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An American citizen but educated in England, Stanley Jewkes began his long career
in the Malayan Public Works Department in the 1930s. An engineering officer in
the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force during the Japanese invasion, he escaped
just before Singapore fell and served the rest of World War II in the Indian Army.
Returning to Malaya after the liberation, Jewkes rose to be Director of Pubhc Works in
the post-Independence period, retiring in 1962 to spend the next 25 years as a consultant
to the United Nations and various governments in Africa, the Middle East, South-East
Asia and other problem areas in the developing world.
In what the author describes as a series of essays in which 'a human journeying
through a brief moment in time observes the behaviour of an ancient planet's new
enigmatic species, and on the way batters a few of the species' idols'. Humankind sets
out to analyse the impact of human evolution on religion, economic systems and political
governance: the conflict between genetic inheritance and learned behaviour, which sets
cruelty against compassion and the desire for dominance against self-sacrifice, often
within the same individual or society. Jewkes illuminates his arguments with anecdotes
drawn from his own unique experience, and he chooses to write under the nom-de-plume
ARCAS, the founder of the idyllic Arcadia of Greek mythology, in the hope that his
philosophy may enhance understanding between people of different ethnicities and
religious beliefs.
No doubt biologists, astronomers, theologians and political theorists will find much
to dispute in Jewkes's culling of their own particular sacred cows, but his most vigorous
battle is waged on modern economists, the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. Readers of this journal will probably be most interested in his convincing
indictment of the fashionable theories which have wrecked many post-colonial
development schemes, to which a large part of the book is devoted and which dominated
the second half of his career. Claiming that economics is 'an art form rather than a
science', since it deals with 'human needs, desires and accomplishments', Jewkes shows
a healthy scepticism about the confusion of money with 'real wealth' and the reliance of
modern economics on rigid mathematical theory, optimum profit and crude statistics,
ignoring human behaviour and common sense, or what Jewkes terms 'fuzzy logic'.
Behind a sometimes light-hearted treatment, the book conveys a serious - indeed
sombre - message. Looking to the future in a chapter entitled 'Chaos or a Brave New
World', Jewkes concludes that the two greatest threats to humankind are the destmction
of the ecosystem through population pressures and mass killings, aggravated by religious
fanaticism, together with the hunger for money and the unequal distribution of wealth.
He argues that the age-old horror of massacres and the destruction of environments have
now reached a global scale, together with the ability of financial predators to make and
destroy money at 'near the speed of light.'
In order to solve these problems, Jewkes argues that this 'disparate predatorial
species' must surrender some freedom of action to more authoritative international
governance than the present divided United Nations. He urges strong and united
leadership to enforce international legislation to prevent war, weapons of mass
destruction, religious fanaticism and terrorism, wrecking of the planet's ecocsystem, and
excessive population growth, and to provide a stable international monetary exchange,
guarantee fair and equitable treatment for all humankind, and a fair distribution of real
wealth. Otherwise he predicts a likely nuclear winter in which 'the species could
eventually self-destruct'.
Perhaps not wishing to end on this sobering note, the book concludes with an
Epilogue on 'The Noble Female of the Species - The Brave Women of Pompong'. In
this detailed and harrowing account of Jewkes's escape from Singapore and the ordeals
of his fellow escapees, he observes that, while few men were willing to risk their
freedom or their lives to save strangers, the women involved invariably showed
compassion and self sacrifice. Reverting to his original premise about evolution, on
which the book's thesis is based, he cites this story to illustrate the anomaly between
mammalian care for others and ruthless reptilian struggles to survive and dominate,
which characterise the enigmatic humankind.
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