Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  Another astonishing fact. We are told that this universe is an expanding one. A mathematician, Sir James Jeans, compares it to a soap-bubble which is getting bigger and bigger, the universe being the surface of the bubble. And this bubble-like universe is so big that it takes millions and millions of years for light to travel across it.

  If your capacity for astonishment is not exhausted, I have something more to tell you about this truly amazing universe. A famous Cambridge astronomer, Sir Arthur Eddington, tells us that our universe is gradually going to pieces, like a clock that is run down, and unless wound up again somehow, will disintegrate. Of course all this happens in millions of years, so we need not worry.

  Physics and chemistry were the leading sciences of the nineteenth century. They helped man to gain command over Nature or the outside world. Then scientific man began to look inside and to study himself. Biology became important; this was the study of life in man and animals and plants. Already it has made extraordinary progress, and biologists say that it will be possible soon to produce changes in the character or temperament of a person by injections, or other means. Thus it may perhaps be possible for a coward to be converted into a man of courage, or, what is more likely, for a government to deal with its critics and opponents by reducing their powers of resistance in this way.

  From biology the next step has been psychology, the science which deals with the mind, with the thoughts and motives and fears and desires of human beings. Science is thus invading new fields and telling us more about ourselves, and so perhaps helping us to command ourselves.

  Eugenics is also a step from biology. It is the science of race improvement.

  It is interesting to notice how the study of certain animals has helped in the development of science. The poor frog was cut up to find out how nerves and muscles functioned. The tiny and insignificant little fly which often sits on over-ripe bananas, hence called the banana fly, has led to more knowledge about heredity than anything else. From careful observations of this fly it has been found how the characteristics of one generation pass on by inheritance to the next generation. To some extent this helps in understanding the working of heredity in human beings.

  An even more absurd animal to teach us much is the common grasshopper. Long and careful study of grasshoppers by American observers has shown how sex is determined in animals as well as in human beings. We know a great deal now as to how the little embryo, right at the beginning of its career, becomes male or female, developing gradually into a tiny male or female animal, a little boy or girl.

  The fourth instance is that of the ordinary household dog. A famous Russian scientist of our time, Pavlov, began observing dogs carefully, especially noting when their mouths watered at the sight of food. He actually measured this saliva in the dog’s mouth. This watering of the dog’s mouth at the sight of food is an automatic occurrence, an “unconditioned reflex” as it is called. Just as when an infant sneezes or yawns or stretches itself without previous experience.

  Then Pavlov tried to produce “conditioned reflexes”—that is, he taught the dog to expect food at a certain signal. The result was that this signal became associated in the dog’s mind with food, and produced the same result as food, although no food was present.

  These experiments on dogs and their saliva have been made the basis of human psychology, and it has been shown how a human being in infancy has a number of “unconditioned reflexes”, and as he grows he develops more and more “conditioned reflexes”. In fact, all we learn is based on this. We form habits in this way, and we learn languages, etc. Our actions are governed by our reflexes, which of course are both pleasant and unpleasant. There is the common reflex of fear. No knowledge of Pavlov’s experiments is necessary for a man to jump away with great rapidity, and without thinking, when he sees a snake near him, or even a bit of a string looking like a snake.

  Pavlov’s experiments have revolutionized the whole science of psychology. Some of them are very interesting, but I cannot go into this question any further here. I must add, though, that there are several other important methods of psychological inquiry.

  I have mentioned these few instances to give you some idea of the methods of scientific work. The old metaphysical way was to talk vaguely about big things which it was not easy, or even possible, to analyse or understand fully. People argued and argued about them and got very heated, but as there was no final test of the truth or otherwise of their arguments, the matter always remained in the air. They were so busy in arguing about the other world that they did not deign to observe the common things of this world. The method of science is the exact opposite. Careful observations are made of what appear to be trivial and insignificant facts, and these lead to important results. Theories are then framed on these results, and these theories are again checked by further observations and experiments.

  This does not mean that science does not go wrong. It often goes wrong, and has to retrace its steps. But the scientific method seems to be the only correct way of approaching a question. Science today has lost all the arrogance and self-sufficiency which it had during the nineteenth century. It is proud of its achievements, and yet it is humble before the vast and ever-widening ocean of knowledge that still lies unexplored. The wise man realizes how little he knows; it is the foolish person who imagines that he knows everything. And so with science. The more it advances, the less dogmatic does it get, and the more hesitating is its answer to the questions that may be put to it. “The progress of science,” says Eddington, “is to be measured not by the number of questions we can answer, but by the number of questions we can ask.” That is perhaps so, but still science does answer more and more questions, and helps us to understand life, and thus enables us, if we will but take advantage of it, to live a better life, directed to a purpose worth having. It illumines the dark corners of life and makes us face reality, instead of the vague confusion of unreason.

