Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 9
and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel
and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of
nearly every literate person. Science and technology were
developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to
assume that they would go on developing. This failed to
happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a
long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific
and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of
thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented
society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it
was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced,
and various devices, always in some way connected with
warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but
experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the
ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have nev-
er been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent
in the machine are still there. From the moment when the
machine first made its appearance it was clear to all think-
ing people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore
to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If
the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger,
overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated
within a few generations. And in fact, without being used
for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—
by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not
to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards
of the average humand being very greatly over a period of
about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries.