no substitute. Well, what if I am? Do we want a world parliament or a world president, a world flag, or indeed anything of that sort? It seems to me that nothing in that form is required. A world control would be necessarily different from an existing government, because it would not be militant. A world control means a stupendous simplification of human affairs. There would be a world economic control board, a central police control which would arise naturally out of that peace and disarmament board I talked about at first, and a great world organization sustaining education, scientific research, and the perpetual revision of ideas. These boards would carry on (and they are really all that is needed for carrying on) the essential business of this planet. Why should there be a world parliament? It would have to meet in the tower of Babel—and what would there be for it to do? Would there be world elections? About what? Would there be great world politicians and leaders of the world people? Upon what issues?
But it may be asked, Who will make the ultimate decision? There must be a king or an assemby, or some such body, to say " Yes " or " No," in the last resort. But must there be? Suppose your intellectual (p. 203) organization, your body of thought, your scientific men, say and prove that this, that, or the other course is the right one. Suppose they have the common-sense of an alert and educated community to sustain them. Why should not a dictatorship—not of this man or that man, nor of the proletariat, but of informed and educated common sense—some day rule the earth? What need is there for a lot of politicians and lawyers to argue about the way things ought to be done, confusing the issue ? Why make a dispute of world welfare? What need is there for some autocrat to say " Yes " or " No " when a course is known to be sound and right? You do not let politicians and rulers run the engineering enterprises of mankind, you do not make public health a political question. Why should professional squabbles of that sort mess about with the world's economic life, or world education, or keeping the peace?
But let me be quite clear about existing governments, flags, and so forth. There is no need to abolish such things. I am no red-handed revolutionary, no destructive firebrand tearing down venerable things. All I should do, as World Dictator, would be to deprive these governments of the power and means of making war, relieve them of supreme financial and economic control, and take the general direction and protection of education and scicntific research throughout the world out of their hands, by requiring them to be set up, or by setting up competent overriding bodies. They would no longer be sovereign powers to that extent, but that is not saying they are to be forcibly extinguished ...
(3) H. G . Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: the Ultimate Revolution. London, Hutchinson & Co., 1933.
(p. 288) The more the reader scrutinizes the agenda, the more is he impressed by the mildness of the official title of the gathering: "A Conference on Scientific and Mercantile Communications and Associated Questions". It is clear that the conveners resolved to press on with their task of world reorganization as far as they possibly could, without rousing the enfeebled and moribund political organizations of the past to obstruction and interference. The language throughout is that of understatement; the shape of the projects is fearlessly bold.
(p. 289) What is this reconstructed transport to carry? How is it to be fed—and paid for? About the air-ports everywhere were tracts and regions sinking back to that primordial peasant cultivation which had been the basis of all the barbaric civilizations of the past. The question of the expropriation of the peasant and the modernization of agricultural production was taken up at Basra where Lenin and Stalin had laid it down, defeated. The Conference was lucidly aware that upon the same planet at the same time you cannot have both an aviator and a starveling breeding peasantry, toiling endlessly and for ever in debt. One or the other has to go, and the fundamental objective of the Conference was to make the world safe for the former. The disappearance of the latter followed, not as a sought-after end but as a necessary consequence. And the disappearance of as much of the institutions of the past as were interwoven with it. (p. 300) ... The abolition of the self-subsisting peasant had been the conscious objective of Lenin and Stalin in Russia. The cultivator, with increasing ease, was to produce fundamental foodstuffs far beyond his own needs and to receive for his surplus an ever increasing variety of helps, comforts and amenities. ...
The ambition of the Modern State Fellowship was to become the landlord of the planet and either to mine, afforest, pasture, and cultivate directly or to have these tasks performed by responsible tenants, or groups and associations of tenants under its general control. But at the outset it had neither the personnel nor the power to carry out so fundamental a reconstruction of human affairs. The comparative failure of the two Five Year Plans in Russia had been a useful warning against extravagant propositions. (p. 301) ... The subsequent propaganda was still more swift and urgent, but the new membership was not always of the same thorough quality as the old. The society wanted the services of every man or woman it could incorporate with its Fellowship, but it did not want an inrush of half-prepared adherents, refugees from moral perplexity equiring guidance, ambitious careerists. Every new religion, every church, every organized movement has known this conflict between the desire for expansion and the dread of dilution. On the one hand the Modern State recalled the headlong shallow mass conversions of Christianity and Islam, which had reduced those great faiths to a mere superstitious veneer upon barbarism ...
