The Salvaging Of Civilisation Part 10

For that reason the mediaeval university teacher was always dividing his subject into firstly and secondly and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so that the student could afterwards tick off and reproduce the points on his fingers--a sort of thumb and finger method of thought--still to be found in perfection in the discourses of that eminent Catholic apologist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that destroys all sense of proportion between the headings; main considerations and secondary and tertiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent numbers, but it was a mnemonic necessity of those vanished days.

And they have by no means completely vanished. We still use the lecture as the normal basis of instruction in our colleges, we still hear discourses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form, and we still prefer even a second-rate professor on the spot to the printed word of the ablest teacher at a distance. Most of us who have been through college courses can recall the distress of hearing a dull and inadequate view of a subject being laboriously unfolded in a long series of tedious lectures, in spite of the existence of full and competent text-books.

And here again it would seem that the time has come to centralize our best teaching, to create a new sort of wide teaching professor who will teach not in one college but in many, and to direct the local professor to the more suitable task of ensuring by a commentary, by organized critical work, and so forth, that the text-book is duly read, discussed and compared with the kindred books in the college library.

This means that the great teaching professors will not lecture, or that they will lecture only to try over their treatment of a subject before an intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of instruction will be not a course of lectures but a book. They will carry out the dictum of Carlyle that the modern university is a university of books.

Now the frank recognition of the book and not the lecture as the substantial basis of instruction opens up a large and interesting range of possibilities. It releases the process of learning from its old servitude to place and to time. It is no longer necessary for the student to go to a particular room, at a particular hour, to hear the golden words drop from the lips of a particular teacher. The young man who reads at eleven o'clock in the morning in luxurious rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, will have no very marked advantage over another young man, employed during the day, who reads at eleven o'clock at night in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow. The former, you will say, may get commentary and discussion, but there is no particular reason why the latter should not form some sort of reading society with his fellows, and discuss the question with them in the dinner hour and on the way to the works. Nor is there any reason why he should not get tutorial help as a university extension from the general educational organization, as good in quality as any other tutorial help.

And this release of the essentials of a college education from limitations of locality and time brought about by modern conditions, not only makes it unnecessary for a man to come "up" to college to be educated, but abolishes the idea that his educational effort comes to an end when he goes "down." Attendance at college no longer justifies a claim to education; inability to enter a college is no longer an excuse for illiteracy.

I do not think that our educational and university authorities realize how far the college stage of education has already escaped from the local limitations of colleges; they do not understand what a great and growing volume of adolescent learning and thought, of college education in the highest and best sense of the word, goes on outside the walls of colleges altogether; and on the other they do not grasp the significant fact that, thanks to the high organization of sports and amus.e.m.e.nts and social life in our more prosperous universities, a great proportion of the youngsters who come in to their colleges never get the realities of a college education at all, and go out into the world again as shallow and uneducated as they came in. And this failure to grasp the great change in educational conditions brought about, for the most part, in the last half-century, accounts for the fact that when we think of any extension of higher education in the modern community we are all too apt to think of it as a great proliferation of expensive, pretentious college buildings and a great multiplication of little teaching professorships, and a further segregation of so many hundreds or thousands of our adolescents from the general community, when as a matter of fact the reality of education has ceased to lie in that direction at all. The modern task is not to multiply teachers _but to exalt and intensify exceptionally good teachers_, to recognize their close relationship with the work of university research--which it is their business to digest and interpret--and to secure the production and wide distribution of books throughout the community.

I am inclined to think that the type of adolescent education, very much segregated in out-of-the-way colleges and aristocratic in spirit, such as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Holloway, Wellesley and the like, has probably reached and pa.s.sed its maximum development. I doubt if the modern community can afford to continue it; it certainly cannot afford to extend it very widely.

But as I have pointed out, there has always been a second strand to college education--the technical side, the professional training or apprenticeship. Here there are sound reasons that the student should go to a particular place, to the special museums and laboratories, to the inst.i.tutes of research, to the hospitals, factories, works, ports, industrial centres and the like where the realities he studies are to be found, or to the studios or workshops or theatres where they practise the art to which he aspires. Here it seems we have natural centres of aggregation in relation to which the college stage of a civilized community, the general adolescent education, the vision of the world as a whole and the realization of the individual place in it, can be organized most conveniently.

