[L.C.]

15 September 1959

# THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN'S EMERGENCE INTO SPACE

by Louis J. Halle,
Graduate Institute of International
Studies,
Geneva, Switzerland.

(Paper prepared for Conference on "International Political Implications of Activities in Outer Space" to be held in Washington, October 22-23, 1959, under the auspices of The RAND Corporation.)

The imminent emergence of man into outer space, from the sea of atmosphere that envelops the earth, is an incident in the long history of the species. To an observer looking back from the year 2959 A.D. the significance of that incident would not, one supposes, be separable from the significance of the historical developments in which it occurred. Such an observer would have an advantage over us in that he would be able to judge its significance by its consequences as well as its antecedents. We, who know something of the past, can only speculate on what lies ahead. Such speculation is worthwhile if one believes that understanding is worthwhile in itself. It may also be useful to the extent that it suggests what we men may have to be prepared for.

What we can now foresee, as imminent, is that men will for the first time succeed in breaking out of the earth's confining atmosphere, like flying fish that develop enough thrust under the sea to break through and skitter over its surface before dropping in again. One clear possibility is that this is as much as we will ever do, that we will never range through outer space and be at home in it any more than the flying fish are at home in the air. While we could do a great deal more theoretically, the incentive to do it might fail us for one reason or another; or the social organization on which the necessary effort depended might break down. A

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great war, fought with weapons now available, might reduce
the human survivors to an existence in which they found no
time to spare from digging for edible roots.

Another possibility is that we may go from practising
short leaps into outer space to long-range navigation in it.
We may cruise about for some distance from the earth, visiting
the moon or the neighboring planets and returning to our
native earth again. Outer space will be like the sea, which
a few of us occasionally cross in boats, but upon which or
in which we do not settle down and live.

Or we may build apartment-houses on the moon and estab-
lish permanent space-stations in which people will, in some
cases, spin out their lives.

Finally, the authors of "Space Handbook: Astronautics
and its Applications" tell us that extraterrestrial residence
as "a long-term solution to the problem of accommodating the
enormously increasing population of the earth" is "not
entirely out of the question," although it strains credibility.*

I refrain from going further, here, to speculate on the
possibility of slowing down real or apparent time, and the
associated process of aging, by traveling through space with
sufficient rapidity; or on encounters with men from planets
that revolve around other suns. On the flights of the immed-
iately foreseeable future, at any rate, trade-goods will not
have to be carried.

+

If one assumes that human history in the large is contin-
uous, without abrupt or capricious breaks, then a useful way to
look at the approaching future is across our present from some

* Unnumbered Report, House of Representatives, 85th Congress, 2nd Session; submitted December 29, 1958; Washington, D. C., page 130.

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distance back in the past. What we see is great secular developments, at least one of which appears to culminate in our present. The specific development to which I refer is the proliferation of the population of mankind.

For centuries numbering at least a thousand, our human population was inadequate to fill up the habitable expanses of the earth. Like salmon, we spawned progeny in excessive numbers of which only the fittest survived, the surplus being culled by exposure, disease, starvation, or other manifestations of an inhospitable natural environment. Then we learned that we could make a more hospitable artificial environment for ourselves -- which is to say that we began to create civilization. This enterprise was begun quite recently and is not yet completed. The increasing protection of civilization increasingly mitigated the severities of natural selection so that our population began to grow and spread. This process was slow at first, not tending until yesterday to fill up the empty places of the earth. Only five hundred years ago, for example, the population of North America above the Rio Grande was probably less than one million. Remarkable things, however, have been happening since.

One is that a single human civilization has extended itself around the globe, rapidly developing a uniform artificial environment for all men everywhere. A man from Mars who, in 1459, had visited Mexico City (then called Tenochtitlan), London, Moscow, Lahore, Pekin, Tokyo, and Honolulu would have seen as many separate and distinct civilizations. Visiting them again today, he would see what was essentially all one civilization.

Another remarkable thing is the explosive modern proliferation of our human population under the hothouse protection afforded by the civilization which has now become worldwide. This begins at its original seat, Europe, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Science and technology begin to develop the means of keeping virtually everyone who is born alive

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for an increasing life-span. According to the estimates, a population of 103 million (for Europe and the Asiatic territories of the Soviet Union) in 1650 has expanded within these geographical limits alone to 44 million in 1750, to 274 million in 1850, and to 594 million in 1950.* But it has not remained within these geographical limits. Instead, it has spilled out across the seas to fill up the empty places of the earth. We must include in the biological increment, therefore, most of the population of the Western Hemisphere in 1950, amounting to 328 million, as well as populations elsewhere outside Europe and Soviet Asia. It is probably fair to say that a population of 103 million in 1650 has multiplied itself nine times by 1950 through procreation.

