(En route, March 21)
Modern urban-industrial man is given to the raping of anything and everything natural on which he can fasten his talons. He rapes the sea; he rapes the soil; he rapes the natural resources of the earth. He rapes the atmosphere. He rapes the future of his own civilization. Instead of living off nature’s surplus, which he ought to do, he lives off its substance.(5)
He would not need to do this were he less numerous, and were he content to live a more simple life. But he is prepared neither to reduce his numbers nor to lead a simpler and more healthful life. So he goes on destroying his own environment, like a vast horde of locusts. And he must be expected, persisting blindly as he does in this depraved process, to put an end to his own existence within the next century. The years 2000 to 2050 should witness, in fact, the end of the great Western civilization. The Chinese, more prudent and less spoiled, no less given to over-population but prepared to be more ruthless in the control of its effects, may inherit the ruins.
Sussex, England, June 4
It occurred to me today that the industrial revolution contained the genes (the “signals,” in modern scientific terminology) of all that we know today: the modern welfare state, the high degree of industrialization & urbanization, decadence, demoralization, decline of educational standards, vulgarization of the process of public communication, undermining of the genetic qualities of the population. All this was there in embryonic form, and not to be avoided, only if rulers had been perceptive enough to adopt certain principles which even today are too far-reaching to be acceptable, among them:
- that nothing should be done by machine that could conceivably be done, at no more than reasonable cost in effort by human hand with animal help,(5??) and
- perhaps also, that keeping a person alive by medical means was as much of a responsibility as putting him to death.