  183

  The Good and Bad Applications of Science

  July 14, 1933

  In my last letter I gave you a peep into the wonderland of the latest developments of science. I do not know if this glimpse will interest you and attract you to these realms of thought and achievement. If you have the desire to know more of these subjects, you can easily find your way to many books. But remember that human thought is ever advancing, ever grappling with and trying to understand the problems of Nature and the universe, and what I tell you today may be wholly insufficient and out-of-date tomorrow. To me there is a great fascination in this challenge of the human mind, and how it soars up to the uttermost corners of the universe and tries to fathom its mysteries, and dares to grasp and measure what appear to be the infinitely big as well as the infinitely small. All this is what is called “pure” science—that is, science which has no direct or immediate effect on life. It is obvious that the Theory of Relativity, or the idea of Space-time, or the size of the universe, have nothing to do with our day-today lives. Most of these theories depend on higher mathematics, and these intricate and upper regions of mathematics are, in this sense, pure science. Most people are not much interested in this kind of science; they are naturally far more attracted by the applications of science to every-day life. It is this applied science that has revolutionized life during the last 160 years. Indeed, life today is governed and conditioned entirely by these offshoots of science, and it is very difficult for us to imagine existence without them. People often talk about the good old days of the past, of a golden age that is gone. Some periods of past history are singularly attractive, and in some ways they may even have been superior to our time. But even this attraction is probably due more to distance and to a certain vagueness than to anything else, and we are apt to think of an age as being great because of some great men who adorned it and dominated it. The fate of the common people right through history has been a miserable one. Science brought them some relief from their age-long burdens.

  Look around you, and you will find that most of th
e things that you can see are somehow connected with science. We travel by the methods of applied science, we communicate with each other in the same way, our food is often produced that way and carried from one place to another. The newspaper we read could not be produced, nor our books, nor the paper I write on or the pen I write with, by methods other than those of science. Sanitation and health and the conquest over some diseases depend on science. For the modern world it is quite impossible to do without applied science. Apart from all other reasons, one reason is a final and conclusive one: without science there would not be enough food for the world’s population, and half of it, or more, would die off from starvation. I have told you how population has gone up with a bound during the last hundred years. This swollen population can only live if the help of science is taken to produce food and transport it from one place to another.

  Ever since science introduced the big machine into human life there has been a continuous process of improving it. Innumerable little changes are being made from year to year, and even month to month, which go to make the machine more efficient and less dependent on human labour. These improvements in technique, these advances in technology, as it is called, have become especially rapid during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. The rate of change in recent years—and it is still going on—has been so tremendous, that it is revolutionizing industry and methods of production as much as the Industrial Revolution of the second half of the eighteenth century. This new revolution is largely due to the increasing use of electricity in production. Thus we have had a great Electrical Revolution in the twentieth century, especially in the United States of America, and this is leading to entirely new conditions of life. Just as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century led to the Machine Age, the Electrical Revolution is now leading to the Power Age. Electric power, which is used for industries, railways, and numerous other purposes, dominates everything. It was because of this that Lenin, looking far ahead, decided to build all over Soviet Russia huge hydro-electric power works.

  This application of electric power to industry, together with other improvements, often results in a great change without costing much. Thus a slight re-arrangement of electrically-driven machinery might double the production. This is largely due to the progressive elimination of the human factor which is slow and liable to err. Thus, as machines go on improving, fewer workers are employed in them. Huge machines are now controlled by one man handling some levers and switches. This results in increasing the production of manufactured goods enormously, and at the same time throwing out many workers from the factory, as they are no longer required. At the same time advances in technology are so rapid, that, often by the time a new machine is installed in a factory, it is itself partly obsolete because of new improvements.

  The process of machines replacing workers had, of course, occurred from the early days of machinery, and, as I think I have told you, there were many riots in those days, and angry workmen broke the new machines. It was found, however, that ultimately machinery resulted in more employment. As a worker could produce far more goods with the help of machinery, his wages went up and the prices of goods went down. The workers and common people could thus buy more of these goods. Their standards of living went up and the demands for manufactured goods grew. This resulted in more factories being built and more men being employed. Thus, although machinery displaced workers in each factory as a whole, far more workers were employed because there were many more factories.

  This process went on for a long time, helped as it was by the exploitation by industrial countries of distant markets in backward countries. During the past few years this process seems to have stopped. Perhaps no further expansion is possible under the present capitalistic system, and some change in the system is necessary. Modern industry goes in for “mass production”, but this can only be carried on if the goods so produced are bought by the masses. If the masses are too poor or are unemployed, then they cannot buy these goods.

