Part 1

Chapter 13,882 wordsPublic domain

TANTALUS

THE FUTURE OF MAN

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future _By J. B. S. Haldane_

ICARUS, or The Future of Science _By Bertrand Russell, F. R. S._

THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST _By F. G. Crookshank, M.D._

WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES _By Prof. A. M. Low_

NARCISSUS, or The Anatomy of Clothes _By Gerald Heard_

TANTALUS, or The Future of Man _By F. C. S. Schiller_

IN PREPARATION

THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS _By Professor Patten_

WOMAN AND THE FUTURE _By Anthony M. Ludovici_

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

TANTALUS OR The Future of Man

BY F. C. S. SCHILLER

_M.A., D.Sc.; Fellow and Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford_

_Man never is, but always to be, blest_

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE

_All Rights Reserved_

_First Printing, November, 1924 Second Printing, March, 1925_

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

I rather anticipate that superficial critics who do not like the argument of this essay will accuse it of pessimism, a charge which perhaps means little more than that they do not like it. Nevertheless, it may be worth while to point out, (1) that pessimism is not a logical objection to a contention of which the truth cannot otherwise be questioned, and (2) that though the argument of _Tantalus_ may be said generally to corroborate that of _Daedalus_ and _Icarus_, yet its conclusion is much less pessimistic than theirs, because (3) it makes it very plain that the evils which threaten the future of mankind are in no case unavoidable. If it is called ‘pessimism’ to point out the methods by which men may escape destruction, because men do not care to adopt them, I suppose it must be ‘optimism’ to rush violently and open-eyed down a precipice, and to expect to be saved by a miracle. Certainly such would appear to be the belief upon which human affairs are at present conducted.

F.C.S.S.

TANTALUS

PROLOGUE: THE ORACLE OF THE DEAD

When I read in Mr Haldane’s _Daedalus_ the wonderful things that Science was going to do for us, and in Mr Russell’s _Icarus_ how easily both we and it might come to grief in consequence, it at once became plain to me that of all the heroes of antiquity Tantalus would be the one best fitted to prognosticate the probable future of Man. For, if we interpret the history of Daedalus as meaning the collapse of Minoan civilization under the strain imposed on its moral fibre by material progress, and the fate of Icarus as meaning man’s inability to use the powers of the air without crashing, one could gauge the probability that history would repeat itself still further, and that man would once more allow his vices to cheat him of the happiness that seemed so clearly within his reach.

I determined, however, to confirm this intelligent forecast by consulting Tantalus himself. To consult the oracle of a dead hero, it was, I knew, only necessary to undergo the process of ‘incubation,’ a sort of camping out on his tomb, in the skin of a sacrificial beast; and fortunately the tomb of Tantalus had just been discovered in Phrygia by the archæologists of the British School at Athens.

I set out, therefore, with great promptitude, and in due course, arrived at the ruins of the tomb of Tantalus. They did not much resemble a first-class hotel, and, of course, my idea of an ‘incubation’ was well laughed at, but I managed to find a pretty level corner, more or less sheltered from the wind. Here I wrapped myself up in my excellent rug, having decided to dispense with the more correct method of ensconcing myself in the gory hide of a sacrificial ox. The night was fine, though cold, and fortunately there were no mosquitoes, nor any of the other insects one would inevitably have encountered in the dwellings of the living. But the ground was very, very, hard, and I tossed about for hours, regretting my classical education and the psychical researcher’s rashness in trying foolish experiments.

At last I fell asleep, at least I suppose so. I also fell a great deal further. I seemed to go right through my rocky bed, and to fall down, down, down, interminably, through a sort of elastic space. When at last the not wholly unpleasant motion stopped, I found myself in a vast, grey, sandy plain, illuminated by a cold grey light as though of dawn. The only thing to catch the eye was a small round hummock, not very far from me. On it grew a mighty tree, with dark green pointed leaves and drooping branches, surrounded by a gleaming white fence or paling. I naturally walked towards it.

As I got near, I noticed that the white paling, which completely enclosed the hummock, was composed of _bones_, or rather of every imaginable sort of spine, tooth and sting, garnished with the saws and swords of sawfish and swordfish, and all knit together into an impenetrable _cheval de frise_ that prevented approach to the foot of the tree. The soil all round this strange hedge had apparently been trodden into deep mud by some creature that had walked round and round the tree, and the water required for its manufacture was supplied by a small spring which rose within the enclosure and flowed out through its interstices.

