CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

There was silence after Mr Stoyte's departure.  A long silence, while each of the three men thought his own private thoughts.  It was Pete who spoke first.

      'Things like that,' he said gloomily, 'they get me kind of wondering if I ought to go on taking his money.  What would you do, Mr Propter, if you were me?'

      'What would I do?'  Mr Propter reflected for a moment.  'I'd go on working in Jo's laboratory,' he said.  'But only so long as I felt fairly certain that what I was doing wouldn't cause more harm than good.  One has to be a utilitarian in these matters.  A utilitarian with a difference,' he qualified.  'Bentham crossed with Eckhart, say, or Nagarjuna.'

      'Poor Bentham!' said Jeremy, horrified by the thought of what was being done to his namesake.

      Mr Propter smiled.  'Poor Bentham, indeed!  Such a good, sweet, absurd, intelligent man!  So nearly right; but so enormously wrong!  Deluding himself with the notion that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be achieved on the strictly human level - the level of time and evil, the level of the absence of God.  Poor Bentham!' he repeated.  'What a great man he would have been if only he could have grasped that good can't be had except where it exists!'

      'That sort of utilitarian you're talking about,' said Pete, 'what would he feel about the job I'm doing now?'

      'I don't know,' Mr Propter answered.  'I haven't thought about it enough to guess what he'd say.  And, anyhow, we haven't yet got the empirical material on which a reasonable judgement could be based.  All I know is that if I were in on this I'd be cautious.  Infinitely cautious,' he insisted.

      'And what about the money?' Peter went on.  'Seeing where it comes from and who it belongs to, do you think I ought to take it?'

      'All money's pretty dirty,' said Mr Propter.  'I don't know that poor Jo's is appreciably dirtier than anyone else's.  You may think it is; but that's only because, for the first time, you're seeing money at its source - its personal, human source.  You're like one of these city children who have been used to getting their milk in sterilized bottles from a shiny white delivery wagon.  When they go out into the country and see it being pumped out of a big, fat, smelly old animal, they're horrified, they're disgusted.  It's the same with money.  You've been used to getting it from behind a bronze grating in a magnificent marble bank.  Now you've come out into the country and are living in the cowshed with the animal that actually secretes the stuff.  And the process doesn't strike you as very savoury or hygienic.  But the same process was going on, even when you didn't know about it.  And if you weren't working for Jo Stoyte, you'd probably be working for some college or university.  But where do colleges and universities get their money from?  From rich men.  In other words, from people like Jo Stoyte.  Again it's dirt served out in sterile containers - by a gentleman in a cap and gown this time.'

      'So you figure it's all right for me to go on like I am now?' said Pete.

      'All right,' Mr Propter answered, 'in the sense that it's not conspicuously worse than anything else.'  Suddenly smiling, 'I was glad to hear that Dr Mulge had got his Art School,' he said in another, lighter tone.  'Immediately after the Auditorium, too.  It's a lot of money.  But I suppose the prestige of being a patron of learning is worth it.  And, of course, there's an enormous social pressure on the rich to make them become patrons of learning.  They're being pushed by shame as well as pulled by the longing to believe they're the benefactors of humanity.  And, happily, with Dr Mulge a rich man can have his kudos with safety.  No amount of art schools at Tarzana will ever disturb the status quo.  Whereas if I were to ask Jo for fifty thousand dollars to finance research into the technique of democracy, he'd turn me down flat.  Why?  Because he knows that sort of thing is dangerous.  He likes speeches about democracy.  (Incidentally, Dr Mulge is really terrific on the subject.)  But he doesn't approve of the coarse materialists who try to find out how to put those ideals into practice.  You saw how angry he got about my poor little sun-machine.  Because, in its tiny way, it's a menace to the sort of big business he makes his money from.  And it's the same with these other little gadgets that I've talked to him about from time to time.  Come and look, if it doesn't bore you.'