(p. 320) ... The new Bavarian government, the Windsor Parliament and the government in Rome were all "arranging to take over" these things within their territories. They were becoming more explicit about it every year. They persisted in regarding the interlocking Controls as a dangerous international Trust.
This was the burthen of the national missions of observation and enquiry which were stewing in the sunshine outside the doors of the Conference—"in a state of tentative menace", as Williams Kapek put it.
... the Conference sized up these antagonisms and discussed their treatment. "There are just three lines of treatment possible," said Ryan brutally. "We can treat with 'em, bribe 'em, or rule 'em. I'm for a straight rule."
"Or combine those ingredients," said Hooper Hamilton.
The method of treaty-making and a modus vivendi was already in operation in regard to Russia. There indeed it was hard to say whether the Communist party or the Modern State Movement was in control, so far had assimilation gone. And the new spirit in the old United States was now so "Modern" that the protests of Washington and of various state governors against the Controls were received hilariously. Aeroplanes from Dearborn circled over the capital and White House and dropped parodies of the President's instructions to dissolve the Air and Food Trust of America. All over that realist continent, indeed, the Controls expanded as a self-owned business with a complete disregard of political formalities.
(p. 321) It was Shi-lung-tang who argued against defiance and stated the case for bribery.
It would take three or four generations to convert the world to a forward-looking attitude. Either the Modern State movement had to seize power openly now and inaugurate a tyranny that would have to last as long as it took to turn round the great majority of intelligences into the new direction, or it had to propitiate, compromise and persuade these outer masses - upon their own lines. ... He unfolded his Machiavellian project. A greedy acquisitiveness was part of the makeup of every energetic old-world type. They were as incurably voracious as dogs. And yet we made good friends and helpers out of dogs... They could never make a solid front against the Modern State. They could always be played off against each other, one against another; they could be neutralised. The (p. 322) lesson of Russia's harsh repression of her bourgeoisie and professional classes in the Twenties and Thirties was a warning against the miseries and social damage of too sudden and forcible an attempt to change ideals of behaviour. Let the Modern State go softly and more kindly ... In spite of Shi-lung-tang's smiling face, there was audible disapproval at this point.
When he had done, his case for tact and insinuating corruption was knocked to pieces by Rin Kay. "If we were a Society of Moral Supermen," he said, "... The inner life of a Modern State Fellow was a sustained effort to be simple and serve simply. That should take him all his time. He could not afford to be intricate and politic. We have a difficult enough task before us just to do what we have to do, plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to say and do this and mean that." William Ryan supported that with vigour, but Hooper Hamilton spoke long and elaborately on the other side. The spirit of the society was plainly with Kay.
M. L. Tagore, an economic botanist, introduced a new line of thought into the discussion, or rather he revived the line of thought of nineteenth-century mystical liberalism. He said he was (p. 323) equally against bribery, insincere treaties or any use of force. He was old-fashioned enough to be a democrat and a believer in the innate wisdom of the unsophisticated man... Let the Modern State society go on with the scientific organization of the world, yes, and let us go on with the propaganda of its doctrines in every land. But let it not lift a hand to compel, not even to resist evil. He appealed to the missionary successes of early Buddhism and Christianity as evidence of the practical successfulness of spiritual urgency and physical passivity. He concluded in a glow of religious enthusiasm that did not spare him the contemptuous criticisms of the social psychologists who fell upon him tooth and nail so soon as he had done.
These speeches ... were the three salient types of opinion in that gathering. The immense majority were for the active line, for frankness and rule ... The problems of the Russian system and America were abundantly discussed. Russia now was represented only by technicians, and there was abundant evidence that the repressive influence of the Og-pu had waned. Ivan Englehart was again a leading figure. He assured the Conference that there would be no trouble from Moscow. "Russia," he said, "is ready to assimilate. Is eager to assimilate.''
Arden Essenden spoke late in the general discussion; he (p. 324) spoke with a harsh enthusiasm and passionate faith; he carried all the younger men and most of the older ones with him, and he shaped the ultimate decisions. [transcriber's note: this implies that this speaker is a vehicle for Wells himself.]
