Summary

World Brain is a collection of essays and addresses by the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells, dating from the period of 1936–1938. Throughout the book, Wells describes his vision of the World Brain: a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent "World Encyclopaedia" that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.

Introduction: Constructive Sociology as a Biological Science

H.G. Wells positions his collection of papers and addresses as a contribution to the field of "constructive sociology," which he defines as the science of social organization. He views this discipline as a highly specialized subsection of human ecology, which in turn is a branch of general ecology and a component of the biological sciences.

Unlike experimental biology, constructive sociology stands at the opposite pole, alongside paleontology, because it does not allow for verification through controlled experiments. It is a science of pure observation, analysis, and the identification of historical and environmental correlations. Human ecology examines the species Homo sapiens across space and time, while sociology focuses on the interactions, interdependence, and psychology of human groups. Wells argues that over the last half-million years, human interactions and their "ranges of reaction" have expanded rapidly, now approaching a planetary limit.

Natural Selection vs. Human Educability

Wells contrasts human adaptation with that of other biological species:

• Unconscious Genetic Adaptation: In the wider animal kingdom, adaptation to changing environments occurs primarily through natural selection, genetic mutations, and inherited traits. If a species adapts successfully, it survives; if not, it perishes.

• Individual Adaptability: In higher, cerebral animals (such as dogs, cats, seals, and elephants), natural selection is supplemented by individual learning, memories, and habits formed within a single generation. However, these learned behaviors die with the individual, and subsequent generations must learn them anew.

• Human Educability and Tradition: Human beings possess an unprecedented capacity for learning, supplemented by curiosity, formal instruction (precept), and tradition. In humans, educational adaptation is incredibly swift compared to slow genetic adaptation. Physically and genetically, humans have changed very little since the late Stone Age, yet their social lives, habits, and environments have changed completely.

Consequently, the modern human is born with fundamental instincts that are entirely inadequate for the complex society they must inhabit. The "social man" is a manufactured product built upon the raw nucleus of the "natural man." Constructive sociology, therefore, has two inseparable, reciprocal tasks:

• To analyze and design social organizations, laws, and customs.

• To design the specific educational systems required to sustain those social organizations.

The Historical Lag in Ideological Adaptation

For the past twenty-six centuries, and intensely during the last three, humanity has expended vast mental energy trying to adapt to new conditions of association. This has historically been expressed through religions, theologies, socialisms, communisms, and moral codes. Wells refers to these efforts as "human adaptology."

Historically, the connection between social development and ideological framework was loose and often subconscious (for example, the concept of a universal God arose following the growth of great empires, though contemporaries did not explicitly link the two). In the modern era, however, education must become explicitly political, economic, and deliberately planned.

During the 19th century, mechanical progress fundamentally altered the nature of labor and warfare, rendering the traditional reliance on laboring classes and subject peoples obsolete. Despite the physical and mechanical unification of the world, human ideology has lagged dangerously behind:

• The Failure of Private Ownership: The fragmentary control of production and trade through irresponsible private ownership produces inadequate and chaotic results.

• The Rise of Nationalism: Sentimental nationalism, kept alive by outdated school curriculums and newspaper propaganda, poses a growing threat to global welfare.

• The Ideological Gulf: A dangerous rift has opened between rapidly changing global conditions and lagging mental and moral adaptations. This gap can only be filled by a massive expansion of systematic teaching and instruction.

The Critique of Impatient Politics and Dictatorships

Wells criticizes the intellectual impatience of humanity. When people realize the need for a new world order, they often bypass rigorous planning and rush into aggressive, poorly designed revolutionary actions. This impatience has resulted in a tremendous waste of moral, physical, and mental resources over the past century through premature, unscientific reconstructions.

Wells outlines a political spectrum of failure:

• The Illusion of Quick Fixes: Movements like generic socialism or pacifism are merely broad outlines of the required adaptation, not ready-to-use blueprints. Simply professing to be a socialist or a pacifist does not solve the complex administrative problems of global organization.

• The Rise of Dictatorships: Out of fear of responsibility and a craving for leadership, societies surrender to dictators of both the Right and the Left. Wells views these dictatorships as the tragic result of panic-driven impatience. When global changes become terrifyingly fast and uncontrolled, mass hysteria leads to the rise of a "hero"—a single, inadequate human being adorned with a preposterous hat—who pretends to have all the answers while global conditions continue to drift inexorably out of control.

