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HELIOS, OR THE FUTURE BEYOND SCIENCE
Written 4 June 1924 (Unpublished)
June 4, 1924 e.v. 3 P.M.
Au Cadran Bleu Chelles, S. et M., France
Helios or The Future Beyond Science.
by 666 The Prophet of the New Aeon.
Raise the spell of Ra-Hoor-Khuit
Preface "Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite and unknown; and all their words are skew-wise." — Liber Legis Cap. II. V. 32.
The first and sooth to say, the most abiding impression made by Daedalus and Icarus, is that both authors know their subject admirably and nothing outside it, and that their subject is a merest froth upon the great tides of the question which they wrongly suppose themselves to be discussing.
They have both lived too long in an extraordinarily narrow environment which their evidently desperate attempts at wide reading has done rather less than nothing to enlarge. The education of both has lacked the advantages of travel and failed to instill the habit of reflection. It is perfectly true that Mr. Russell has travelled many thousand miles but he has apparently never, for as much as one week, gone off the track of the type of mind familiar to him, whether in Japan or Wilsonia.
The result is that both writers show an extraordinary lack of perspective. The first chapter of The Napoleon of Nottinghill should have been read more carefully by Mr. Haldane, for his whole thesis is an elaboration of the most absurd mistake of science, its bad mathematics. From the earliest days, science has always been promising to produce something devilish which will upset the equilibrium of the Universe, and the Universe has always been too much for it. They start to expand (x + 1)n and they scream with delight as they observe that in every term the coefficient gets bigger and bigger. But before reaching the [illegible] term they are caught up into a holy frenzy they begin to prophesy.
This conception is really too painful. "Let me rather give a lift of the "Kings of Israel and Judah". At least let us examine this bugge of progress.
Section I.
"There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was" — Liber Legis II. — 32.
In the last 13 months, I have lived mainly in three highly civilized places. The first id Sicily. The scene is a prosperous fishing town, with 14,000 inhabitants; it boasts one of the two finest cathedrals south of St. Peters; it is connected by a first-rate railway service with the capital, and the other appurtenances of modern science. But there is no one in the whole town who knows anything at all about science, who could repair any single piece of apparatus if it went wrong, which it usually does. The very University students possess the most rudimentary attainments in even the commonest knowledge. Dante is (however) slowly penetrating to the more attuned circles.
Above the town rises a great rock covered with the ruins of a whole series of civilization, beginning many hundred years B.C., and the hillside is every where dotted with tiny cottages which serve for farms of one sort or another. Their nearest advance towards modern science is that sometimes there is glass in the windows.
This peasantry constitutes the whole of the real support of the town, and the manners of the peasants have not changed essentially in any way since the first record of them in the Odyssey.
Scene Two. Tunisia.
Tunis itself is a bifurcated town. It has a European quarter modelled as closely as may be on Paris; almost any one who had never been to Paris would notice the fact quite soon; and there is a native quarter which has not changed in any important feature since the time of Harun-Al-Raschid. An enterprising person can have just the same adventures as he could a thousand years ago. Outside the city itself are minor towns, a few of which possess noticeable European excrescences upon the original Islam and it is laughably evident that this grafting is an artificial hybridism of the most comically futile sort. The European population only survives by the most drastic forcing measures on the part of the authorities in Europe. There is no faintest symptoms of any natural growth.
Even these towns are few and scattered; a lamentable railway staggers[1] along somehow to Tozeur, the terminus less than 200 miles from Tunis itself. Beyond Tozeur here is nothing but a sporadic near-motor service to Nefta, an enormous oasis supporting many thousand people of whom four, including officials and their wives, are more or less European. Since authorities vigorously claim that there are six.
But it was at Nefta, despite this deplorable backwardness, that I was granted a vision of Science as the future.
At half past twelve one night I was awakened by what I thought must be the near-motor arriving. What on earth could have brought it on at such a time! I went out on to the balcony; no car to be seen. It then seemed that the noise was in the woodwork of the hotel itself, which was still more impossible. Sleepy voice from the bedroom "That's not a car, it's an aeroplane". Well, why not the sea-serpent! However, I looked up: and there, sure enough, sailing along triumphantly in the moonlight heading S.W. was a gigantic dirigible. I watched it with interest, and without any suspicion that I was destined to be the last European to set eyes on it. Yet something made me smile—and I fancied that I heard the answering laughter of the Desert Jinn. On awakening again, I found a sandstorm had arisen—just a flurry—not enough to hide the houses on the other side of the market-place, still less to interfere with the camels and the merchants, but it was enough to catch the Dismude, probably within half an hour of her reaching her hangar at Derga and blowing her to hell and ribbons.
Scene Three. Chelles sur Marne.
This time we are only 19 Kilometers from Paris. The station is a mile and a half away, with a excellent service on one of the main lines of France. Yet when I look for evidence of progress and science, and all those pretty patterns which are so unfortunately flaws in the objectives of Messrs. Haldane and Russell's microscopes, and not in the slide at all, observation becomes almost barren. There is a telephone in this combination farm and inn but I have never heard of any one using it.[2] Motor cars pass now and again but only stop on Sundays and feasts. They belong to people who have come here to try to save themselves from being driven mad exactly by the car itself and what it represents.
It is true that there is occasional iron-work in bridges and fences, and passing fashions in Architecture which would have aroused the interest of Julius Caesar. On the other hand, the river traffic is far earlier! Most of the boats—or punts—or whatever they are, are pure Cro-Magnan.[3] The inhabitants speak a language to which twenty five years constant use of French affords no clue.
This is no mere accident. At Moret, an important junction on the P.L.M. I asked the waitress, a thoroughly intelligent girl who spoke good French, for her impressions of the War. She brightened up at once. It had been an immense stimulus in the monotony of her life. "Yes" she admitted "we heard of it sometimes", and then after a moment's thought—"Sometimes soldiers came through".
Section 2.
Let us extend for a moment our survey. Let us take the question of the railway which is certainly the basis of all scientific progress. Most readers of this essay will of course be intimately familiar with the great main roads between Turkestan, China, Tibet, and India. They will doubtless recall pleasurably the remarkable speed and comfort of the trains connecting those great countries. It is only a bad dream of mine that on most of those main arteries of traffic I was hard put to it to get a fancy to travel. Similar remarks apply to communications in Africa, Australia, and S. America. It is, in short, only in Europe and N. America, that there is even any overt pretense of railway communication. If we look at the economics of the matter, we perceive an even worse menacing fact. In December 1919, I travelled from Detroit to New York in the best sleeping car of the best train. I lay all night fully dressed with my fur coat on under as many bedclothes as I could bribe out of the porter. In January 1924, I travelled from Nice to Paris in a Wagon-Lit, which was, if anything, over-heated. But the journey aroused a feeling of classic contempt for the achievements of [illegible] and other molly coddles. Since then, the railway fares all over France have been drastically raised to a point at which travel begins to feel the inhibition. The same applies to London trains and buses. They cannot be made to pay. They are no longer economical, and transport being the very first condition of life in big cities which are of necessity not self-supporting because they cannot grow their food, transport will have to be subsidised more and more as the conditions grow more acute. Ultimately that means throwing more and more taxation on the actual producers of the real wealth of the world at the same time as their numbers tend to diminish, for the very reasons that conditions of country life become constantly more onerous, the life-blood being drawn from them by the cities. It is very doubtful whether the alleged economic advantages of scientific invention really exist. It is easy to "prove" them; but one may suspect that the process is somewhat analogous to that which an imaginative cashier conceals defalcations. Everything shows a profit—how true and how beautiful! Then how is it that municipal and national debts have everywhere been multiplied, some 40 fold, some 60 fold and some an hundred fold? And what has become of all the profit when the purchasing power of money is daily swindling?
Mr. Russell appears to see dimly that the prosperity of England in Victorian times was due to the introduction of railways and industrial machines combined with the spirit of adventure in foreign markets, also that the imitation of England by other countries has left us very flat. But he cherishes, on what ground I entirely fail to perceive, the belief that if only industrialism could be made universal, a profit would again appear.
There is an alternative view. Consider Lighting. A hundred years ago the citizen who wished to visit a neighbour at night either lit a torch and went forth rejoicing or groped his way without one. It was his business; and his economic situation had to reckon with that torch. But nowadays every street of every big town must be brilliantly illuminated in the most expensive way. Not only is there 95% of waste in the energy itself, but probably 95% of that remaining 5% is wasted. There are similar questions such as of the street paving required by motor cars! Of the enormous waste of bureaucratic administration due to the shifting of the responsibility of his safety and welfare from the individual to the government. Instead of the armed citizen who had a short way with burglars and assassins, we have a large police system which actually supports a large population of criminals. The principal function of the police is to interfere with the private business of the honest man in enforcing a million trumpery regulations. So far from being able to defend himself against the robber, he is hard put to it to keep off the police, for he can never be sure when he is breaking the law.