The largely tropical setting of Africa was slower to receive the new civilization, and here the proliferation began later. The estimated African population of 100 million in 1650 was still 100 million in 1850; but by 1950 it was 199 million and going up at an increasing rate. The Asian population (outside Soviet Asia), estimated at 257 million in 1650, was 437 million in 1750, 656 million in 1850, and 1,272 million in 1950, when economic and social development programs were promising to perform wonders with the rate of growth that would beggar the most spectacular precedents.

Putting all this together, we find that a world population of 470 million in 1650 had become a world population of 2,406 million in 1950. (That was nine years ago, and the world population today is hundreds of millions higher still.) What has happened within living memory is that this increasing population has filled the last habitable empty spaces of the earth and has begun to find itself increasingly crowded together on what has

* These figures are taken from "Bulletin Démographique," No. 1, December, 1951, United Nations, New York.

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come to seem an increasingly inadequate planet. (In some
places it has even built skyscrapers in the direction of outer
space, so that people could live on top of one another.)

The process of geographical expansion is most vividly
seen in the pushing of the frontier westward from Europe
between the early seventeenth and the late nineteenth cent-
uries. By the end of the eighteenth century (after two centuries
of colonization) the population of the United States was still
only 4 million. By the end of the nineteenth century it was
76 million, and the frontier was which the constant increase
had been pushing out was no more. Space had filled up. New-
comers would now have to find room for themselves as best they
could among the oldcomers. Housing shortages and overcrowded
schools would be among the consequences. The frontier of the
outpouring European peoples had been pushed westward across
North America for a century in a constant migratory movement
that the politicians referred to as "manifest destiny." It
acquired enough thrust in that time so that, involuntarily,
it kept on going, projecting itself across the outer space of
the Pacific to the Philippine Islands on the other side, whose
unexpected acquisition was thereupon identified with the same
"manifest destiny." But in the western Pacific the European
peoples expanding their civilization and settlement westward
came up against the European peoples who were expanding the
same civilization eastward, and there the gap was closed. No
more empty spaces were left; and one civilization girdled the
globe.

Unlike the European peoples, the Asian peoples have had
to find room for their expanding population at home -- with
consequences that anyone can see, today, on the pavements and
in the railway-stations of the cities of India.

I cannot believe that, to an observer in 2959, this dis-
appearance of the frontier (while the human population not only

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continues but increases its rate of proliferation) will not be one of the significant features of what is, for us, the present. Is it too much to speculate that he will see human history as a development that could be compared to a pond filling up with fish? Traditionally, the ancestral fish had lived their lives quietly at the bottom of the pond. But now, as their descendants become crowded, they find their way into all parts of it and at last the observer sees them, in their increasing restlessness, breaking the surface of the pond to take little leaps into outer space.

This may be all there will ever be to it. The "manifest destiny" that has caused us to fill up our planet represents a continuing momentum which now expresses itself in little leaps through the surface of that planet's atmosphere. We leap out and fall back in, and that is as far as we ever get. Here we have reached a sort of terminal point in the evolution of mankind.

Alternatively, we may somehow keep on going, packaging the terrestrial environment on which we depend and taking it with us -- to the moon, to Mars, to Alpha Centauri (where we may find empty planets inviting settlement, or planets with inhabitants ready to receive us according to their ways). Eventually, mankind may find unbounded peace and happiness in outer space, and our descendants may make reverend pilgrimages to that historic monument, the old earth, perhaps to lay wreaths on our tombs.

+

I noted earlier that, if one looks toward the approaching future across our present, from some distance back in the past, one sees great secular developments, of which the demographic development just discussed seems to culminate in our present.

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There is another secular development, which I have already
touched on, that may also be approaching a culmination closely
associated with our emergence into outer space. It bears on
the possible end toward which the biological evolution of man
has been moving, and it therefore involves some philosophical
speculation.

