Looking Forward, Kenneth Jr. [best android ereader txt] 📗

the puny muscles of human beings and animals with other sources of power. The use of sails on boats eventually replaced galley slaves. Water power was used to carry things downstream. The water wheel furnished power to run mills. Later, steam power replaced even more human muscles. During the last hundred years we learned to manufacture large amounts of electrical energy. Then things began to hum because this made energy or power available at any point to which we could run a wire or lug a generator.

From a modern point of view one of the most useful measures of the development of a civilization is the amount of available energy per person. To a large extent the degree of physical comfort that you enjoy today is correlated with the energy that is at your disposal.

The application of the scientific method of thinking has made it possible to develop almost unlimited amounts of energy. This energy may be in the form of electricity which will run a constellation of labor-saving and life-enriching appliances and instruments. It may be in the form of coal, gasoline, oil, or nuclear power. It may be in chemical form, such as in an automobile battery or a flashlight cell. Imagine the almost complete paralysis that would occur if your electricity and gasoline supply were cut off, and you had to use your own muscles in place of the complex of machines upon which you now rely.

Our Rapidly Evolving Civilization

We are today but a few steps from the jungle. While we’ve been trying to get away from the animal patterns of the jungle for a little over a half-million years, we really got moving only a few thousand years ago with the development of cities and the invention of writing. It has just been in the last century that we have started the large scale use of non-muscular sources of energy and power. Most factory workers today are laboring in industries that were not even in existence in 1900. Although our world may in some ways appear stable to us, we are in a furious transitional phase in which changes are occurring at the fastest rate in history.

Today we are at the beginning of this third phase of the development of our civilization. Fantastic developments lie ahead.

If life at times seems bewildering, if you feel pulled in many directions, if you find that no matter what you do, you still have sticky problems, if you find that our economic, political, and social ways of doing things sometimes create more difficulties than they solve, then you are simply playing your part in suffering through the present transitional phase of our civilization.

Much of your life is patterned along the lines used in western Asia several thousand years ago. Yet, some of the conditions to which you are trying to adjust have come out of the laboratory in the last few decades. If the day-by-day pattern of your personal, business, and social life is something less than serene, you’ve been caught in the wringer of change, and you’ve got lots of company.

2. The Confusion of Our Times

The habit patterns of men and women that may have been appropriate several thousand years ago cannot be made to yield maximum happiness in the changed world of today—to say nothing of the future civilization toward which we are rapidly evolving. This chapter will briefly catalogue some of the things that keep us frustrated, insecure, and jumpy. As might be expected in a time of rapid transition, few of the basic needs of men and women are now met in a satisfying way. We hope you will bear with us as we haul out some of the dirt that usually stays lumpily under the rug.

Among the hangovers from the past, we might list the grisly pattern of war. Back in Mesopotamia a war might have chewed up a few thousand people. The First World War killed approximately ten million people of whom 5 per cent were civilians. But that’s only the beginning. The Second World War rolled up a death toll five times as large—approximately fifty million. About 50 per cent were civilians.

Suppose there were no police and no laws in your city. Who would be safe? Criminals might like it. But not you and your family. Similarly, the lack of a respected and enforced international law between nations endangers everyone on earth today. It’s like living in a jungle.

General Eisenhower has summed up the tragic effects of the custom of war as a method of settling disputes between nations:

...a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth...

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:

A modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people ...

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

When Bertrand Russell, world famous philosopher, participated at the age of ninety in a big peace demonstration in London in 1962, he was arrested and sent to jail for a week! It seemed that he wanted to change some of