Program Notes
Guest speaker: Aldous Huxley
[NOTE: All quotations are by Aldous Huxley.]
“To possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it.”
“When advancing science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man’s long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies, and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination what ought we to do? What can we do?”
“Extreme poverty, when combined with ignorance, breeds that lack of desire to better things, which has been called ‘wantlessness’, the resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot’.”
“From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short. Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels.”
“And even where democratic institutions exist, science technology and preparation for war combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty.”
“Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote, are prevented by the basic postulates in terms in which they do their thinking and their feeling, from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations.”
“Some day, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prisons in which they are now confined.”
“In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always willing, but it’s technical and organizational flesh was generally weak. Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit.”
“My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective intention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects to the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving. We have to get it into our collective heads that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological.”
“It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children, who in less than forty years will be six billion, to lead a tolerably human existence without in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment.” -Aldous Huxley (November 30, 1962)
“All that I meant was, the sort of basic frame of reference in which political activities will take place shall be less culture-bound and more ecology-bound, let’s say.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And if you caught my note on either Facebook or on our salon blog,
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you know that my plan was to take this month off from podcasting.
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But as you can tell, I just couldn’t stay away very long.
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So when Forrest R. sent in a donation the other day,
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I got to thinking that maybe not everybody wanted to take a little time away from the salon, and so today Forrest and I are joining you in a little extra summertime fun
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in the way of a talk by Aldous Huxley.
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So, hey, thanks for the nudge, Forrest, and thanks for the donation.
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It’s just what I needed to remind me how much I enjoy being with you all here in the salon each week.
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Now, while many people say that the modern ecology movement
00:01:06 ►
began with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson,
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I think it may be more accurate to take into account
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that a good many intellectuals at the time
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were also beginning to gain an ecological perspective.
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In fact, the talk we are about to hear was given on November 30, 1962,
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which was within just a few months of Carlson’s book being published. In fact, the talk we are about to hear was given on November 30, 1962,
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which was within just a few months of Carlson’s book being published.
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And as you will soon hear, Aldous Huxley was also beating the drum for an ecological awakening back then.
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Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to me that we’ve made a lot of progress in the forward direction since the day this talk was delivered.
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And maybe that’s
00:01:45 ►
why we’re here today, to get rebooted into new action ourselves. Now, this talk was hosted by
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the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which was based in Santa Barbara, California,
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and at the time, John Kennedy was still president. In fact, it would be less than a year later,
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on November 22nd of the following year,
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that Kennedy would be assassinated on the same day that Aldous Huxley also took his last breath.
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Two momentous events that no one suspected on the day this talk was given.
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I wish I could say that I was on the ecological bandwagon back then myself,
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but at the time this talk was delivered, I was in my
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third year of electrical engineering studies and was more focused on sailboats and women than on
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doing things to help save our environment. And as a little historical side note, I see that it was
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less than 30 days before this talk was given that a new concept first appeared in the mainstream press. You’ve probably heard about it by now,
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but back then the concept about people having their very own personal computer
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was as foreign to the world as were UFOs.
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So as we listen to this talk right now,
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try to put your mind back into a world in which no one knew about the ozone holes,
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dead zones in the ocean,
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into a world in which no one knew about the ozone holes,
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dead zones in the ocean, and the huge islands of plastic trash that are taking up sizable portions of the Central Pacific,
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I’d like to think that if we could all have clearly seen the future back then,
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then maybe things would be different now.
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Huxley could see it, and he did what he could to alert us to the dangers
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that were not so very far ahead,
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dangers that are clear and present today.
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Now it’s up to us, the ones who can also see clearly now,
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to do whatever we can, at the very least,
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maybe change our own personal affairs in ways that are somewhat more Earth-friendly.
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Anyhow, let’s now travel back in time to almost 50 years ago,
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back before news of the American War in Vietnam had made it to the front page,
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back when segregation was still the law of the land,
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and when the population of this little planet was less than one-half of what it is today.
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We open our symposium this morning.
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The definition of symposium in the dictionary is a drinking party with conversation.
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This is said to be, however, the ancient Greek definition.
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The deterioration since Greek times is indicative of the fact that we have conversation with drinking parties on the side.
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They will come along and do the course.
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Protestant ethic does not permit a drinking party on the side. They’ll come along and do the course. Protestant ethic is not permitted.
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A drinking party at this hour.
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Now, it is highly appropriate that we should open this discussion
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of the impact of science and technology on democratic institutions
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by presenting the man who first saw it all.
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In Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, Mr. Huxley has indicated the problems that
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we are now going to discuss.
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All of my generation were brought up on Chrome Yellow and Andye, written by a brilliant young Hestie in England, who since that time
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has retained the brilliance of his style and penetration, but has moved on to even more
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interesting subjects than those with which he dealt in the carefree twenties.
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Mr. Huxley is a constant attendant, I’m happy to say, at our discussions in Santa Barbara.
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And now that we’re beginning the most important one we ever had, I’m glad to have him here to introduce Mr. Huxley.
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May I remain sitting? Because I have to read with a glass. If you can sit loud, you can remain sitting?
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Because I have to read with a glass.
