Abstract
SIR ARTHUR KEITH in his address, “Can Race Progress be Rationalised ?”, delivered on April 5 at Oxford, before the Universities Congress of the National Union of Students, turned once more to the problem of world peace as it presents itself to him as an anthropologist and a follower of Darwin. As he has expressed himself on more than one previous occasion, Sir Arthur is convinced that racial and national instinct is an all-powerful factor in the evolutionary progress of mankind, producing new and, perhaps, better races; but, as he points out, this spirit is incompatible with man's economic needs, and the result is the disharmony which is to be seen in the world to-day. Granting that this spirit is ineradicable, and accepting the inevitable consequence that the nations of the world can never be welded into a whole, is it then possible, Sir Arthur asks, to bring about conditions in which each nationality may work out its destiny by peaceful progress ? Ethically the nations of to-day are in no respect superior to their predecessors; each pursues its own ends selfishly. Nothing daunted, Sir Arthur sees hope for the future in such manifestations as the suppression of separatist tendencies by reason in Scotland and Wales, and in the spread of English-speaking peoples, which he regards as the greatest attempt to rationalise the peoples of the world that has ever been made. Race progress, he concludes, can be rationalised only by a process of self-understanding, self-education, and, if need be, self-sacrifice on the part of all.
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Race Prejudice and World Peace. Nature 129, 572 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129572c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129572c0