H. Wells - You Can't Be Too Careful

This new thrust of the rebellious proteus may be expected to seek and find its own implements and methods in the replacement of the world muddle of Homo Tewler by the awakening will of sapiens. One thing towards which it is moving even now is the renascence of law upon a world scale. Like medical practice, the legal organisation has been corrupted by the protective professionalism of the old order of things, yet law, even bad, old-fashioned law, rigidly enforced, is an instrument for liberty. The man under law is a man protected from arbitrary violence; he knows clearly beforehand what he may do and what he may not do, and the advance of freedom wherever it has existed in the world has gone on concurrently with the declaration and maintenance of rights. Even our Edward Albert and his Evangeline struggled to express something they called their “rights” of the case, and it is a hopeful augury of revolution that there should be even now a formulated Declaration of Rights approved of by a growing number of intelligent and resentful people, and resisted, actively or passively, by every existing government on earth. For governing gangs and classes everywhere know what that Declaration means for them. It offers a fundamental law for a touted and reciviiised world, into which their pomps and pretensions will be dissolved, and as the old order of things becomes more and more plainly an intolerable confusion of enslavement and frustration, it will be the sole means of uniting and implementing a thousand storms of resentment. What possible rival can it have? Fraudulent imitations and falsifications may help the diffusion of its suggestions rather than Binder its establishment. Given only a few desperate men, sick with disgust at the tediums and pretences of the Tewler life, and bored to fury by the vistas of aimless, incessant and finally suicidal bloodshed ahead of them, in which they personally can expect no gratification, and there is no reason now why they by the measure of any previous human experience should not put a new face upon reality very rapidly indeed. They need not be idealists nor devotees nor anything of that sort. If they belong to the school of Mr F.’s aunt in David Copperfield it is enough. “I hate a fool,” said the old lady.

The collaboration of these exasperated men will find infinitely more powerful means of ousting old ideas by new ones than any previous revolutionaries. The Acts of the Apostles were vocal, pedestrian and storm-tossed, and Christianity seeped and changed about the Roman world through a long and confusing adolescence and was one thing here and another there; it took centuries to penetrate the countryside (pagani) or reach the frontiers; even the Marxist propaganda was an affair of books, periodicals, smuggled leaflets, slogans, small lecturing nuclei; but modern mechanism now, as it has developed in the last third of a century, gives all that is needed for a simultaneous diffusion of the same essential ideas and the immediate correction of differences, from end to end of the earth. Even an opposition suggestion spreads at lightning speed, as the German propaganda shows, and quite a small number of men in earnest and in unison could wrench the whole world into acquiescence with a unifying fundamental law.

And when we think of reconditioning the mind of mankind, we need not be dismayed by a vision of ill-lit stuffy classrooms and millions of half-trained teachers struggling with blackboard and tattered text-book to “teach” scores of millions of children. In a world of plenty all that will be different, and modern apparatus—radio, screen, gramophone and the like—affords the possibility of an enormous economy of teaching ability. One skilful teacher or demonstrator can teach from pole to pole, just as Toscanini can conduct Brahms for all the world to hear, and at the same time go on record for our children’s children. All this “canned teaching” will provoke Mr Chamble Pewter’s rich sense of humour. I doubt if that will deter those angry rebels who have got their hands upon the levers, and are determined to let the children see and hear and know and hope. Not in any mood of love or that sort of thing, but because they hate the pomp and glories of incapable authority.

And hard upon the revolt in teaching and the sweeping-away of the irritating private localised and nationalised controls of universal interests, may come the establishment of a great framework of ordered and recorded knowledge throughout the world. At present such encyclopaedias as our world possesses are in the hands of unscrupulous salesmen, they are a century and a half antiquated and blinkered in outlook, but the facilities afforded by microphotography, modern methods of multiplication, modern methods of documentation, open up the clear possibility of putting all the knowledge in the world, brought right up to date, within easy reach of every man everywhere on earth, within a couple of days. That is no fantastic dream; it is a plain and calculable enterprise now to throw that net of living consciousness over all our planet. (Here in the most untimely fashion Edward Albert Tewler intervenes with raucous screams of “Bawls! I tell you. Bawls.”) Once the new plant has struck root it will be very difficult to be#t it down again. It will give far more satisfaction to the elementary needs of Homo Tewler than the old stuff, which was not only inadequate and frustrating but humiliating. It will be like horse-radish, which grows again from any torn shred wherever it has once been grown.

It may be that we want a new word for a system of knowledge-distribution that alms only to inform and put everything that is known within the reach of every individual man, Mr H.D. Jennings White would sweep away the word “education” altogether, as a tainted word, and have us talk of Eutrophy, good nourishment of body and mind, and then let free men decide. A Eutrophic world from which priest and pedagogue have been swept as unnecessary evils is quite within the range of human possibility.

Moreover, when we canvass the possibilities of a break towards the light and “sapiens”, there is another important factor in the process of mental liberation that must be brought into our accounting, and that is revolt from within. These Tewler priesthoods, the more they dominate, the more they must awaken the spirit of insubordination in those whose role is mainly acquiescence.

The Catholic priesthood has never sat lightly and easily upon the lives of common men, and wherever the level of education has risen to a general elementary literacy, there has been revolt. Catholicism has produced the bloodiest revolts in history. Wherever the Catholic Church has been in complete control of education, the final outcome has been a revolution at once bloodthirsty and blasphemous. The lands have risen in a state of infuriated ingratitude to hunt priests and desecrate and burn churches. Mrs Nesta Webster ascribes this to the direct activity of Satan, and possibly she is right. Perhaps he does not exert himself so much in Protestant and Pagan countries because they can be considered damned already. But this reaction has been so invariable in the past, it has occurred in so many countries, that it seems for instance a fairly safe bet that in quite a short time the faithful in Ireland, bored to death by a too intimate control of their minds, their morals and their economic life, may be shooting their priests exactly as they used to shoot their landlords, and through practically the same wholesome exasperation of their inferiority complex.

But it seems probable that this lack of submissiveness is not peculiar to the flock. The shepherds also must feel the stirring of Satan in their souls. Much of this is hidden from the enquiring outsider. What his fellow-cardinals think of the encyclicals of the current Pope, for instance, is wrapped in the darkness of their discretion, but up and down the body of the Church there is and always has been a certain restiveness, and in this time of universal mental stress there is likely to be more. The chief critical attacks that have strained and broken the solidarity of the Great Imposition in the past have come from Churchmen.