The Corruption of Comfort
Someone lately asked me by what image I would represent the age that began with the use of steam and ended with the World War. I was not sure that any age had actually ended then, but an image did occur to me. It came from the story of the fisherman in the Thousand Nights and a Night who let the Jinni out of the jar and then found him fierce and uncontrollable. But upon second thought I saw that the image was not accurate: the fisherman by using his wits did persuade the spirit back into his copper prison and made a bargain with him which saved the man from death. Then another image occurred to me. It was that of a crew of pirates who chanced upon an unexpected island and there found such incalculable treasure that they went mad with their good fortune, raged up and down the island, extended their fury to a whole archipelago, and at last wound up in a debauch of robbery and slaughter. But neither did this image satisfy me: the people of the last age were not criminals to start with; they were as virtuous as those of any other age on—or not on—record. A better image would be that of some tribe of anthropoids who, after long subsisting on a more or less difficult plane of life, suddenly got hold of a hundred tricks and secrets which gave them power over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with human riches without human discipline.
And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.
Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look, like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment.
Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could find its head again.
The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state. Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills.