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

must have been a long age of turmoil. Within that age must have lain, or must lie, the period that readers of this book call
modern, a moment within a longer period during which the struggle between the light and the darkness remained inconclusive.

On the one side was the sluggish reptilian will for ease and sleep and death, rising sometimes to active hate and destructiveness;
on the other side the still blindfold and blundering will for the lucid and coherent spirit. Each generation, it seemed, set out with
courage and hope, and with some real aptitude for the life of love and wisdom, but also with the fatal human frailty, and in
circumstances hostile to the generous development of the spirit. Each in turn, in the upshot of innumerable solitary ephemeral
struggles, sank into middle age, disillusioned or fanatical, inert or obsessively greedy for personal power.

The world was a chrysalis world, but the chrysalis was damaged. Under the stress of science and mechanization the old order had
become effete, the old patterns of life could no longer be healthily lived; yet the new order and the new mentality could not be
born. The swarms of human creatures whose minds had been moulded to the old patterns were plunged from security into
insecurity and bewilderment. Creatures specialized by circumstance to knit themselves into the existing but disintegrating social




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Darkness and the Light




texture found themselves adrift in dreadful chaos, their talents useless, their minds out-moded, their values falsified. And so, like
bees in a queenless hive, they floundered into primitive ways. They became marauding gangsters, or clamoured for some new,
strong, ruthless and barbaric tribal order, into which they might once more themselves. In this nadir of civilization, this wide-
craving for the savage and the stark, this night of spirit, there rose to power the basest and hitherto t despised of human types, the
hooligan and the gun-man, who recognized no values but personal dominance, whose vengeful aim was to trample the
civilization that spurned them, and to rule for brigandage alone a new gangster society.

Thus, wherever the breakdown of the old order was far gone, a new order did indeed begin to emerge, ruthless, barbaric, but
armed with science and intricately fashioned for war. And war in that age, though not perpetual, was never far away. In one
region or another of the planet there was nearly always war. No sooner had one war ended than another began elsewhere. And
where there was no actual war, there was the constant fear of wars to come.

The crux for this unfinished human species, half animal but potentially humane, had always been the inconclusive effort to will
true community, true and integrated union of individual spirits, personal, diverse, but mutually comprehending and mutually
cherishing. And always the groping impulse for community had been frustrated by the failure to distinguish between true
community and the savage unity of the pack; and on the other hand between a man's duty to the innermost spirit and mere subtle
self-pride, and again between love and mere possessiveness.

And now, in this final balance of the strife between light and darkness, the newly won Aladdin's lamp, science, had given men
such power for good and evil that they inevitably must either win speedily through to true community or set foot upon a
steepening slope leading to annihilation. In the immediate contacts of man with man, and in the affairs of cities, provinces, slates
and social classes, and further (newest and most dangerous necessity) in the ordering of the planet as a whole, there must now
begin some glimmer of a new spirit; or else, failing in the great test, man must slide into a new and irrevocable savagery. And in
a world close-knit by science savagery brings death.

In the new world, made one by trains, ships, aeroplanes and radio there was room for one society only. But a world-wide society
must inevitably be planned and organized in every detail. Not otherwise can freedom and fulfilment be secured for all