Some of his phrases are, as people used to say, "historical". He said, "The World-State is not a thing of the future. It is here and now. It has always been here and now, since ever men said they had a common God above them, or talked, however timidly, of the brotherhood of mankind. The man who serves a particular state or a particular ownership in despite of the human commonweal is a traitor. Men who did that have always been traitors and men who tolerated them nursed treason in their hearts. In the past the World-State had been torn up among three-score-and-ten anarchies and a countless myriad of proprietors and creditors, and the socialists and cosmopolitans, the true heirs of the race, were hunted like criminals and persecuted and killed. [transcriber's note: note the religious origin; it does not come from Plato. In Stalin's later years, "cosmopolitan" meant Jewish and Trotskyist.]
"Now ... the world has fallen into our hands ... we here, have power. If we do not use it, if we do not use it to the fullest, we are traitors in our turn. Are we to tolerate even a temporary revival of the old system? In the name of reason, why? If their brains have got into the wrong grooves—well, we can make fresh brains. Are we to connive with and indulge this riff-raff that waits outside our doors? Go out and look at them. Look at their insincere faces ! Look at their furtive hands. Weigh what they say. Weigh the offers they will make you ! [transcriber's note: the riff-raff are presumably the "common people".]
To us to-day that seems platitudinous and over emphatic, but it conveyed the sense of the Conference and it led directly to the general decisions with which its proceedings concluded. The most significant of these was the increase of the Police of the Air and Sea Ways to a million men, and the apportionment of a greatly increased amount of energy to the improvement of their equipment. There was also to be a great intensification and speeding up of Modern State education and propaganda. Provision was also made for the enlistment of auxiliary forces and services as they might be needed for the preservation of order; these auxiliaries were to renounce any allegiance except to the Transport or other Control that might enlist them. The Controls were reorganized, and a central committee, which speedily became known as the
(p. 325) World Council, was appointed by them to act as the speaking head of the whole system. The ideas of treaties and contracts with exterior administrations and of any diplomatic dealings with dissentients were abandoned. Instead it was determined that this central committee, the World Council, should openly declare itself the sole government of the world and proceed to make the associated Controls the administrative organization of the planet.
Accordingly a proclamation was prepared to this effect and issued very widely. It was broadcast as well as printed and reprinted from a multitude of centres. It was "put upon the ether" everywhere to the exclusion of other matter. For now the world had its wireless again in as great abundance already as in the early Thirties. So simultaneously the whole planet received it. It whipped up the waiting miscellany at Basra into a foam of excited enquiry. All over the world city crowds or solitary workers received it open-mouthed. At first there was very little discussion. The effect was too stunning for that. People began to talk after a day or so ...
(p. 327) ... There was nowhere any immediate uprising in response to the proclamation of a World Government. Although it had been plainly coming for some years, although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition prepared anywhere. Thirteen years had wrought a profound change in Soviet Russia and the large areas of China in association with Moscow. The practical assimilation of Soviet Transport and Communications was almost tacitly accepted. The details of the amalgamation were entrusted to committees flying between Moscow and Basra. All over the world, wherever there was any sort of governing or managing body not already associated with the Modern State System, it fell to debating just how and to what extent it could be incorporated or how it could resist incorporation Everywhere there were Modern State nuclei ready to come into conference and fully informed upon local or regional issues. The plain necessity for a systematic "renucleation" of the world became evident. The "Section of Training and Advertisement'' had long since worked out the broad lines of a modus vivendi between the old and the new.
That modus vivendi is called variously The Life-time Plan or—with a memory of that pioneer effort in planning, The Five Year Plan of the Russian Dictatorship - The Thirty Year Plan. (p. 328) ... whenever possible the small owning peasant or the agricultural tenant was not dispossessed; he was given a fixed price for his output counselled or directed in the matter of improvements and so merged by bearable degrees into the class of agricultural workers. This, as Rupert Bordinesco put it ... gave them "time to die out". Because it was an integral part of the Life-time Plan that the new generation should be educated to develop a service mentality in the place of a proprietary mentality. There were to be no independent merchants or independent cultivators under twenty in 1980, none under thirty in 1990 and none under forty in 2000. This not only gave the old order time to die out; it gave the new order time to develop the more complex system of direction, mechanism and delivery it needed soundly and healthily. The lesson of the mental discords and tragic disproportions in the headlong development of the first Russian Five Year Plan—disproportions as monstrous and distressful as the hypertrophies and atrophies of the planless ''Capitalist System" of the nineteenth century-- had been marked and learnt.