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If you can sit loud, you can remain sitting.
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All right, I can sit loud.
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I’ll try and sit loud, because I have difficulty in reading.
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The title of this thing is
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Democratic Institutions in the Context of Advancing Science and Technology.
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A sort of general introduction to this subject.
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In politics, the central and fundamental problem is the problem of power.
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Who is to exercise power, and by what authority,
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with what purpose in view, and under what controls?
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Yes, under what controls?
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For as history has made it abundantly clear,
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to possess power is ipso facto to be tempted to abuse it.
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In mere self-preservation,
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we must create and maintain institutions
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that make it difficult for the powerful
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to be led into those temptations
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which, when succumbed to, transform them into
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tyrants at home and imperialists abroad. For this purpose, what kind of institutions are
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effective, and having created them, how can we guarantee them against obsolescence? Circumstances
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change, and as they change, the old, the once so admirably effective
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devices for controlling power cease to be adequate. What then? Specifically, when advancing
00:07:15 ►
science and acceleratingly progressive technology alter man’s long-standing relationships with the planet on which he lives, revolutionize his societies,
00:07:28 ►
and at the same time equip his rulers with new and immensely more powerful instruments of domination,
00:07:36 ►
what ought we to do? What can we do?
00:07:41 ►
Very briefly, let us review the situation in which we now find ourselves, and in the light of
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present facts, hazard a few guesses about the future. On the biological level, advancing science
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and technology have set going a revolutionary process that seems to be destined, for the next
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century at least, perhaps for much longer,
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to exercise a decisive influence upon the destinies of all societies and their individual members.
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In the course of the last 50 years, extremely effective methods for lowering the prevailing rates of infant and adult mortality were developed by Western scientists.
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These methods were very simple and could be applied with the expenditure of very little
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money by very small numbers of not very highly trained technicians.
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For these reasons, and because everyone regards life as intrinsically good and death as intrinsically
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bad, they were
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in fact applied on a worldwide scale. The results were spectacular. In the past, high
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birth rates were balanced by high death rates. Thanks to science, death rates have been halved,
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but except in the most highly industrialized, contraceptive-using countries, birth rates remain as high as ever.
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An enormous and accelerating increase in human numbers has been the inevitable consequence.
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At the beginning of the Christian era, so demographers assure us, our planet supported a human population of about 250 millions. When the Pilgrim Fathers
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stepped ashore, the figure had risen to about 500 millions. We see then that in the relatively
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recent past, it took 1600 years for the human species to double its numbers. Today world population stands at 3,000 millions. By the year 2000, unless something
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appallingly bad or miraculously good should happen in the interval, 6,000 millions of us will be
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sitting down to breakfast every morning. In a word, 12 times as many people are destined to double their numbers in 1 40th of the time.
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And this is not the whole story.
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In many areas of the world, human numbers are increasing at a rate much higher
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than the average for the whole species.
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In India, for example, the rate of increase is now 2.3% per annum. By 1990, its 450 million inhabitants will have become 900 million inhabitants.
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A comparable rate of increase will raise the population of China to the billion mark by about 1980.
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In Ceylon, in Egypt, in many of the countries of South and Central America,
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human numbers are
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increasing at an annual rate of 3%.
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The result will be a doubling of their present populations in approximately 23 years.
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On the social, political and economic levels, what is likely to happen in an underdeveloped
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country whose population doubles itself in a single generation or even less.
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An underdeveloped society is a society without adequate capital resources,
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for capital is what is left over after primary needs have been satisfied,
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and in underdeveloped countries most people never satisfy their primary needs.
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And in underdeveloped countries, most people never satisfy their primary needs.
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It is also a society without a sufficient force of trained teachers, administrators and technicians,
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a society with few or no industries and few or no developed sources of industrial power, a society, finally, with enormous arrears in food production, education, road building, housing and sanitation to be made good.
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A quarter of a century from now, when there will be twice as many of them as there are today,
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what is the likelihood that the members of such a society will be better fed, better housed, clothed and schooled than at present? And
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what are the chances in such a society for the maintenance, if they already exist, or
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the creation, if they do not exist, of democratic institutions? Not long ago, Mr. Eugene Black,
00:12:20 ►
the president of the World Bank, expressed the opinion that it would be extremely difficult,
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perhaps even impossible, for an underdeveloped country with a very rapid rate of population
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increase to achieve full industrialization. All its resources, he pointed out, would be
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absorbed year by year in the task of supplying, or not quite supplying, the primary needs of
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its new members.
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Merely to stand still, merely to maintain its current subhumanly inadequate standard
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of living, will require hard work and the expenditure of all the nation’s available
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capital.
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Available capital may be increased
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by loans and gifts from abroad,
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but in a world where the industrialized nations
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are involved in power politics
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and an increasingly expensive armament race,
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there will never be enough foreign aid
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to make much difference,
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and even if the loans and gifts
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to underdeveloped countries
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were to be substantially
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increased, any resulting gains would be largely nullified by the uncontrolled population explosion.
