Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (best mobile ebook reader TXT) 📖

the patient’s blood to regulate itself

automatically by tapping from the communal drug-pipes whatever chemicals

were needed for correct physiological balance.

 

Even in the case of broadcasting itself the human element would no

longer be needed, for all possible experiences would have been already

recorded from the most exquisite living examples. These would be

continuously broadcast in a great number of alternative programs.

 

A few technicians and organizers might still be needed to superintend

the system; but, properly distributed, their work would entail for each

member of the World Broadcasting Authority’s staff no more than a few

hours of interesting activity each week.

 

Children, if future generations were required, would be produced

ectogenetically. The World Director of Broadcasting would be requested

to submit psychological and physiological specifications of the ideal

“listening breed.” Infants produced in accordance with this pattern

would then be educated by special radio programs to prepare them for

adult radio life. They would never leave their cots, save to pass by

stages to the full-sized beds of maturity. At the latter end of life, if

medical science did not succeed in circumventing senility and death, the

individual would at least be able to secure a painless end by pressing

an appropriate button.

 

Enthusiasm for this astounding project spread rapidly in all civilized

countries, but certain forces of reaction were bitterly opposed to it.

The old-fashioned religious people and the militant nationalists both

affirmed that it was man’s glory to be active. The religious held that

only in self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and constant

prayer, could the soul be fitted for eternal life. The nationalists of

each country declared that their own people had been given a sacred

trust to rule the baser kinds, and that in any case only the martial

virtues could ensure the spirit’s admittance to Valhalla.

 

Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored

radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now

turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they

needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial

ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an

opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse

the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact,

the “Other Fascism,” complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and

state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal

at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.

 

Opposed to all these critics of radio-bliss, and equally opposed to

radio-bliss itself, there was in each country a small and bewildered

party which asserted that the true goal of human activity was the

creation of a worldwide community of awakened and intelligently

creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the

common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.

Much of their doctrine was a re-statement of the teachings of religious

seers of a fine long past, but it had also been deeply influenced by

contemporary science. This party, however, was misunderstood by the

scientists, cursed by the clerics, ridiculed by the militarists, and

ignored by the advocates of radio-bliss.

 

Now at this time economic confusion had been driving the great

commercial empires of the Other Earth into more and more desperate

competition for markets. These economic rivalries had combined with

ancient tribal passions of fear and hate and pride to bring about an

interminable series of war scares each of which threatened universal

Armageddon.

 

In this situation the radio-enthusiasts pointed out that, if their

policy were accepted, war would never occur, and on the other hand that,

if a world-war broke out, their policy would be indefinitely postponed.

They contrived a worldwide peace movement; and such was the passion for

radio-bliss that the demand for peace swept all countries. An

International Broadcasting Authority was at last founded, to propogate

the radio gospel, compose the differences between the empires, and

eventually to take over the sovereignty of the world.

 

Meanwhile the earnestly “religous” and the sincere militarists, rightly

dismayed at the baseness of the motives behind the new internationalism,

but in their own manner equally wrong-headed, determined to save the

Other Men in spite of themselves by goading the peoples into war. All

the forces of propaganda and financial corruption were heroically

wielded to foment the passions of nationalism. Even so, the greed for

radio-bliss was by now so general and so passionate, that the war party

would never have succeeded had it not been for the wealth of the great

armorers, and their experience in fomenting strife.

 

Trouble was successfully created between one of the older commercial

empires and a certain state which had only recently adopted mechanical

civilization, but was already a Great Power, and a Power in desperate

need of markets. Radio, which formerly had been the main force making

for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus

to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was

assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were

plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the

barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every

country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable. A

dispute arose over the control of a frontier province. During those

critical days Bvalltu and I happened to be in a large provincial town. I

shall never forget how the populace plunged into almost maniacal hate.

All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept

away by a savage blood-lust. Panic-stricken governments began projecting

long-range rocket bombs at their dangerous neighbors. Within a few weeks

several of the capitals of the Other Earth had been destroyed from the

air. Each people now began straining every nerve to do more hurt than it

received.

 

Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of

the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country,

looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the

disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless

military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture

and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there

is no need to speak in detail.

 

Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which

overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances,

would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely

overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a

scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us,

we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always

manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last

moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself. Not so with the Other Men.