Dr. Julian Huxley, in an essay entitled "The Uniqueness
of Man,"* has advanced the argument that man is distinguished
from all the other animals today by being, as yet, unfinished.
"Man," he says, "has now become the sole representative of life
in that progressive aspect and its sole trustee for any progress
in the future." This hypothesis offers one explanation of the
peculiar difficulty that would face anyone who tried to write a
descriptive statement, like Maeterlink's "The Life of the Bee,"
of The Life of the Man. Maeterlink could study one community
of honeybees and assume that his observations were valid for all
communities. An apian New York would not differ from an apian
Paris or Pekin. The hive has long been standardized. Its pol-
itical organization has been established as far back as human
knowledge extends and is no longer in question. The role of
queen, drone, and worker is fixed, accepted, invariable.

But the society of the hive did not spring into being by
one act of creation. Bees, as a species, evolved slowly from
the same organic speck as man. Their first associations among
themselves could not have manifested the elaborate and rigid
organization we see today. (Rousseau might have said about
bees what he said about men, that they were born free and are
everywhere in chains.) There must have been simple beginnings.
For thousands of years, then, there must have been variety and
uncertainty in their social relations. Two communities would not

* "Iale Review," Vol. 28 (1938-39).

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be quite alike, and perhaps one would survive, perpetuating
its kind, where the other would not. Among the varieties of
organization, those best adapted to survival would become
established while the others disappeared. The evolutionary
process, based on natural selection, did not produce the indiv-
idual bee only. It also achieved its completion in the modern
hive, which no longer changes.

The history of human society, from the most primitive
beginnings of which we know, has been one of constant variety
in which no forms have become established. All is experiment,
change, breakdown, and renewed experiment. Typical nation-
states of today, such as those of Western Europe, were unknown
two centuries ago and may well have disappeared from the world
of our grandchildren. The Soviet state, today, shows one kind
of organization, the United States another; and both are in
constant transformation. Neither is stable, neither established.
One may speculate that this process of human evolution, of
experiment and continuous change, will not go on forever but,
like that of the bees in times past, is directed to an end.
The appearance in our present of one worldwide civilization,
involving an increasingly elaborate, extensive, and unified
organization of human society, might foreshadow such an end.

This new and increasingly uniform civilization appears to
be imposed on mankind by the revolutionary development of
science and technology over the past three centuries. All the
diverse experimental civilizations of the past (what is left
of them) seem to be coming under its sway. This is happening,
not as a matter of choice, but as a matter of what circumstances
require. The initial development of the artificial environment
called civilization creates the conditions by which its contin-
ued development is shaped. When the protection of civilization
results in the multiplication of the population, then the econ-
omic requirements of survival impose a degree of elaborate

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social organization that had not been necessary before. When people live a hundred to the acre a degree of social organization is necessary that was not necessary when they lived one to a hundred acres. Perhaps they have to walk around in double columns, obeying the traffic-lights that once were unnecessary. We have seen how the division of labor has led to industrialization, and its accompanying regimentation, on an ever larger and more elaborate scale; and we have seen how industrialization has led to a new role for machines that is being realized today by what we call automation. Individuals become servants of one great social machine, within the protective ramparts of which they live. Each has his assigned task; each has one bit of the machinery that he must tend, like any bee in the hive.

As this evolution of civilization takes place, the areas of economic and social interdependence grow. A village with its surrounding lands was commonly a self-sufficient area of interdependence in the eighteenth century. With the elaboration of economic life and organization in the more developed areas of the earth during the nineteenth century, such as completeness and self-sufficiency could no longer be found in any unit smaller than the nation-state. And in the twentieth century we have seen a development of worldwide interdependence within the context of which the nation-state is coming to seem increasingly obsolete. Soon, perhaps, the world itself will not be enough.

I have noted that, in essence, the creation of civilization is the creation of an artificial environment in place of the earth's natural environment. In limited numbers, man could live in this natural environment like the ribbon or the gorilla. An artificial environment has enabled him, however, to increase his numbers. It is now enabling him to do something else. By

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making him independent of the earth's natural environment it
is enabling him to leave the earth. For he can wrap up the
artificial environment which he has created, he can insert him-
self into the package, and with it he can go off into outer
space, leaving behind him the natural terrestrial environment
on which he had once been dependent.

Because men are adapted to the natural environment of the
earth they are not wholly dependent, while they remain upon it,
on an artificial environment. Up to now, in fact, the artificial
environment has been essentially supplementary to the natural
environment. In outer space, however, the natural environment
will have to be excluded altogether. We would not be able to
emerge at all, from the artificial protection represented by our
apartment houses on the moon, into the death-dealing radiation
of an environment without atmosphere. Here would be the logical
end of a development that began when it first occurred to a man
to make a palm-leaf hat for protection against the rays of the sun.

