An Institute of Scientific Humanism
| Autor: | Oliver L. Reiser |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1945 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Philosophy of Science. 12:45-51 |
| ISSN: | 1539-767X 0031-8248 |
| Popis: | Recently I was asked by a somewhat disillusioned but well informed official of one of the important Foundations how long I thought it would be before we attained Utopia. My reply was that I thought we would make substantial progress toward a better world within the next one hundred years. The reply to this, as the reader may surmise, was that my estimate was much too optimistic, the intimation being that anyone who hopes for such rapid progress in this world must be rather naive in practical matters. Such a judgment represents a widely prevailing view, but one which is supposed to be "realistic." According to this view, social advancement is a slow business. It will be said that there is no evidence that we are much better off than the ancients. Rather than that we have progressed beyond antiquity, we find that we, as of old, have our evidences of social degradation and maladjustment. Crimes, wars, unemployment, divorce, racial and religious conflicts, even W. P. A. projects-all these are as old as recorded history. Man cannot hope to go far in the next one hundred years because in the last one thousand years he has not improved his lot in terms of fundamental human values. All he has done is multiply his gadgets and invent some new ones. Perhaps-my critic opined-we can make some headway in the next thousand years, but it will be a slow and painful process. The reply to this tired liberal, with his long time-scale perspective, is that he is the one who is not being "realistic." The argument that we have a thousand years before us because we have five thousand years behind us is not sound. Unless we make substantial progress within the next one hundred years, it won't matter much what we do in the remaining nine hundred years of the hypothetical future we have left for social advances. The idea that the world can go on in the future, pretty much as it has in the past, without any fundamental alterations of human behavior and social relationships, ignores a very important fact: the fact that, as the world shrinks in size, as it progressively contracts in its spatial relations, social processes already at work are speeded up. As the world becomes "one world" through technological unifications by means of radio, airplanes, television, and the rest, the forces that make for destruction of friendly human adaptations are intensified and speeded up, so that, in a sense, time moves faster and faster. This heightens the tensions and intensifies the struggles of conflicting forces-and the old time-scale breaks down. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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