A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

Now let the reader note that in this paper I have said not a word for or against the practices known as birth-control nor about anticipatory sexual hygiene. I have my own very definite opinions on these matters, but the question under discussion here is not what should or may be done, but about what may be known. It is the far profounder question of whether common poor people are to be treated as worthy of understanding and knowing about the things that concern their most intimate lives, or whether in the interests of cheap labour, the Roman Catholic, population statistics, army recruiting, racial jealousy, or out of regard to the unpleasant feelings and imaginations of priests and elderly spinsters, they are to be left and imprisoned in black ignorance even when they want to know. Here I find in myself a streak of surprisingly passionate democracy. I hold that every man and woman should be the conscious and instructed master of his or her own fate. It is amazing, it is dismaying, to find a Labour Minister as ready to consider the common people a breeding herd of human beasts and as ready to keep them helplessly in the dark as the extremist Tory could be. I am convinced that even as a politician he has blundered. When women fought for votes they fought for a symbol; the reality was the possession of themselves. And that is impossible without this, if not forbidden, at least impeded knowledge.

Most politicians have still to learn the significance of the women’s vote. Because one or two pretty ladies on the Labour side have lost their heads, adorned themselves in trains and ostrich feathers, given themselves over to the photographers and interviewers and succumbed to the delightful temptation of patronising the Queen, it does not follow that the mass of Labour women are not intensely sane and realist. Sexual questions are coming into politics, and they are coming to stay. Before the next election every parliamentary candidate will have to make up his mind whether he stands for knowledge or ignorance in this matter.

XLI
BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE

14.6.24

A sure way to madden Americans is to make comparisons between education in the United States and in Western Europe. Even if the comparison is flattering it leaves them mad. Apparently belief in the superior education of the American citizen is becoming as sacred as belief in the American constitution. Doubt is prohibited. Visitors to the United States may presently have to sign a form about it.

Hitherto with an extraordinary discretion I have avoided, or at least skirted, this sensitive point. I propose to continue to skirt it. There has been one exception. I touched upon the sore place a little while ago in a book called The Dream, and my mail from America came for some weeks bristling with an unwonted and distressing hostility. I gave an account of the elementary school teaching of England—it is much the same stuff, more or less, in most civilised countries—as I think it will appear to an observer a few centuries ahead. I added casually that on the whole the American rural school was worse than the English one I described. To the best of my knowledge and belief it is worse. In many parts of the United States the elementary education is far below the Western European level, the consequent illiteracy is shocking, and I should not be doing my duty as a writer for the English-speaking public if I did not say so. I was not thinking so much of new districts inhabited by fresh immigrants, but of old, native-born American regions, like Kentucky. The United States is abnormally slack about its elementary education, and needs plain, stimulating speech in the matter. But the Americans are in a state of irritable self-satisfaction about their schools. They are refusing almost violently to know that their general education has not kept pace with their enormous increase in wealth and material civilisation. Morally, if not legally, I am as much a citizen of the United States of America as of the British Empire; mentally the American and British worlds are two hemispheres of one brain; I cannot think of them functioning independently, and it is just as much my business to discuss this American slackness as it is to reprove the frightful negligences of the British in respect to Indian education.

This, however, is in parenthesis. It is merely to emphasise the fact that in this article I am instituting no comparisons at all. I am taking a text from an American instance; that is all. There has been a little tiff between the undergraduates and the authorities of Harvard, and I find it extremely suggestive. The brighter of the Harvard undergraduates, represented on the governing board of the Harvard Union by Mr. Corliss Lamont, want to hear about Radicalism and Communism at first hand from people like Mr. Debs and Mr. W. Z. Foster, and the authorities are suppressing these youthful aspirations. They want the young men who will presently sway American affairs to be fed their knowledge of radical and revolutionary ideas by orthodox and respectable persons who have pre-digested it for them and removed all disturbing elements. The young men want the real stuff and to deal with it themselves. I confess myself heart and soul for these young men.

There has recently been a controversy between Mr. Bertrand Russell and President Lowell about the relative mental freedom of American and British Universities. As Mr. Bertrand Russell was turned down for pacifism from Cambridge during the war, he started in that controversy with a handicap. It seems to me that such a dispute is bound to be ineffectual. There are cases of mental restriction and suppression from both sides of the Atlantic, and there are no scales invented yet to weigh this case against that. The real conflict here is not between American and European conditions, but between two types of men. It is a conflict that rages throughout the entire world. Everywhere one finds the managing, directive, limiting type of mind with a craving to get on to governing bodies, the industry to get on governing bodies, and a consequent tendency to get on governing bodies. Everywhere we find also a less abundant supply of critical, sceptical, creative, restless minds producing innovations and stimulating ideas and with an equal tendency to get thrown out of organisations and governing bodies. They are the seed, the ferment, the living factor in the human mind. In Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler America has produced the perfect specimen of the former class, just as in the late William James and in James Harvey Robinson she has produced excellent samples of the second. It is loudly boasted in British intellectual circles that Britain could not have produced Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, but so far as I am able to judge there is as much Nicholas Murray Butlerism in Britain as in America, as much large empty active influential pretentiousness, though it may be more diffused, and it is at least as resolute to sit upon and addle intellectual institutions.

For the peculiar evil of the governing body type is its failure to understand its lack of finality. It has no sense of the unknown, no sense of the provisional nature of all mundane things. It wants to fix knowledge in its own image, to make subsidiary and to apportion and departmentalise the work of the gifted exceptional and disturbing men. It seeks to set up classics, to perpetuate existing institutions, to inaugurate ancestor worship. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler is to be the American Confucius and stereotype this perfect world of 1924; the last of the Founders. The coming generation will learn that at this point the world congealed. The thing this dominating type dreads supremely is revolutionary suggestion and the possibility of the young getting away with new ideas. Its educational ideal is blinkers and an obedient youth looking neither to the right nor the left, but pursuing the one right path.

But the sustaining factor of life is death. Happily, most happily, Founders die, and their codes and constitutions, their classical utterances, die and pass away. Even the inspired addresses and deliverances of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, so beautifully printed and so relentlessly distributed, will some day shrivel and pass, and be no more heeded. So that life may go on. Without death there could be no birth. The most fundamental fact about youth is its disrespect for its elders and the past. That is what it is for. A generation that wanted to repeat the preceding generation would not be birth, it would be life stuttering. And the one thing youth does most need and want and fight to get, as its supreme instinctive duty, is and always will be every sort of destructive criticism of existing authorities, of the existing order, and of established institutions. Young America at Harvard probably has no illusions about Mr. Debs or Mr. Foster; it calls them, I am reasonably certain, “Old Debs” and “Old Foster.” But it means to hear them, it will hear them, and the college authorities had better help it to hear without any attempts whatever to jam the message Old Debs and Old Foster have to deliver against the old system young Harvard has been born to alter—and has been born for no other apparent end that I can see.