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If Mr. Black is correct, and there are plenty of economists and demographers who share his
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opinion, the outlook for most of the world’s newly independent and economically non-viable
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nations is gloomy indeed. To those that have shall be given. Within the next ten or twenty
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years, if war can be avoided, poverty will almost have disappeared from the highly industrialized
00:14:00 ►
and contraceptive using societies of the West. Meanwhile, in the underdeveloped and uncontrollably breeding societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America,
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the condition of the masses, twice as numerous a generation from now as they are today,
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will have become no better and may even be decidedly worse than it is at present.
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and may even be decidedly worse than it is at present.
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Such a decline is foreshadowed by current statistics of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
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In some underdeveloped regions of the world, we are told,
00:14:42 ►
people are somewhat less adequately fed, clothed and housed than were their parents and grandparents
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thirty and forty years ago.
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And what of elementary education?
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UNESCO recently provided an answer.
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Since the end of World War II, heroic efforts have been made to teach the whole world how
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to read.
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The population explosion has largely stultified these efforts. The absolute number of illiterates is greater now than at any time in the past.
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to offset the consequences of death control by a planned control of births has had as yet no effect upon the family life of people in underdeveloped countries.
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This is not surprising.
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Death control, as I have already remarked, is easy, cheap,
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and can be carried out by a small force of technicians.
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Birth control, on the other hand, is rather expensive,
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involves the whole adult population,
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and demands of those who practice it a good deal of forethought and directed willpower.
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To persuade hundreds of millions of men and women
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to abandon their tradition-hallowed views of sexual morality,
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then to distribute and teach them to make use of contraceptive devices or fertility-controlling drugs.
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This is a huge and difficult task, so huge and so difficult that it seems very unlikely
00:16:18 ►
that it can be successfully carried out within a sufficiently short space of time in any of the countries where
00:16:26 ►
control of the birth rate is most urgently needed.
00:16:32 ►
Extreme poverty when combined with ignorance breeds that lack of desire for better things which has been called wantlessness.
00:16:43 ►
The resigned acceptance of a subhuman lot.
00:16:47 ►
But extreme poverty, when it is combined with the knowledge that some societies are affluent,
00:16:54 ►
breeds envious desires and the expectation that these desires must of necessity and very
00:17:01 ►
soon be satisfied. By means of the mass media, those easily exportable
00:17:08 ►
products of advancing science and technology, some knowledge of what life is like in affluent
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societies has been widely disseminated among the world’s underdeveloped regions. But alas, the science and technology which have given the industrial West
00:17:28 ►
its cars, refrigerators and contraceptives
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have given the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America
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only movies and radio broadcasts
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which they are too simple-minded to be able to criticize
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together with a population explosion which
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they are still too poor and too tradition-bound to be able to control by deliberate family
00:17:53 ►
planning.
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In the context of a three or even of a mere two percent annual increase in numbers, high
00:18:02 ►
expectations are foredoomed to disappointment.
00:18:06 ►
From disappointment through resentful frustration to widespread social unrest, the road is short.
00:18:13 ►
Shorter still is the road from social unrest through chaos to dictatorship, possibly of
00:18:20 ►
the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels.
00:18:24 ►
of the Communist Party, more probably of generals and colonels.
00:18:28 ►
It would seem then that for two-thirds of the human race,
00:18:31 ►
and the two-thirds of the human race now suffering from the consequences of uncontrolled breeding
00:18:34 ►
in a context of industrial backwardness, poverty and illiteracy,
00:18:38 ►
the prospects for democracy during the next 10 or 20 years
00:18:43 ►
are poor in the extreme.
00:18:46 ►
From underdeveloped societies and the probable political consequences of their explosive increase in numbers,
00:18:53 ►
we now pass to the prospects for democracy in the fully industrialized, contraceptive-using societies of the West.
00:19:09 ►
societies of the West. It used to be assumed that political freedom was a necessary precondition of scientific research. Ideological dogmatism and dictatorial institutions were supposed
00:19:16 ►
to be incompatible with the open-mindedness and the freedom of experimental action, in
00:19:23 ►
the absence of which discovery and invention are impossible.
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Recent history has proved these comforting assumptions
00:19:30 ►
to be completely unfounded.
00:19:33 ►
It was under Stalin that Russian scientists developed the A-bomb
00:19:37 ►
and a few years later the H-bomb.
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And it is under a more than Stalinist dictatorship
00:19:42 ►
that Chinese scientists are now in process of performing the same feat.
00:19:49 ►
Another disquieting lesson of recent history
00:19:51 ►
is that in a developing society,
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science and technology can be used exclusively
00:19:58 ►
for the enhancement of military power,
00:20:01 ►
not at all for the benefit of the masses.
00:20:04 ►
Russia has demonstrated, and China is now doing
00:20:07 ►
its best to demonstrate, that poverty and primitive conditions of life for the overwhelming majority
00:20:13 ►
of the population are perfectly compatible with the wholesale production of the most advanced and
00:20:20 ►
sophisticated military hardware. Indeed, it is by deliberately imposing poverty on the masses
00:20:26 ►
that the rulers of developing industrial nations
00:20:30 ►
are able to create the capital necessary for building an armament industry
00:20:34 ►
and maintaining a well-equipped army
00:20:37 ►
with which to play their part in the suicidal game of international power politics.