(p. 330) But the rulers of the new World-State, as their enlargements of the Air and Sea Police made manifest, were under no illusion that the new order could be established in the world by declarations ... constabularies and ... regulations ... made the reorganized nuclei the sole means of communication of independent local authorities, businesses and individuals with the central Controls. In nearly every part of the earth the nuclei had prepared a personnel of sympathizers and auxiliaries, varying in character with local conditions, outside the ranks of the Fellowship. The khaki uniform of the street and road guardians ... appeared as if by magic all over the world, and the symbol of the winged disc broke out upon aeroplanes, post offices, telephone and telegraph booths, road signs, transport vehicles and public buildings. There was still no discord with Russia; there the blazon of the wings was put up side by side with the old hammer and sickle.
Nowhere at first was there any armed insurrectionary movement ... There were, however, protests, ... and much passive resistance and failure to comply. ... This phase of tacit acquiescence was, however, only temporary, until the opposition could gather itself into new forms and phases and discover methods of organization. The elements of antagonism were abundant enough. The Fascist garrison in Rome, (p. 331) claiming to be the government of all Italy, was one of the earliest to make its challenge. It had a number of airmen, unlicensed for various reasons by the Transport Control, and it now sent a detachment of its Black Shirts to occupy the new aeroplane factory outside the old Roman town of Turin, and to seize a small aerodrome and whatever air material was to be found in it at Ostia. The winged disc at these two places was replaced by the national fasces. ... The new air police had been waiting ... for a provocation of this sort. It had been equipped with a new type of gas bomb ... With this it now proceeded to "treat" the long-resented customs house at Ventimiglia and the factory and aerodrome in dispute.
At Ostia the police planes found a complication of the situation. An extraordinary ceremony was in progress in the aerodrome. Three new aeroplanes had just been brought thither from the Turin factory, and they were being blessed by the Pope (Pope Alban III). ... this particular occasion had been made something of a demonstration against the World Council. The Pope had come; the King and the reigning Duce were present...
(p. 338) ... the gassing of the Pope and the martyrdom of Saint Odet of Ostia... marking a supremely significant corner which humanity was turning. It was something that had to happen and it was something he had never let his mind dwell upon. It ended a practical truce that had endured for nearly three centuries in the matter of moral teaching, in the organization of motive, in what was then understood as religion. It was the first killing in a new religious conflict. The new government meant to rule not only the planet but the human will. One thing meant the other. It had realized that to its own surprise. And Raven, with an equal surprise, had realized that so it had to be.
Nearly a year earlier the one World-State had been declared at Basra. There already it had been asserted plainly that a new order must insist upon its own specific education, and that it could not tolerate any other forms of training for the world-wide lives it contemplated. But to say a thing like that is not to realize its meaning. Things of that sort had been said before, and passed like musical flourishes across the minds of men. The new government did not apprehend the fullness of its own intentions until this unpremeditated act of supreme sacrilege forced decision upon it. But now it had struck down the very head of Catholic Christianity and killed an officiating priest in the midst of his ministrations. It had gripped that vast world organization, the Catholic Church, and told it in effect to be still for evermore. It was now awake to its own purpose. It might have retreated or compromised. It decided to go on.
Ten days later air guards descended upon Mecca and closed the chief holy places. A number of religious observances were suppressed in India, and the slaughter-houses in which kosher food was prepared in an antiquated and unpleasant manner for orthodox Jews were closed throughout the world. An Act of Uniformity came into operation everywhere. There was now to be one faith only in the world, the moral expression of the one world community. [transcriber's note: this actually happened in the USSR in the early years. Wells expresses no misgivings about it, above or below. The One World movement is itself is a religion, a totalitarian one that cannot tolerate rivals.]
(p. 339) Raven was taken unawares, as the world of 1978 was taken unawares, by this swift unfolding of a transport monopoly into a government, a social order and a universal faith. And yet the experiment of Soviet Russia, and the practical suppression of any other religion than the so-called Communism that had been forced upon it, might well have prepared his mind for the realization that for any new social order there must be a new education of all who were to live willingly and helpfully in it, and that the core of an education is a religion. Plainly he had not thought out all that such a statement means. Like almost all the liberal-minded people of our time, he had disbelieved in every form of contemporary religion, but he had tolerated them all. It had seemed to him entirely reasonable that minds could be left to take the mould of any pattern and interpretation of life that chanced upon them without any serious effect upon their social and political reactions. It is extraordinary how such contradictory conceptions of living still exist side by side in our present world with only a little mutual nagging. But very evidently that is not going to be accepted by the generations that are coming. They are going to realize that there can be only one right way of looking at the world for a normal human being and only one conception of a proper scheme of social reactions, and that all others must be wrong and misleading and involve destructive distortions of conduct.