You see that what I am suggesting here is in effect that we should take our colleges, so far as they are segregations of young people for general adolescent education, and break them as a cook breaks eggs--and stir them up again into the general intellectual life of the community.

Coupled with that there should, of course, be a proposal to restrict the hours of industrial work or specialized technical study up to the age of twenty, at least, in order to leave time for this college stage in the general education of every citizen of the world.

The idea has already been broached that men and women in the modern community are no longer inclined to consider themselves as ever completely adult and finished; there is a growing disposition and a growing necessity to keep on learning throughout life. In the worlds of research, of literature and art and economic enterprise, that adult learning takes highly specialized forms which I will not discuss now; but in the general modern community the process of continuing education after the college stage is still evidently only at a primitive level of development. There are a certain number of literary societies and societies for the study of particular subjects; the pulpit still performs an educational function; there are public lectures and in America there are the hopeful germs of what may become later on a very considerable organization of adult study in the Lyceum Chautauqua system; but for the generality of people the daily newspaper, the Sunday newspaper, the magazine and the book const.i.tute the only methods of mental revision and enlargement after the school or college stage is past.

Now we have to remember that the bulk of this great organization of newspapers and periodicals and all the wide distribution of books that goes on to-day are extremely recent things. This new nexus of print has grown up in the lifetime of four or five generations, and it is undergoing constant changes. We are apt to forget its extreme newness in history and to disregard the profound difference in mental conditions it makes between our own times and any former period. It is impossible to believe that thus far it is anything but a sketch and intimation of what it will presently be. It has grown. No man foresaw it; no one planned it. We of this generation have grown up with it and are in the habit of behaving as though this nexus had always been with us and as though it would certainly remain with us. The latter conclusion is almost wilder than the former.

By what we can only consider a series of fortunate accidents, the press and the book world have provided and do provide a necessary organ in the modern world state, an organ for swift general information upon matters of fact and for the rapid promulgation and diffusion of ideas and interpretations. The newspaper grew, as we know, out of the news-letter which in a ma.n.u.script form existed before the Roman Empire; it owes its later developments largely to the advertis.e.m.e.nt possibilities that came with the expansion of the range of trading as the railways and suchlike means of communication developed. Modern newspapers have been described, not altogether inaptly, as sheets of advertis.e.m.e.nts with news and discussions printed on the back. The extension of book reading from a small cla.s.s, chiefly of men, to the whole community has also been largely a response to new facilities; though it owes something also to the religious disputes of the last three centuries. The population of Europe, one may say with a certain truth, first learnt to read the Bible, and only afterwards to read books in general. A large proportion of the book publishing in the English language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still consisted of sermons and controversial theological works.

Both newspaper and book production began in a small way as the enterprise of free individuals, without anyone realizing the dimensions to which the thing would grow. Our modern press and book trade, in spite of many efforts to centralize and control it, in spite of Defence of the Realm Acts and the like, is still the production of an unorganized mult.i.tude of persons. It is not centralized; it is not controlled. To this fact the nexus of print owes what is still its most valuable quality. Thoughts and ideas of the most varied and conflicting sort arise and are developed and worked out and fought out in this nexus, just as they do in a freely thinking vigorous mind.

I am not, you will note, saying that this freedom is perfect or that the thought process of the print nexus could not go very much better than it does, but I am saying that it has a very considerable freedom and vigour and that so far as it has these qualities it is a very fine thing indeed.

Now many people think that we are moving in the direction of world socialism to-day. Collectivism is perhaps a better, more definite word than socialism, and, so far as keeping the peace goes, and in matters of transport and communication, trade, currency, elementary education, the production and distribution of staples and the conservation of the natural resources of the world go, I believe that the world and the common sense of mankind move steadily towards a world collectivism. But the more co-operation we have in our common interests, the more necessary is it to guard very jealously the freedom of the mind, that is to say, the liberty of discussion and suggestion.

It is here that the Communist regime in Russia has encountered its most fatal difficulty. A catastrophic unqualified abolition of private property has necessarily resulted in all the paper, all the printing machinery, all the libraries, all the news-stalls and book shops, becoming Government property. It is impossible to print anything without the consent of the Government. One cannot buy a book or newspaper; one must take what the Government distributes. Free discussion--never a very free thing in Russia--has now on any general scale become quite impossible. It was a difficulty foreseen long ago in Socialist discussions, but never completely met by the thorough-paced Communist.

