What I Saw in America — Chapter 15 Part 1 Wells and the World State

_Wells and the World State_ There was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation.

Some of the most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H.

G.

Wells and Mr. J.

L.

Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific aviators luminously discussed the new science.

Among their graceful felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note was struck, which I myself can never hear, even in the most harmless after-dinner speech, without an impulse to leap up and yell, and smash the decanters and wreck the dinner-table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard it with fury; and never since have I been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury.

I heard it when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war would become too horrible for patriots to endure.

It sounded to me like saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist, that would finally cure me of loving my dog.

And I felt it again when all these wise and well-meaning persons began to talk about the inevitable effect of aviation in bridging the Atlantic, and establishing alliance and affection between England and America.

I resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad.

But I resent quite equally the suggestion that a machine can make me good.

It might be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the suburban villa and garden next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it.

But if somebody told me that a new kind of lawn-mower had just been invented, of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a bosom-friend of Mr. Blenkinsop whether I liked it or not, I should be very much annoyed.

I should be moved to say that if that was the only way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbour.

Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife.

And suppose somebody told him that the introduction of an entirely new vacuum-cleaner would compel him to a reluctant reconciliation with his wife.

It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum.

Reasonably spirited human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing-machines; and a sane man will not be made good, let alone bad, by the things he has himself made.

I have occasionally dictated to a typewriter, but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter, even of the newest and most complicated mechanism; nor have I ever met a typewriter, however complex, that attempted such a tyranny.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distances; and an international aviation abolishing nationalities.

This and nothing else was really implied in one speaker's prediction that such aviation will almost necessitate an Anglo-American friendship.

Incidentally, I may remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical and materialistic sense; and the speaker's phrase refuted the speaker's argument.

He said that international relations must be more friendly when men can get from England to America in a day.

Well, men can already get from England to Germany in a day; and the result was a mutual invitation of which the formalities lasted for five years.

Men could get from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly, through nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with arms against each other.

They could get there very quickly when Nelson went down by that Burford Inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that camp at Boulogne that filled England with alarums of invasion.

Are these the amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when Englishmen can get to America in a day?

The shortening of the distance seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the Middle Ages; when French invaders carried away the bells of Rye, and the men of those flats of East Sussex gloriously pursued and recovered them.

I do not know whether American privateers, landing at Liverpool, would carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of the past.

I know not if the English, on ripe reflection, would essay with any enthusiasm to get them back.

But anyhow it is anything but self-evident that people cannot fight each other because they are near to each other; and if it were true, there would never have been any such thing as border warfare in the world.

As a fact, border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it was most difficult to bring under control.

And our own traditional position in face of this new logic is somewhat disconcerting.

We have always supposed ourselves safer because we were insular and therefore isolated.

We have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbours.

And now they are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neighbours.

We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers, because a frontier only produces fighting; and now we are trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will produce friendship.

But, as a matter of fact, and for a far deeper and more spiritual reason, a frontier will not produce friendship.

Only friendliness produces friendship.

And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

But apart from this fallacy about the facts, I feel, as I say, a strong abstract anger against the idea, or what some would call the ideal.

If it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, even if they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability, I should think it the most tragic truth in the world.

A man so improved would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it.

But in truth he cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to be coerced into evil.

Of the financial characters who figure as philanthropists and philosophers in such cases, it is strictly true to say that their good is evil.

The light in their bodies is darkness, and the highest objects of such men are the lowest objects of ordinary men.

Their peace is mere safety, their friendship is mere trade; their international friendship is mere international trade.

The best we can say of that school of capitalism is that it will be unsuccessful.

It has every other vice, but it is not practical.

It has at least the impossibility of idealism; and so far as remoteness can carry it, that Inferno is indeed a Utopia.

All the visible manifestations of these men are materialistic; but at least their visions will not materialise.

The worst we suffer; but the best we shall at any rate escape.

We may continue to endure the realities of cosmopolitan capitalism; but we shall be spared its ideals.

But I am not primarily interested in the plutocrats whose vision takes so vulgar a form.

I am interested in the same thing when it takes a far more subtle form, in men of genius and genuine social enthusiasm like Mr. H.

G.

Wells.

It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror.

He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity.

But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism.

He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these are almost his own words) we shall be destroyed by the instruments and machinery we have ourselves made.

