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VI

The new attitude, resting as it does upon the policy of diminishing strife and misery by the atrophy of the faculties capable of causing them, is naturally hostile to, or at least suspicious of, disinterested curiosity (which might end anywhere), and looks upon the practice of all arts not obviously useful to society as being at best forms of social frivolity. Such occupations when they are not a positive menace, are, in this view, an irritating and wasteful irrelevance, a trivial fiddling, a dissipation or diversion of energy. which is in any case difficult enough to accumulate and should therefore be directed wholeheartedly and unceasingly to the task of building and maintaining the well-adjusted-- sometimes called the `integrated'--social whole. In this state of mind it is only natural that such terms as truth or honour or obligation or beauty become transformed into purely offensive or defensive weapons, used by a state or a party in the struggle to create a community impervious to influences beyond its own direct control. This result can be achieved either by rigid censorship and insulation from the rest of the world--a world which remains free at least in the sense that many of its inhabitants continue to say what they wish, in which words are relatively. unorganized, with all the unpredictable and consequently `dangerous' consequences that flow from this; or else it can be achieved by extending the area of strict control until it stretches over all possible sources of anarchy, i. e. the whole of mankind. Only by one of these two expedients can a state of affairs be achieved in which human behaviour can be manipulated with relative ease by technically qualified specialists--adjusters of conflicts and promoters of peace both of body and of mind, engineers and other scientific experts in the service of the ruling group, psychologists, sociologists, economic and social planners, and so on. Clearly this is not an intellectual climate which favours originality of judgment, moral independence, or uncommon powers of insight. The entire trend of such an order is to reduce all issues to technical problems of lesser or greater complexity, in particular the problem of how to survive, get rid of maladjustments, achieve a condition in which the individual's psychological or economic capacities are harnessed to producing the maximum of unclouded social contentment compatible with opposition to all experiment outside the bounds of the system; and this in its turn depends upon the suppression of whatever in the individual might raise doubt or assert itself against the single all-embracing, all-clarifying, all-satisfying-plan.

The tendency, present in all stable societies--perhaps in all societies as such--has, owing to the repression of all rival influences, assumed a particularly acute form in, for example; the Soviet Union. There, subordination to the central plan, and the elimination of disturbing forces, whether by education or repression, has been enacted with that capacity for believing in the literal inspiration of ideologies--in the ability and duty of human beings to translate ideas into practice fully, rigorously, and immediately--to which Russian thinkers of all schools seem singularly addicted. The Soviet pattern is clear, simple, and deduced from `scientifically demonstrated' premisses. The task of realizing it must be entrusted to technically trained believers who look on the human beings at their disposal as material which is infinitely malleable within the confines revealed by the sciences. Stalin's remark that creative artists are `engineers of human souls' is a very precise expression of this spirit. The presence of something analogous in various Fascist societies, with intuition or instinct substituted for science, and cynicism for hypocrisy, are equally clear for all to see. In Western Europe this tendency has taken the milder form of a shift of emphasis away from disagreement about political principles (and from party struggles which at least in part sprang from genuine differences of outlook) towards disagreements, ultimately technical about methods--about the best ways of achieving that degree of minimum economic or social stability without which arguments concerned with fundamental principles and the ends of life are felt to be `abstract', `academic', and unrelated to the urgent needs. of the hour. It leads to that noticeably growing lack of interest in long-term political issues--as opposed to current day-to-day economic or social problems--on the part of the populations of the Western European continent which is occasionally deplored by shocked American and British observers, who mistakenly ascribe it to the growth of cynicism and disenchantment with ideals.

No doubt all abandonment of old values for new may appear to the surviving adherents of the former as conscienceless disregard for morality as such. If so, it is a great delusion. There is all too little disbelief, whether conscienceless or apathetic, in the new values. On the contrary, they are clung to with unreasoning faith and that blind intolerance towards scepticism which springs, as often as not, from an inner bankruptcy or terror, the hope against hope that here at least is a safe haven, narrow, dark, cut off, but secure. Growing numbers of human beings are prepared to purchase this sense of security even at the cost of allowing vast tracts of life to be controlled by persons who, whether consciously or not, act systematically to narrow the horizon of human activity to manageable proportions, to train human beings into more easily combinable parts--interchangeable, almost prefabricated--of a total pattern. In the face of such a strong desire to stabilize, if need be, at the lowest level--upon the floor from which you cannot fall, which cannot betray you, let you down--all the ancient political principles begin to vanish, feeble symbols of creeds no longer relevant to the new realities.

This process does not move at a uniform pace everywhere. In the United States perhaps, for obvious economic reasons, the nineteenth century survives more powerfully than anywhere else. The political issues and conflicts, the topics of discussion, and the idealized personalities of democratic leaders are more. reminiscent of Victorian-Europe than anything to be found on that continent now.