 

3. PROSPECTS OF THE RACE

 

The longer I stayed on the Other Earth, the more I suspected that there

must be some important underlying difference between this human race and

my own. In some sense the difference was obviously one of balance. Homo

sapiens was on the whole better integrated, more gifted with common

sense, less apt to fall into extravagance through mental dissociation.

 

Perhaps the most striking example of the extravagance of the Other Men

was the part played by religion in their more advanced societies.

Religion was a much greater power than on my own planet; and the

religious teachings of the prophets of old were able to kindle even my

alien and sluggish heart with fervor. Yet religion, as it occurred

around me in contemporary society, was far from edifying.

 

I must begin by explaining that in the development of religion on the

Other Earth gustatory sensation had played a very great part. Tribal

gods had of course been endowed with the taste-characters most moving to

the tribe’s own members. Later, when monotheisms arose, descriptions of

God’s power, his wisdom, his justice, his benevolence, were accompanied

by descriptions of his taste. In mystical literature God was often

likened to an ancient and mellow wine; and some reports of religious

experience suggested that this gustatory-ecstasy was in many ways akin

to the reverent zest of our own wine-tasters, savoring some rare

vintage.

 

Unfortunately, owing to the diversity of gustatory huma? types, there

had seldom been any widespread agreement as to the taste of God.

Religious wars had been waged to decid whether he was in the main sweet

or salt, or whether his preponderant flavor was one of the many

gustatory charac ters which my own race cannot conceive. Some teachers

insist ed that only the feet could taste him, others only the hands 01

the mouth, others that he could be experienced only in the subtle

complex of gustatory flavors known as the immaculate union, which was a

sensual, and mainly sexual, ecstasy induced by contemplation of

intercourse with the deity.

 

Other teachers declared that, though God was indeed tasty, it was not

through any bodily instrument but to the naked spirit that his essence

was revealed; and that his was a flavor more subtle and delicious than

the flavor of the beloved, since it included all that was most fragrant

and spiritual in man, and infinitely more.

 

Some went so far as to declare that God should be thought of not as a

person at all but as actually being this flavor. Bvalltu used to say,

“Either God is the universe, or he is the flavor of creativity pervading

all things.”

 

Some ten or fifteen centuries earlier, when religion, so far as I could

tell, was most vital, there were no churches or priesthoods; but every

man’s life was dominated by religious ideas to an extent which to me was

almost incredible. Later, churches and priesthoods had returned, to play

an important part in preserving what was now evidently a declining

religious consciousness. Still later, a few centuries before the

Industrial Revolution, institutional religion had gained such a hold on

the most civilized peoples that three-quarters of their total income was

spent on the upkeep of religious institutions. The working classes,

indeed, who slaved for the owners in return for a mere pittance, gave

much of their miserable earnings to the priests, and lived in more

abject squalor than need have been.

 

Science and industry had brought one of those sudden and extreme

revolutions of thought which were so characteristic of the Other Men.

Nearly all the churches were destroyed or turned into temporary

factories or industrial museums. Atheism, lately persecuted, became

fashionable. All the best minds turned agnostic. More recently, however,

apparently in horror at the effects of a materialistic culture which was

far more cynical and blatant than our own, the most industrialized

peoples began to turn once more to religion. A spiritistic foundation

was provided for natural science. The old churches were re-sanctified,

and so many new religious edifices were built that they were soon as

plentiful as cinema houses with us. Indeed, the new churches gradually

absorbed the cinema, and provided non-stop picture shows in which

sensual orgies and ecclesiastical propaganda were skilfully blended.

 

At the time of my visit the churches had regained all their lost power.

Radio had indeed at one time competed with them, but was successfully

absorbed. They still refused to broadcast the immaculate union, which

gained fresh prestige from the popular belief that it was too spiritual

to be transmitted on the ether. The more advanced clerics, however, had

agreed that if ever the universal system of “radio-bliss” was

established, this difficulty might be overcome. Communism, meanwhile,

still maintained its irreligious convention; but in the two great

Communist countries the officially organized “irreligion” was becoming a

religion in all but name. It had its institutions, its priesthood, its

ritual, its morality, its system of absolution, its metaphysical

doctrines, which,