The Day of the Triffids(35)

“My friends,” he said, “I think I may claim to be the oldest among you. In nearly seventy years I have learned, and had to unlearn, many things—though not nearly so many as I could have wished. But if, in the course of a long study of man’s institutions, one thing has struck me more than their stubbornness, it is their variety.

“Well, indeed do the French say autres temps, autres m?urs. We must all see, if we pause to think, that one kind of community’s virtue may well be another kind of community’s crime; that what is frowned upon here may be considered laudable elsewhere; that customs condemned in one century are condoned in another. And we must also see that in each community and each period there is a widespread belief in the moral rightness of its own customs.

“Now, clearly, since many of these beliefs conflict, they cannot all be ‘right’ in an absolute sense. The most judgment one can pass on them—if one has to pass judgments at all—is to say that they have at some period been ‘right’ for those communities that hold them. It may be that they still are, but it frequently is found that they are not, and that the communities who continue to follow them blindly without heed to changed circumstances do so to their own disadvantage—perhaps to their ultimate destruction.”

The audience did not perceive where this introduction might be leading. It fidgeted. Most of it was accustomed, when it encountered this kind of thing, to turn the radio off at once. Now it felt trapped. The speaker decided to make himself clearer.

“Thus,” he continued, “you would not expect to find the same manners, customs, and forms in a penurious Indian village living on the edge of starvation as you would in, say, Mayfair. Similarly, the people in a warm country, where life is easy, are going to differ quite a deal from the people of an overcrowded, hard-working country as to the nature of the principle virtues. In other words, different environments set different standards.

“I point this out to you because the world we knew is gone—finished.

“The conditions which framed and taught us our standards have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different. If you want an example, I would point out to you that we have all spent the day indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again—which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful.

“Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree. But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation will voluntarily risk death for an ideal—but also in this way is produced the dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is ‘right.’

“In the time now ahead of us a great many of these prejudices we have been given will have to go, or be radically altered. We can accept and retain only one primary prejudice, and that is that the race is worth preserving. To that consideration all else will, for a time at least, be subordinate. We must look at all we do, with this question in mind: ‘Is this going to help our race survive—or will it hinder us?’ If it will help, we must do it, whether or not it conflicts with the ideas in which we were brought up. If not, we must avoid it, even though the omission may clash with our previous notions of duty and even of justice.

“It will not be easy; old prejudices die hard. The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept; so do the timid; so do the mentally lazy—and so do all of us, more than we imagine. Now that the organization has gone, our ready reckoners for conduct within it no longer give the right answers. We must have the moral courage to think and to plan for ourselves.”

He paused to survey his audience thoughtfully. Then he said:

“There is one thing to be made quite clear to you before you decide to join our community. It is that those of us who start on this task will all have our parts to play. The men must work—the women must have babies. Unless you can agree to that, there can be no place for you in our community.”

After an interval of dead silence, he added:

“We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see. We cannot afford to support men who cannot see. In our new world, then, babies become very much more important than husbands.”

For some seconds after he stopped speaking, silence continued, then isolated murmurs grew quickly into a general buzz.

I looked at Josella. To my astonishment, she was grinning impishly.

“What do you find funny about this?” I asked a trifle shortly.

“People’s expressions mostly,” she replied.

I had to admit it as a reason. I looked round the place, and then across at Michael. His eyes were moving from one section to another of the audience as he tried to sum up the reaction.

“Michael’s looking a bit anxious,” I observed.

“He should worry,” said Josella. “If Brigham Young could bring it off in the middle of the nineteenth century, this ought to be a pushover.”

“What a crude young woman you are at times,” I said. “Were you in on this before?”