The prospect of some existence in space, then, even for the
duration of short leaps, forces the pace at which we men have
been developing the artificial environment called civilization,
bringing us nearer to a possible finality corresponding to the
finality which the bees realized when their evolution was com-
pleted by the society and the appurtenances of the hive.

What is of more immediate significance is that the very
process of forcing our way out of the earth's atmosphere is
demanding a mobilization of human society and its resources on
a scale that no other enterprise has ever demanded. According
to a staff report of the Select Committee on Astronautics and
Space Exploration, it is "possible that some of the more signif-
icant space projects of the future will be so extensive as to
make their undertaking by a single nation impracticable."* It

* House Report No. 2709, Washington, D.C., 1959, page 12.

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appears that even the superpowers of our day are, by them-
selves, too limited in the resources at their disposal.

None of this is comforting to those who cherish individ-
ual or private enterprise, or who are not good "organization
men." Only yesterday, M. and Mme. Pierre Curie could discover
radium by experiments in their own kitchen-sink. Today, vast
beehives of scientists are mobilized and organized, under the
auspices of governmental bureaucracies which dispose of the
resources of whole nations, for the advancement of applied
science and technology. Tomorrow, it appears, the resources
of the whole world will have to be mobilized by the governments
to carry out single "space projects." The implication for
human society is plain. Individuals will have to be brought
together in beehives which will have to be combined, in turn,
to form super-beehives -- until at last, perhaps, the whole of
mankind is brought within one centralized organization that
operates the civilization of the future, maintaining and regul-
ating the artificial environment which it provides.

All we can note in 1959 is that this is the compulsive
direction which human society is following at an accelerating
pace. The movement to emerge from the earth's atmosphere, in
the degree to which it develops, is bound to contribute to this
acceleration. Superorganization will be required for us to get
out into space, and superorganization will be required for us
to survive in space when we get there. It may be that, in this
direction, we can now see the end toward which the evolution of
man and the associated history of mankind have been moving.

I offer this as speculation rather than prediction. It
represents a plausible possibility. But various possibilities
of failure to keep on toward its realization -- at least in the
immediate future, say the next five hundred years -- are equally
plausible. The whole structure of an excessively elaborate and
unstable civilization could collapse and fall into the dust, as

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has happened before. Then it might be left to the generation
of the observer in 2959 to resume the progress on which we are
now embarked, or some other progress.

+

For purposes of planning we must aim at going on in the
direction implicit in those secular developments that provide
the context of our emergence into space. It will therefore be
useful to note some of the dilemmas or problems with which the
prospect confronts us.

1.

I said at the outset that we men might never go beyond
short leaps out of the earth's atmosphere, after the fashion
of flying fish. The incentive to do more might fail, I said,
for one reason or another.

Today the United States and the Soviet Union are each
making immense sacrifices, mobilizing ever greater resources
for the effort to break out into the open beyond the earth's
atmosphere. Prospective annual budgets begin to be computed
in billions of dollars. It is not clear that such expenditure
is likely to pay for itself by the eventual extraction of min-
erals from the moon, or by any other possibility of increasing
the revenue of the people who have to make it. Economically,
it is unproductive. What, then, is the incentive behind it ?

The prospect of drawing back the curtain on the unknown
makes an appeal that, in itself, provides a powerful incentive.
It would explain a calm and economical effort over the decades
to project our instruments and eventually ourselves beyond the
surface of the atmospheric sea for a look around. Then there
are the various uses to which satellites might be put for

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observation and communication.* This kind of thing provides enough incentive to explain even a major effort, albeit an effort that takes its time.

But the effort today assumes the form of inevitably wasteful crash programs, like the programs of weapons development and production in wartime. Such crash programs are disproportionate to the normal incentives which I have noted. The incentives they represent are, rather, the incentives of people engaged in desperate, life-and-death, international rivalry. The programs are energized, in fact, by the dynamics of war, whether of cold war or of hot war in prospect. They represent in preponderant degree that spectacular development of military technology which has been a consequence of the political failures of the twentieth century. They are among the products of those failures.

At the same time, these crash programs provide a powerful argument for international cooperation even on a worldwide scale. They provide it by the military dangers which they entail in the absence of international control (since their military components cannot be separated either from the other components or from other military programs); and they provide it on economic grounds. Uncontrolled by effective and universal international agreement, they threaten nations with insolvency, or with destruction by the military use of nuclear fission. On the other hand, the development of international cooperation and the mitigation of the cold war, which we must all hope for, would rob them of most of the incentive by which they are now kept going.