Woodrow Wilson was a nineteenth-century liberal in a very full and unqualified sense. The New Deal and the personality of President Roosevelt excited political passions far more like those of the baffles which raged round Gladstone or Lloyd George, or the anti-clerical governments at the turn of the century in France, than anything actually contemporary with it in Europe; and this great liberal enterprise, certainly the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed, corresponds more closely to the political and economic ideals of John Stuart Mill in his last humanitarian-Socialist phase then to left-wing thought in Europe in the thirties. The controversy about international organization, about the United Nations and its subsidiaries, as well as the other post-war international institutions, like the controversies which in the years after 1918 surrounded the League of Nations, are fully intelligible in terms of nineteenth-century political ideals, and therefore occupied far more attention and meant much more in America than in Europe. The United States may have disavowed President Wilson, but it continued to live in a moral atmosphere not very different from that of Wilson's time--the easily recognizable black-and-white moral world of the Victorian values. The events of 1918 preyed on the American conscience for twenty-five years, whereas in Europe the exalter atmosphere of 1918-19 was soon dissipated-- a brief moment of illumination which in retrospect seems more American than European, the last manifestation in Europe of a great but dying tradition in a. world already living, and fully conscious of living, in a new medium, too well aware of its differences from, and resentful of, its past. The break was not sudden and total, a dramatic coup de théâtre. Many of the seeds planted in the eighteenth or nineteenth century have flow red-on1y in the twentieth: the political and ethical climate in which trade unions flourished, for instance, in Germany, or England, or France contained as elements the old, familiar doctrines of human rights and duties which were the common property, avowed or not, of almost all parties and views in the liberal, humanitarian, expansionist hundred years of peace and technological progress.

The main current of the nineteenth century does of course, survive into the present, and especially in America, Scandinavia, and the British Commonwealth; but it is not what is most characteristic of our time. For in the past there were conflicts of ideas; whereas what characterizes our time is less the struggle of one set of ideas against another than the mounting wave of hostility to all ideas as such. Since ideas are considered the source of too much disquiet, there is a tendency to suppress the conflict between liberal claims to individual political rights and the patent economic injustice which can result from their satisfaction (which forms the substance of socialist criticism) by the submersion of both in an authoritarian regime which removes the free area within which such conflict can occur. What is genuinely typical of our time is a new concept of the society, the values of which are analysable not in terms of the desires or the moral sense which inspire the view of its ultimate ends held by a group or an individual, but from some factual hypothesis or metaphysical dogma about history, or race, or national character in terms of which the answers to the question what is good, right, required, desirable, fitting, can be `scientifically' deduced, or intuited, or expressed in this or that kind of behaviour. There is one and only one direction in which a given aggregate of individuals is conceived to be travelling, driven thither by quasi-occult impersonal forces, such as their class structure, or their collective unconscious, or their racial origin, or the `real' social or physical roots of this or that `popular' or `group' `mythology'. The direction is alterable, but only by tampering with the hidden cause of behaviour--those who wish to tamper being, according to this view, free to a limited degree to determine their own direction and that of others not by the increase of rationality and by argument addressed to it, but by having a superior understanding of the machinery of social behaviour and skill in manipulating it.

In this sinister fashion have the words of Saint-Simon's prophecy finally come true--words which once seemed so brave and optimistic: `The government of man will be replaced by the administration of things.' The cosmic forces are conceived as omnipotent and indestructible. Hopes, fears, prayers cannot wish them out of existence; but the élite of experts can canalize them and control them to some extent. The task of these experts is to ad just human beings to these forces and to develop in them an unshakeable faith in the new order, and unquestioning loyalty to it, which will anchor it securely and for ever. Consequently the technical disciplines which direct natural forces and adjust men to the new order must take primacy over humane pursuits--philosophical, historical, artistic. Such pursuits, at most, will serve only to prop up and embellish the new establishment. Turgenev's naive materialist, the hero of his novel Fathers and Sons, the `nihilistic' scientist Bazarov, has finally come into his own, as Saint-Simon and his more pedestrian follower Comte always felt sure that he would, but for reasons very different from those which seemed plausible a century ago. Bazarov's faith rested on the claim that the dissection of frogs was more important than poetry because it led to the truth, whereas the poetry of Pushkin did not.

The motive at work today is more devastating: anatomy is superior to art because it generates no independent ends of life, provides no experiences which act as independent criteria of good or evil, truth or falsehood, and are therefore liable to clash with the orthodoxy which we have created as the only bulwark strong enough to preserve us from doubts and despairs and all the horrors of maladjustment. To be borne this way and that emotionally or intellectually is a form of malaise. Against it nothing will work but the elimination of alternatives so nearly in equal balance that choice between them is--or at least appears to be--possible.

This is, of course, the position of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: he said that what men dreaded most was freedom of choice, to be left alone to grope their way in the dark; and the Church by lifting the responsibility from their shoulders made them willing, grateful, and happy slaves; The Grand Inquisitor stood for the dogmatic organization of the life of the spirit: Bazarov for its theoretical opposite--free scientific inquiry, the facing of the `hard' facts, the acceptance of the truth however brutal or upsetting. By an irony of history (not unforeseen by Dostoevsky) they have formed a pact, they are allies, and today are often indistinguishable Buridan's ass, we are told, unable to choose between two equidistant bundles of hay, starved to death. Against this fate the only remedy is blind obedience and faith. Whether the refuge is a dogmatic religious faith or a dogmatic faith in social or natural science matters relatively little: for without such obedience and faith there is no confidence. and no hope, no optimistic, `constructive', `positive' form of life. That the disciples of those who first exposed the idolatry of ideas frozen into oppressive institutions--Fourier, Feuerbach and Marx--should be the most ferocious supporters of the new forms of `reification' and `dehumanization' is indeed an irony of history.


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