1984 - Planet eBook

and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steeland snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness ofnearly every literate person. Science and technology weredeveloping at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural toassume that they would go on developing. This failed tohappen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by along series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientificand technical progress depended on the empirical habit ofthought, which could not survive in a strictly regimentedsociety. As a whole the world is more primitive today than itwas fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced,and various devices, always in some way connected withwarfare and police espionage, have been developed, butexperiment and invention have largely stopped, and theravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have neverbeen fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherentin the machine are still there. From the moment when themachine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinkingpeople that the need for human drudgery, and thereforeto a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. Ifthe machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger,overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminatedwithin a few generations. And in fact, without being usedfor any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible notto distribute—the machine did raise the living standardsof the average humand being very greatly over a period ofabout fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginningof the twentieth centuries.