00:20:43 ►
We see then that democratic institutions and libertarian
00:20:48 ►
traditions are not at all necessary to the progress of science and technology, and that
00:20:54 ►
such progress does not of itself make for human betterment at home and peace abroad,
00:21:02 ►
only where democratic institutions already exist, only where the masses convoke
00:21:08 ►
their rulers out of office and so compel them to pay some attention to the popular will,
00:21:15 ►
are science and technology used for the benefit of the majority as well as for increasing
00:21:21 ►
the power of the state.
00:21:23 ►
And even where democratic institutions exist,
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science, technology and preparation for war
00:21:29 ►
combine to pose a serious threat to civil and political liberty.
00:21:34 ►
A few days before he left the White House,
00:21:37 ►
President Eisenhower delivered a farewell address
00:21:40 ►
in which he urged his fellow countrymen
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to guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
00:21:47 ►
whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
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The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
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And he added that we must never let the weight of this military-industrial combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.
00:22:12 ►
Most human beings prefer a measure of freedom to being constantly pushed around, prefer peace to war, and would much rather be alive than dead.
00:22:22 ►
But in every part of the world, in democratically organized
00:22:26 ►
countries, as well as in countries under dictatorships, men and women have been brought up to regard
00:22:32 ►
nationalism as axiomatic, and war between nations as something cosmically ordained by
00:22:40 ►
God or fate or the essential nature of things. Prisoners of their culture, the masses, even in those countries where they are free to vote,
00:22:50 ►
are prevented by the basic postulates in terms of which they do their thinking and their feeling
00:22:55 ►
from summarily decreeing an end to the collective paranoia that governs international relations.
00:23:03 ►
As for the world’s ruling minorities, by the very
00:23:07 ►
fact of their position and their power, they are chained even more closely to the current systems
00:23:14 ►
of ideas and the prevailing political customs. For this reason, they are even less capable than
00:23:20 ►
their subjects of expressing the simple human preference for life and peace.
00:23:26 ►
Someday, let us hope, rulers and ruled will break out of the cultural prison in which
00:23:32 ►
they are now confined.
00:23:34 ►
Someday, and may that day come soon, for thanks to our rapidly advancing science and technology,
00:23:42 ►
we have very little time at our disposal. The river of change flows ever
00:23:47 ►
faster and somewhere downstream, perhaps only a few years ahead, we shall come to the rapids,
00:23:54 ►
shall hear louder and ever louder the roaring of a cataract. Modern war is a product of advancing
00:24:02 ►
science and technology. Conversely, advancing science and technology are products of modern war.
00:24:10 ►
Nuclear fusion and nuclear fission have revolutionized war.
00:24:15 ►
But it was in order to wage war more effectively
00:24:18 ►
that first the United States, then Britain and the USSR
00:24:21 ►
financed the crash programs that resulted so quickly
00:24:26 ►
in the harnessing of atomic forces
00:24:29 ►
primarily for military purposes
00:24:31 ►
and secondarily as a byproduct of the A-bomb
00:24:34 ►
as a source of industrial power
00:24:37 ►
again it was primarily for military purposes
00:24:40 ►
the techniques of automation
00:24:42 ►
which are now in process of revolutionizing
00:24:46 ►
industrial production and the whole system of administrative and bureaucratic control,
00:24:52 ►
were first developed.
00:24:54 ►
During World War II, writes Mr. John Diebold, the theory and use of feedback was studied
00:25:01 ►
in great detail by a number of scientists scientists both in this country and in Britain.
00:25:07 ►
The introduction of rapidly moving aircraft very quickly made traditional gun-laying techniques of anti-aircraft warfare obsolete.
00:25:17 ►
As a result, a large part of scientific manpower in this country
00:25:22 ►
was directed towards the development of self-regulating
00:25:27 ►
devices and systems to control our military equipment. It is out of this work that the
00:25:34 ►
technology of automation as we understand it today has developed. The headlong rapidity
00:25:41 ►
with which scientific and technological changes, with all their disturbing
00:25:45 ►
consequences in the fields of politics and social relations, are taking place, is due
00:25:52 ►
in large measure to the fact that both in the USA and the USSR, research in pure and
00:25:59 ►
applied science is lavishly financed by military planners whose first concern is the development of bigger and better weapons
00:26:08 ►
in the shortest possible time.
00:26:11 ►
In the frantic effort on one side of the Iron Curtain
00:26:14 ►
to keep up with the Joneses,
00:26:16 ►
on the other side to keep up with the Ivanovs,
00:26:19 ►
these military planners spend gigantic sums on research and development.
00:26:27 ►
The military revolution advances under forced graft, and as it goes forward, it initiates an uninterrupted succession of
00:26:35 ►
industrial, social, and political revolutions. It is against this background of chronic upheaval
00:26:42 ►
that the members of a species biologically and
00:26:45 ►
historically adapted to a
00:26:48 ►
slowly changing environment
00:26:49 ►
must now
00:26:51 ►
live out their bewildered
00:26:54 ►
lives.
00:26:55 ►
Old fashioned war
00:26:57 ►
was incompatible while it was being
00:26:59 ►
waged with
00:27:01 ►
democratic institutions.