At one blow the active mental life of Russia has been ended, and so long as Russia remains completely and consistently communist it cannot be resumed. It can only be resumed by some surrender of paper, printing and book distribution from absolute Government ownership to free individual control. That can only be done by an abandonment of the full rigours of communist theory.

In our western communities the dangers to the intellectual nexus lie rather on the other side. The war period produced considerable efforts at Government control and as a consequence considerable annoyance to writers, much concealment and some interference with the expression of opinion; but on the whole both newspapers and books held their own.

There is to-day probably as much freedom of publishing as ever there was. It is not from the western governments that mischief is likely to come to free intellectual activity in the western communities but from the undisciplined individual, and from the incitements to mob violence by propagandist religions and cults against free discussion.

About the American press I know and can say little. I will speak only of things with which I am familiar. I am inclined to think that there has been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in the British press since 1914, and a marked loss of journalistic self-respect. Particular interests have secured control of large groups of papers and pushed their particular schemes in entire disregard of the general mental well-being. For instance, there has recently been a remarkable boycott in the London press of a very able collectivist book, Sir Leo Money's _Triumph of Nationalization_, because it would have interfered with the operation of very large groups which were concerned in getting back public property into private hands on terms advantageous to the latter.

It is a book not only important as a statement of a peculiar economic view, but because of the statesmanlike gravity and clearness of its exposition. I do not think it would have been possible to stand between the public and a writer in this way in the years before 1914. A considerable proportion of the industrial and commercial news is now written to an end. The British press has also suffered greatly from the outbreak of social and nationalist rancour arising out of the great war, the inability of the European mind to grasp the Bolshevik issue, and the clumsy blunderings of the Versailles settlement. Quite half the news from Eastern Europe that appears in the London press is now deliberate fabrication, and a considerable proportion of the rest is rephrased and mutilated to give a misleading impression to the reader.

But people cannot be continuously deceived in this way, and the consequence of this press demoralization has been a great loss of influence for the daily paper. A diminishing number of people now believe the news as it is given them, and fewer still take the unsigned portions of the newspaper as written in good faith. And there has been a consequent enhancement of the importance of signed journalism. Men of manifest honesty, men with names to keep clean, have built up reputations and influence upon the ruins of editorial prestige. The exploitation of newspapers by the adventurers of "private enterprise" in business, has carried with it this immense depreciation in the power and honour of the newspaper.

I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary phase in the development of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult education which is our present concern.

Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly.

We need a much better and more trustworthy press than we possess. We cannot get on to a new and better world without it. The remedy is to be found not, I believe, in any sort of Government control, but in a legal campaign against the one thing harmful--the lie. It would be in the interests of most big advertisers, for most big advertis.e.m.e.nt is honest; it would be, in the long run, in the interests of the Press; and it would mean an enormous step forward in the general mental clarity of the world if a deliberate lie, whether in an advertis.e.m.e.nt or in the news or other columns of the press, was punishable--punishable whether it did or did not involve anything that is now an actionable damage. And it would still further strengthen the print nexus and clear the mind of the world if it were compulsory to correct untrue statements in the periodical press, whether they had been made in good faith or not, at least as conspicuously and lengthily as the original statement. I can see no impossibility in the realization of either of these proposals, and no objection that a really honest newspaper proprietor or advertiser could offer to them. It would make everyone careful, of course, but I fail to see any grievance in that. The sanitary effect upon the festering disputes of our time would be incalculably great. It would be like opening the windows upon a stuffy, overcrowded and unventilated room of disputing people.

Given adequate laws to prevent the cornering of paper or the partisan control of the means of distribution of books and printed matter, I believe that the present freedoms and the unhampered individualism of the world of thought, discussion and literary expression are and must remain conditions essential to the proper growth and activity of a common world mind. On the basis of that sounder education I have sketched in a preceding paper, there is possible such an extension of understanding, such an increase of intelligent co-operations and such a clarification of wills as to dissolve away half the difficulties and conflicts of the present time and to provide for the other half such a power of solution as we, in the heats, entanglements and limitations of our present ignorance, doubt and misinformation can scarcely begin to imagine.

