To-day
WHAT do I believe about man in his relation to the universe? Very little, and that little very doubtfully. But about man's own nature, and about his position on this planet to-day I have certain beliefs which are firm, precise and far-reaching in their consequences. Though in the last chapter of this book I shall make a few guesses about the universe, I shall in the main be concerned with matters nearer home.
“Belief" is a vague word. We may distinguish between three attitudes, which I shall call “surmise," "belief" and "conviction". The distinction is not rigid, but it is useful. In "surmise" I feel a minimum of belief, but not no belief at all. So far as possible I avoid taking action, but if action is inevitable I act as though the surmised proposition were true. In "belief", though I have not certainty, I am ready to bet very heavily on the truth of the proposition. I act unhesitatingly, or rather with no appreciable hesitation. In "conviction" I have no doubt whatever that the proposition is true. I cannot conceive its being false.
In the course of my life I have acquired a certain loose tissue of thought about man and the rest of the universe. This tissue is made up of bushels of woolly surmise, a few relatively firm threads of belief, and one or two indestructible convictions, like rare wires of steel maintaining the whole web. These indestructible convictions are intuitive. They do not present themselves to me as propositions which I might perhaps have doubted but do in fact believe; they are immediate perceptions. I find them very difficult to describe in a satisfactory manner, but as they actually present themselves to me they are indubitable.
For instance, I perceive intuitively that kindliness and mutual respect and co-operation are in some sense "good", intrinsically and universally. But what exactly I mean by saying this, I find it extremely difficult to determine. All the same, the statement does represent an intuition which I find indubitable and immensely significant for practical life.
With equal certainty I perceive that it is "good" to become, so far as possible, accurately and comprehensively aware of the world, including myself and other individuals. It is "good" to be as sensitive as possible and as intelligent as possible. It is "good" to strive to see things truly and to see things whole.
Kindliness and intelligence, or in more exalted language, love and reason, present themselves to me with a special savour in virtue of which I call them "good", and declare with absolute confidence that in general, and apart from particular qualifying circumstances, they ought to exist.
From this intuited savour of love and reason I derive one of my very few firm, but theoretically dubitable beliefs. I firmly believe that no mind which clearly apprehends love and reason as they really are can fail to perceive them as good, can fail to approve of them. To anyone who denies that he perceives them as good I reply, "Either you do not understand what these words mean, or you have never clearly apprehended love and reason in your own experience; or else, though you have indeed encountered them, something is preventing you from attending to the fact that you do actually perceive them as good, intrinsically and universally." In a later chapter I shall try to defend this position. Meanwhile I am merely giving examples of my convictions, beliefs and surmises.
Another of my few firm beliefs is one of a very different order. It is much more complex and much more questionable. None the less, in my case it is very firm, and it has very far-reaching consequences. Along with my conviction of the goodness of love and reason, it is a controlling factor in my attitude to life. I believe that I am living at a time when human society and human culture are being refashioned perhaps more radically and certainly more rapidly than ever before. Indeed I believe that, if this change fulfils its promise, all earlier ages, including our own, will come to be regarded as ages of darkness and barbarism. To-day, most of the ideas in terms of which we conceive our beliefs are dissolving. Some will be abolished altogether; others will be reshaped into almost unrecognizable forms. It is impossible to-day for anyone who retains any suppleness of mind to state his beliefs without having very soon to discover that he was in many respects deluded.
My belief in the fluidity of our culture persuades me that beliefs should be reduced to a minimum. This scepticism is connected with my intuitive conviction that reason, or intellectual integrity, is itself good. I believe that no proposition whatever should be believed which, when everything relevant has been considered, offends reason. To say this, of course, is not to say that no proposition should be believed which reason cannot prove. For reason must at bottom be a reasoning about unprovable but not unreasonable propositions, based on immediate experience. And for my part I do not believe that the only immediate experiences which reason must take into account are sense-perceptions.
Intellectual integrity, then, impels me to reduce my beliefs to a minimum. I must recognize the limitations of human thought. Some people tell me that they believe in God, a benevolent and almighty ruler of the universe. Some say they believe in personal immortality, some in Evolution as a metaphysical principle, others in Materialism and so on. In these remote spheres I cannot reach any firm belief at all. Do I believe in God? Is Materialism true? Almost as intelligibly I might ask myself, is the fundamental essence of things Sunday or is it Monday morning? I dare hazard the guess that, in a very metaphorical sense, reality is a good deal more Mondayish than Sundayish. And as to God and Materialism I might perhaps in a moment of self-confidence hazard the guess that there is something not wholly undeserving of the adjective "God-like" in or about the universe; and yet that from another point of view the universe may very well turn out to be "matterish" through and through, if matter may be interpreted in the Pickwickian manner of Dialectical Materialism. But to raise either part of this guess into the rank of belief, to take either Theism or Materialism as an article of faith, a principle for the guidance of one’s life, seems to me unwarrantable, unwise, and inconsistent with strict intellectual integrity.
For my part I believe that for right living we must cling not to the frail stuff of metaphysical surmise, however bright or however exhilaratingly bleak its pattern, but to those few steel-true threads of intuition on which the rest is woven; and also, though less confidently, to certain generalizations based on logic and science and history. Of these, one of the most secure and most important is the belief in the fluidity of contemporary institutions and culture.
Of course, though this fluidity is obvious, the direction of social and cultural change is by no means certain. Though the process of revolutionary development in our institutions and ideas has begun, it may be frustrated. For in the present condition of the human race, and therefore in contemporary culture, there are two conflicting tendencies, intricately entangled with one another in every geographical region, in every department of social and individual life, and indeed in every "ideology" or system of doctrine. The one is an impulse toward archaic values, the values of primitive man. The other is directed toward the values appropriate to a highly developed society.
