Description

Modern man, homo sapiens, as he calls his species with a characteristic lack of modesty, has left evidence of his presence in various locations on earth for fifty thousand years or more. During this long interval his fortunes have fluctuated widely, periods of relative prosperity have alternated with grim struggles for survival, but there has been an unmistakable general trend towards a better understanding of the problems of existence, and human life is far different today from what it was in the Old Stone Age. When we stop to analyze this progress, however, it is apparent that the forward movement has been far from uniform. In most fields of activity the gains have been meager and painfully slow. Indeed, in some of these fields it is questionable whether we have advanced much beyond the point where our ancestors stood at the dawn of recorded history. Politically, war and the threat of war are still the same psychological and material burden on the nations of today as they were on the rival tribes of the prehistoric era. Economically, the great majority of the human race still live under one version or another of the same primitive communal economic organization that developed from man‘s first awkward efforts at group living, and where more advanced systems have evolved they are imperfectly understood and ineptly handled. Ethically, the conduct of the populace in general is still far below the standards of even the earliest of the great moral and religious teachers.
In striking contrast, progress toward understanding and control of the physical environment has been outstanding, and during the last few centuries knowledge in this field, the province of physical science and its applied branches, has been expanding at a rate that might well be termed explosive. Recent spectacular achievements in certain special areas have merely dramatized this rapidly accelerating forward movement which is taking place all along the physical front. This situation wherein one branch of knowledge is continually reaching out for new worlds to conquer while its fellows still grapple unsuccessfully with the problems of the Cave Dwellers is a strange anomaly in our present-day society, and the reasons for the extraordinary disparity deserve much more serious consideration than they are commonly given.
A comparison like this is usually shrugged off with the assertion that the problems in these other fields are more difficult than physical problems, and that the slower rate of progress is due to this factor. We are entitled, however, to take this kind of a contention with a grain of salt. It is one of those statements that can neither be proved nor disproved, the kind of an explanation that is made to order for those who wish to rationalize failure to reach their goals. From a purely detached point of view it is hard to understand why the maintenance of full productive employment, for instance, should warrant being classified as a more difficult task than the design and manufacture of an airplane. If exactly the same methods had been applied to the solution of both problems we might perhaps be justified in concluding that the problem which resisted these methods was the more difficult, but where totally different methods have been utilized we are certainly not out of order in suspecting that failure in one case and success in the other is a reflection of the relative ....