I do not know how far I have conveyed to you in the last two papers my underlying idea of an education not merely intensive but extensive, planned so economically and so ably as to reach every man and woman in the world.

It is a dream not of _individuals educated_--we have thought too much of the individual educated _for_ the individual--but of a _world educated_ to a pitch of understanding and co-operation far beyond anything we know of to-day, for the sake of all mankind.

I have tried to show that, given organization, given the will for it, such a world-wide education is possible.

I wish I had the gift of eloquence so that I could touch your wills in this matter. I do not know how this world of to-day strikes upon you. I am not ungrateful for the gift of life. While there is life and a human mind, it seems to me there must always be excitements and beauty, even if the excitements are fierce and the beauty terrible and tragic.

Nevertheless, this world of mankind to-day seems to me to be a very sinister and dreadful world. It has come to this--that I open my newspaper every morning with a sinking heart, and usually I find little to console me. Every day there is a new tale of silly bloodshed. Every day I read of anger and hate, oppression and misery and want--stupid anger and oppression, needless misery and want--the insults and suspicions of ignorant men, and the inane and horrible self-satisfaction of the well-to-do. It is a vile world because it is an under-educated world, unreasonable, suspicious, base and ferocious. The air of our lives is a close and wrathful air; it has the closeness of a prison--the indescribable offence of crowded and restricted humanity.

And yet I know that there is a way out.

Up certain steps there is a door to this dark prison of ignorance, prejudice and pa.s.sion in which we live--and that door is only locked on the inside. It is within our power, given the will for it, given the courage for it--it is within our power to go out. The key to all our human disorder is organized education, comprehensive and universal. The watchword of conduct that will clear up all our difficulties is, the _plain truth_. Rely upon that watchword, use that key with courage and we can go out of the prison in which we live; we can go right out of the conditions of war, shortage, angry scrambling, mutual thwarting and malaise and disease in which we live; we and our kind can go out into sunlight, into a sweet air of understanding, into confident freedoms and a full creative life--for ever.

I do not know--I do not dare to believe--that I shall live to hear that key grating in the lock. It may be our children and our children's children will still be living in this jail. But a day will surely come when that door will open wide and all our race will pa.s.s out from this magic prison of ignorance, suspicion and indiscipline in which we now all suffer together.

VIII

THE ENVOY

In the preceding papers I have, with some repet.i.tion and much stumbling, set out a fairly complete theory of what men and women have to do at the present time if human life is to go on hopefully to any great happiness and achievement in the days to come. Much of this material was first prepared to be delivered to a lecture audience, and I regret that ill-health has prevented a complete re-writing of these portions. There is more of the uplifted forefinger and the reiterated point than I should have allowed myself in an essay. But this is a loss of grace rather than of clearness. And since I am stating a case and not offering the reader anything professing to be a literary work, I shall not apologise for finally summing up and underlining the chief points of this book.

They are, firstly: that a great change in human conditions has been brought about during the past century, and secondly that a vast task of adaptation, which must be, initially and fundamentally, _mental_ adaptation, has to be undertaken by our race. It is a task which politicians, who live from day to day, and statesmen, who live from event to event, may hinder or aid very greatly, but which they cannot be expected to conduct or control. Politicians and statesmen perforce live and work in the scheme of ideas they find about them; the conditions of their activities are made for them. They can be compelled by the weight of public opinion to help it, but the driving force for this great task must come not from official sources but from the steadfast educational pressure of a great and growing mult.i.tude of convinced people. In times of fluctuation and dissolving landmarks, the importance of the teacher--using the word in its widest sense--rises with the progressive dissolution of the established order.

The creative responsibility for the world to-day pa.s.ses steadily into the hands of writers and school teachers, students of social and economic science, professors and poets, editors and journalists, publishers and newspaper proprietors, preachers, every sort of propagandist and every sort of disinterested person who can give time and energy to the reconstruction of the social idea. Human life will continue to be more and more dangerously chaotic until a world social idea crystallizes out. That--and no existing inst.i.tution and no current issue--is the primary concern of the present age.