00:27:04 ►
Nuclear war, if it is ever waged, will prove in all
00:27:08 ►
likelihood to be incompatible with civilization, perhaps with human survival. Meanwhile, what
00:27:15 ►
of the preparations for nuclear war? If certain physicists and military planners had their
00:27:21 ►
way, democracy where it exists would be replaced by a system
00:27:27 ►
of regimentation centered upon the bomb shelter. The entire population would have
00:27:33 ►
to be systematically drilled in the ticklish operation of going underground
00:27:38 ►
at a moment’s notice, systematically exercised in the art of living
00:27:44 ►
troglodytically under conditions resembling those in the art of living troglodytically
00:27:45 ►
under conditions resembling those in the hold of an 18th century slave ship.
00:27:51 ►
The notion fills most of us with horror,
00:27:55 ►
but if we fail to break out of the ideological prison of our nationalistic and bellicose culture,
00:28:02 ►
we may find ourselves compelled by the military consequences of
00:28:06 ►
our science and technology to descend into the steel and concrete dungeons of total and
00:28:13 ►
totalitarian civil defense.
00:28:16 ►
In the past, one of the most effective guarantees of liberty was governmental inefficiency.
00:28:23 ►
The spirit of tyranny was always willing,
00:28:27 ►
but its technical and organizational flesh was generally weak.
00:28:32 ►
Today the flesh is as strong as the spirit.
00:28:35 ►
Governmental organization is a fine art based upon scientific principles
00:28:40 ►
and disposing of marvelously efficient equipment.
00:28:45 ►
Fifty years ago, an armed revolution still had some chance of success.
00:28:50 ►
In the context of modern weaponry, a popular uprising is foredoomed.
00:28:56 ►
Crowds armed with rifles and homemade grenades are no match for tanks.
00:29:02 ►
And it is not only in its armament
00:29:05 ►
that a modern government
00:29:07 ►
knows its overwhelming power.
00:29:09 ►
It also possesses the strength
00:29:11 ►
of superior knowledge
00:29:13 ►
derived from its communication systems,
00:29:17 ►
its stores of accumulated data,
00:29:20 ►
its batteries of computers,
00:29:22 ►
its network of inspection and administration.
00:29:27 ►
Where democratic institutions exist and the masses can vote their rulers out of office,
00:29:34 ►
the enormous powers with which science, technology and the arts of organization have endowed the ruling minority
00:29:41 ►
are used with some discretion and a decent regard for civil and political liberty.
00:29:48 ►
Where the masses can exercise no control over their rulers,
00:29:52 ►
these powers are used without compunction
00:29:55 ►
to enforce ideological orthodoxy
00:29:58 ►
and to strengthen the dictatorial state.
00:30:02 ►
The nature of science and technology is such that it is
00:30:06 ►
peculiarly easy for a dictatorial government to use them for its own anti-democratic purposes.
00:30:13 ►
Well financed, equipped and organized, an astonishingly small number of scientists and
00:30:19 ►
technologists can achieve prodigious results. The crash program which produced the A-bomb and ushered in a new historical era was planned
00:30:32 ►
and directed by some 4,000 theoreticians, experimenters, and engineers.
00:30:40 ►
To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been so completely at the mercy of so few.
00:30:49 ►
Throughout the 19th century, the state was relatively feeble,
00:30:53 ►
and its interest in and influence upon scientific research was negligible.
00:30:59 ►
In our day, the state is everywhere exceedingly powerful,
00:31:03 ►
and everywhere a lavish patron of basic and
00:31:07 ►
ad hoc research. In Western Europe and North America, the relations between the state and
00:31:13 ►
its scientists on the one hand, and individual citizens, professional organisations, industrial,
00:31:19 ►
commercial and educational institutions on the other, are fairly satisfactory.
00:31:26 ►
Advancing science, the population explosion, the armament race,
00:31:31 ►
and the steady increase and centralization of political and economic power
00:31:36 ►
are still compatible in countries that have a libertarian tradition with democratic forms of government.
00:31:44 ►
To maintain this
00:31:45 ►
compatibility in a rapidly changing world bearing less and less resemblance
00:31:50 ►
to the world in which these democratic institutions were developed, this quite
00:31:55 ►
obviously is going to be increasingly difficult. A rapid and accelerating
00:32:01 ►
population increase that will nullify the best efforts of underdeveloped societies to better their lot
00:32:07 ►
and will keep two-thirds of the human race in a condition of misery in anarchy or of misery under dictatorship
00:32:14 ►
and the intensive preparations for a new kind of war that if it breaks out
00:32:20 ►
may bring irretrievable ruin to one-third of the human race
00:32:24 ►
now living prosperously
00:32:26 ►
in highly industrialized societies.
00:32:29 ►
These are the two main threats to democracy now confronting us.
00:32:34 ►
Can these threats be eliminated, or if not eliminated, at least reduced?
00:32:40 ►
My own view is that it is only by shifting our collective attention from the merely political to the basic biological aspects of the human situation that we can hope to mitigate and shorten the time of troubles into which it would seem we are now moving.
00:33:05 ►
We have to get it into our collective head that the basic problem now confronting us is ecological.