As I walked round the tree to the further side of the hummock, I came upon an extraordinary sight. I beheld a naked man trying to reach some of the fruit that dangled down from the outer branches of the tree but appeared to be just out of his reach, and so intent upon his design that he did not notice my approach. He seemed a tall man, and the upper part of his body was well formed. His features were good and regular, though somewhat hard, and not intellectual; his resolute jaw bespoke the man of action, accustomed to command and to be obeyed. So far, his appearance would have done credit to any modern captain of industry. But the lower half of his body appeared to be misshapen. His thighs were so curved that he could not walk upright, but had to stoop and lean forward as he slowly shambled along. Still more monstrous seemed the feet, with which he churned up the mud around the fence; they were enormous and hardly seemed human in their shape, though they were too deeply plunged in the mud to permit one to see what exactly was wrong with them.

This strange being, whom the bold intuition of the dream-consciousness at once identified with Tantalus, was evidently trying to grasp the fruit that hung from the lower branches of the tree. For a while his efforts were vain, but then a gust of wind brought within his reach a large conical shining red fruit he had long coveted. It was one of the strange features of the tree that it was covered with fruit, and higher up also with flowers, of the most various sizes, shapes, and colours. He seized it triumphantly; but the effect was surprising. For he had hardly touched it when it exploded, and covered him from head to foot with its blood-red juice. He at once sank senseless to the ground. But, after a while, he slowly recovered, and recommenced his old game. This time, he attacked a large round yellowish fruit; but when he succeeded in seizing it, it too exploded, and poured out upon him volumes of a heavy yellow-green vapour. Again he collapsed, and this time his stupor lasted longer.

By the time he began to stir again I had, I thought, grasped the situation, and determined to intervene. So I drew near, and addressed him: “Can I be mistaken in thinking that I see before me the far-famed hero, Tantalus, boon companion of the gods?” “And their victim.” “And what tree is this, I pray you, about which you busy yourself?” “The Tree of Knowledge.” “And the water, which you have trampled into mud, is what?” “The Elixir of Life.” “Then you seem to have all the materials for a happy life. Why don’t you eat of the fruits of the tree, and drink of the elixir?” “You have seen the results of my efforts.” “I cannot but think you have been unfortunate in your choice of the fruits: there are many that look much better higher up.” “And how am I to get at them?” “Well, of course, you must break through all these _debris_ of former animal life, which bar your access to the trunk of the tree, and prevent you from drinking of the water of life; after that, you can climb up the tree, and pick the best of the fruits.” “And how am I to break through the barrier of bones?” “Even though you appear to have no instruments, you can surely find a stone?” “Where shall I find a stone in the Plain of Forgetfulness? And besides, how should I climb the tree with these ... feet?” And he lifted up one of his monstrous limbs. “Certainly you seem to be pretty badly earth-bound,” said I, “but I will try to find you some stones.”

So off I set. I had not got far when a fierce blast struck me and peppered me with sand. I struggled stoutly against it, but was nearly choked. And then, suddenly, I awoke to find that day was dawning and that the wind had gone round to the north, and was blowing in my face. But I was well satisfied with my experiment. The interpretation of the response I had obtained from Tantalus was too plain to need the aid of a psycho-analyst.

Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much, and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide, or rather, mutual murder, after the fashion of the Kilkenny cats.

To these dismal forecasts it is reasonable to reply that there is nothing novel in the present situation. The human race has always known enough to wreck itself, and its abounding folly has always inspired its wise men with the gravest apprehension for its future. Yet, either by chance or providence, it has always known also how to avoid destruction. It has never known enough to make itself happy; nor does it know enough to do so now. Its future has always been precarious, because it has always been uncertain whether it would use its knowledge well or ill, to improve or to ruin itself. It has always had a choice between alternative policies, and it has so now.

What sense then is there in making such a fuss about the present crisis? It is a particularly plain case of the perennial choice of Hercules. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain speaking to a society more than usually debauched by a long regime of flattery, propaganda, and subterfuge. Mankind _can_ make a fool of itself, as it always could; if it does, its blood will be on its own head. For it has knowledge enough to avoid the dangers that threaten it, if it will use its knowledge properly.

