But there are two great differences which separate the political characteristics of our age from their origins in the past. In the first place, the reactionaries or romantics of previous periods, however much they might have advocated the superior wisdom of institutional authority or the revealed word over that of individual reason, did not in their moments of wildest unreason minimize the importance of the questions to be answered. On the contrary, they maintained that so crucial was it to obtain the correct answer that only hallowed institutions; or inspired leaders, or mystical revelation, or divine grace could vouch safe a solution of sufficient depth and universality. No doubt an order of importance of questions underlies any established social system--a hierarchical order the authority of which is itself not open to question. Moreover, the obscurity of some among the answers offered has in every age concealed their lack of truth or their irrelevance to the questions which they purported to solve. And perhaps much hypocrisy has traditionally been necessary to secure their success. But hypocrisy is very different from cynicism or blindness. Even the censors of opinion and the enemies of the truth felt compelled to pay formal homage to the vital importance of obtaining true answers to the great problems by the best available means. If their practice belied this, at least there was something to be belied: traitors and heretics often keep alive the memory--and the authority--of the beliefs which they are intent on betraying.
The second difference consists in the fact that in the past such attempts to obscure the nature of the issues were mostly associated with the avowed enemies of reason and individual freedom. The alignment of forces has been clear at any rate since the Renaissance; progress and reaction, however much these words have been abused, are not empty concepts. On one side stood the supporters of authority, unreasoning faith, suspicious of, or openly opposed to, the uncontrolled pursuit of truth or the free realization of individual ideals. On the other, whatever their differences, were those supporters of free inquiry and self-expression who looked upon Voltaire and Lessing, Mill and Darwin, even Ibsen as their prophets. Their common quality--perhaps their only common quality--was some degree of devotion to the ideals of the Renaissance and a hatred of all that was associated, whether justly or not with the Middle Ages--darkness, suppression, the stifling of all heterodoxy, the hatred of the flesh and of gaiety, of freedom of thought and expression, and of the love of natural beauty. There were of course many who cannot be classified so simply or so crudely; but until our own day the lines were drawn sharply enough to determine clearly the position of the men who most deeply influenced their age. A combination of devotion to scientific principles with `obscurantist' social theory seemed altogether unthinkable. Today the tendency to circumscribe and confine and limit, to determine the range of what may be asked and what may not, to what may be believed and what may not, is no longer a distinguishing mark of the old `reactionaries'. On the contrary, it comes as powerfully from the heirs of the radicals, rationalists, `progressives' of the nineteenth century as from the descendants science or at least in its name; and this is a nightmare scarcely foreseen by the most Cassandra-like prophets of either camp.
We are often told that the present is an age of cynicism and despair, of crumbling values and the dissolution of the fixed standards and landmarks of Western civilization. But this is neither true nor even plausible. So far from showing the loose texture of a collapsing order, the world is today stiff with rigid rules and codes and ardent, irrational religions; So far from evincing the toleration which springs from cynical disregard of the ancient sanctions, it treats heterodoxy as the supreme danger.
