The World Set Free

Section 1

The task that lay before the Assembly of Brissago, viewed as we may view it now from the clarifying standpoint of things accomplished, was in its broad issues a simple one.  Essentially it was to place social organisation upon the new footing that the swift, accelerated advance of human knowledge had rendered necessary.  The council was gathered together with the haste of a salvage expedition, and it was confronted with wreckage; but the wreckage was irreparable wreckage, and the only possibilities of the case were either the relapse of mankind to the agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order.  The old tendencies of human nature, suspicion, jealousy, particularism, and belligerency, were incompatible with the monstrous destructive power of the new appliances the inhuman logic of science had produced.  The equilibrium could be restored only by civilisation destroying itself down to a level at which modern apparatus could no longer be produced, or by human nature adapting itself in its institutions to the new conditions.  It was for the latter alternative that the assembly existed.

Sooner or later this choice would have confronted mankind.  The sudden development of atomic science did but precipitate and render rapid and dramatic a clash between the new and the customary that had been gathering since ever the first flint was chipped or the first fire built together.  From the day when man contrived himself a tool and suffered another male to draw near him, he ceased to be altogether a thing of instinct and untroubled convictions.  From that day forth a widening breach can be traced between his egotistical passions and the social need.  Slowly he adapted himself to the life of the homestead, and his passionate impulses widened out to the demands of the clan and the tribe.  But widen though his impulses might, the latent hunter and wanderer and wonderer in his imagination outstripped their development.  He was never quite subdued to the soil nor quite tamed to the home.  Everywhere it needed teaching and the priest to keep him within the bounds of the plough-life and the beast-tending.  Slowly a vast system of traditional imperatives superposed itself upon his instincts, imperatives that were admirably fitted to make him that cultivator, that cattle-mincer, who was for twice ten thousand years the normal man.

And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came civilisation.  Civilisation was the agricultural surplus.  It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded the seas, and within its primitive courts, within temples grown rich and leisurely and amidst the gathering medley of the seaport towns rose speculation and philosophy and science, and the beginning of the new order that has at last established itself as human life.  Slowly at first, as we traced it, and then with an accumulating velocity, the new powers were fabricated.  Man as a whole did not seek them nor desire them; they were thrust into his hand.  For a time men took up and used these new things and the new powers inadvertently as they came to him, recking nothing of the consequences.  For endless generations change led him very gently.  But when he had been led far enough, change quickened the pace.  It was with a series of shocks that he realised at last that he was living the old life less and less and a new life more and more.

Already before the release of atomic energy the tensions between the old way of living and the new were intense.  They were far intenser than they had been even at the collapse of the Roman imperial system.  On the one hand was the ancient life of the family and the small community and the petty industry, on the other was a new life on a larger scale, with remoter horizons and a strange sense of purpose.  Already it was growing clear that men must live on one side or the other.  One could not have little tradespeople and syndicated businesses in the same market, sleeping carters and motor trolleys on the same road, bows and arrows and aeroplane sharpshooters in the same army, or illiterate peasant industries and power-driven factories in the same world.  And still less it was possible that one could have the ideas and ambitions and greed and jealousy of peasants equipped with the vast appliances of the new age.  If there had been no atomic bombs to bring together most of the directing intelligence of the world to that hasty conference at Brissago, there would still have been, extended over great areas and a considerable space of time perhaps, a less formal conference of responsible and understanding people upon the perplexities of this world-wide opposition.  If the work of Holsten had been spread over centuries and imparted to the world by imperceptible degrees, it would nevertheless have made it necessary for men to take counsel upon and set a plan for the future.  Indeed already there had been accumulating for a hundred years before the crisis a literature of foresight; there was a whole mass of ‘Modern State’ scheming available for the conference to go upon.  These bombs did but accentuate and dramatise an already developing problem.