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Phanteur, whole no. 3, July 1946

Page 3

3     PHANTEUR     3

liest historical times, the most advanced peoples killed all prisoners of war; we regard such a practice with horror. Later, prisoners were enslaved for life; that was a genuine advancement of major importance. It made possible for example, the Golden Age of Pericles, and much of the engineering achieved by the Egyptians and Romans. In the last war, we quartered and fed prisoners approximately the same as our own troops, and paid them for such non-military tasks as cutting sugar cane or picking cotton. After the war, we sent them home.
Progress from crest to crest shows up in other lines, too. The high point in Egyptian culture was superior in several ways to the preceding Babylonian culture, although not in all. The Greeks carried Egyptian develoments to a new high, and produced much original work of their own, in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and government. The Romans transformed Greek ideas into hard, practical roads and bridges and ways of government. The Middle Ages produced unsurpassed architectural triumphs, and carried the art of "logical" reasoning from a priori data to its ultimate (and, perhaps, ridiculous!) limit. During each of these broad crests, humanity advanced beyond an intervening period of retrogression; in some cases as for example, the Middle Ages, the retrogression in many lines continued through the period of high development of specialties.
Perhaps there are some fans who consider the Age of Pericles superior to the Twentieth Century, but I doubt it. That Age was based on slave labor; so firmly based that such a practical invention as Hero's Engine was regarded, even by the inventor, as nothing but a toy. The Greeks, to be sure, achieved much with little; yet it has been said that they might have achieved far more, had it not been for certain glaring shortcomings of their culture; a culture which made of Geometry of a sort of aggravatedpuzzle for the idle rich, and scorned its practical applications; which embroidered arithmentic with fanciful magical qualities which precluded its practical use; and produced Aristotle, a man of prodigious capabilities of whom it was long said that he knew everything worth knowing (a statement with which he would scarcely have agreed) and of whom it is now often said that he had a positive genius for finding the wrong answer to every problem, no matter how obvious. An incidentally, they had wars in those days, too.
Our own Age is often charged with excessive concentration on the "physical" as opposed to the "spiritual" values in life. Disregarding the obvious argument that the concept of independent existence of the "spiritual" and "physical" is the product of muddled thinking, have we not our Rosicrucians; our Aldous Huxley, and the many others who devote their energies, as did the "spiritual" leaders before them, not to seeking the truth, but seeking to prove that their preconceived notions of truth are indeed true?
The Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renascence periods were only a few of many crests in human development; crests which grew out of periods of cultural abasement compared to which our late depression was as nothing at all.
All of which leads to the proposition that the astonishing fan habit of assuming that we are heading for an oblivion from which only a miracle can save us, is completely out of keeping both with the teachings of history, and with the qualities which are assumed to go into the make-up of a fan. Granted, the bomb has greatly increased the possibility that the next war will throw humanity into a tailspin surpassing anything in the past, the fact still remains that war is not inevitable; and, barring a war in the immediate future, we can almost say that the first trip to the moon is inevitable within the foreseeable future. We are living in a period of rapid change, comparable on a vast scale to that immediately preceeding the advent of The Golden Age. Unlike the Greeks, we have unlimited horizons before us, because we are independent of purely human and animal sources of energy, with control of atomic energy offering a dazzling prospect such as we but dreamed of a few short years ago. Where the Greeks had scores of brilliant men, we have hundreds of thousands; where they had achieved their ideals of human comfort, we have only begun to approach ours; where they had only the boundaries of the Mediterranean, we have a whole Solar System as a spur to our advancement; perhaps a whole Galaxy. And some fans have talked of retiring to an isolated Citadel, and preserving what we have!

The way to achieve fan ideals is to work for them here and now, with what

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3 PHANTEUR 3 liest historical times, the most advanced peoples killed all prisoners of war; we regard such a practice with horror. Later, prisoners were enslaved for life; that was a genuine advancement of major importance. It made possible for example, the Golden Age of Pericles, and much of the engineering achieved by the Egyptians and Romans. In the last war, we quartered and fed prisoners approximately the same as our own troops, and paid them for such non-military tasks as cutting sugar cane or picking cotton. After the war, we sent them home. Progress from crest to crest shows up in other lines, too. The high point in Egyptian culture was superior in several ways to the preceding Babylonian culture, although not in all. The Greeks carried Egyptian develoments to a new high, and produced much original work of their own, in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and government. The Romans transformed Greek ideas into hard, practical roads and bridges and ways of government. The Middle Ages produced unsurpassed architectural triumphs, and carried the art of "logical" reasoning from a priori data to its ultimate (and, perhaps, ridiculous!) limit. During each of these broad crests, humanity advanced beyond an intervening period of retrogression; in some cases as for example, the Middle Ages, the retrogression in many lines continued through the period of high development of specialties. Perhaps there are some fans who consider the Age of Pericles superior to the Twentieth Century, but I doubt it. That Age was based on slave labor; so firmly based that such a practical invention as Hero's Engine was regarded, even by the inventor, as nothing but a toy. The Greeks, to be sure, achieved much with little; yet it has been said that they might have achieved far more, had it not been for certain glaring shortcomings of their culture; a culture which made of Geometry of a sort of aggravatedpuzzle for the idle rich, and scorned its practical applications; which embroidered arithmentic with fanciful magical qualities which precluded its practical use; and produced Aristotle, a man of prodigious capabilities of whom it was long said that he knew everything worth knowing (a statement with which he would scarcely have agreed) and of whom it is now often said that he had a positive genius for finding the wrong answer to every problem, no matter how obvious. An incidentally, they had wars in those days, too. Our own Age is often charged with excessive concentration on the "physical" as opposed to the "spiritual" values in life. Disregarding the obvious argument that the concept of independent existence of the "spiritual" and "physical" is the product of muddled thinking, have we not our Rosicrucians; our Aldous Huxley, and the many others who devote their energies, as did the "spiritual" leaders before them, not to seeking the truth, but seeking to prove that their preconceived notions of truth are indeed true? The Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renascence periods were only a few of many crests in human development; crests which grew out of periods of cultural abasement compared to which our late depression was as nothing at all. All of which leads to the proposition that the astonishing fan habit of assuming that we are heading for an oblivion from which only a miracle can save us, is completely out of keeping both with the teachings of history, and with the qualities which are assumed to go into the make-up of a fan. Granted, the bomb has greatly increased the possibility that the next war will throw humanity into a tailspin surpassing anything in the past, the fact still remains that war is not inevitable; and, barring a war in the immediate future, we can almost say that the first trip to the moon is inevitable within the foreseeable future. We are living in a period of rapid change, comparable on a vast scale to that immediately preceeding the advent of The Golden Age. Unlike the Greeks, we have unlimited horizons before us, because we are independent of purely human and animal sources of energy, with control of atomic energy offering a dazzling prospect such as we but dreamed of a few short years ago. Where the Greeks had scores of brilliant men, we have hundreds of thousands; where they had achieved their ideals of human comfort, we have only begun to approach ours; where they had only the boundaries of the Mediterranean, we have a whole Solar System as a spur to our advancement; perhaps a whole Galaxy. And some fans have talked of retiring to an isolated Citadel, and preserving what we have! The way to achieve fan ideals is to work for them here and now, with what