The Way the World is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead

Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human life. “Human nature” never alters, we are assured; man in the Stone Age, any Stone Age, was exactly what he is now, or rather more so; he felt the same things; he imagined the same things; he travelled the same round; his fears, his hopes were identical. Save for a few superficialities, human life has always been the same and will always be the same, and neither the past nor the future can be allowed to cast a reflection by difference upon our satisfaction with the lives we lead to-day. Life as we know it is, in fact, the cream and the whole of existence. There was nothing very different behind us and there is nothing better ahead.

Quite similarly we protect our self-esteem by the persuasion that life under all sorts of circumstances and in all social positions is very much of a muchness. It gratifies our inherent grudgingness to think that life in a palace differs in no essential quality from life in our own cottage, that all the grapes above our heads are sour, and it eases our social conscience to reflect over the fire in the evening that the miner cramped in his seam or the out-of-work on tramp is so attuned to his level of existence that for all practical purposes he has just as much fun and contentment in life as we do. There is no real inequality, we assure ourselves, just as there is no progress. Our lives are as good as any lives can be. “Riches,” we all say, “cannot buy happiness,” and it seems hardly to touch that statement that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the completest enjoyment of existence who would be cripples or dead if they had not been able to command the services of expensive surgeons, undergo costly treatments or take imperative holidays at this or that crisis in their careers. In any other age, under any available conditions, they would be cripples or dead. But it makes us happier to deny that, just as it makes us happier to think that the life of our times will always be regarded with respect by posterity. Our heroes will always be the most heroic of heroes; the great men we have made our symbols will shine as stars of the first magnitude for ever; the art, the literature that delight us will last for “all time.” Our Newton is for ever; our Shakespeare is for ever; Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon are for ever; it is almost as if we were for ever.


This sort of consolation is so natural to most of us, so near to being a necessity, that to run over a few of the facts that make it absurd can rob hardly a soul of the pleasure of it. For everyday purposes we believe what we want to believe, and if we do not want to believe the truth, we do generally contrive to dispose of it as a sort of extravaganza. In that spirit most of us contemplate the fact that human life, the tune, the quality, the elements, are changing visibly before our eyes. Human life, as a matter of fact and not as a matter of sentiment, is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different. The scope of it and the feel of it and the spirit of it change. Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided, and comprehensive a process of change as ours to-day. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.

These papers, of which this is the first, will all consider some aspect or other of this great change that is going on. In them we will release our imaginations to the truth that we are things that pass, and do not leave our like, and that the ways and experiences of our children and our children’s children promise to be profoundly different from the life we lead at the present time. We will give a rest to our practical working belief in the security of things asthey are. We will take the rest and refreshment of a few glances at the longer realities.

Man has always been a changing animal. The earliest human remains of a few score thousand years ago are of creatures so different that they are now regarded as a distinct species of Homo. Only within twenty or thirty thousand years does man seem to have been truly man. There is a disposition in some quarters to exaggerate the resemblance of the later Stone Age men to modern types, and to minimize the changes that have occurred since the onset of civilization. What is called the Cro-Magnon race was a race of big individuals, and, as in the case of their brutish predecessors, the Neanderthalers (Homo Neanderthalensis), that bigness extended to the brain case—in quantity at least their brains were above our present average—but they were beings of a coarser texture than the average modern, and there has been the most preposterous nonsense written about their artistic gifts and their general intelligence. They drew and carved—about as well as recent Bushmen have drawn and carved. They were so far “modern” in their art that at times it was strikingly obscene.

A brain is known by its fruits, and the total product of this Cro-Magnon brain, of which certain excited anthropologists have made a marvel, was the precarious life of painted, wandering savages. In build and skull type and general character this Cro-Magnon people differed from any race now flourishing in this world. Industrious search may find odd individuals here and there, in Central France and the Canary Isles, for example, rather after the Cro-Magnon type. They are rarely eminent individuals.

Throughout the whole historical period the races of men have been changing. In a recent lecture Sir Arthur Keith noted some of the differences between the average Briton of to-day and his predecessor of only a few centuries ago. The former has, for instance, a “scissor bite” of the teeth instead of an edge-to-edge bite; his face is finer and longer and his palate narrower; his nose is thinner and more prominent. These are the modifications wrought upon him by the comparatively slow and slight alterations in his circumstances, extended and altered dietary, increased clothing, and the like, that went on during the Middle Ages and the subsequent two or three centuries. They are unimportant in comparison with the modifications that are being pressed upon him by the changing circumstances of to-day.