* When two or three satellites, acting as relays, enable one political leader to address, face-to-face and simultaneously, the entire population of the world, then we shall have taken a distinct step toward the creation of the super-beehive about which I have been speculating and which was predicted by George Orwell in his novel, "1984."

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I conclude that the situation is unstable and therefore the more unpredictable. I also conclude that the best of alternatives would be the one with the side effect of reducing the incentive on which the present effort so largely depends. We would be well advised to work for what may incidentally lead to smaller budgets for travel in outer space, however much we may desire larger budgets. Here space-scientists, space-technicians, and space-officials must face a dilemma that conscientious military men have had to face for generations. They dare not allow themselves to be mastered by a vested interest in conflict.

While the effort to emerge into outer space, in its present form, depends on international rivalry, it also contributes to the multitude of developments that show up the obsolete configuration of an international world hampered by boundaries that responded, in their origin, to the circumstances of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. It provides one more among the many incentives that are impelling the states of Western Europe to associate ever more closely together in common enterprises, and that draw them also into that Atlantic community of which the leadership has been assumed by the United States. It makes its contribution to the current transformation of the traditional Western state-system. Whatever the future course of the rivalry between the parties to the cold war, it will be politically desirable for us to push this trend, to organize joint effort for the conquest of outer space, to give as much of the free world as possible a stake in which should represent a common success. What hampers the expression of the essentially undiminished potential of Western civilization more than anything else today is an obsolete organisation of its international society.

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2.

The obsolete organization of international society is the product of another phenomenon that characterizes the history which leads up to our present -- and across our present into the unknown future. We might call this the phenomenon of acceleration. The great secular developments to which I have referred all began slowly. The human population, for example, grew and spread almost imperceptibly over thousands of years. The artificial environment of civilization developed at the same slow pace. Beginning with European civilization in about the sixteenth century, however, an acceleration begins to be conspicuous. The curves of development are no longer (if they ever were) straight lines rising evenly on the scale of time, but curves that, flat at first, become progressively steeper. The effect of the acceleration is like that of a motion-picture which, at first, shows people moving normally about their business, but which is progressively speeded-up until the people are all darting about in chaotic movements too quick for the eye to follow. Looking back at history, one sees the population growing slowly at first, but finally doubling and tripling and quadrupling itself as one looks on. Again -- one sees small clearings here and there in the natural wilderness of the earth's surface, increasing slowly at first, over millenia of time, but at last at an accelerating pace until whole continents appear to be cleared and macadamized in a twinkling. In the physical sciences, in the technology of production and communication, and in the technology of warfare one sees the same thing. At last, in our critical present, our society is expanding and evolving at such a rate that we face a major problem of psychological and cultural adjustment to keep pace with it. If, now, we are going to fan out from the earth, if we are going to introduce

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ourselves to other planets, if we are going to push asteroids
around and strip the clouds from Venus, if we are going to begin
to populate outer space -- if this is what the future holds for
us, then the problems of psychological and cultural adjustment
will become acute. Philosophy in all its branches will face a
desperate struggle with insanity.

For the foundations of such order as we know -- in our own
minds and in our societies -- are all traditional. What we think
as individuals and as communities, and all the patterns of our
behavior, make sense in a traditional context. They are relevant
to the traditionally established circumstances in which we
live. As these circumstances change, our thinking and behavior
have to change too. The concepts, the attitudes, and the manners
of old generations have to give way to new concepts, new attitudes,
and new manners in the generations that succeed them. But tradition
is conservative by very definition. It can change only
slowly and painfully. Consequently, even in societies that are
evolving at a leisurely pace there is likely to be some lag
between the actual circumstances of the environment and the
traditions that supposedly respond to them. What threatens when
the pace is stepped up, however, is moral and intellectual chaos.

Take the problem of education on which civilization depends
for its perpetuation. Education is, basically, a course of
discipline designed to equip men for living in a traditional
world that will presumably still be there for them to live in
when they have completed it. It provides them with an intellectual
and spiritual culture which corresponds to that world
and invests it with meaning (on which sanity depends). But the
world of Oak Ridge is no longer the world of the Curies' kitchen.
The beehive operated by automation is no longer the world of the
village shoemaker. Elizabethan poetry and Gregorian plain song,
which once gave the richest kind of meaning to human existence,
may mean nothing to the classified member of Personnel Group 473 C,

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2nd Division, Company S, as he dons his space-suit for the trip to Mars.

