The World, the Flesh and the Devil by J.D. Bernal

Author:J.D. Bernal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

IV

THE DEVIL

WHY DO THE FIRST LINES OF ATTACK AGAINST the inorganic forces of the world and the organic structure of our bodies seem so doubtful, fanciful and Utopian? Because we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh only if we first expel the devil, and the devil, for all that he has lost individuality, is still as powerful as ever. The devil is the most difficult of all to deal with: he is inside ourselves, we cannot see him. Our capacities, our desires, our inner confusions are almost impossible to understand or cope with in the present, still less can we predict what will be the future of them. Psychology at the present day is hardly in a better state than physics in the time of Aristotle; it has acquired a vocabulary, the general movements and transformations of conscious and unconscious motives are described, but nothing more. Yet in the absence of scientific analysis something must be said, because all the changes I have predicted in the organic or inorganic world must, in the first place, start from some human psychological motive and effect themselves through the operation of human intellectual processes. We are obviously not in a position to predict the particular new orientations which a change in psychology would give to human development, beyond that which would result from the removal of what we know are inhibitory causes, so that here I will only attempt to estimate the effect of psychological forces in preventing or retarding the kind of processes outlined in the first two sections. The progress of the future depends no longer on physiological evolution but on the reaction of intelligence on a material universe. It will be hindered or stopped either by a failure in the capacity for maintaining creative intellectual thinking, or by the lack of desire to apply such thinking to the progress of humanity, or, of course, by both these causes together. Consider first the retarding factors that endanger the capacity for creative thinking. Some are apparent now. It is pretty clear that they are ineffective in stopping the course of thought at present, but they have not always been so in the past and we cannot be sure that they will not be so in the future. One of the most threatening retarding factors of the present is specialization, particularly as it is bound to increase with scientific knowledge itself. But it is doubtful whether specialization in itself is capable of bringing scientific thought to a standstill. It retards it in so far as the specialist is ignorant of current thought in other fields, and the remedy for this is obviously an intelligently operated system of distribution and grading of knowledge so that each worker may have the amount that he requires outside his own field, in a form which can be absorbed with a minimum of mental effort. The problem is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid advance communications become disorganized, and there is a temporary halting until they are again in working order.

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