203 conservation is not enough 



The more completely we bring nature "under control," 

 the more complicated our methods must become, the 

 more disastrous the chain reaction which is set up by any 

 failure of wisdom, or watchfulness, or technique. We are 

 required to know more and more and we are always threat- 

 ened by the impossibility of achieving adequate knowl- 

 edge, much less of adequate wisdom and virtue. 



Every increase in the complexity of organization has 

 made the situation more precarious at the same time that 

 it has increased our comfort and our wealth. Until we 

 learned to support a population far larger than would have 

 been beheved possible a century ago, there was no danger 

 of general starvation, however disastrous and common lo- 

 cal famines may have been, and though Malthus was ob- 

 viously wrong in his estimates, it is by no means certain 

 that he was wrong in his general principle. Until we in- 

 creased the wealth of nations by linking them one with 

 another we were not exposed to the danger of world-wide 

 economic collapse. Until we learned how to "control" the 

 atom there was no danger that atomic phenomena would 

 get out of control and hence it is still not clear whether 

 we are running machines or machines are running us. We 

 have three tigers — the economic, the physical and the bi- 

 ological — ^by the tail and three tigers are more than three 

 times as dangerous as one. We cannot let any of them go. 

 But it is also not certain that we can hold all of them 

 indefinitely. Many a despot has discovered that it was just 

 when his power seemed to have been made absolute at 

 last that the revolution broke out. And it may be that just 

 about three hundred years was necessary to expose the fal- 

 lacy of the ideal born in the seventeenth century. 



If one is prepared to admit that there is a limit to the 