00:33:07 ►
How does the human race propose to survive and, if possible, better the lot of all its
00:33:13 ►
members?
00:33:14 ►
Do we propose to live on this planet in symbiotic harmony with our environment?
00:33:20 ►
Or preferring to be wantonly stupid, shall we choose to live like murderous and suicidal parasites
00:33:27 ►
that kill their host and so destroy themselves?
00:33:32 ►
It might be sensible to think less about the problem
00:33:36 ►
of landing a couple of astronauts on the moon
00:33:39 ►
and rather more about the problem
00:33:41 ►
of enabling three billion men, women and children,
00:33:45 ►
who in less than forty years will be six billions, to lead a tolerably human existence without
00:33:51 ►
in the process ruining and befouling their planetary environment.
00:33:58 ►
Indeed, I believe that it is only by cultivating this kind of ecological thinking that we shall
00:34:04 ►
be able to reduce the
00:34:06 ►
threat of war.
00:34:09 ►
Rationalized and justified in terms of national ideals and dogmatic ideology, power politics
00:34:17 ►
raises problems that except by war are almost insoluble.
00:34:22 ►
The problems of ecology, on the other hand, admit of a rational solution
00:34:26 ►
and can be tackled without arousing the violent passions always associated with nationalism
00:34:32 ►
and ideology. There may be arguments about the best way of raising wheat in a cold climate
00:34:39 ►
or of re-foresting a denuded mountain. But such arguments never lead to organized slaughter.
00:34:47 ►
Organized slaughter is the result of arguments about such questions as the following.
00:34:53 ►
Which is the best nation?
00:34:55 ►
The best religion?
00:34:56 ►
The best political theory?
00:34:58 ►
The best form of government?
00:35:00 ►
Why are other people so stupid and wicked?
00:35:03 ►
Why can’t they see how good and intelligent we are?
00:35:07 ►
Why do they resist our beneficent efforts to bring them under our control and make them like ourselves?
00:35:14 ►
To questions of this kind, the final answer has always been war.
00:35:20 ►
War, said Clausewitz, is not merely a political act, it is a real political instrument, a continuation of previous political relationships, a continuation of policy by other means.
00:35:35 ►
This was true enough in the 1820s, when Clausewitz wrote his famous treatise, and it continued to be more or less true until 1945. Now pretty obviously,
00:35:47 ►
nuclear weapons, long-range rockets, nerve gases, bacterial aerosols, and the laser,
00:35:56 ►
that highly promising latest addition to the world’s military arsenals, have given the
00:36:01 ►
lie to Clausewitz. All-out war with modern weapons is no longer a continuation of previous policy.
00:36:09 ►
It is a complete and irreversible break with previous policy.
00:36:14 ►
Power politics, nationalism, and dogmatic ideology
00:36:20 ►
are luxuries which the human race can no longer afford. Nor as a species can
00:36:28 ►
we afford the luxury of ignoring man’s ecological situation by shifting our attention from the
00:36:35 ►
now completely irrelevant and anachronistic politics of nationalism and military power to the problems of the human species
00:36:47 ►
and the still inchoate politics of human ecology,
00:36:51 ►
we shall be killing two birds with one stone,
00:36:54 ►
reducing the threat of sudden destruction by scientific war
00:36:59 ►
and at the same time reducing the threat of more gradual biological disaster. In the process of reducing
00:37:07 ►
these twin threats, we shall find no doubt that we have done something, in President
00:37:14 ►
Wilson’s prematurely optimistic words, to make the world safe for democracy. Thank you.
00:37:40 ►
Mr. Huxley sees three problems, population, arms race, nationalism,
00:37:45 ►
and believes that we should shift our attention from politics to ecology in order to engage in arguments which will not result in war
00:37:51 ►
and divert our attention from those arguments which are certain to result in war.
00:37:58 ►
I’d like to begin by asking Mr. Huxley for an item of clarification.
00:38:04 ►
As he sounded his original attack on politics,
00:38:08 ►
he made it very comprehensive and deep.
00:38:10 ►
He said,
00:38:12 ►
let us shift our attention from politics to ecology.
00:38:16 ►
He said later, and it relieved me somewhat,
00:38:19 ►
that what he wanted us to do
00:38:21 ►
was to shift our attention from the politics of nationalism
00:38:24 ►
and military power to ecology.
00:38:28 ►
And I assume, all this, that when you say you want us to shift our attention from politics,
00:38:33 ►
you do not want us to shift our attention from the problem of how you make government intelligent and effective
00:38:40 ►
or from the problem of how you make democracy work, but precisely what you
00:38:48 ►
said the second time, that you want to get out of a kind of politics that focuses around
00:38:54 ►
nationalism and military power.
00:38:56 ►
Well, I did speak about the still inchoate politics of ecology.
00:39:01 ►
I mean, it seems to me that we simply as a matter of
00:39:07 ►
self-preservation we have to consider the problem of man the species. After all,
00:39:12 ►
we’ve already been using this word man here without defining what we mean. It
00:39:17 ►
has three major meanings. I mean, man can refer to the species as a whole. Man can refer to the average behavior of human beings within a given culture.
00:39:30 ►
Or else man can be the locus of unshareable experiences of each individual.
