The central point which I wish to make is this: during all the centuries of recorded history the course of intellectual endeavour, the purpose of education, the substance of controversies about the truth or value of ideas, presupposed the existence of certain crucial questions, the answers to which were of paramount importance. How valid, it was asked, were the various claims to provide the best methods of arriving at knowledge and truth made by such great and famous disciplines as metaphysics, ethics, theology, and the sciences of nature and of man ? What was the right life for men to lead and how was it discovered? Did God exist, and could His purposes be known or even guessed at? Did the universe, and in particular human life, have a purpose? If so, whose purpose did it fulfil? How did one set about answering such questions? Were they, or were they not, analogous to the kind of questions to which the sciences or common sense provided satisfactory, generally accepted, replies? If not, did it make sense to ask them?
And as in metaphysics and ethics, so in politics too. The political problem was concerned, for example, with establishing why any individual or individuals should obey other individuals or associations of individuals. All the classical doctrines which deal with the familiar topics of liberty and authority, sovereignty and natural rights, the ends of the state and the ends of the individual, the General Will and the rights of minorities, secularism and theocracy, functionalism and centralization--all these are various ways of attempting to formulate methods in terms of which this fundamental question can be answered in a manner compatible with the other beliefs and the general outlook of the inquirer and his generation. Great and sometimes mortal conflicts have arisen over the proper techniques for the - answering of such questions. Some sought answers in sacred books, others in direct personal revelation, some in metaphysical insight, others in the pronouncements of infallible sages or in speculative systems or in laborious empirical investigations. The questions were of vital importance for the conduct of life. There were, of course, sceptics in every generation who suggested that there were, perhaps, no final answers, that solutions hitherto provided depended on highly variable factors such as the climate in which the theorist's life was lived, or his social or economic or political condition, or that of his fellows, or his or their emotional disposition, or the kinds of intellectual interests which absorbed him or them. But such sceptics were usually treated as either frivolous and therefore unimportant, or else as unduly disturbing and even dangerous; in times of instability they were liable to persecution. But even they--even Sextus Empiricus or Montaigne or Hume--did not actually doubt the importance of the questions themselves. What they doubted was the possibility of obtaining final and absolute solutions.
It was left to the twentieth century to do something more drastic than this. For the first time it was now conceived that the most effective way of dealing with questions, particularly those recurrent issues which had perplexed and often tormented original and honest minds in every generation, was not by employing the tools of reason, still less those of the more mysterious capacities called `insight' and `intuition', but by obliterating the questions themselves. And this method consists not in removing them by rational means--by proving, for example, that they are founded on intellectual error or verbal muddles or ignorance of the facts-- for to prove this would in its turn presuppose the need for rational methods of philosophical or psychological argument. Rather it consists in so treating the questioner that problems which appeared at once overwhelmingly important and utterly insoluble vanish from the questioner's consciousness like evil dreams and trouble him no more. It consists, not in developing the logical implications and elucidating the meaning, the context, or the relevance and origin of a specific problem--in seeing what it `amounts to'--but in altering the outlook which gave rise to it in the first Place. Questions for whose solution no ready-made technique could easily be produced are all too easily classified as obsessions from which the patient must becured. Thus if a man is haunted by the suspicion that, for example, full individual liberty is not compatible with coercion by the majority in a democratic state, and yet continues to hanker after both democracy and individual liberty, it may be possible by appropriate treatment to rid him of his idée fixe, so that it will disappear, to return no more. The worried questioner of political institutions is thereby relieved of his burden and freed to pursue socially useful tasks, unhampered by disturbing and distracting reflections which have been eliminated by the eradication of their cause.
The method has the bold simplicity of genius: it secures agreement on matters of political principle by removing the psychological possibility of alternatives, which itself depends, or is held to. depend, on the older form of social organization, rendered obsolete by the revolution and the new social order. And this is how Communist and Fascist states--and all other quasi- and semi-totalitarian societies and secular and religious creeds--have in fact proceeded in the task of imposing political and ideological conformity.
For this the works of Karl Marx are certainly no more responsible than the other tendencies of our time. Marx was a typical nineteenth-century social theorist, in the same sense as Mill or Comte or Buckle. A policy of deliberate psychological conditioning was as alien to him as to them. He believed that many of the questions of his predecessors were quite genuine, and thought that he had solved them. He supported his solutions with arguments which he certainly supposed to conform to the best scientific and philosophical canons of his time. Whether his outlook was in fact as scientific as he claimed, or his solutions as plausible, is another question. What matters is that he recognized the genuineness of the questions he was attempting to answer and offered a theory with a claim to being scientific in the accepted sense of the term; and thereby poured much light (and some darkness) on many vexed problems, and led to much fruitful (and sterile) revaluation and reinterpretation.