• "Do-Nothing" Democracies: Between the extremes of Right and Left hysteria lies the passive territory of "do-nothing democracy." The sudden realization that current democratic institutions are slow, inefficient, and inadequate often triggers the psychological panic that allows gangster dictators to seize power. Wells asserts that merely declaring oneself "anti-fascist" or "anti-communist" says nothing about how the world should actually be governed.

The Solution: The "World Brain"

The central challenge of modern times is Plato's unresolved problem of the "competent receiver"—identifying who or what is capable of administering the complex, unified affairs of the world. Wells argues that constructive sociology must approach this problem in a spirit of pure, non-propagandistic scientific inquiry.

The ultimate solution lies in raising, unifying, and implementing a highly coordinated global intelligence service. Wells calls for a "gigantic and many-sided educational renaissance" to mobilize the dispersed, ineffective intellectual resources of the human race.

This vision, termed the World Brain, involves:

• A systematic coordination of the world's knowledge and ideas.

• A closer synthesis of university and educational activities globally.

• The replacement of highly fragmented, uncoordinated national educational systems, localized research institutions, and politically driven literatures with a single, highly integrated educational network.

Wells concludes that only through a self-conscious, globally organized intelligence—rather than through dictators, oligarchies, or class rule—can humanity find a competent receiver for its affairs and steer itself away from its current destructive drift.

Transcript

World Brain

by H.G. Wells

Preface

The papers and addresses I have collected in this little book are submitted as contributions, however informal, to what is essentially a scientific research. But it is a research in a field to which scientific standing is not generally accorded, and where peculiar methods have to be employed. It is in the field of constructive sociology, the science of social organization. This is a special subsection of human ecology, which is a branch of general ecology, which again is a stem in the great and growing cluster of biological sciences.

It stands, with paleontology, at the opposite pole to experimental biology. Hardly any verificatory experiment is possible, and no controls. It is a science of pure observation, therefore, of analysis and of search for confirmatory instances. On the one hand, it passes without crossing any definite boundaries into historical science proper—into the analysis of historical fact, that is—and on the other, into the examination of such matters as geographical and geological conditions and the social consequences of industrial processes.

Human ecology surveys the species Homo sapiens as a whole in space and time. Sociology is that part of the survey which concerns itself with the interaction and interdependence of human groups and individuals. It is hardly to be distinguished from social psychology.

There has been an enormous increase in the intensity and scope of human interaction and interdependence during the past half-million years or more. Communities, and what one may call ranges of reaction, have enlarged and continue to enlarge more and more rapidly towards a planetary limit. The human intelligence is involved in this enlargement, and it is too deeply concerned with its role in the process to observe it with the detachment it can maintain towards the facts, for example, of astronomy or crystallography.

Constructive sociology has to bring not only the study of conduct, but an irreducible element of purpose into its problems. Human beings are not simply born or thrown together into association like a swarm of herrings; they keep together with a sense of collective activities and common ends, even if these ends are little more than mutual aid, protection, and defense.

Throughout the whole range of ecology, we study the adaptation of living species to changing environments. But outside the human experience, these adaptations are generally made unconsciously by the natural selection of mutations and variations. These adaptations are inherited; they are either successful, and the species is modified and survives, or it perishes.

In the cerebral animals, however, natural selection is supplemented by very considerable individual adaptability. Memories and habits are established in each generation which fit individuals to the special circumstances of their own generation. They are adaptations which perish with the individual. Such creatures learn; they are educable creatures. Dogs, cats, seals, and elephants, for example, learn, and the next generation has, if necessary, to learn the old lesson all over again, or a different lesson.

In the human being, there is an unprecedented extension of educability. Not only is learning developed to relatively immense proportions, but it is further supplemented by curiosity, precept, and tradition. In such a slow-breeding creature as man, educational adaptation is beyond all comparison a swifter process than genetic adaptation. His social life, his habits, have changed completely—have even undergone reversion and reversal—while his heredity seems to have changed very little, if at all, since the late Stone Age. Possibly he is more teachable now, and with a more prolonged physical and mental adolescence.

The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate. He has to be educated systematically for his social role. The social man is a manufactured product of which the natural man is the raw nucleus.

In a world of fluctuating and generally expanding communities and ranges of reaction, the science of constructive sociology seeks to detect and give definition to the trends and requirements of man's social circumstances, and to study the possibilities and methods of adapting the natural man to them. It is the science of current adaptations. It has, therefore, two reciprocal aspects: on the one hand, it has to deal with social organizations, laws, customs, and regulations which may there be actually operative or merely projected and potential; and on the other hand, it has to examine the education these real or proposed social organizations require.

