moral standard. It is in an ethical sense that the word 'good' bears its
essential meaning, when applied to things human; and no process of
human evolution can be counted real which is not above all an
evolution in "goodness."(3)
A society based on false principles inevitably disintegrates. We
quote again from Briffault:
What really happens is that the phase of society, the order of things in
which disregard of right is habitual and accepted, inevitably
deteriorates and parishes. However much the individual may
temporarily benefit by inequity, the social organisation of which he is a
part and the very class which enjoys the fruits of that inequity, suffer
inevitable deterioration through its operation. They are unadapted to
the facts of their environment. The wages of sin is death by the
inevitable operation of natural selection.(4)
This did not happen only in the remote past when men were still
ignorant and intellectually immature. We notice the same process of
deterioration in the modern scientific civilisation. Let us see what
Western thinkers have to say about their own civilisation. We quote
from Rene Guenon:
Modern civilisation has gone downwards step by step until it has ended
by sinking to the lowest elements in man and aiming at little more than
the satisfaction of the needs inherent in the material side of his nature,
an aim which is, in any case, illusory as it constantly creates more
artificial needs than it can satisfy.(5)
He goes on to say:
Not only have they limited their intellectual ambition to inventing and
constructing machines, but they have ended by becoming in actual
fact, machines themselves. The inventions whose number is at present
growing at an ever increasing rate, are all the more dangerous in that
they bring into play forces whose real nature is quite unknown to the
men who utilise them.(6)
Guenon ventures to predict the ultimate result of these activities:
Those who unchain the brute forces of matter will perish, crushed by
these same forces, of which they will no longer be masters.(7)
Einstein's remarks on this point deserve careful attention:
By painful experience we have learnt that rational thinking does not
suffice to solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research
and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for
mankind, producing on the one hand, inventions which liberated man
from exhausting physical labour, making his life easier and richer; but
Rise and Fall of Nations 274