It is true, of course, that the plain citizen does feel himself protected from imminent outrage, but the price of this security is absurdly high, partly fallacious, and fatal to his moral wellbeing. The very idea on independence has been eliminated from city life. The only surviving person who retains the idea is the explorer, for independence is inseparable from vigilance and the presence of imminent danger.
Section 3.
To return again to the limits of Scientific invention. Nature is a good deal older than even our youngest professors. It would be presumptuous to suggest that she is wiser. Better say in fact, straight out, that she is a cantankerous old cow, for she invariably acts in the most annoying way when energetic people with lofty ideals and occult powers try to interfere with her routine. What is the use of getting rid of disease, which on the whole tends to improve the race by eliminating the weak, the imbecile, the unattractive? The only result of clogging her system is to decide her to purge herself by some vast War which tends, on the whole, to eliminate the strong, generous, and noble, for the benefit of the unfit. It is true that in the last war She mercifully put things as straight as She could by inventing the so-called Spanish Influenza and wiping off a lot of people whose digestions could not assimilate war-bread. But even to war there seems a natural limit. Foch failed to push home his victory, apparently from sheer sickness of heart at the slaughter, thus leaving Germany in an excellent position to retrieve the disaster and make another attempt to wipe out civilization within the next 10 years. That project again, even if successful, would probably break down for some similar reason.
There is only one way to win a war. That is to exterminate the males, capture the females, and give each soldier enough of the conquered country to cultivate as a prosperous peasant proprietor. That should have been done in 1919. Such a course would have re-established the equilibrium between town and country, which industrialisation has upset.
Once again we come to the bedrock economic problem. Who is to pay for what we call the necessities of civilized life—street paving and lighting, poor relief housing, armies of officials and the rest of it? In a really stable form of society, such as one finds in Baltistan, or say, in Sze-Chuan, no such problems can arise.[4] The key note of a stable society is that every one lives within his means, whereas in civilization, every one has to live beyond his means whether he likes it or no. Consider the legendary thrift of the French peasant. Not half a generation ago he was able to put by his profits in the celebrated stocking and used them as he chose when he chose. To-day, no matter how prosperous he may be, he cannot possibly save. He cannot get gold or even silver coin. He is compelled to gamble. He can put away thousand franc notes to his heart's content, or buy government bonds with them, but for all he knows he had better use them to thatch his roof, for at any moment the exchange may collapse or the value of securities tumble to nothing without a word of warning. So far as he is prosperous, in fact, it is just so far as he keeps outside the market, living on his own produce as best he can and only selling the surplus. But even so times become constantly worse for him, because of increasing taxation which he can only pay in the depreciated currency which even at that is so much harder to get than before. So as far as Science has helped him economically at all it is by a sort of temporary makeshift. So long as he is first in the field to exploit a new invention it may advantage him for the moment, but the others soon catch up and he is no better off than before, in fact, worse, for the new machine is an added responsibility and ultimately an added expense, for the production of that machine would have contributed indirectly to increasing his taxation.
Section 4.
The fancy really revels in Mr. Haldane's vision of ecto-genesis. (It is even funnier than before the prefix was attached!) It is a typical example of the extraordinary short-sightedness of the scientific enthusiast. No account is taken of the difficulty of striking at the very root of every man's nature, nor is there a moment's consideration of the difficulties which would arise, supposing all these embryos successfully brought to birth. Who is going to look after them? The problem is not solved in any sense at all. The reason for birth control was that to have children hampered the freedom, economic and social, of the parents, but unless his embryos are to be turned out to grass, it does not appear who is to rear them. It may have escaped Mr. Haldane in his preoccupation with echino derms, brachio pods and the salaries of his less fortunate colleagues that children required a good deal of care if they are to be brought up properly and that the only people available for this task would be either men or women. And as those men and women have refused to be put out even to the extent of looking after their own children, it appears, perhaps superficially, a little unlikely that they will devote themselves with any enthusiasm to looking after Mr. Haldane's abortions.
