The Abysmal Future
Darkness and the Ltght. By Olaf Stapledon. (Methuen; 78. 6d.) MR. STAPLEDON'S book is concerned with the future of the human race ; but he prefers to present his vision not as a prophecy but a memory. The Wide spaces of time to come have been projected before him, and having travelled across them, he looks back and describes the successive phases of mankind as they appeared to his consciousness. Curiously enough, he has two separate visions. "Two entirely distinct futures," he dis- covers, "lie before mankind—one dark, one bright ; one the defeat of all man's hopes; the betrayal of all his ideals: the other their hard-won triumph." In one world the will for the light prevails, in the other the will for darkness. The future history of each of these he traces in turn.
We should not look upon this book as a sort of Utopia in the one case, or a prophecy of doom in the other ; for though Mr. Stapledon is susceptible to the lure of the ingenious and the fanciful, his real concern is with the society that we know, to disentangle the forces at work within it and show to what end they are leading, here and now. He cannot analyse the dominant human motives subtly as a novelist might do, simply because his landscape is too vast, containing the whole world in hundreds of thousands of years; and therefore we find that the virtues of " light " are more or less those that we expect to find in a true democracy, and the qualities of darkness are those that appear in a totalitarian dictatorship. The present world-struggle perhaps indicates the dividing line ; the caricature offers no new concepts. Freedom and joyful service, resting on love of man and love of wisdom, are characteristics of the one, contrasting with the doctrine of blind submission to authority, resting on cruelty, which distinguishes the other. The opposites are not much different from those named by General Chiang Kai-shek when he said: "The present struggle is one between freedom and slavery, between light and darkness, between good and evil." We must imagine a world in which the progress of science is giving an ever-increasing control over the forces of Nature, in- cluding control over mechanism which influences the human mind. Two authoritarian States have partitioned almost the whole world between them, and he chooses to call them Russia and China ; but one little State has contrived to preserve its independence and develop a community which respected freedom, equality and a belief in the "primitive unconscious sources of all human thought and feeling." Tibet was the "one sane and joyful . community in a crazy world," a society consciously planned for the full expression of the spirit. Bit in the first, the "dark," future which Mr. Stapledon remembers, Tibet was crushed, and with it the last hope of mankind. The young psychologist who persuaded the Government to counter the insidious ideals of the Tibetans with an opposite doctrine, that of a cult of suffering and cruelty in obedience to a ruthless State, turned the course of human society. Thenceforward the "servants of darkness," themselves the victims of a sort of evil automatism, controlled a world-wide society which gradually lost all power of initiative, and submitted even their thoughts 10 official scrutiny and direction. One of the scientific inventions of this age was a cold-storage warehouse where millions of un- wanted human beings were kept refrigerated for future use. In the end the degenerate human species was exterminated by rat'. Set against this is the other future which Mr. Staple& remembers, a world in which Tibet was not_ defeated, in which the inner light prevailed, and in which in the course of thousands of years a finer race of more humane, more confident, mat intelligent mortals moved on to phases of living surpassing OUT understanding. But not without crises on the way. An en- lightened bureaucracy had to be deposed because it became tos bureaucratic. A class of saintly mystics who sought to sacrifice society in an effort to crush the occult powers of evil neall brought the world to disaster. These and other intriguing ideas are the embroideries on Mr. Stapledon's vision. He knows Wen enough that this is not exactly what will happen. His bok ceases to be fictitious when we recognise in it ,what has already happened or is happening in society. Existing human proPensl- ties are shown in their nakedness, in forms lovely or grotesque: His future is already present in our consciousness. In thli reflective and stimulating book the brutal and the humane, the mean and the generous, the dark and the light, are co-existent It humanity, fighting for supremacy, pregnant with future Pow
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