The first fact to be enunciated plainly, and faced, until it grows familiar, and its import is appreciated, is that, biologically speaking, Man has ceased to be a progressive species long ago. The evolutionary impetus which carried our ancestors from the level of the ape or even of the lemur, through such subhuman types as _Pithecanthropus_, and the Heidelberg and Neanderthal men, to ‘modern’ man, seems to have spent itself by the middle of the palæolithic period, _i.e._ say, thirty thousand years ago. At any rate, the Cro-Magnon people of the Aurignacian age, who then appeared upon the scene, were in no wise inferior to any subsequent race of men, either in stature or in brain capacity. They average six feet three inches in height, with one-sixth more brains than the modern European. So far indeed as their physical remains can indicate, they seem to have been very definitely the finest race of human beings that has ever existed. If we have improved on them, it has probably been only in such minor matters as resistance to the microbes of the many diseases which flourish among dense populations under slum conditions. Against that probability have to be set such certainties as that our toes and many of our muscles are being atrophied and that we are getting more liable to caries and baldness.

This remarkable fact of the arrest of his biological development is certainly the greatest mystery in the history of Man. It at once raises two further questions: In the first place, how did it happen, and what caused it? And, secondly, what has enabled man, nevertheless, to progress in other respects, in knowledge, in power, and in culture?

To answer the first question we cannot do better than argue back from what is now the most salient feature about man’s biological position, namely that his survival is determined far more by his relations to the social group to which he belongs than by personal efficiency: hence he can draw on the collective resources of his tribe, and, to a growing extent, gets emancipated from the control of natural selection. Thus social selection and the survival of societies profoundly modify (and often defeat), the working of natural selection. The advantages are obvious; it is no longer essential for a member of a society that collectively controls the conditions of existence to develop any high degree of personal capacity, in order to survive. A single wise and provident minister, like Joseph, is enough to keep alive millions of Pharaoh’s subjects through the lean years of famine. But the inferior and incompetent survive with the rest.

Now, if we suppose that by mid-palæolithic times man had established his ascendency over nature and perfected his social organization sufficiently to render these services to his fellows, we have suggested a possible cause of the cessation of biological progress. For social influences are as likely as not to be ‘contra-selective,’ that is, to tend to preserve by preference the stocks which are less viable from a merely biological point of view. They are markedly so at present, and it would be asking too much to expect the tribal chiefs of early men to have been wise and provident enough to see to it that their social institutions were eugenical in their effects. We cannot even now find such a pitch of wisdom and providence in the controllers of our destinies.

III

The answer to the second question is much easier. The human race has continued to progress in its culture, in its knowledge, in its power over nature, because it has devised institutions which have created for it a continuous social memory that defies death. Now, as ever, the wisest and the best must die, while their place is taken by babies born as ignorant and void of knowledge as in the beginning. Only there has been invented apparatus which relieves the civilized baby of his hereditary ignorance, and renders him potentially the heir to all the wisdom of the ages.

In the first place, _Language_ not only extends enormously the possibilities of co-operation and common action, but also renders possible the consolidation of customs and their preservation by oral tradition. In the next place, _Writing_ enables a society to record all that it considers worth remembering. Upon these two inventions may be reared vast intricate structures, religious, political, social, and scientific, which knit together and dominate human societies from generation to generation, and create the conditions for an almost mechanical accumulation of knowledge.

Man has thereby become an educable creature and fallen a victim to the arts of the examiner. Provided the mechanisms of education do not get out of gear, it is hard to set limits to the amounts of knowledge with which he can be crammed; but it is clear that they are far greater than he could ever have acquired in a lifetime for himself. And as education (of sorts) has now become world wide, it might seem that the future of knowledge was now assured, and no longer liable to setbacks such as those due to the famous burning of the library of Alexandria at the command of the Caliph Omar, or the extinction of the only Greek scientists who seriously concerned themselves with the applications of science to life, of Archimedes and his School, in the sack of Syracuse. At any rate, it seemed clear that progress in knowledge could continue indefinitely, even in an otherwise stationary or decadent society.

Whoever argued thus would fail to make sufficient allowance for the perversity of human nature. Human institutions, like the human body, are ever tending to get clogged with the waste products of their own working. Hence, so far from performing the functions for which they were intended, they are constantly becoming the most formidable instruments for their frustration. Experience shows how easily Churches become the most effective deadeners of religious zeal, how often Law becomes the negation of justice, how deadly is the School to the inborn craving for knowledge which seemed to Aristotle so characteristic of man’s nature.