We need, therefore, before all other sorts of organization, educational organizations; we need, before any other sort of work, work of education and enlightenment; we need everywhere active societies pressing for a better, more efficient conduct of public schooling, for a wider, more enlightening school curriculum, for a world-wide linking-up of educational systems, for a ruthless subordination of naval, military and court expenditure to educational needs, and for a systematic discouragement of mischief-making between nation and nation and race and race and cla.s.s and cla.s.s. I could wish to see Educational Societies, organized as such, springing up everywhere, watching local bodies in order to divert economies from the educational starvation of a district to other less harmful saving; watching for obscurantism and reaction and mischievous nationalist teaching in the local schools and colleges and in the local press; watching members of parliament and congressmen for evidences of educational good-will or malignity; watching and getting control of the administration of public libraries; a.s.sisting, when necessary, in the supply of sound literature in their districts; raising funds for invigorating educational propaganda in poor countries like China and in atrociously educated countries like Ireland, and corresponding with kindred societies throughout the world. I believe such societies would speedily become much more influential than the ordinary political party clubs and a.s.sociations that now use up so much human energy in the western communities. Subordinating all vulgar political considerations to educational development as the supreme need in the world's affairs, even quite small societies could exercise a powerful decisive voice in a great number of political contests. And an educational movement is more tenacious than any other sort of social or political movement whatever. It trains its adherents. What it wins it holds.

I know that in thus putting all the importance upon educational needs at the present time I shall seem to many readers to be ignoring quite excessively the profound racial, social and economic conflicts that are in progress. I do. I believe we shall never get on with human affairs until we do ignore them. I offer no suggestion whatever as to what sides people should take in such an issue as that between France and Germany or between Sinn Fein and the British Government, or in the cla.s.s war. I offer no such suggestion because I believe that all these conflicts and all such current conflicts are so irrational and destructive that it is impossible for a sane man who wishes to serve the world to identify himself with either side in any of them. These conflicts are mere aspects of the gross and pa.s.sionate stupidity and ignorance and sectionalism of our present world. The cla.s.s war, the push for and the resistance to some vague reorganization called the Social Revolution--such things are the natural inevitable result of the sordid moral and intellectual muddle of our common ideas about property. The capitalist, the employer, the property-owning cla.s.s, as a cla.s.s, have neither the intelligence nor the conscience to comprehend any moral limitations, any limitations whatever but the strong arm of the law, upon what they do with their property. Their black and obstinate ignorance, the clumsy adventurousness they call private enterprise, their unconscious insolence to poor people, their stupidly conspicuous self-indulgence, produce as a necessary result the black hatred of the employed and the expropriated. On one side we have greed, insensibility and incapacity, on the other envy and suffering stung to vindictive revolt: on neither side light nor generosity nor creative will. Neither side has any power to give us any reality we need. Neither side is more than a hate and an aggression. How can one take sides between them?

The present system, _unless it can develop a better intelligence and a better heart_, is manifestly destined to foster fresh wars and to continue wasting what is left of the substance of mankind, until absolute social disaster overtakes us all. And manifestly the revolutionary communist, _at his present level of education_, has neither the plans nor the capacity to subst.i.tute any more efficient system for this crazy edifice of ill-disciplined private enterprise that is now blundering to destruction. But at a higher level of intelligence, at a level at which it is possible to define the limitations of private property clearly and to ensure a really loyal and effectual co-operation between individual and state, this issue--this wholly destructive conflict between the property manipulator and the communist fanatic which is now rapidly wrecking our world--disappears. It disappears as completely as the causes of a murderous conflict between two drunken men will disappear when they are separated and put under a stream of clear cold water.

So it is that, in spite of their apparent urgency, I ask the reader to detach himself from these present conflicts of national politics, of political parties and of the cla.s.s war as completely as he can; or, if he cannot detach himself completely, then to play such a part in them, regardless of any other consideration, as may be most conducive to a wide-thinking, wide-ranging education upon which we can base a new world order. A resolute push for quite a short period now might reconstruct the entire basis of our collective human life.

In this book I have tried to show what form that push should take, to show that it has a reasonable hope of an ultimate success, and that unless it is made, the outlook for mankind is likely to become an entirely dismal prospect. I put these theses before the reader for his consideration. They are not discursive criticisms of life, not haphazard grumblings at our present discontents, they are offered as the fundamental propositions of an ordered constructive project in which he can easily find a part to play commensurate with his ability and opportunities.