      He took them into the house.  Here was the little electric mill, hardly larger than a coffee-machine, in which he ground his own flour as he needed it.  Here was the loom at which he had learnt and was now teaching others to weave.  Next he took them out to the shed in which, with a few hundred dollars' worth of electrically operated tools, he was equipped to do any kind of carpentry and even some light metalwork.  Beyond the shed were the still unfinished greenhouses; for the vegetable plots weren't adequate to supply the demands of his transients.  There they were, he added, pointing through the increasing darkness to the lights of a row of cabins.  He could put up only a few of them; the rest had to live in a sort of garbage-heap down in the dry bed of the river - paying rent to Jo Stoyte for the privilege.  Not the best material to work with, of course.  But such misery as theirs left one no choice.  They simply had to be attended to.  A few had come through undemoralized; and, of these, a few could see what had to be done, what you had to aim at.  Two or three were working with him here; and he had been able to raise money to settle two or three more on some land near Santa Suzanna.  Mere beginning - unsatisfactory at that.  Because, obviously, you could not even start experimenting properly until you had a full-fledged community working under the new conditions.  But to set a community on its feet would require money.  A lot of money.  But rich men wouldn't touch the work; they preferred art schools at Tarzana.  The people who were interested had no money; that was one of the reasons why they were interested.  Borrowing at the current commercial rates was dangerous.  Except in very favourable circumstances, the chances were that you'd merely be selling yourself into slavery to a bank.

      'It isn't easy,' said Mr Propter, as they walked back to the house.  'But the great point is that, easy or not easy, it's there, waiting to be done.  Because, after all, Pete, there is something to do.'

      Mr Propter went into the bungalow for a moment to turn out the lights, then emerged again on to the porch.  Together, the three men walked down the path to the road.  Before them the castle was a vast black silhouette punctured by occasional lights.

      'There is something you can do,' Mr Propter resumed; 'but only on condition that you know what the nature of the world happens to be.  If you know that the strictly human level is the level of evil, you won't waste your time trying to produce good on that level.  Good manifests itself only on the animal level and on the level of eternity.  Knowing that, you'll realize that the best you can do on the human level is preventive.  You can see that purely human activities don't interfere too much with the manifestation of good on the other levels.  That's all.  But politicians don't know the nature of reality.  If they did, they wouldn't be politicians.  Reactionary or revolutionary, they're all humanists, all romantics.  They live in a world of illusion, a world that's a mere projection of their own human personalities.  They act in ways which would be appropriate if such a world as they think they live in really existed.  But, unfortunately, it doesn't exist except in their imaginations.  Hence nothing that they do is appropriate to the real world.  All their actions are the actions of lunatics, and all, as history is there to demonstrate, are more or less completely disastrous.  So much for the romantics.  The realists, who have studied the nature of the world, know that an exclusively humanistic attitude towards life is always fatal, and that all strictly human activities must therefore be made instrumental to animal and spiritual good.  They know, in other words, that men's business is to make the human world safe for animals and spirits.  Or perhaps,' he added, turning to Jeremy, 'perhaps, as an Englishman, you prefer Lloyd George's phrase to Wilson's: "A home fit for heroes to live in" - wasn't that it?  A home fit for animals and spirits, for physiology and disinterested consciousness.  At present, I'm afraid, it's profoundly unfit.  The world we've made for ourselves is a world of sick bodies and insane or criminal personalities.  How shall we make this world safe for ourselves as animals and as spirits?  If we can answer that question, we've discovered what to do.'

      Mr Propter halted at what appeared to be a wayside shrine, opened a small steel door with a key he carried in his pocket, and, lifting the receiver of the telephone within, announced their presence to an invisible porter, somewhere on the other side of the moat.  They walked on.

      'What are the things that make the world unsafe for animals and spirits?' Mr Propter continued.  'Obviously greed and fear, lust for power, hatred, anger ...'

      At this moment, a dazzling light struck them full in the face and was almost immediately turned out.

      'What in heaven's name ...?' Jeremy began.

