There are other truths about ourselves of this same order:
The minerals. We are digging them up with the reckless violence of pigs after truffles. Truffles can grow again—but not minerals. We are converting the earth's elements into forms all but irrecoverable even by the most immense expenditures of human energy and time.
Our genes—and the holy habit we've got into, of inhibiting birth among our most likely specimens—of proliferating boobs and nuts—of maintaining the feeble and the dim, abetting their rabbity bedding together—and of sending the cream of each generation to war's slaughter. This, alone, will drive us back toward apehood faster even than our growing physical destitution. Some European nations are doubtless already floundering in the poverty of residual blood-lines—bereft of brains and leadership by their religious devotion and their glorious wars.
Also, of course, there is our failure to perceive our instinctual nature. My own elected department in the category of dooms. Instinctively, as we must, all of us feel the weight of such colossal crimes against the meaning of instinct as those above—our cosmic disavowals (by our acts) of any responsibility toward men to come. That is why, at bottom, no one is happy in modern society—happy in his spirit, content, full of a sense of purpose and significance. It is why we shall have to remake civilization consciously—or to suffer its self-destruction.
Mr. Vogt, I thought, would feel the power of instinct, as it now blindly controls us, when he saw how religious men reacted to his simple indication of the necessity for using reason in our sex relations. And he would see the inertia of our traditions when he saw how utterly his warning was disbelieved, ignored, ridiculed, and forgotten. Others, with the same wild cry of despair, have had such reception, for the same reason.
It is not that man cannot do for himself.
But that he will not.
And he will not because he is self-flattered into the incredible illusion that Mr. and Mrs. America are doing very well already, thank you kindly.
After a long while, grinning over the tremendous sins of those who take it upon themselves to reject knowledge and yet to say what sin is, I closed the book.
Hell has one funny aspect.