These two aspects are inseparable; they need to fit like hand and glove. Plans and theories of social structure and plans and theories of education are the outer and inner aspects of the same thing; each necessitates the other. Every social order must have its own distinctive process of education.

In the past, this imperative association of education and social structure was not recognized so clearly as it is at the present time. Communities would grow up and not change their mental clothes until they burst out of them. Ideas would change and disorganize institutions. For the past twenty-six centuries, and particularly and much more definitely during the last three, there has been a very great expenditure of mental energy upon the statement—in various terms and metaphors, as theologies, as religions, socialisms, communisms, devotions, loyalties, codes of behavior, and so on—of the desirable and necessary form of human adaptation to new conditions of association.

From the point of view of constructive sociology—to coin a hideous phrase, "human adaptology"—all these efforts, though not deliberately made as experiments, are so much experience in working material. And though almost all of them have involved special teachings and doctrines, the need for a close interlocking of training and teaching with the social order sought, though always fairly obvious, has never been so fully realized as it is today.

The new doctrines were often only subconsciously linked to the new needs. The idea, for instance, of a universal God replacing local gods ensued upon the growth of great empires, but it was not explicitly related to the growth of great empires; the connection was not plainly apparent to men's minds. In the looser, easier past of our species, there has never been such a close interweaving of current usage and practices with instruction and precept as we are now beginning to feel desirable. The reference of one to the other was not direct.

Now, education becomes more and more definitely political and economic. It must penetrate deeper and deeper into life as life ceases to be customary and grows more and more deliberately planned and adjusted. The need for lively and continuous invention in constructive sociology, and for an animated and progressive education correlated with these innovations, has hardly more than dawned on the world. The urgency of adaptation has still to be grasped.

Throughout the nineteenth century, certain systems of adaptive ideas spread throughout the world to meet the requirements of what was recognized with increasing understanding as a new age. Mechanism was altering both the fundamental need for toil and the essential nature of war. The practical and cynically accepted need for laboring classes and subject peoples was dissolving quietly out of human thought—though it still exists in the minds of those who employ personal servants. Means of intercommunication and mutual help and injury have developed amazingly. A mechanical unification of the world has been demanding, and still demands, profound moral and ideological readjustments.

It is, for example, being realized slowly but steadily that the fragmentary control of production and trade through irresponsible individual ownership gives quite lamentably inadequate results; that the whole property-money system needs revision very urgently; and that the belated recrudescence of sentimental nationalism, largely through misguided school teaching and newspaper propaganda, is becoming an increasing menace to world welfare. The old ideological equipments throughout the world are misfits everywhere. Mental and moral adaptation is lagging dreadfully behind the change in our conditions. A great and menacing gulf opens, which only an immense expansion of teaching and instruction can fill.

In the field of sociology, it is impossible to disentangle social analysis from literature, and the criticism of the social order by Ruskin, William Morris, and so forth, was at least as much a contribution to social science as Herbert Spencer's quasi-scientific defense of individualism and the abstracts and dogmas of the political economists. The biological sciences did not spread very easily into this undeveloped region; it was a hinterland of novel problems and possibilities. Even today, proper methods of study in this field have still to be fully worked out and brought into association. It has had to be explored by moral and religious appeals, by Utopias, and by speculative writings of a quality and texture very unsatisfying to scientific workers in more definite fields. It is still subject to eruptions of a type that the normal scientist of today finds highly questionable. Poets and even seers have their role in this experimentation, but economics and sociology can only be made "hard" sciences by eliminating much of their living content.

Knowledge has to be attained by any available means. Inquirers cannot be limited to passive limitations of the methods followed in other fields. It may be doubted if constructive social biology and educational science can ever be freed from a certain literary, aesthetic, and ethical flavoring. We have to assume certain desiderata before we can get down to effective, applicable work.

Yet, it does seem possible to state the problem of adaptation in practical, scientific terms. It was not realized at first, and it is still not fully realized, how vague and unsuitable for immediate application the generous propositions of socialism and world peace remain until further intensive and continuous research and elaboration have been undertaken. It is widely assumed that to profess socialism or pacifism implies the immediate undertaking of vehement political activities, unencumbered by further thought. But the profession of socialism or world peace should commit a man to nothing of the sort. Socialism and world peace are hardly more than sketches of the general frame of adaptation of which our species stands in need. We are all socialists nowadays, but all the same, there is very little really efficient, working socialism. "All men are brothers"—we have echoed that since the days of Buddha and Christ, but Spain and China are poor evidence of that fraternity. We know we want these things quite clearly, but we have still to learn how they are to be got.