Raven's dream book, as it unfolded the history of the last great revolution in human affairs to him, shattered all the evasive optimism, al the kindly disastrous toleration and good fellowship of our time, in his mind. If there was to be peace on earth and any further welfare for mankind, if there was to be an end to wars, plunderings, poverty and bitter universal frustration, not only the connective organization of the race but the moral making of the individual had to begin anew. The formal revolution that had taken place was only the prelude to the real revolution; it provided only the frame, the Provisional Government, within which the essential thing, mental reconstruction, had now to begin.
That precarious first world government with its few millions of imperfectly assimilated adherents, which now clutched the earth, had to immobilize or destroy every facile system of errors, misinterpretations, compensations and self-consolations that still
(p. 358) The political structure of the world developed in this fashion:
After the chaos of the war (1949-50) and the subsequent pestilence and "social fragmentation'' (1950-60) there arose, among other attempts to again reconstitute a larger society, a combine of the surviving aviators and the men employed upon the ground plant of their trade and transport. This combine was called The Transport Union. It does not appear to have realized its full potentialities in the beginning, in spite of the forecasts of De Windt.
It initiated various conferences of technicians and at last one in 1965, when it was reorganized as The Air and Sea Control and produced as subsidiary organs The Supply Control, The Transport (and Trading) Control an Educational and Advertisement Control, and other Controls which varied from time to time.
It was this Air and Sea Control which ultimately gave rise in 1978 at the Second Conference of Basra to the World Council. This was the first declared and formal supreme government of the world. The Air and Sea Control then disappeared, but its subordinate Controls remained, and coalesced and multiplied as ministries do in existing governments, under the supreme direction of the World Council.
... The Modern State Movement was never a formally constituted government nor anything in the nature of a public administration; it was the propaganda and development of a system of ideas, and this system of ideas produced its own forms of government. The "Movement" was initially a propaganda and research, and then a propaganda, research, and educational organization. Its active full members were called Fellows; it had a class of dormant members ... and it had a class of neophytes or apprentices, as numerous or more numerous than its active Fellows. It ultimately incorporated the mass of adult mankind (and womankind) in its Fellowship. (p. 360) ... Later a Bureau of Reconciliation and Cooperation seems to (p. 361) have grown up, which decided upon the necessity and method of inter-Control conferences. ... the department of social psychology ... by 2106 had become, so to speak, the whole literature, philosophy, and general thought of the world. It was the surviving vital faculty of the Modern State Movement, the reasoning soul in the body of the race.
(p. 365) History becomes a record of increasingly vast engineering undertakings and cultivations, of the pursuit of minerals and of the first deep borings into the planet. New mechanisms appeared, multiplied, and were swept away by better mechanisms. The face of the earth changed. The scientific redistribution of population began.
(p. 366) The New Puritans "disinfected" the old literature ... old stories, plays, and poems ... before the persecution those books were, as one censor called them, "fever rags". They stood then for "real life". They provided patterns for behaviour and general conduct. That queer clowning with insults and repartees, that insincerely sympathetic mocking of inferiors, that denigration of superiors, which constituted "humour" in the old days, strikes us as either fatuous or malicious. We cannot understand, for instance, the joy our ancestors found in the little blunders and misconceptions of ill-educated people. But then they also laughed at the cripples who still abounded in the world! Equally distasteful now is most of their ''romance" with its false stresses, its unnecessary sacrifices and desperations. "Romance'', says Paul Hennessey, "is essentially the violent and miserable reaction of weak spirits to prohibitions they cannot fairly overcome."
We find the books glorifying war and massacre, and the tangled masses of suggestion that elaborated the innate hostility and excitement caused by difference of racial type, so unconvincing that it is difficult to believe that they ever gripped. But they did grip and compel. They drove innumerable men to murders, lynchings, deliberate torture. They dressed the foulest and cruellest of crimes in heroic colours. There had to be a break with these traditions before they could be seen as we see them now. It needed the heroic "priggishness" of the Air Dictatorship, putting away the old literature and drama for a time, suppressing the suggestion systems of the old religions and superstitions, jailing and segregating men and women for "hate incitement",
(p. 367) ... insisting upon a universal frank sexual hygiene, to cleanse the human mind for good and all and inaugurate the unconstrained civilization of to-day. There was no other way to renaissance... it was in fact a release ... that ''disentanglement from tradition" ... now we are all disentangled.
