Top: The moment of first powered manned flight
Middle: The Wright Brothers' Memorial
Bottom: The Wright brothers' wind tunnel

THE FAUSTIAN SPIRIT WILL SAVE US


The story of the Wright Brothers is an object lesson to the East

It was about eighteen months ago when I was listening to a National Alliance (“white” separatist group based in the USA) broadcast on the Internet that I heard the late and unlamented William Pierce talking about the “Faustian spirit” which drives those with European ancestries to probe and discover and explore.

It is almost needless to add that Dr Pierce was in the process of advocating the outlawing of romantic contacts between primarily “white” women and non-European men in order to preserve the sanctities of the European gene pool and European womanhood.

Offensive as such remarks are to most people and, in particular, to persons such as ourselves who live as minorities in Western Europe, there does appear to be a kernel of truth in that deceased physicist’s calumnies against us.

By way of example, about a decade and a half ago I overheard a young man (whose family was originally from Dhaka) telling an Iranian man that he had been interested in the fields of psychology and psychiatry but had dismissed many topics in the former subject as “irrelevant” because they were not of utility value to him in helping him to handle other people, for example, reaction time studies. The Iranian agreed with his argument wholeheartedly.

“The Faustian spirit”, of course, refers to the celebrated stage play by Christopher Marlowe the 17th Century English dramatist about a Dr Johann Faust who sold his soul to the Devil in return for omniscience and omnipotence. In Dr Faust own words:
“Now would I have a book where I might see all characters and planets of the heavens, that I might know their motions and dispositions.”
By way of contrast, let us examine the traditional method of career choice employed in the nations of South Asia. Over there, the usual and sole criteria are the getting of jobs and the earning of money. Nothing else matters, it seems. In many families over there, throughout the decades and up to now, parents advised their bright sons to choose from the “big four” professions: medicine, law, accountancy and engineering. The reasons were that professional qualifications in those fields almost guaranteed gainful employment and improved marriage prospects. Not many parents from our side advise their children to study philosophy at university or elsewhere. Why? There are few jobs in philosophy.
It follows as night follows day that in the event of there being a society of people whose sole goal in life is material gain, in the place where they live as a majority there will be no seeking after knowledge for its own sake. Everything has to have a socio-economic or physical well-being justification for being pursued. Subjects such as astronomy and other pure sciences, literature and abstract art get ignored.
Throughout their history, however, the Europeans have not been like that. English historians have recorded that in past centuries poverty stricken Scottish shepherds living in near-hovels in the Highlands used to spend their snatched spare moments studying Greek and Roman classics and pondering natural philosophy (the earlier name for physics) – even when they found it difficult to find anything edible to feed themselves with.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that these questing races occupying the north-western regions of the giant Eurasian landmass have led Mankind in inventions, all manner of fundamental discoveries and innovations and improvements in everything from cosmology to wine-making.
We Asians however, although some of us, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese in particular, score higher collectively in intelligence tests than the Europeans have discovered but little over the last few hundred years in comparison with the avalanche produced by the Anglo-Saxon race alone. Surely, it must be the basic motivation and basic drive characteristics that account for the difference.
Take, by way of example, the field of aviation, which is itself merely the antechamber to the infinitely greater field of space-travel which may take Mankind to future homes outside this particular planet. While Asia’s principal interest in the heavens appears to be astrology the Western cultures have investigated everything from first principles through observation, painstaking experimentation and attention to detail in often unrewarding circumstances.
At the time of this writing aviation is 103 years old and celebrated its centenary in 2003. As most well informed people know, aviation was born in 1903 when the now celebrated Wright brothers managed to make a short powered flight in a homemade aircraft at considerable risk to life and limb and every chance of failure and ridicule. There was next to no monetary reward in all of this for the two of them.
The story of the childhoods of the two brothers alone is an object lesson to us. With us, most parents simply urge their offspring to study as hard as possible and then to utilise the examination passes gained by doing so to secure entry into the most prestigious and lucrative professions and businesses going.
Not so in the case of the Wright family. Wilbur and Orville Wright were two of the three sons (there was also a daughter) of a bishop in the United Brethren Church in the USA during the late 19th Century. Instead of being immersed in religion-by-rote as would the offspring of imams and mowlanahs in our homelands, Bishop Milton Wright encouraged all four of his to explore and to investigate and not just to learn what had been presented to them by the teaching profession and textbook writers.
As a result, both of the boys who went into aviation were encouraged to experiment where nobody had ventured before. One day in 1878 the bishop returned home from an ecclesiastical trip with a toy aeroplane which was constructed of paper and wood and was powered by a rubber band. Wilbur and Orville played with it until it broke and both became curious about the mystery of getting airborne. Instead of saying: “If God wanted Man to fly he would have given him wings” as many a 19th Century Muslim father would have done, the bishop approved of the speculation.
Later, instead of encouraging the boys into some “safe” profession such as chartered accountancy, the parents did not object when they ventured into a high risk printing business and making a small weekly local newspaper – The West Side News and a daily called The Evening Item. The daily newspaper folded up and the print house carried on without it.
When the bicycling craze took over America, Wilbur and Orville started The Wright Cycle Company which repaired and sold bicycles. It returned a handsome profit but the brothers had their eyes on the skies. They wanted to fly.
With unusual perspicacity Wilbur and Orville reviewed the attempts to fly previously attempted, all of which had failed, bar balloons and kites. They realised that the missing ingredient was the absence of controls in the aircraft that had been tried out. Perhaps bicycle steering apparatus inspired them.
Lets allow The Wright Brothers Aviation Company, a virtual museum of pioneer aviation put it in its own way:
“They made their first test flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on the shores of the Atlantic where the strong winds helped to launch the gliders and the soft sands helped to cushion the fall when they crashed. Their first two gliders, flown in 1900 and 1901, failed to perform as the Wrights had hoped. The gliders did not provide enough lift nor were they fully controllable. So during the winter of 1901-1902 Wilbur and Orville built a wind tunnel and conducted experiments to determine the best wing shape for an airplane. This enabled them to build a glider with sufficient lift, and concentrate on the problem of control. Toward the end of the 1902 flying season, their third glider became the first fully controllable aircraft, with roll, pitch, and yaw controls.
“During the winter of 1902-1903, with the help of their mechanic, Charlie Taylor, the Wrights designed and built a gasoline engine light enough and powerful enough to propel an airplane. They also designed the first true airplane propellers and built a new, powered aircraft. Back in Kitty Hawk, they suddenly found themselves in a race. Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had also built a powered aircraft, patterned after a small, unmanned "aerodrome" he had flown successfully in 1896. To add to their frustrations, the Wrights were delayed by problems with their propeller shafts and the weather, giving Langley time to test his aircraft twice in late 1903. Both attempts failed miserably, however, and Langley left the field to the Wrights. On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first sustained, controlled flights in a powered aircraft.”
What I am getting at is that both young men were ready and willing to probe the unknown and to take failure after failure in order to reap the improbable reward of powered flight. So many had failed before but they persisted and achieved.
Part of the reason why we are always following and not leading and learning what other people have found out and not finding out independently is that we are not from earliest childhood trained to explore and to experiment.
Since the West may soon lose interest in teaching us any more, our time is short.

THE END

This article was published in the 29th June 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read all over the world from the Arctic to the Antarctic.