Man reflects before he acts, but not very much. He is still by nature intellectually impatient. No sooner does he apprehend, in whole or in part, the need of a new world than—without further plans or estimates—he gets into a state of passionate aggressiveness and suspicion and sets about trying to change the present order there and then. He sets about it with anything that comes handy, violently, disastrously, making the discordances worse instead of better, and quarreling bitterly with anyone who is not in complete accordance with his particular spasmodic conception of the change needful. He is unable to realize that when the time comes to act, that also is the time to think fast and hard. He will not think enough.

There has been, therefore, an enormous waste of human mental, moral, and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions, and restorations of the social order during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems.

The idea of expropriating the owners of land and industrial plants, for instance—socialism—long preceded any deliberate attempt to create a "competent receiver." Hysterical objection to further research, to any sustained criticism, has been and is still characteristic of nearly all the pseudo-constructive movements of our time, culminating in projects for a seizure of power by some presumptuous association or other.

The meanest thing in human nature is the fear of responsibility and the craving for leadership. Right dictators there are and Left dictators, and, in effect, there is hardly a pin to choose between them. The important thing about them from our present point of view is that fear-saturated impatience for guidance which renders dictatorships possible. First, there comes a terrifying realization of the limitless, uncontrolled changes now in progress; then wild stampedes, suspicions, mass murders; and finally, mus ridiculus, the hero emerges—a poor, single, silly little human cranium, held high and adorned usually with something preposterous in the way of hats. "He knows!" they cry. "Hail the Leader!" He acts his part; he may even believe in it. And for quite a long time, the crowd will refuse to realize that not only is nothing better than it was before, but that change is still marching on, and marching at them as inexorably as though there were no leaders on the scene at all.

Between the extremes of Right and Left hysteria, there remains a great, underdeveloped region in the world of political thought and will that we may characterize as "do-nothing democracy." Out of the sudden realization of its do-nothingness arise those psychological storms which give gangster dictators their opportunities. It is only gradually that people have come to realize that current democratic institutions are a very poor, slow, and slack method of conducting human affairs, which need an exhaustive revision; and that when one has declared oneself anti-fascist, anti-communist, or both, one has still said precisely nothing about the government of the world. One is brought back to the unsolved problem of the competent receiver.

It exercised Plato; it has been intermittently revived and neglected ever since. It is an intricate and difficult problem. To that I can testify, because for more than half my life it has been my main preoccupation. The attack on this problem is, to begin with, a task to be done in the study, and in the unhurried and irresponsible spirit of pure inquiry. As the attack gathers confidence, a taint of propaganda may easily infect it; but the less that constructive sociology is propagandist, the higher will be its scientific standing and the greater its ultimate usefulness to mankind. The application of the results of its researches is another business altogether—the business of the statesman, organizer, and practical administrator.

And in spite of the paucity of disinterested explorers in this region of speculation and analysis, and in spite of the lack of effective discussion and interchange in this field—due mainly, I think, to the inadequate recognition of its immense scientific importance, which forces its workers so often into a hampering association with politically active bodies—there does seem to be a growing and spreading clarification of the realities of the human situation.

It is becoming apparent that the real clue to that reconciliation of freedom and sustained initiative with the more elaborate social organization which is being demanded from us lies in raising, unifying, and so implementing and making more effective the general intelligence services of the world. That, at least, is the argument in this book.

The missing factor in human affairs, it is suggested here, is a gigantic and many-sided educational renaissance. The highly educated section, the finer minds of the human race, are so dispersed, so ineffectively related to the common man, that they are powerless in the face of political and social adventurers of the coarsest sort. We want a reconditioned and more powerful public opinion, a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas, a closer synthesis of university and educational activities, and the evocation—that is—of what I have here called the "World Brain," operating by an enhanced educational system through the whole body of mankind.

A World Brain which will replace our multitude of uncoordinated ganglia, our miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose, national educational systems, and the like. In that, and in that alone—it is maintained—is there any clear hope of a really competent receiver for world affairs, any hope of an adequate directive control of the present destructive drift of world affairs.

We do not want dictators. We do not want oligarchic parties or class rule. We want a widespread world intelligence, conscious of itself, to work out a way to that World Brain. Organization is, therefore, our primary need in this age of imperative construction. It is an immense undertaking, but not an impossible undertaking. I do not think there is any insurmountable obstacle in the way of the production of such a ruling World Brain. There are favorable conditions for it, encouraging precedents, and a plainly evident need.

Pantheon Series

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