536 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
high and dry, a shipwrecked crew might swim across the still lagoon
beyond, and so reach one of the palm-crowned isles alive. If the moment
of the raft's arrival at the reef should happen to coincide with the flood
of one of those high tides that periodically submerged the reef to a depth
that compelled the breakers temporarily to subside, the Kon-Tiki might,
after all, clear the death-line in calm water, and so come through
unscathed. In the event, a high tide did flow in to lift her battered
frame off the reef into the lagoon1 some days after the surf had cast
her up on to a bare coral crest; but on the morning of the 7th August,
1947, no man on board the Kon-Tiki could tell which of these alter-
native destinies was going to be hers and theirs.

The experience of these six young Scandinavian seafarers on that day
was an apt allegory of an ordeal that still lay ahead of Mankind at the
opening of the second half of the twentieth century of the Christian
Era. In A.D. 1952 an Ark of Civilization that had travelled a time-
distance of some five or six thousand years across the ocean of History
was now making, like the Kon-Tiki, for a reef which its crew would
not be able to circumnavigate. This unavoidable danger ahead was the
perilous line of transition between a world partitioned into an American
and a Russian sphere and a world united under the control of the single
political authority which, in an age of atomic weapons, must supersede
the present division of authority sooner or later in one way or another.
Was the eventual transition to be pacific or catastrophic, and, if catas-
trophic, how dire was the catastrophe to be? In A.D. 1952 no one in the
World could foreknow the outcome of the ordeal towards which the
World was then manifestly moving. One thing alone was certain, and
this was that the spirit in which an inevitable ordeal would best be met
was the spirit shown by Thor Heyerdahl and his companions at the
moment when the Kon-Tiki struck the Raroia Reef.

(IV) POSSIBLE CONSTITUENT ELEMENTS OF A
FUTURE WORLD ORDER

Without waiting for a facile wisdom after the event, an observer of
world affairs in A.D. 1952 might perhaps usefully speculate on the shape
of things to come so long as he confined his consideration of a future
world order to elements that an oecumenical dispensation seemed likely
to have in common with each of the two demi-mundane dispensations
that had been crystallizing round the United States and round the Soviet
Union since A.D. 1947.

If the construction of a world order had depended on the Technology
in which Man was so accomplished an adept, and not on the Human,
Nature that Man found it so difficult to govern and guide, Mankind in
A.D. 1952 could have contemplated the future with complacency; for a
simultaneous coalescence and shrinkage of the Oikoumend that had made
it more dangerous than ever before to go on waging war had also made
it less difficult than ever before to put Mankind in a position to preserve
the peace by finding technological solutions for the administrative prob-
1 See Heyerdahl, op. cit., pp. 373-4.