But the practice of Communist states and, more logically, of Fascist states (since they openly deny and denounce the value of the rational question-and-answer method) has not been the training of the critical, or solution-finding, powers of their citizens, nor yet the development in them of any capacity for special insights or intuitions regarded as likely to reveal the truth. It consists in something which any nineteenth-century thinker with respect for the sciences would have regarded with genuine horror--the training of individuals incapable of being troubled by questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system; the building and elaboration of a strong framework of institutions, `myths', habits of life and thought intended to preserve it from sudden shocks or slow decay. This is the intellectual outlook which attends the rise of totalitarian ideologies--the substance of the hair-raising satires of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley--the state of mind in which troublesome questions appear as a form of mental-perturbation, noxious to the mental health of individuals and, when too widely discussed, to the health of societies. This is an attitude, far removed from Marx or Freud, which looks on all inner conflict as an evil, or at best as a form of futile self-frustration; which considers the kind of friction, the moral or emotional or intellectual collisions, the particular kind of acute mental discomfort which rises to a condition of agony from which great works of the human intellect and imagination have sprung, as being no better than purely destructive diseases--neuroses, psychoses, mental derangements, genuinely requiring psychiatric aid; above all as being dangerous deviations from that line to which individuals and societies must adhere if they are to march towards a state of well-ordered, painless, contented, self-perpetual equilibrium
This is a truly far-reaching conception, and something more powerful than the pessimism or cynicism of thinkers like Plato or De Maistre, Swift or Carlyle, who looked on the majority of mankind as unalterably stupid or incurably vicious, and therefore concerned themselves with how the world might be made safe for the exceptional, enlightened, or otherwise superior minority or individual For their view did at least concede the reality of the painful problems, and merely denied the capacity of the majority to solve them; whereas the more radical attitude looks upon intellectual perplexity as being caused either by a technical problem to be settled in terms of practical policy, or else as a neurosis to be cured, that is, made to disappear; if possible' without a trace. This leads to a novel conception of the truth and of disinterested ideals in general, which would hardly have been intelligible to previous centuries. To adopt it is to hold that outside the purely technical sphere (where one asks only what are the most efficient means towards this or that practical end) words like `true', or `right', or `free', and the concepts which they denote, are to be re-defined in terms of the only activity recognized as valuable, namely, the organization of society as a smoothly working machine providing for the needs of such of its members as are permitted to survive. The words and ideas in such a society will reflect the outlook of the citizens, being so adjusted as to involve as little friction as possible between, and within, individuals, leaving them free to make the `optimum' use of the resources available to them.
This is indeed Dostoevsky's utilitarian nightmare. In the course of their pursuit of social welfare, humanitarian liberals, deeply outraged by cruelty, injustice, and inefficiency, discover that the only sound method of preventing these evils, is not by providing the widest opportunities for free intellectual or emotional development--for who can tell where this might not lead ?--but by eliminating the motives for the pursuit of these perilous ends, by suppressing any tendencies likely to lead to criticism, dissatisfaction, disorderly forms of life. I shall not attempt here to trace historically how this came to pass. No doubt the story must at some stage include the fact that mere disparity in tempo and extent between technical development and social change, together with the fact that the two could not be guaranteed to harmonize--despite the optimistic hopes of Adam Smith--and indeed clashed more and more often, led to increasingly destructive and apparently unavertable economic crises. These were accompanied by social, political, and moral disasters which the general framework--the patterns of behaviour, habits, outlook, language, that is, the `ideological superstructure' of the victims--could not sustain. The result was a loss of faith in existing political activities and ideals, and a desperate desire to live in a universe which, however dull and flat, was at any rate secure against the repetition of such catastrophes. An element in this was a growing sense of the greater or lesser meaninglessness of such ancient battle-cries as liberty or equality or civilization or truth, since their application to the surrounding scene was no longer as intelligible as it had been in the nineteenth century.
Together with this development, in the majority of cases, there went a reluctance to face it. But the once hallowed phrases were not abandoned. They were used--robbed of their original value--to cover the different and sometimes diametrically opposed notions of the new morality, which, in terms of the old system of values, seemed both unscrupulous and brutal. The Fascists alone did not take the trouble to pretend to retain the old symbols, and while political diehards and the representatives of the more unbridled forms of modern big business clung half cynically, half hopefully, to such terms as freedom or democracy; the Fascists rejected them outright with theatrical gestures of disdain and loathing, and poured scorn upon them as the outworn husks of ideals which had long ago rotted away But despite the differences of policy concerning the use of specific symbols there is a substantial similarity between all the variants of the new political attitude.
Observers in the twenty-first century will doubtless see these similarities of pattern more easily than we who are involved can possibly do today. They will distinguish them as naturally and clearly from their immediate past--that hortus inclusus of the nineteenth century in which so many writers both of history and of journalism and of political addresses today still seem to be living--as we distinguish the growth of romantic nationalism or of naive positivism from that of enlightened despotism or of patrician republics. Still, even we who live in them can discern something novel in our own times. Even we perceive the growth of new characteristics common to widely different spheres. On the one hand, we can see the progressive and conscious subordination of political to social and economic interests. The most vivid symptoms of this subordination are the open self-identification and conscious solidarity of men as capitalists or workers; these cut across, though they seldom even weaken, national and religious loyalties. On the other, we meet with the conviction that political liberty is useless without the economic strength to use it, and consequently implied or open denial of the rival proposition that economic opportunity is of use only to politically free men. This in its turn carries with it a tacit acceptance of the proposition that the responsibilities of the state to its citizens must and will grow and not diminish, a theorem which is today taken for granted by masters and men alike, in Europe perhaps more unquestioningly than in the United States, but accepted even there to a degree which seemed utopian only thirty, let alone fifty, years ago. This great transformation, with its genuine material gains, and no less genuine growth in social equality in the least liberal societies, is accompanied by something which forms the obverse side of the medal--the elimination, or; at the very best, strong disapproval of those propensities for free inquiry and creation which cannot, without losing their nature, remain as conformist and law-abiding as the twentieth century demands. A century ago Auguste Comte asked why, if there was rightly no demand for freedom to disagree. in mathematics, it should be allowed and even encouraged in ethics or the social sciences. And indeed, if the creation of certain `optimum' patterns of behaviour (and of thought and feeling) in individuals or entire societies is the main goal of social and individual action, Comte's case is unanswerable. Yet it is the extent of this very right to disregard the forces of order and convention, even the publicly accepted `optimum' goals of action, that forms the glory of that bourgeois culture which reached its zenith in the nineteenth century and of which we have only now begun to witness the beginning of the end.