Love & Passion Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is doing something sly here: he reduces the human saga to two blunt imperatives, then treats modernity as a technical project that can finally take them off the table. “Hunger and sex” is deliberately unromantic language for needs that usually get dressed up as morality, romance, or destiny. By calling them “primitive” and “mammalian,” he frames history as an engineering problem inherited from biology: we behave badly because our bodies are old hardware.

The hinge of the passage is his confident “within sight.” Writing from the early-to-mid 20th century, Bernal had watched industrial agriculture, electrification, antibiotics, and mass production prove that scarcity isn’t fate. The subtext is anti-Malthusian and quietly anti-clerical: if deprivation and repression once passed for spiritual discipline or natural law, they now look like policy failures. “Permanent plenty” is a provocation, not a lullaby. It implies that continued hunger in an age of productive capacity is less tragedy than indictment.

Then comes the price tag: “awaits the arrival of permanent peace.” That phrase is doing heavy ideological work. It smuggles a scientist’s faith in planning into geopolitics, suggesting abundance is ready to be delivered, stalled only by war. Given Bernal’s era - world wars, the rise of nuclear weaponry, and the belief (especially among left-modernists) that rational coordination could outpace chaos - the line reads as both prophecy and warning. The optimism is real, but it’s conditional: technology can end want; only politics can stop us from using it.