Accordingly, no one familiar with the actual working of academic institutions is likely to fall into the error of pinning his faith to them. They are, of course, designed for the purpose of preserving and promoting the highest and most advanced knowledge hitherto attained: but do they anywhere fulfil this purpose? Its execution must of necessity be left to professors not exempt from human frailty, always selected by more or less defective methods, whose interests by no means coincide with those of their subjects. The interest of the subject is to become more widely understood and so more influential. The interest of the professor is to become more unassailable, and so more authoritative. He achieves this by becoming more technical. For the more technical he gets, the fewer can comprehend him; the fewer are competent to criticize him, the more of an oracle he becomes; if, therefore, he wishes for an easy life of undisturbed academic leisure, the more he will indulge his natural tendency to grow more technical as his knowledge grows, the more he will turn away from those aspects of his subject which have any direct practical or human interest. He will wrap himself in mysteries of technical jargon, and become as nearly as possible unintelligible. Truly, as William James once exclaimed to me, apropos of the policy of certain philosophers, “the natural enemy of any subject is the professor thereof!” It is clear that if these tendencies are allowed to prevail, every subject must in course of time become unteachable, and not worth learning.

Thus educational systems become the chief enemies of education, and seats of learning the chief obstacles to the growth of knowledge, while in an otherwise stagnant or decadent society these tendencies sooner or later get the upper hand and utterly corrupt the social memory. The power of the professor is revealed not so much by the things he teaches, as by the things he fails or refuses to teach.

History is full of examples. How many religions have not perished from ritual sclerosis, how many sciences have not been degraded into pseudo-sciences or games! Logic has been just examinable nonsense for over two thousand years. The present economic chaos in the world has been indirectly brought about by the policy adopted by the professors of economics forty or fifty years ago, to suit their own convenience. For they then decided that they must escape from the unwelcome attentions of the public by becoming more ‘scientific’; _i.e._ they ceased to express themselves in plain language and took to mathematical formulae and curves instead; with the result that the world promptly relapsed into its primitive depths of economic ignorance. So soon as the professors had retired from it, every economic heresy and delusion, which had been exposed and uprooted by Adam Smith, at once revived and flourished. In one generation economics disappeared completely from the public ken and the political world, and the makers of the Peace Treaties of 1919 were so incapable of understanding an economic argument that not even the lucid intelligence of Mr Keynes could dissuade them from enacting the preposterous conditions which rendered impossible the realization of their aims.[A] Nor was it so very long ago that, in order to save the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, it had to be recast, because it had degenerated into an intellectual jig-saw puzzle, wholly unrelated to the applications of mathematics to the other sciences. To avoid jealousies, I hasten to add that the University of Oxford, which has organized itself as an asylum for lost causes, skilfully cultivates, by means of its classical and historical studies, a backward-looking bias in its _alumni_. The true ‘Greats’ man is meant to go down indelibly imbued with the conviction that in matters of morals and politics nothing of importance has been discovered or said since Plato and Aristotle, and that nothing else matters.

Clearly then we cannot take for granted that in any society knowledge can progress without limits, nor can we count on our academic institutions to save us from stagnation and decay, even in matters of knowledge. All institutions are social mechanisms, and all mechanisms need a modicum of intelligent supervision, in the absence of which they become dangerous engines of destruction.

It appears then that we can extract no guarantee of progress either from the nature of Man or from the nature of human institutions. There is no _law_ of progress, if by law be meant a superior power able to coerce the creatures that are said to ‘obey’ it. Neither can we extract from history any proof of the superiority of civilized man over his uncivilized ancestors. Such progress as has been attained has been achieved only by the active co-operation of the progressive organisms: every step has been fought for, and progress has ceased whenever effort ceased, or was switched off into different directions.

Consequently, modern man has no right to ‘boast himself far better than his fathers’--in intrinsic quality. Intrinsically, _i.e._ apart from the effects of culture and social training, it is probable that he is slightly _inferior_ in capacity to his own ancestors, while very markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the Greeks) in their hey-day. Nor is there any reason to suppose that his moral nature has changed materially. Modern man may be a little tamer and better-tempered, because he has been herded together much more closely than primitive man, and city life, even in slums, demands, and produces, a certain ‘urbanity.’ For many generations those who would not pack tight and could not stand the strain of constantly exhibiting ‘company manners’ and accommodating their action to those of their fellows, must have fled away into the wilds, where they could be independent, or have eliminated themselves in other ways, _e.g._ by committing murder. It is probable that the social history of Iceland, settled as it was by unbridled individualists who would not brook any form of organized government, might throw some light on this process of taming the individual.