We see, today, how our primary and secondary schools face a problem greater even than that of crowded classrooms and the shortage of teachers. Those who run them are no longer sure, as they once were, of what to teach in them. Therefore they have become permanently experimental.* They experiment with courses in social studies, in which they may teach how bananas are marketed, or how the Security Council of the United Nations functions, or how steel is manufactured, or what Koreans eat for breakfast. They experiment with courses in typewriting, hoping that the typewriter will not be obsolete by the time the children grow up. School administrators, themselves at a loss, encourage the teachers they hire to teach whatever they please in the name of experiment. When the Russians launched their first earth-satellite a good many Americans decided overnight that what the schools ought to be teaching was science and technology.

The operative on the space team presumably does not need Shakespeare: he can learn nothing from Hamlet's problems. He does not need Socrates, who lived before even the Second Law of Thermodynamics had been heard of. He would not know what the Epistles of St. Paul were talking about. And he would see no practical application for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The question arises, however, whether this operative has been dehumanized. Has he (the man of the future) become a mindless button-pusher, oblivious of that search for meaning and that aspiration toward divinity which had distinguished his human

* A fundamental difference between experiment in the physical sciences and experiment in education is in the price of failure. An unsuccessful experiment with a new way of learning to read produces men and women who don't properly know how to read. Even if one assumes the most conservative estimate for the proportion of experiments that do not succeed, one may find in this an explanation of the increasing number of uneducated people that our educational system has been turning out.

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forebears ? Is there nothing of Socrates left in him, no sensation of soul stirring within to inspire him with awe, no passion to understand why life was created ? Is there no more thought that perhaps,

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,
White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand
Why men were born . . . ?

Is all this gone, and has the race that knew Socrates and Jesus,
Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach, been transformed at last
into a race of mindless worker-bees ?

Those who are concerned with the education of the upcoming
generations must know the answer. Otherwise they cannot know
what to teach.

In the great traditions of human history so far, the highest end of civilization has been to provide men with the circumstances and the means to develop their capacity for diversity, to realize that potential for a higher existence which they feel within them and to which the greatest of them have given expression in monuments that constitute the cultural heritage of mankind. If this is still the end of civilization, even in outer space, then we shall wish to pass our cultural heritage on to the successive generations, and to build upon it. But if the end is merely the beehive, which itself exists to no purpose, then we may as well abandon that heritage and confine education to training in scientific research and technology.

I offer, here, the opinion that, in consequence of the phenomenon of acceleration, we are going to be a culturally "disturbed" society for some time to come. The effort to fit our old ideas to the new environment which every new day seems to bring is going to produce individual and mass psychological

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breakdowns that will be a major problem for society. Prophets will arise in the land to tell us to return to God, or to the principles of our forefathers, or to the old oaken bucket. But they will not be much help. At last we are going to be so preoccupied with making our unstable and rapidly changing environment work that we shall have nothing to spare for less immediate matters. Principles of ethics and systems of thought based on concepts of good and evil will become irrelevant to our lives. We will become culturally illiterate and incapable of profound experience. Consequently, we shall welcome slavery because we shall find ourselves incapable of freedom. The purpose of our education will be to produce "well adjusted" personnel. If any Socrates shows up among us we will again give him the hemlock to drink.

And what then ?

What lies ahead may be one of those periods of transition in which all the real values of human existence will tend to be lost -- as happened in the days of Rome's grandeur. A new day may at last come, however, when society again settles down, acquiring some stability even on a foundation of outer space, a new day when the soul of man will again stir within him.

This paper should have a practical conclusion. The conclusion that I offer is that we must address ourselves vigorously to the necessities with which history confronts us. We should work for a more rational organization of mankind than we have at present; but until such organization changes the present circumstances we shall have to hold our own in the most demanding kind of international competition. What is most urgent must always have priority over what is most important. This means that we are going to have to give our primary attention to science and technology, both in the training of the young and the allocation of resources.

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But we are also going to have to deal with the dangers
of mass insanity or mass imbecility, dangers that we may not
recognize even in their realization. Anything we can do,
therefore, to keep wisdom alive will be to the good. Perhaps
we should set aside some schools and some universities for the
development of "generalists," of a few men with broad philosoph-
ical minds and a command of general knowledge who can survey the
whole human scene in which the mindless operatives swarm, who
can speak for direction and ultimate purpose, who can preserve
the heritage of humanity through the period of transition.
Perhaps we should build a few ivory towar against the day
when we are able again to resume, whether on earth or in
outer space, that progress which, rather than identifying us
with the bees, distinguishes us from them.