Editing World Brain (section)

=== The Brain Organization of the Modern World ===
This section was first delivered as a lecture in America, October and November 1937.

This lecture promotes the doctrine New Encyclopedism described previously. Wells begins with the observation that the world has become a single interconnected community due to the [[History of telecommunication|enormously increased speed of telecommunications]]. Secondly, he says that [[energy]] is available on a new scale, enabling, among other things, the capability for mass destruction. Consequently, the establishment of a [[New world order (politics)|new world order]] is imperative:

<blockquote>One needs an exceptional stupidity even to question the urgency we are under to establish some effective World Pax, before gathering disaster overwhelms us. The problem of reshaping human affairs on a world-scale, this World problem, is drawing together an ever-increasing multitude of minds.</blockquote>

Neither Christianity nor socialism can solve the World Problem. The solution is a modernized "World Knowledge Apparatus"—the World Encyclopedia—"a sort of mental clearing house for the mind, a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared".<ref name=WB38/>{{rp|49}} Wells thought that technological advances such as [[microfilm]] could be used towards this end so that "any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine ''any'' book, ''any'' document, in an exact replica".<ref name=WB38/>{{rp|54}}

In this lecture Wells develops the analogy of the encyclopedia to a brain, saying, "it would be a clearing house for universities and research institutions; it would play the role of a cerebral cortex to these essential ganglia".

He mentions the [[International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation]], an advisory branch of the [[League of Nations]], and the 1937 [[World Congress of Universal Documentation]] as contemporary forerunners of the world brain.