Whether in the East or West, the danger has not been. greater since the ages of faith. Conformities are called for much mores eagerly today than yesterday; loyalties are tested far more severely; sceptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behaviour, if. they do not take care to identify themselves with an organized movement, are objects of fear or derision and targets of persecution for either side, execrated or despised by all the embattled parties in the great ideological wars of our time. And although this is less acute in societies traditionally averse to extremes--Great Britain, say, or Denmark or Switzerland--this makes little difference to the general pattern. In the world today individual stupidity and wickedness are forgiven more easily than failure to be identified with a recognized party or attitude, to achieve an approved political or economic or intellectual status. In earlier periods, when more than one authority ruled human life, a man might escape the pressure of the state by taking refuge in the fortress of the opposition--of an organized church or a dissident feudal establishment. The mere fact of conflict between authorities allowed room for a narrow and shifting, but still never entirely non-existent, no-man's land, where private lives might still precariously be lived, because neither side dared to go too far for fear of too greatly strengthening the other. Today the very virtues of even the best intentioned paternalistic state, its genuine anxiety to reduce destitution and disease and inequality, to penetrate all the neglected nooks and crannies of life which may stand in need of its justice and its bounty--its very success in those beneficent activities--have narrowed the area within which the individual may commit blunders, and curtailed his liberties in the interest (the very real interest) of his welfare or of his sanity, his health, his security, his freedom from want and fear. His area of choice has grown smaller not in the name of some opposing principle--as in the Dark Ages or during the rise of the nationalities-- but in order to create a situation in which the very possibility of opposed principles, with all their unlimited capacity to cause mental stress and danger and destructive collisions, is eliminated in favour of a simpler and better regulated life, a robust faith in an efficiently working order, untroubled by agonizing moral conflict. Yet this is not a gratuitous development: the social and economic situation in which we are placed, the failure to harmonize the effects of technical progress with the forces of political and economic organization inherited from an earlier phase, do call for a measure of social control to prevent chaos and destitution that can be no less fatal to the development of human faculties than blind conformity. It is neither realistic nor morally conceivable that we should give up our social gains and meditate for an instant the possibility of a return to ancient injustice and inequality and hopeless misery. The progress of technological skill makes it rational and indeed imperative to plan, and anxiety for the success of a particular planned society naturally inclines the planners to seek insulation from dangerous, because incalculable, forces which may jeopardize the plan. And this is a powerful incentive to `autarky' and `socialism in one country', whether imposed by conservatives, or New Dealers, or isolationists, or Social Democrats, or, indeed, imperialists. And this in its turn generates artificial barriers and increasingly restricts the planners' own resources. In extreme cases this policy leads to repression of the discontented and a perpetual tightening of discipline, until it absorbs more and more of the time and ingenuity of those who originally conceived it only as a means to a minimum of efficiency. Presently it grows to be a hideous end in itself, since its realization leads to a vicious circle of repression in order to survive and; of survival mainly to repress. So the remedy grows to be worse than the disease, and takes the form of those orthodoxies which rest on the simple puritanical faith of individuals who never knew or have forgotten whatdouceur de vivre, free self-expression, the infinite variety of persons and of the relationships between them, and the right of free choice, difficult to endure but more intolerable to surrender, can ever have been like.
The dilemma is logically insoluble: we cannot sacrifice either freedom or the organization needed for its defence, or a minimum standard of welfare The way out must therefore lie in some logically untidy, flexible, and even ambiguous compromise. Every situation calls for its own specific policy, since out of the crooked timber of humanity, as Kant once remarked, no straight thing was ever made. What the age calls for is not (as we are so often told) more faith, or stronger leadership, or more scientific organization. Rather is it the opposite--less Messianic ardour, more enlightened scepticism, more toleration of idiosyncrasies, more frequent ad hoc measures to achieve aims in a foreseeable future, more room for the attainment of their personal ends by individuals and by minorities whose tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority. What is required is a less mechanical, less fanatical application of general principles, however rational or righteous, a more cautious and less arrogantly self-confident application of accepted, scientifically tested, general solutions to unexamined individual cases. The wicked Talleyrand's `surtout pas trop de zèle' can be more humane than the demand for uniformity of the virtuous Robespierre, and a salutary brake upon too much control of men's lives in an age of social planning and technology. We must submit to authority not because it is infallible, but only for strictly and openly utilitarian reasons, as a necessary expedient. Since no solution can be guaranteed against error, no disposition is final. And therefore a loose texture and toleration of a minimum of inefficiency, even a degree of indulgence in idle talk, idle curiosity, aimless pursuit of this or that without authorization--'conspicuous waste' i e. --may allow more spontaneous, individual variation (for which the individual must in the end assume full responsibility), and will always be worth more than the neatest and most delicately fashioned imposed pattern. Above all, it must be realized that the kinds of problems which this or that method of education or system of scientific or religious or social organization is guaranteed to solve are not eo facto the only central questions of human life. Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance--these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. It is from intense preoccupation with these ends, ultimate, incommensurable, guaranteed neither to change nor to stand still--it is through the absorbed individual or collective pursuit of these, unplanned and at times without wholly adequate technical equipment, more often than not without conscious hope of success, still less of the approbation of the official audit that the best moments come in the lives of individuals and peoples.