And next to this ruthless "mental disinfection" of the world, and indeed inseparable from it, we must put the physical disinfection of mankind to the credit of the Air Dictatorship. Between 2000 and 2040 every domicile in the world was either destroyed and replaced, or reconditioned and exhaustively disinfected.
(p. 369) ... The department of General Psychology ... had taken the place of the various "Arts" and Law curricula of the old regime. It was the modernization of the "humanities". ... It became the thought, as the World Council had become the will, of mankind acting as a whole. And since the education and legal adjustment of the World-State was thus under the direction of a department of research continually advancing, they differed diametrically in character from the education and teaching of the old-world order. ... The old Education existed to preserve traditions and institutions. Progressive forces arose as a dissent from it and operated outside its machinery. (p. 370) ... the New Education, based on a swiftly expanding science of relationship, was no longer the preservation of a tradition, but instead the explanation of a creative effort in the light of a constantly most penetrating criticism of contemporary things. ... The failure of the German revolution of 1918 and the relapse of that unfortunate country into the puerility and brutish follies of Hitlerism was entirely due to the disregard of the elementary principle that no revolution could be a real and assured revolution until it has completely altered the educational system of the community.
(p. 386) systems, Christianity, Jewry, Islam, Buddhism and so forth, which right up to the close of the twentieth century were still in active competition with the Modern State movement for the direction of the individual life and the control of human affairs. While these competing cultures remained in being they were bound to become refuges and rallying-shelters for all the opposition forces that set themselves to cripple and defeat the new order of the world.
We have told already how that issue was joined, and shown how necessary it was to bring all the moral and intellectual training of the race into direct and simple relations with the Modern State organization. After 2020 there is no record of any schools being open in the world except the Modern State schools. Christianity where it remained sacerdotal and intractable was suppressed, but over large parts of the world it was not so much abolished as watered down to modernity. Everywhere its endowments had vanished in the universal slump; it could find no supply of educated men to sustain its ministry; the majority of its churches stood neglected and empty, and when the great rebuilding of the world began most of them vanished with all the other old edifices that lacked beauty or interest. They were cleared away like dead leaves.
The story of Islam was closely parallel. It went more readily even than Christianity because its school organization was weaker. It was pinned very closely to the teaching of Arabic. The decadence of that language shattered its solidarity much as the disuse of Latin disintegrated Western Christianity. It left a few-score beautiful mosques as Christianity left a few-score beautiful chapels, churches and cathedrals. And patterns, legends, memories remained over in abundance, more gracious and lovely by far than the realities from which they were distilled.
There had been a widespread belief in the tenacity and solidarity of Judaism. The Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within the nation, in every state in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity everywhere. They had played a peculiar in-and-out game of social relationship. One could never tell whether a Jew was being a citizen or whether he was being just a Jew. They married, they traded preferentially They had their own standards (p. 387) of behaviour. Wherever they abounded their peculiarities aroused bitter resentment.
It might have been supposed that a people so widely dispersed would nave developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organization for many world purposes, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor seemed anxious to attempt. After the World War the orthodox Jews played but a poor part in the early attempts to formulate the Modern State, being far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism, the dream of a fantastic independent state all of their own in Palestine, which according to their Babylonian legend was the original home of all this synthesis of Semitic-speaking peoples. Only a psycho-analyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state. It emphasized their traditional wilful separation from the main body of mankind. It irritated the world against them, subtly and incurably.
On another score also the unpopularity of Israel intensified in the early twentieth century. The core of the slump process was manifestly monetary. Something was profoundly rotten with money and credit. The Jews had always had and cultivated the reputation of a peculiar understanding and cleverness in monetary processes. Yet in the immense difficulties of that time no authoritative direction came from the Jews. The leading minds of the time who grappled with the intricate problems of monetary reconstruction and simplification were almost all Gentiles. It was natural for the common man to ask, ''Where are the Jews ?" It was easy for him to relapse into suspicion and persecution. Were they speculating unobtrusively? It was an obvious thing for Gentile speculators to shift suspicion to this race which gloried in and suffered by its obstinate resolve to remain a "peculiar people''.