In effect, men must abandon patriotism or they will be murdered by science.

After this, surely no one can accuse Mr. Wells of an undue tenderness for scientific over other types of training.

Greek may be a good thing or no; but nobody says that if Greek scholarship is carried past a certain point, everybody will be torn in pieces like Orpheus, or burned up like Semele, or poisoned like Socrates.

Philosophy, theology and logic may or may not be idle academic studies; but nobody supposes that the study of philosophy, or even of theology, ultimately forces its students to manufacture racks and thumb-screws against their will; or that even logicians need be so alarmingly logical as all that.

Science seems to be the only branch of study in which people have to be waved back from perfection as from a pestilence.

But my business is not with the scientific dangers which alarm Mr. Wells, but with the remedy he proposes for them; or rather with the relation of that remedy to the foundation and the future of America.

Now it is not too much to say that Mr. Wells finds his model in America.

The World State is to be the United States of the World.

He answers almost all objections to the practicability of such a peace among states, by pointing out that the American States have such a peace, and by adding, truly enough, that another turn of history might easily have seen them broken up by war.

The pattern of the World State is to be found in the New World.

Oddly enough, as it seems to me, he proposes almost cosmic conquests for the American Constitution, while leaving out the most successful thing in that Constitution.

The point appeared in answer to a question which many, like myself, must have put in this matter; the question of despotism and democracy.

I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect a system of government.

It is hard enough anywhere to get representatives to represent.

It is hard enough to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the street, and could kick them down the street if they liked.

What the same town councillors would be like if they were ruling all their fellow-creatures from the North Pole or the New Jerusalem, is a vision of Oriental despotism beyond the towering fancies of Tamberlane.

This difficulty in all representative government is felt everywhere, and not least in America.

But I think that if there is one truth apparent in such a choice of evils, it is that monarchy is at least better than oligarchy; and that where we have to act on a large scale, the most genuine popularity can gather round a particular person like a Pope or a President of the United States, or even a dictator like Caesar or Napoleon, rather than round a more or less corrupt committee which can only be defined as an obscure oligarchy.

And in that sense any oligarchy is obscure.

For people to continue to trust twenty-seven men it is necessary, as a preliminary formality, that people should have heard of them.

And there are no twenty-seven men of whom everybody has heard as everybody in France had heard of Napoleon, as all Catholics have heard of the Pope or all Americans have heard of the President.

I think the mass of ordinary Americans do really elect their President; and even where they cannot control him at least they watch him, and in the long run they judge him.

I think, therefore, that the American Constitution has a real popular institution in the Presidency.

But Mr. Wells would appear to want the American Constitution without the Presidency.

If I understand his words rightly, he seems to want the great democracy without its popular institution.

Alluding to this danger, that the World State might be a world tyranny, he seems to take tyranny entirely in the sense of autocracy.

He asks whether the President of the World State would not be rather too tremendous a person, and seems to suggest in answer that there need not even be any such person.

He seems to imply that the committee controlling the planet could meet almost without any one in the chair, certainly without any one on the throne.

I cannot imagine anything more manifestly made to be a tyranny than such an acephalous aristocracy.

But while Mr. Wells's decision seems to me strange, his reason for it seems to me still more extraordinary.

He suggests that no such dictator will be needed in his World State because 'there will be no wars and no diplomacy.'

A World State ought doubtless to go round the world; and going round the world seems to be a good training for arguing in a circle.

Obviously there will be no wars and no war-diplomacy if something has the power to prevent them; and we cannot deduce that the something will not want any power.

It is rather as if somebody, urging that the Germans could only be defeated by uniting the Allied commands under Marshal Foch, had said that after all it need not offend the British Generals because the French supremacy need only be a fiction, the Germans being defeated.

We should naturally say that the German defeat would only be a reality because the Allied command was not a fiction.

So the universal peace would only be a reality if the World State were not a fiction.

And it could not be even a state if it were not a government.

This argument amounts to saying, first that the World State will be needed because it is strong, and then that it may safely be weak because it will not be needed.

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy.

I do not say it is incompatible with it; but any combination of the two will be a compromise between the two.

The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge.

The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities.

All Irishmen may know roughly the same sort of things about Ireland; but it is absurd to say they all know the same things about Iceland, when they may include a scholar steeped in Icelandic sagas or a sailor who has been to Iceland.

To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters.

If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.