The archaic values are those connected with the solidarity of the tribe against its enemies, and the triumph of the heroic individual as tribe-compeller. The developed values are those which centre round the remote but increasingly important ideal of a world-community of very diverse but mutually respecting and mutually enriching individuals. To the unwarped mind it is becoming increasingly clear that the right goal of all social policy has two aspects, which involve one another. One is the development of individuality in all human beings up to the limit of their capacity. This is no vague phrase. It stands for a concept which at a later stage I shall try to state with precision. The other aspect of the social goal is the development of culture; or, let us say, of a communal pattern of knowing, feeling and creating.
The struggle between the archaic and the developed aspirations is the great issue of our day. The forces of reaction may defeat the forces of progress. If this happens, unprecedented natural knowledge and physical power will be used to establish the archaic values. The result will be a new kind of barbarism, archaic in spirit, but equipped with aeroplanes, bombs, radio and pseudo-modern ideas. The driving force of this new barbarism will be mistrust and dread of all that is most prized in the half-born progressive culture; and hatred, therefore, of reasonableness and kindliness and the ideal of a harmoniously co-operating mankind. It is possible, though unlikely, that if the new barbarism triumphs throughout the world it may actually destroy man’s intuition that reasonableness and kindliness are good. Moreover by systematic persecution it may seriously reduce the capacity of the race for these most human and most precious activities, these powers by which man rose to mastery of this planet. Then our species will inevitably decline, and perhaps vanish. This disaster is improbable because the way of life which is signified by these little words, "reason" and "love", is the only way by which man can find lasting peace and satisfaction. Almost inevitably, then, through however much self-frustration and self-torture, the race will sooner or later attain full realization of this fact, and reorganize its institutions in accord with this most practical of all principles.
But even if the species does not destroy itself, a temporary disaster seems probable. The triumph of the archaic in a world that is by now structurally modern may well cause a long period of misery and mental darkness. We can but hope that the wide-spread access of fury, which seems to us who witness it an apocalyptic catastrophe, may after all in the view of history turn out to have been a necessary period of revitalization after a phase of lassitude.
The struggle of our age may well be regarded as a war of ideas. But the conflicting ideas are themselves the reflections of the conflicting tendencies in human circumstances. The new form of society, and the new culture, if they come into existence, will be in a sense an expression of the immense objective changes in man's conditions during the modern period. The new society and the new culture must of course be created by men's minds; but they will be products of men's minds acting in response to objective conditions, in fact to the very novel conditions brought about by physical science and the use of mechanical power. Some men, no doubt, will be in specially comfortable or specially secluded circumstances which will make them not desire but dread any great change of institutions and ideas. Again some will be blinded by obsessive devotion to the old order. Many, even though their distressful personal circumstances are all the while driving them toward the new order, may lack the sensitivity to feel which way the wind of circumstance is blowing. These will cling passionately to the order that is crushing them. But in time either the human race will be forced by the pressure of circumstances to adopt the developed attitude or it will stagnate and decline.
Of course no one, not even the most sensitive and intelligent and least hide-bound, can yet know in any detail what kind of a society and what kind of a culture will really fulfil the requirements of man's rapidly changing circumstances. No doubt many bright minds think they know. They tirelessly advocate some particular social system or cultural principle. They assure us that they have seen the truth. But for my part I cannot believe that any of the conflicting ideologies of our day is the culture toward which we are so painfully groping. Most of them, no doubt, contain some truth. Some are probably very much more true than others. Some point more or less in the right direction, are in the true line of development, are based on fertile principles; while others are relatively perverse and barren. But all alike are expressions of the present transitional state of human society and the present "half-baked" human intelligence, which is the best that such a society can produce. And so we may be sure that all, even the truest, are in one way or another fantastically mistaken. Not one of them is such as to merit that in our day a sensitive and reasonable man should adopt it literally and without qualification as a sacred article of faith in relation to which his whole life should be unswervingly directed.
It may sometimes be right for a man to behave as though he did believe the least false of these half-truths. Social loyalty may compel him to attach himself to some party or movement which seems to him to be on the whole the main defence of progress against reaction. But if he remains intelligent and sensitive he will still maintain an inner detachment from this orthodoxy. He will never forget that all contemporary ideas are necessarily inadequate to man's rapidly changing conditions. He will try to imagine the most probable direction of cultural advance. But also he will constantly remind himself that his own most cherished beliefs, which he has reached by trying to regard everything in his experience objectively, must be shot through with prejudice and error. He will try to keep his mind supple enough to alter them.
Though suppleness of mind and far-reaching agnosticism are demanded by our changing world, there remain the few very important beliefs about which We can reasonably feel sure. Our culture is indeed being revolutionized by our changing conditions, but in some fundamental respects our conditions will remain the same. And our own human nature will remain at bottom what it is to-day. Consequently the culture towards which we are striving will not be wholly different from ours. Though it will be stripped of many of our illusions and prejudices, and doubtless will have characteristic illusions and prejudices of its own, it will be based, like our culture, on certain fundamental and enduring human values.
Of these enduring values kindliness and critical intelligence, or love and reason, are by far the most important. Any culture which ignores these values, or pays merely lip-service to them, is inadequate to the facts of human experience, and must sooner or later lead to disaster.
The problem for anyone trying to form a clear view of this perplexing world is the problem of being at once thoroughly sen............