And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination; there were worldwide pogroms during the political and social breakdown of the Famished Fifties, but under the Tyranny there w as never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations. (p. 388) Their attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to "Israel".
This success—the people of the nineteenth century would have deemed it a miracle—is explicable because of two things. The first of them is that the Modern State revolution was from the first educational and only secondarily political; it ploughed deeper than any previous revolution. And next it came about under new and more favourable conditions. In the nineteenth century the family group had ceased to be the effective nucleus in either economic or cultural life. And all the odd exclusiveness of the Jew had been engendered in his closed and guarded prolific home. There is an immense collection of fiction written by Jews for Jews in the early twentieth century, in which the relaxation of this immemorial close home-training and the clash of the old and modernizing generations is described. The dissolution of Israel was beginning even then.
The task of making the mind of the next generation had been abandoned almost unconsciously, for Jew and Gentile alike, to external influences, and particularly to the newspaper and the common school. After 1940 this supersession of home training was renewed in an extensive form. The Modern State movement had from the outset gripped the teachers, re-created popular education after the dark decades upon its own lines, and arrested every attempt to revive competing schools. Even had he desired it the Jew could no longer be peculiar in the food either of his body or his mind.
The complete solidarity of mankind in 2059, the disappearance of the last shadows of dislike and distrust between varied cults, races, and language groups ... As the curtain of separatist dreams, racial fantasies and hate nightmares thinned out and passed away ... If most of the divisions and barriers of the period of the sovereign states had disappeared ... there were still many indications that the world was under control and still not quite sure of its own good behaviour. ... The stripping and burning of forests that had devastated the world so extensively in the middle decades of the preceding hundred years had led to strenuous reafforestation.
(4) H.G. Wells, Science and the World Mind, London, The New Europe Publishing Co., 1942.
(p. 16) ... there is the struggle of an intelligent minority to extract a rational conception of life (p. 17) from the confusion. That is the state of the world-mind at the present time, and that is why the ultimate decision of human destiny lies in this propaganda war ... if there is to be any peace on the earth henceforth, there must be a federal control of the air and of the material of international transport. Next we have to rescue our planet from devastation by ruthless political and mercenary appropriation, and that we can do by adopting Mr. Gifford Pinchot's project for the Federal Conservation of World Resources. Thirdly, we have to impose as a fundamental law upon earth a plain Declaration of Human Rights that will ensure for every man a fair participation in these resources, and a sense of responsible ownership in our planet. These are the obvious threefold imperatives that stare Homo sapiens in the face.
These triple imperatives are so plain that I will not insult my readers by arguing about them. But what is not so plain is the reason why these imperatives are treated as platitudes or unattainable absurdities by the mass of people everywhere, and why we seem powerless to get them over to the world-mind. The (p. 18) immediate answer is that there is no world-mind as yet, but only a vast dementia; that directly you pass out of our comparatively enlightened circles, you pass into all unprogressive incoherence, a clamour ... ask yourselves whether we scientific workers and writers, who have a certain claim to be considered the intellectual prompters of mankind, have really done our full duty in this matter of human inter-communication.
Now I propose to invoke a ghost ... The ghost ... who stands beside me now, challenging our pretensions, appealing to our energy and courage, is the New World Order, whose very existence depends upon us. "You talk," says our Visitant, "of a New World Order. Plainly that is impossible without a world-mind. And a world-mind demands a language in which men can exchange ideas from one end of the federation to another. What are you doing about that?"
... people can still repeat ... that this minimum of rational world order will rob this wide world of some beautiful variety that exists at the present time. "Such dreadful monotony!" they say. I ask them to look at the world at the present time and realise how imaginary this pretended variety is. All over the world, from China to Peru, they will see the mass of young men wearing almost exactly the same uniforms, undergoing the same drill, ... wherever they go, east or west, they will find that chain-shops, controlled stores and standardised production have already been reducing mankind to the same dead level of everyday living. They live in the same sort of houses, wear the same sort of clothes, eat the same flabby foods and upset themselves with the same advertised medicines.
(p. 24) ... On the whole, the weight of opinion is in favour of using English as the substantial basis of a world language. ... before the English language can be proffered to the World of the Future, its spelling has to be reformed. ... Here again is an immediate demand for ... some definite decisions.