00:39:36 ►
And, I mean, of course, one of the great secrets of philosophical writing
00:39:40 ►
is to muddle up the three meanings and never to explain exactly what you’re saying
00:39:44 ►
so that almost anything can be proved when you talk about man.
00:39:47 ►
But we have, I mean, the problem is can we reconcile the basic desires and tendencies and potentialities of man, the locus of immediate experiences,
00:40:08 ►
with immediate experiences, with what man is doing as the beneficiary and the victim of culture, and how can these two things be related to the fate, the destiny of the species
00:40:16 ►
as a whole?
00:40:17 ►
And there is, it seems to me, I mean, of course we can’t do without politics, but I mean,
00:40:22 ►
what are we doing politics for? I mean, are we doing it
00:40:26 ►
for the survival of the species as a whole or for the survival of a particular national
00:40:32 ►
group? I mean, are we going to indulge in nationalistic idolatry or are we going to
00:40:38 ►
have some sort of overall humanistic view which entails as well as the cultural preoccupations, the preoccupation
00:40:47 ►
with the destiny of man as a whole and with the destiny of man as an individual.
00:40:52 ►
I mean, all that I meant was that the sort of basic frame of reference in which political
00:41:00 ►
activities should take place shall be less culture bound
00:41:06 ►
and more ecology
00:41:08 ►
bound, so to say.
00:41:11 ►
I saw
00:41:12 ►
a remarkable link up between politics
00:41:14 ►
and ecology the other day.
00:41:16 ►
A bumper strip on an automobile
00:41:17 ►
said, keep Mars in ecological
00:41:20 ►
preserve.
00:41:21 ►
preserve. May not be a bad idea.
00:41:22 ►
Yes.
00:41:23 ►
Do you have a question?
00:41:24 ►
Yes, Dr. Hudson.
00:41:25 ►
There’s been so much talk about change relating it to problems of our society.
00:41:30 ►
Is there any evidence at all there’s been any change in man and male consumption in the
00:41:39 ►
world? of our society, is there any evidence at all there’s been any change in man, and I’ll accept
00:41:50 ►
any one of these three definitions or three characterizations, and if there hasn’t been,
00:42:00 ►
there isn’t any evidence of any fundamental change in any one of those three characters,
00:42:05 ►
Aikens and Mann, on a real basis for believing that we’re going anywhere except for self-destruction.
00:42:14 ►
The fact is that this society is probably more advanced in its respect for human dignity
00:42:24 ►
than any society in a long time in numerical terms at least.
00:42:28 ►
Now, it’s also a fact that in this very advanced and sophisticated society with groups like this thinking about people and their problems,
00:42:37 ►
you have some of the leading figures in the United States who will argue that, in all seriousness,
00:42:43 ►
that colored children ought not to be permitted
00:42:46 ►
to go to school with white children. Now, this is okay in 1860, I suppose, and it’s
00:42:51 ►
okay perhaps today in Southeast Asia, and maybe it’s even okay ten years ago.
00:42:59 ►
Well, isn’t the evidence of change the fact that Plessy against Ferguson has been overruled?
00:43:03 ►
have changed the fact that Plessy against Ferguson has been overruled.
00:43:10 ►
And the sentiments that you express are now held by a minority of the people or ones held by almost everybody.
00:43:13 ►
Can’t you see similar social changes taking place all over the world in very recent history,
00:43:19 ►
such as the complete transformation of England from a sink of bribery and iniquity in the 18th century
00:43:27 ►
into a model of administrative purity in the 19th.
00:43:32 ►
We’ve seen a mean kind of superficial…
00:43:34 ►
Well, they’re no more superficial than the one you selected yourself,
00:43:38 ►
which is the attitude toward the Negro in the South.
00:43:41 ►
I say that has changed, and if that’s a good example, why not say it’s evidence of change?
00:43:49 ►
But the real fact is it hasn’t, hasn’t it?
00:43:50 ►
I mean, what are the real reports?
00:43:54 ►
The court’s made an adjustment in its thinking.
00:43:57 ►
Well, I say that it’s not.
00:43:59 ►
And that’s a change, don’t you think?
00:44:02 ►
The Supreme Court used to, Mr. Dooley
00:44:05 ►
used to say
00:44:06 ►
that the Supreme
00:44:06 ►
Court followed
00:44:07 ►
the election
00:44:07 ►
returns.
00:44:09 ►
I think that
00:44:09 ►
was perhaps a
00:44:10 ►
little too
00:44:10 ►
specific, but
00:44:11 ►
we would say,
00:44:12 ►
wouldn’t we,
00:44:12 ►
that the Supreme
00:44:12 ►
Court is
00:44:14 ►
affected somewhat
00:44:15 ►
by changes in
00:44:16 ►
public opinion.
00:44:17 ►
Mr. White?
00:44:19 ►
I think what
00:44:20 ►
my friend over
00:44:22 ►
there was kind
00:44:23 ►
of saying was
00:44:24 ►
what I’ve been inclined to say myself in part at least
00:44:28 ►
is that aren’t changes taking place in our environment
00:44:32 ►
so much more rapidly than the evolutionary changes in man?