The case of Porphysocus Fuscation [?] is typical of the other kind of scientific blindness, the kind that fails to realize that in a finite universe all curves must be closed. There was a limit even to the rabbits in Australia and to the diseases presented in Europe to the Polynesians. It is useless to argue that any new force will go on increasing indefinitely because there is nothing in sight calculated to stop it. Nature works in round about ways. The end is always a compromise. What prevented the annihilation of the English people in the Norman invasion? They were absolutely powerless against their new masters. But the end was not even serfdom, it was fusion. (And—later—Con-fusion!)
There is a reason why this should be always the case. A great deal of the success of the invading force is due to its inherent adaptability to meet the new conditions and each such adaptation produces a radical change in its character. If it seeks to exterminate its surroundings it destroys its own means of support, and if it settles down to live with them it is insensibly changed in them.
The same criticisms apply to Mr. Russell's nightmares of World States. He mentions the U.S.A. is humanity to be chocked with its own excrement? If England lacks the manhood to save civilization, men of honor must [illegible]. It is true that the invention of the telegraph and the rest has been responsible for an increase in population, and a centralization of control; but it is just at the centre that the control is already beginning to break down. In the latter stages of the war the most obvious feature of the situation was that there was nobody at all capable of comprehending the situation as a whole, with the possible exception of Mr. Haldane, Mr. Russell, and of course, one other. But of we three had been in office, with all those papers to sign, our philosophy would have petered out in 48 hours. Mr. Russell's dilemma about injecting the philanthro fists [sic] with kindliness first of all is very acute; and this consideration leads gradually to the main point of this paper. We must here quote the actual words of the Essayists. It is almost startling to observe the coincidence of two such different minds arguing against each other upon one matter which is the essential factor in their equations, a factor which they hardly suspect, for it "is infinite and unknown; and all their words are skew-wise."
(Haldane) Quote p. 90 "From the time has . . . arisen" (Mr. Haldane writes in ignorance. It arose 20 years ago as will appear in due course.)
Icarus Quote p. 63 "Science . . . bad" p. 63
Both writers are perhaps subconsciously aware of the supreme limitation of science; that it is exclusively a matter of the intellect, and therefore does not touch the deeper strata of human nature at all except in the indirect way of supplying them with fresh information. The intellect is wholly indifferent to good and evil; and its fortification, as Mr. Russell is indeed at pains to point out, merely aids its possessor to fulfil self-destruction, as in the case of a doctor whose knowledge of drugs leads to his abusing them fatally; or of a country squire with a good income, whose knowledge of the Stock Exchange tempts him to run himself. It is in no case true to say that Science as such helps us even to preserve our lives, for no matter how much we might know we should not apply the knowledge unless our instincts of prudence and the like compelled us.
This is the real reason that the revolutionary discoveries of science have never revolutionized anything except in a temporary and local manner where the conditions happened to be favourable.
Mr. Russell does indeed point out one very serious danger: the complete amorality of science might ultimately tend, if we could conceive the majority of mankind becoming acquainted with its teachings, in inculcating a complete carelessness of any beyond the immediate results of any given action.
The conclusion from all this should be clear enough. The world requires two things if it is to progress in any real sense. Firstly, a religion with a spiritual theorem and an ethical basis which could be unanimously accepted. Secondly, the human brain must be definitely improved in order to enable it to cope with the present problems; in default of (or in conjunction with) that, it should have access to Intelligences higher than its own who are willing to guide our feeble footsteps in the way of truth. Twenty years ago this double was solved at a stroke, and the remainder of this essay will be devoted to a brief exposition of the facts. I was personally concerned in the matter, though in a passive role; yet it will be more convenient if the thesis is presented by an entirely independent witness: to whom therefore I resign the pen.
1—This is not the fault of the Engineers. It is due to the fact that the tender is boarded with raw alcohol in various forms for illicit sale—as in the U.S.A.—instead of coal. 2—Since writing the above it rang once. But that was on Whitsunday. Everyone got drunk: the moment should be excused for its exhibition of sympathetic feeling. 3—Sanitary arrangements pertain to the lowest igneous strata, if that. 4—Suppose the entire population wiped out by a raid of invaders. Nothing happens to society as such for the new colonists insensibly adopt the customs natural to the conditions. A glance at the history of India confirms this view. Any number of conquests have done nothing whatever to change the essential features of the lives of the people.
Notes.
The inserted page is a suggestion for a phrase of so of the unwritten part of the essay. The one point is to prove from my writings or else how that the only way out is in the acquisition of the Samadhi consciousness of the Kings of Thelema. The others, of course, are mere statements for the granting of AL and a demonstration that it could not have been written by any human intelligence as we commonly understand those words.
