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Scientifictionist, v. 2, issue 2, whole no. 8, March-April 1947

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IT'S UP TO US 
by Jack Speer
If there is any rightness in human aspirations, our Western civilization must be preserved. This is not said in worship of the status quo, but in protest at the many voices saying that the world is in such a mess that the A-bomb might just about as well wipe the slate clean for a fresh start.
Before going further we have to dispose of the romantic belief that man in a state of nature is a noble savage and is only corrupted by civilization. The man without civilization is a savage squatting before a fire, bodily miserable with ver-min, cold, and disease, and mentally miserable with animistic projections of his ears, misapprehensions of his inner yearnings, ignorant of the nature of the simplest object he hold in his hand. Our age has the best chance to save man forever from that fate.
Oh, there would be new civilizations, if mankind survived. But by what license do the pessimistic optimists suppose that such civilizations would be like ours or the Greeks', rather than like the dozen others in antiquity which were by our lights as totally misdirected as the Spanish Inquisition!
Books would survive, perhaps. Scattered individuals might even preserve in their own minds the essential attitides to which men have progressed in this mid-dle decade of the twentieth century and which are recognized as the highest values ever attained. But it takes more than this to save the good things of a civilization. The Dark Ages were no less dark because some men, in the universities, knew that the earth was round and Jerusalem did not stand at its center. In our day teh mass of men are kept keyed up to a certain degree of awareness of the world and its structure, by means of public schools and colleges and their products. These in turn are kept worthy of their task by teaching standards enforced by normal schools and professional associations, and preserved against decay by the continual ferment of inquiring minds tied into a far flung network of intercommunications. Collapse of our political and economic integration would break up this intricate mechanism. Ex-tremes would no longer cancel out, and all manner of local errors and personal pre-judice and idiosyncrasy would creep in. Society would revert to its normal condi-tion of class privilege and oppression. Misunderstandings of science tenfold those presently propagated by religious organization, encouragement of erroneous interpretations fo the facts and forces of history, loss of prestige for cultural achievements which would be no longer available in variety nor properly interpreted, and stifling of the inquisitive and progressive spirit are the best that could be hoped for. 
Consider some of the hardwon intellectual achievements of the last two hundred years. Liberal democracy has been justified in theory and proved in prac-tice, with the help of a new continent to try it out in. Dawinism, based on an enormous body of collected observations of countless men, dd far more than explain the origin of species; it suggested a mechanism which will cut the foundations from under many more metaphysical forms of superstition, when the full impact is felt. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume blasted old ideas of the means of our knowledge, and opened up the way for pragmatism and nonaristotelianism. general Semantics, impos-sible to be invented or explained without the body of modern scientific knowledge and its refinements by Einstein, Eddington, et al, points the way to an orientation in which man may effectively address himself to his environment rather than to internal phantoms. Not one of these systems of ideas is likely to survive in credible form or to be rediscovered in the next civilization, if we let our present world order go under. 
We would not be fair to our descendants to expect them to regain even the physical techniques which underlie our comfort and our knowledge. We see in the lost cintenent of Europe the effect of destroying only a fraction of the capital
(Continued on page 3)
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IT'S UP TO US by Jack Speer If there is any rightness in human aspirations, our Western civilization must be preserved. This is not said in worship of the status quo, but in protest at the many voices saying that the world is in such a mess that the A-bomb might just about as well wipe the slate clean for a fresh start. Before going further we have to dispose of the romantic belief that man in a state of nature is a noble savage and is only corrupted by civilization. The man without civilization is a savage squatting before a fire, bodily miserable with ver-min, cold, and disease, and mentally miserable with animistic projections of his ears, misapprehensions of his inner yearnings, ignorant of the nature of the simplest object he hold in his hand. Our age has the best chance to save man forever from that fate. Oh, there would be new civilizations, if mankind survived. But by what license do the pessimistic optimists suppose that such civilizations would be like ours or the Greeks', rather than like the dozen others in antiquity which were by our lights as totally misdirected as the Spanish Inquisition! Books would survive, perhaps. Scattered individuals might even preserve in their own minds the essential attitides to which men have progressed in this mid-dle decade of the twentieth century and which are recognized as the highest values ever attained. But it takes more than this to save the good things of a civilization. The Dark Ages were no less dark because some men, in the universities, knew that the earth was round and Jerusalem did not stand at its center. In our day teh mass of men are kept keyed up to a certain degree of awareness of the world and its structure, by means of public schools and colleges and their products. These in turn are kept worthy of their task by teaching standards enforced by normal schools and professional associations, and preserved against decay by the continual ferment of inquiring minds tied into a far flung network of intercommunications. Collapse of our political and economic integration would break up this intricate mechanism. Ex-tremes would no longer cancel out, and all manner of local errors and personal pre-judice and idiosyncrasy would creep in. Society would revert to its normal condi-tion of class privilege and oppression. Misunderstandings of science tenfold those presently propagated by religious organization, encouragement of erroneous interpretations fo the facts and forces of history, loss of prestige for cultural achievements which would be no longer available in variety nor properly interpreted, and stifling of the inquisitive and progressive spirit are the best that could be hoped for. Consider some of the hardwon intellectual achievements of the last two hundred years. Liberal democracy has been justified in theory and proved in prac-tice, with the help of a new continent to try it out in. Dawinism, based on an enormous body of collected observations of countless men, dd far more than explain the origin of species; it suggested a mechanism which will cut the foundations from under many more metaphysical forms of superstition, when the full impact is felt. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume blasted old ideas of the means of our knowledge, and opened up the way for pragmatism and nonaristotelianism. general Semantics, impos-sible to be invented or explained without the body of modern scientific knowledge and its refinements by Einstein, Eddington, et al, points the way to an orientation in which man may effectively address himself to his environment rather than to internal phantoms. Not one of these systems of ideas is likely to survive in credible form or to be rediscovered in the next civilization, if we let our present world order go under. We would not be fair to our descendants to expect them to regain even the physical techniques which underlie our comfort and our knowledge. We see in the lost cintenent of Europe the effect of destroying only a fraction of the capital (Continued on page 3) page 1