The rich and the poor

The main issue of the scientific revolution is that the people in the industrialized countries aregettin richer and those in non industrialised countries are at best standing still.So that the gap between the industrialised countries and the rest is widening everyday.On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor.
Among the rich are the U.S,the white Commonwealth countries,great britan,most of Europe,and the U.S.S.R.China is betwixt and between ,not yet over the industrial hump,but probably getting there.The poor are all the rest.In the rich countries ,people are living longer,eating better,working less.In a poor country like india,the expectation of life is less than half what is it in England.There is some evidence that Indians and other Asians are eating less,in absolute quantities,than they were a generation ago.The statistics are not reliable ,and informatants in F.A.O. have told me not to put much trust in them. But it is accepted that
in all non industrial countries people are ot eating better than at the subsistance level.
They are working as people have always had to work from neolithic times until our own.
Life for the overwhelming majority of mankind has always been nasty, brutish and short.
It is so in the poor countries still
This desparity between rich and the poor has been noticed. It has been noticed
most accutetly and not unnaturally by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it wont
last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the earth 2000, that wont.
Once the rick of getting rich is known as it now is, the world cant survive half rich and half
poor. It just not on. The west has got to help in this trtansmission. The trouble is, the
West with its divided culture finds it hard to grasp just how big, and above all just how fast,
the transformation must be.
During all human history until this century the rate of social change has been
very slow. So slow that it would pass unnoticed in one persons life time. This is no longer
so. The rate of change has increased so much that our imagination cant keep up. There is
bound to be more social change, affecting more people, in the next decade than in any before. There is bound to be more change again in the 1970s. In the poor countries, people have caught on to this simple concept. Men there are no longer prepared to wait for periods longer than one person's lifetime.
The comforting assurances, given de haut en bas that may be in the hundred or two hundred years things may be slightly better for them - they only madden. Pronouncements such as one still hears from Old Asia or Old Africa hands - why, it will take those people five hundred years to get up to our standard - they are both suicidal and technologically illiterate. Particularly when said, as they always seem to be said, by someone looking as though it wouldn't take Neanderthan Man five years to catch up with him.
The fact is, the rate of change has already been proved possible. Someone said, when the first atomic bomb wnet off, that the only important secret is now let out - the thing works. After that, any determined country could make the bomb, given a few years. In the same way, the only secret of the Russian and Chinese industrialization is that they've brought if off. That is what Asians and Africans have noticed.
It is simply that technology is rather easy. Or more exactly, technology is the branch of human experience that people can learn with predictable results. For a long time the west misjudged this very badly. After all, a good many Englishmen had been skilled in mechanical crafts for half a dozen generations. Some how we've made ourselves believe that the whole of technology was a more or less incommunicable art. It's true enough, we start with a certain advantage. Not so much because of tradition, I think, as because all our children play with mechanical toys. They are picking up peices of applied science before they can read. This is an advantage we haven't made the most of , just as the Americans have the advantage that nine out of ten adults can drive a car and are to some extent mechanics. In the last war, which was war of small machines that was real military asset. Russia is catching up with the U.S. in major industry but it will be a long time before Russia is as convenient a country as the U.S. in which to have one's car break down.
It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India,Africa the middle east within fifty years.There s no excuse for western man not to know this.And to know that this is one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way .h-bomb war ,over population,the gap between the rich and the poor.this is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.
Since the gap between the rich countries and the poor can be removed,it will be.If we are short sighted,inept,incapable,either of goodwill or enlightened self interest then it may be removed to the accompaniment of war and starvation,but removed it will be.The questions are,how, and by whom.To those questions,one can only give partial answers.,but that may be enough to set us thinking.The scientific revolution on the world scale needs,first, foremost capital:capital in all forms, including capital machinery.The poor countries,until they have got beyond a certain point on the industrial curve cannot accumalate that capital.That is why the gap between rich and poor is widening.the capital must come from outside.
The second requirement , after capital, as important as capital is men. That s , trained scientists and engineers adaptable enough to devote themselves to a foreign country 's industrialization for at least ten years out of their lives. Here unless and until the Americans and we educate ourselves both sensibly and imaginatively, the Russians have a clear edge,This is where their educational policy has already paid big dividends.they have such men to spare if they are needed.We just have not and the Americans are not much better off. Imagine for example , the U.S government and ours had agreed to help the Indians to carry out a major industrialization ,similar in scale to the Chinese. Imagine that the capital could be found. It would then require something like ten thousand to twenty thousand engineers from U.S. and here to help get the thing going. At present, we could not find them.
There are steps to be taken which aren't outside the powers of reflective people.Education is in't the total solution of this problem.:but without education the west cant even begin to cope.All the arrows poin the same way. Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense, as well as in the most practical.
When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom. For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country's special danger, for the sake of the western society living precariouslly rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn't be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans and the whole west to look at our education with fresh eyes. This is one of the cases where we and the Americans share the most to learn from each other. We have each a good deal to learn from the Russians, if we are not too proud. Inceidentally, the Russians have a good deal to learn from us , too.
Isn't it time we began? The danger is, we have been brought up to think as though we had all the time in the world. We have very little time. So little that I dare not guess at it.