Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1134

Penciling in a notebook

1942

Original -> 1130

There is also the possibility, if not probability, that modern mankind, through its world-wide organization of communications and automatic exchange relationships, has become actually or virtually the equivalent of an enormous organism. Upon this assumption its centers of learning, of knowledge and information, and its electrical system of communications may well be its nervous system, its system of production and travel, trade and exchange, its nutritional and circulatory system, and all the populations united by what biologists call disjunctive symbiosis into a single organism with myriad units and a high plurality of interfunctioning parts.

     Under this hypothesis we should be prepared to find when in one part of the world the flow of energy as life years is checked and ravaged by war, or by widespread disease causing a shortening of the lives, that the basic corrective of increase of numbers takes its first effect not immediately in the war-torn or disease-ravaged population but in other and more favored parts of the earth where the average life span has not yet been cut down and may still be even in process of being extended. This phenomenon of hyperactivity in other and remote parts to counteract the pathology of a given part so familiar to physiologists may very well and likely take place in the social organization under similar inimical conditions affecting any of its normally interfunctioning parts. Indeed, there is evidence in modern vital statistics that such compensating changes in the birth-frequency do take place.

     At the present time (1942) while the average life span and the birth-rate of the war-torn populations of Europe are doubtless diminishing together there has occurred at the same time a sudden up turn of the birth rate in the United State without as yet any reversal of the long upward trend of the average span. In an organization so closely knit as the modern world such compensations for sudden dysgenic or negative changes in the duration and frequency of life, would seem almost certain to occur. Moreover, it is quite possible that these compensations remote from the manifest danger not only avoid a serious “time lag” in the vital energy adjustment but that they actually anticipate and make preparation for pathological conditions that, locally at least, have not yet arrived.

The sudden and short term changes in the length or frequency of the successive generations as energy waves and the local compensations of distant adverse and dysgenic influences by quick alterations in the reproductive rate may at times constitute apparent exceptions to the over-all rule that a shortening or lengthening of the wave or span must be accompanied by an equal contrary change in the numbers of the lives unless there be at the same time a change in the whole energy flow, the total life years, per generation.

End of Chapter 7