  In spite of all this, technical improvements go on ceaselessly, and result in machinery displacing men and adding to the unemployed. From 1929 onwards there was a great depression in trade all over the world, but even this did not prevent technology from advancing. It is said that there have been so many improvements since 1929 in the United States that millions of people who have been thrown out of work can never be employed, even if the production of 1929 were to be kept up.

  This is one of the reasons—there are many others also—that has produced the great problem of the unemployed all over the world, and especially in the advanced industrial countries. It is a curious and inverted problem, for greater production by up-to-date machinery means, or ought to mean, greater wealth for the nation and higher standards of living for everyone. Instead, it has resulted in poverty and terrible suffering. One would have thought that a scientific solution of the problem would not be difficult. Perhaps it is not. But the real difficulty comes in trying to solve it scientifically and reasonably. For in doing so many vested interests are affected, and they are powerful enough to control their governments. Then again, the problem is essentially an international one, and today national rivalries prevent an international solution. Soviet Russia is applying the methods of science to similar problems, but because she has to proceed nationally, the rest of the world being capitalist and hostile to her, she has far greater difficulties than she would otherwise have had. The world is essentially international today, although its political structure lags behind and is narrowly national. For socialism to succeed finally, it will have to be international world socialism. The hands of the clock cannot be put back, nor can the international structure of today, incomplete as it is, be suppressed in favour of national isolation. An attempt at the intensification of nationalism, as the fascists are trying to do in various countries, is bound to fail in the end, because it runs counter to the fundamental international character of world economy today. It may be, of course, that in so failing it may carry the world with it, and involve what is called modern civilization in a common disaster.

  The danger of such a disaster is by no means remote and unthinkable. Science, as we have seen, has brought many good things in its train, but science has also added enormously to the horrors of war. States and governments have often neglected many branches of science, pure and applied. But they have not neglected the warlike aspects of science, and they have taken full advantage of the latest scientific technique to arm and strengthen themselves. Most States rest, in the final analysis, on force, and scientific technique is making these governments so strong that they can tyrannize over people without, as a rule, any fear of consequences. The old days of popular risings against tyrannical governments and the building of barricades and fights in the open streets, such as occurred in the great French Revolution, are long past. It is impossible now for an unarmed or even armed crowd to fight with an organized and well-equipped State force. The State army itself may turn against the Government, as happened in the Russian Revolution, but, unless this happens, it cannot be forcibly defeated. Hence the necessity has arisen for people, struggling for freedom, to seek other and more peaceful methods of mass action.

  Science thus leads to groups or oligarchies controlling States, and to the destruction of individual liberty and the old nineteenth century ideas of democracy. Such oligarchies arise in different States, sometimes outwardly paying homage to the principles of democracy, at other times openly condemning them. These different State oligarchies come into conflict with each other and nations go to war. Such a big war today or in the future may well destroy not only these oligarchies, but civilization itself. Or it may be that out of its ashes an international socialist order might arise, as expected by the Marxist philosophy.

  War is not a pleasant subject to contemplate in all its horrid reality, and because of this the reality is hidden behind fine phrases and brave music and bright uniforms. But it is necessary to know something of what war means today. The last war—the Wor
ld War—brought home to many the horror of war. And yet it is said that the last war was nothing compared to what the next one is likely to be. For if industrial technique has advanced tenfold during the last few years, the science of war has advanced a hundredfold. War is no longer an affair of infantry charges and cavalry dashes; the old foot-soldier and cavalryman are almost as useless now in war as the bow and arrow. War today is an affair of mechanized tanks (a kind of moving battleship on caterpillar wheels), aeroplanes and bombs, and especially the latter two. Aeroplanes are increasing in speed and efficiency from day to day.

  If war breaks out, it is expected that the warring nations will immediately be attacked by hostile aircraft. These aeroplanes will come immediately after the declaration of war, or they may even come before, to steal an advantage over the enemy, and hurl high-explosive bombs at the great cities and factories. Some of the enemy aeroplanes might be destroyed, but the remaining ones will be quite enough to bomb the city. Poison gases will come out of the bombs thrown from aeroplanes, and these will spread and envelop whole areas, suffocating and killing every living thing within their reach. It will be a large-scale destruction of the civilian population in the cruellest and most painful way, causing intolerable suffering and mental distress. And this kind of thing might be done simultaneously in the great cities of the rival Powers at war with each other. In a European war, London, Paris, Berlin might be a heap of smouldering ruins within a few days or weeks.

  There is worse to come. The bombs thrown from the aeroplanes might contain germs and bacteria of various horrible diseases, so that a whole city might be infected with these diseases. This kind of “bacteriological warfare” can be carried on in other ways also: by infecting food and drinking-water and by animal-carriers—for instance, a rat which carries plague.