A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

They think me a dismal and cantankerous hunks for wanting, as I seem to them to do, to shatter and reconstruct a world which sustains such delightful things. They do not realise that this world is being shattered anyhow, and will not be reconstructed by any automatic process. They want this world left as it is and not “messed about with” by innovating people. They have a will to be satisfied, an obstinate will for contentment. Mixed up with that, and probably fundamental to it, is a profound disbelief in the power of men wilfully to alter their conditions and determine their collective fate.

Now if I have any claim to distinction among journalists it is that I do not share that widespread scepticism and fatalism. I do not let the fact that some of us, myself included, are having an undeservedly good time hide the fact that the system, such as it is, is wasteful, that it cripples the possibilities of nearly everyone, and is, to millions of people, actively distressful and cruel.

I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster of wild change that is now trampling this world. We believe that human society could be and presently will be deliberately reconstructed more boldly, more elaborately, and with more definite intention, upon a scale commensurate with the greatness of modern mechanism and to an extent that will enable it to anticipate and discipline what are now the incalculable forces of change. And our faith is that the way to this expansion of life, this release from chance, lies through Universities and schools, through a universal education of the entire population of the world and through a universal and sustained thought process keeping pace with ever-changing necessities.

We are all democratic Socialists in so far as we regard it as the general concern to maintain order and law, to secure the common needs of everyone by carrying on the exploitation of natural wealth and the production and distribution of staple necessities for the universal and not for particular profit, and to provide education and health services for all; but we are aristocratic individualists in demanding world-wide freedom of movement for all, the utmost scope for self-realisation, and the freest utterance and hearing for every creative and innovating spirit—for everyone indeed who may possibly be creative. We see, as the only way to the sort of human life we desire, an immense development of the reorganisation of every sort of research and of the whole educational system of the world.

A rough parallelism of things mechanical and things mental will put the case as we see it. In the last two centuries the means of transport has developed from the stage coach and sailing ship to the automobile, express train, great liner, and aeroplane; there has been much more than a tenfold increase in speed and a corresponding increase in security, versatility, and comfort. Our mechanical power and mechanical productivity have increased in far greater proportion. There has been an educational advance also, but it has not kept pace with this. More people in the country are educated now, certain elements of education, reading and writing, have been spread very widely, but the education of a fully educated man is not conspicuously better than it was two hundred years ago, and education has not spread, as railways and factories have spread from the Atlantic countries, all over the earth.

We believe that we are now in the dawn of a phase of educational thrust, corresponding to the mechanical thrust of a century ago. That former thrust redistributed the population of every country it affected, created new towns, altered the build and lay-out of every town it touched, created new suburban systems, and revolutionised the visible aspect of life. The new thrust will reconstruct the scattered and confused mental life of the age, will create mental nuclei everywhere, link up the whole countryside to new and more powerful mental centres. I doubt whether at present, apart from school children, one person in a hundred in either Europe or America could be described as a mental worker; we foretell a time when something like one in eight or one in five will be definitely employed in work that is primarily mental, either as student, as teacher, as scientific investigator, as artist or writer.

In every village there will be a school, a reading-room, a theatre, closely associated with the health service and recreation of the place. It will be the central architectural fact of the place, the group of buildings about which the homes will cluster. In every town there will be the district schools and the great high school, the art studios, the theatres, the laboratories. Every considerable town will have a University as its chief expression and its crowning glory. The agricultural and industrial life of the land will be closely linked to the technical research of the colleges; they will go thither for advice and direction. The business and financial system will no longer be secret and private, a system of competitive conspiracies, but it will be working in close touch with the general scientific life; the banker will be a professor of economics, the iron-master will be a metallurgist. That is the order of the world we desire, and which we foresee through our hopes. That is the world that will replace the system of stampedes, scrambles, riots, and traffic jams in which we live to-day.

XLVIII
THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS, WHALES, AND GORILLAS

2.8.24

The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is open to all sorts of criticism, and is occasionally quite absurd, but it contrives to be entertaining. Many of us dislike the Kipling quality and the strong, unpleasant flavour of Imperial Preference that hang about it. I have reviled its commercialism; its relative disregard of educational duties and responsibilities; its suggestion of imperial self-sufficiency. But all sorts of conferences are meeting at Wembley, and occasionally a strong breath of human common sense dispels for a time the stuffy, foggy conceit of our recent and transitory Empire. Wembley, in spite of itself, becomes international and contributes to the project of a new world.