00:44:39 ►
These changes are taking place so rapidly
00:44:40 ►
that we’re worried that demand won’t be able to take these
00:44:47 ►
changes in his stride without shattering him and completely alienating him from
00:44:52 ►
his existence this is what’s bothering us and may I make one or two remarks it
00:44:58 ►
is of course obviously we’re under the pressure of excessively great changes
00:45:03 ►
but I think one of the extraordinary things about the human being
00:45:06 ►
is its capacity for adapting to entirely novel things
00:45:11 ►
I’m old enough to remember having seen as a very small child
00:45:15 ►
Queen Victoria going for her afternoon constitutional in Windsor Park
00:45:20 ►
she was in a bath chair with a very fat pony
00:45:24 ►
and her equerries at the side and travelling
00:45:29 ►
at about two and a half miles an hour. I mean, this is what one regarded as the normal speed
00:45:33 ►
for old ladies at that time. Well, now you can see ladies of comparable age and dignity
00:45:38 ►
stepping on the gas along the freeway. I mean, who would have conceived at that time that these elderly
00:45:47 ►
people could possibly do the things that in fact they are doing now? I mean, this is absolutely
00:45:52 ►
extraordinary. This, of course, confirms what Dr. Salk was saying about the enormous potentialities
00:45:59 ►
which still lie waiting for actualization in the human mind.
00:46:10 ►
But it is quite extraordinary, if one has lived long enough, as I have,
00:46:17 ►
to remember London and Paris without one single vehicle which was not horse-drawn,
00:46:23 ►
and to see now this extraordinary capacity, which no one suspected at that time,
00:46:25 ►
for immensely rapid reactions with the control of very very powerful machines. I mean there is no doubt that although we
00:46:32 ►
are under the terrible stress at the present time that we have extraordinary capacities
00:46:37 ►
for adaptation. I mean one of the tragedies is to see that many young people hardly out of college have developed
00:46:46 ►
what may be called a kind of mental arteriosclerosis
00:46:49 ►
40 years before they developed physical arteriosclerosis.
00:46:53 ►
On the other hand, you will see people 90 years old like Bertrand Russell.
00:46:58 ►
I mean, the last time I saw Russell,
00:47:00 ►
he made a wonderful remark at my brother’s house.
00:47:03 ►
My brother was talking about some curious fact of animal behavior.
00:47:08 ►
Russell listened very carefully and he said,
00:47:10 ►
How nice it is to know things.
00:47:19 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:47:21 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:47:28 ►
Although those dire warnings that Aldous Huxley gave in the lecture we just heard
00:47:32 ►
were delivered over 48 years ago, or almost 48 years ago, they probably could have been
00:47:39 ►
given last night. As my dear departed mother would say, everything’s different, but nothing’s changed.
00:47:47 ►
Now, I don’t know about you, but I was really mesmerized
00:47:50 ►
when Huxley was talking just now about being in London and Paris
00:47:53 ►
when every vehicle was horse-drawn.
00:47:56 ►
It made me think of the story that my stepfather, Leo Altapeter, told
00:48:00 ►
about the time when almost everyone in the small farming town he lived in drove into
00:48:05 ►
Chicago to witness the landing of the very first twin-engine airplane to touchdown in Illinois.
00:48:11 ►
He said that at the time, most of them simply didn’t believe something that big could fly.
00:48:16 ►
And by the way, Leo wasn’t all that much older than me, which is a little scary now that I think
00:48:21 ►
about it. As a boy, the crystal radio set that I built
00:48:26 ►
was considered state-of-the-art,
00:48:28 ►
do-it-yourself electronic technology for the day.
00:48:31 ►
It was the leading edge of high tech
00:48:34 ►
because transistors would still have to wait
00:48:36 ►
for over a decade or more to be invented.
00:48:40 ►
Today, kids that are that age are building websites
00:48:44 ►
that are even more sophisticated than anything I ever did when I was still coding for a living.
00:48:49 ►
And even though I was a founding member of Verizon’s first Internet and Java development group and spoke at conferences like Java 1, extolling the future possibilities of the net,
00:49:00 ►
I have to admit that I failed as a futurist because even I didn’t foresee watching YouTube videos on an iPhone while walking down the street.
00:49:09 ►
It’s a new world.
00:49:11 ►
I guess what got me into this loop was Huxley’s statement that when he was quite young, there was no one alive who could have predicted the world of 1962.
00:49:31 ►
What that means is that right now, right at this very moment in time, there’s simply no way, even in our wildest dreams, that we can foresee what the next 48 years are going to bring.
00:49:40 ►
And unfortunately, even under the most optimistic predictions about longevity, there’s no way I’m going to be here to find out.
00:49:42 ►
So for your sake, I hope it’s all ducky. And it will be for you, I’m sure, as long as you
00:49:46 ►
follow your heart and not that overactive mind of yours. Well, that’s going to do it for now.
00:49:53 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast, again, by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts
00:49:58 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
00:50:02 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
00:50:07 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:50:09 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:50:13 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:50:16 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
00:50:19 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
00:50:23 ►
which is available as an audiobook that you can download at
00:50:26 ►
genesisgeneration.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:50:34 ►
Be well, my friends.