Notes. [written by Norman Mudd on July 20, 1924. 12:30 p.m.]
Chelles (for the day) Helios (Footnote)
At Amiens, vegetables are being thrown into the river. At the same time the price of those vegetables in Paris is almost prohibitive. The explanation of the paradox is that the cost of transport is actually prohibitive.
This again means that the cost of labour, coal, and iron is prohibitive.
The upshot is that civilization has reached a stage when the proportion of city dwellers to country dwellers has become too great with the result that both parties are starving in the midst of plenty. The actual producers however will manage to survive physically, altho deprived of the so-called benefits of civilization, but the town dwellers whose physique is already impaired by their unnatural mode of life, will go under entirely.
Artificial solutions of the problem, such as subsidizing the transport, cannot change the situation! It is necessary first of all to establish a type of peasant mentally and physically capable of holding his own. Pari pasu, the condition of town dwellers must be fundamentally altered in the matter of diet and mode of life. Thirdly, the strain on transport must be relieved by lessening the amount necessary. Finally, it must be discovered mathematically what is the ideal proportion between town and country dwellers.
Most of the existing difficulty is due to 2 main causes. The first is the false theory of education and in particular the corruption produced by sensational newspapers which tend to make country life impossible. (It will make bad worse to "alleviate the tedium of country-life" by the development of radio and cinema. The tiger that has tasted blood is not to be converted to vegetarianism by exciting his imagination by pictures of orgies.)
I insist on the newspaper as the most dangerous forum of the general menace to social stability.
The effect here is duplex. There is the morbid excitement of the news which id deliberately printed, false or true, with the object of increasing circulation. But as a paper depends upon advertisements chiefly for revenue, the whole economic stress is directed towards influence.
Creating abnormal appetites so that in their turn the products of manufacturers may bring the maximum profit. The circle is entirely vicious, because, as the cost of material and labour increases, the selling price must increase, and the output also. Any business which fails to keep on increasing in this morbid way is bound to break down, as we see happening daily. The destruction of the vegetables at Amiens, of herrings at fishing towns, and the like, are equivalent to the bankruptcy of small producers, middle men and consumers, and to the breaking down of newspapers.
It seems from the above as if education, journalism, and advertisement must be abolished if society is to continue at all on its present lines. This is to go too far but it should be understood that they must be completely remodelled. Education, for example, should be as of old, a privilege to be attained by those who show aptitude for learning and who are able to continue their studies up to a point when their victim becomes useful to society instead of leaving him, as at present, when his ability to read merely stimulates his criminal instincts.
Advertisement should be controlled by confining it to a statement of demonstrable facts. It should be censored by authorities beyond the reach of corruption. Journalism should be restored by prohibiting ad captandum and dishonest contents.
One may sum up the proper programme by saying "Education must be replaced by initiation. Knowledge and power should be the privilege for those who show themselves capable of them. This is probably impossible until authority is dissociated from wealth. Some such idea is presumably at the basis of the best type of anarchist theory. (Let there be no confusion of thought here. The patriarchal and feudal systems are anarchistic theory. Some modification of these systems is clearly indicated as the only solution.)
In other words, the fable of the belly and the members must be brought up to date on scientific lines or to summarize the matter in one perfect phrase "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
Helios (Inserts)
1. Inserts on Chelles and in other places suitable
(a) The food and cooking are super-excellent, unspoilt by knavery: only in the shoddy of clothes in Manchester made manifest.
(b) "More poisoned by war-bread than by war-gas" (re modern "Engines of destruction")
(c) Presbyterian Church unanimous manifesto against Evolution metaphysically equal to lowest fetishism. Science can never make real progress until Christianity is wiped out completely.
(d) The real advance of civilization is that for all sensible men the life of crime (Include law and politics) has been made more attractive than any other.
Re Chelles
(e) The crazy wooden shack in which I write is illuminated by what unlighted, looks like an imitation candle: six of them would pierce the gloom better than a tallow dip.
In winter the floods stand from 4 to 10 feet deep in the houses: only in one case did the builder have sense enough to raise his ground floor on a stone foundation out of danger.
Odds and Ends.
Amendment to Helios—(where it speaks of economy practised by the railways) They advance the fairs and haven't enough money to print new tickets.
Stanza 2 line 4 "Triumph of Time"
Foregone — Forborne
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