"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

fluctuated. There were periods when it seemed that discipline would be relaxed for the sake of liberal advancement in education.
But presently foreign danger, real or fictitious, or else some threat of internal conflict would become an excuse for the
intensification of tyranny. Thousands of officials would be shot, the army and the factories purged of disaffected persons.
Education would be cleansed of all tendency to foster critical thought.

The two military regimes which now vied with one another for control of the planet were in many respects alike. In each of them
a minority held effective power over the whole society, and in each a single individual was at once the instrument and the wielder
of that power. Each dictatorship imposed upon its subjects a strict discipline and a stereotyped ideology which, in spite of its




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Darkness and the Light




much emphasized idiosyncracies, was in one respect at least identical with the ideology of its opponent; for both insisted on the
absolute subordination of the individual to the state, yet in both peoples there was still a popular conviction that the aim of social
planning should be fullness of life for all individuals.

Between the two world powers there were great differences. Russia had been first in the field, and had triumphed largely through
the mental bankruptcy of European civilization. Though the Russian culture was itself an expression of that civilization, the
Russians were relatively an uncivilized race which had found no great difficulty in breaking away from a lightly imposed alien
ideology. China, on the other hand, boasted the oldest civilization of the planet, and one which was more conservative than any
other. Moreover, while the Russians had asserted themselves against a decadent but partially civilized Europe, and had always
been secretly overawed by Europe's cultural achievement, the Chinese had asserted themselves against a people whom they
regarded as upstarts and barbarians, the Japanese. More consciously than the Russians they had fought not only for social justice
but for civilization, for culture, and the continuity of their tradition.

Whatever the defects of the Chinese tradition, in one respect it had been indirectly of immense value. Among both rich and poor
the cult of the family had persisted throughout Chinese history, and had survived even the modern revolutionary period. In many
ways this cult, this obsession, had been a reactionary influence, but in two respects it had been beneficial. It had prevented
decline of population; and, more important, it had prevented a decline of intelligence. In China as elsewhere the more intelligent
had tended to rise into the more comfortable circumstances. But whereas in Europe and America the more prosperous classes had
failed to breed adequately, in China the inveterate cult of family ensured that they should do so. In post- revolutionary China the
old love of family was a useful stock on which to graft a new biologically-justified respect not merely for family as such but for
those stocks which showed superior intelligence or superior social feeling. Unfortunately, though public opinion did for a while
move in this direction, the old financial ruling families, seeing their dominance threatened by upstart strains, used all their power
of propaganda and oppression to stamp out this new and heretical version of the old tradition. Thus, though on the whole the
Chinese Empire was richer in intelligence than the Russian, it seriously squandered its resources in this most precious social
asset. And later, as I shall tell, the reactionary policy of the ruling caste threatened this great people with complete bankruptcy of
mental capacity.

In social organization there were differences between imperial Russia and imperial China. In Russia the heroic attempt to create a
communist state had finally gone astray through the moral deterioration of the Communist Party. What had started as a devoted
revolutionary corps had developed as a bureaucracy which in effect owned the whole wealth of the empire. Common ownership
theoretically existed, but in effect it was confined to the Party, which thus became a sort of fabulously wealthy monastic order. In
its earlier phase the Party was recruited by strict social and moral testing, but latterly the hereditary principle had crept in, so that