      'Don't worry,' said Pete.  'They only want  to make sure it's us, not a set of gangsters.  It's just the searchlights.'    'Just our old friend Jo expressing his personality,' said Mr Propter, taking Jeremy's arm.  'In other words, proclaiming to the world that he's afraid because he's been greedy and domineering.  And he's been greedy and domineering, among other reasons, because the present system puts a premium on those qualities.  Our problem is to find a system that will give the fewest possible opportunities for unfortunate people, like Jo Stoyte, to realize their potentialities.'

      The bridge had swung down as they approached the moat, and now the boards rang hollow under their feet.

      'You'd like socialism, Pete,' Mr Propter continued.  'But socialism seems to be fatally committed to centralization and standardized urban mass production all round.  Besides, I see too many occasions for bullying there - too many opportunities for bossy people to display their bossiness, for sluggish people to sit back and be slaves.'

      The portcullis rose, the gates slid back to receive them.

      'If you want to make the world safe for animals and spirits, you must have a system that reduces the amount of fear and greed and hatred and domineering to their minimum.  Which means that you must have enough economic security to get rid at least of that source of worry.  Enough personal responsibility to prevent people from wallowing in sloth.  Enough property to protect them from being bullied by the rich, but not enough to permit them to bully.  And the same thing with political rights and authority - enough of the first for the protection of the many, too little of the second for domination by the few.'

      'Sounds like peasants to me,' said Pete dubiously.

      'Peasants plus small machines and power.  Which means that they're no longer peasants, except insofar as they're largely self-sufficient.'

      'And who makes the machines?  More peasants?'

      'No; the same sort of people as make them now.  What can't be made satisfactorily except by mass production methods, obviously has to go on being made that way.  About a third of all production - that's what it seems to amount to.  The other two-thirds are more economically produced at home or in a small workshop.  The immediate, practical problem is to work out the technique of that small-scale production.  At present, all the research is going to the discovery of new fields for mass production.'

 

      In the Grotto a row of twenty-five electric candles burned in perpetual adoration before the Virgin.  Above, on the tennis-court, the second butler, two maids and the head electrician were playing mixed doubles by the light of arc lamps.

      'And do you figure people will want to leave the cities and live the way you're telling us, on little farms?'

      'Ah, now you're talking, Pete!' said Mr Propter approvingly.  'Frankly, then, I don't expect them to leave the cities, any more than I expect them to stop having wars and revolutions.  All I expect is that, if I do my work and it's reasonably good, there'll be a few people who will want to collaborate with me.  That's all.'

      'But if you're not going to get more than just a few, what's the point?  Why not try to do something with the cities and the factories, seeing that that's where most people are going to stay?  Wouldn't that be more practical?'

      'It depends how one defines the word,' said Mr Propter.  'For example, you seem to think that it's practical to help a great many people to pursue a policy which is known to be fatal; but that it isn't practical to help a very few people to pursue a policy which there is every reason to regard as sound.  I don't agree with you.'

      'But the many are there.  You've got to do something about them.'

      'You've got to do something about them,' Mr Propter agreed.  'But at the same time there are circumstances when you can't do anything.  You can't do anything effective about anyone if he doesn't choose or isn't able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing.  For example, you've got to help people who are being killed off by malaria.  But in practice you can't help them if they refuse to screen their windows and insist on taking walks near stagnant water in the twilight.  It's exactly the same with the diseases of the body politic.  You've got to help people if they're faced by war or ruin or enslavement, if they're under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration.  You've got to help.  But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can't help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble.  For example, you can't preserve people from the horrors of war if they won't give up the pleasures of nationalism.  You can't save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good.  You can't  avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production.  You can't preserve them from collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities - in other words, if they persist in worshipping themselves rather than God.  So much for conditional clauses.  Now let's consider the actual facts of the present situation.  For our purposes, the most significant facts are these: the inhabitants of every civilized country are menaced; all desire passionately to be saved from impending disaster; the overwhelming majority refuse to change the habits of thought, feeling and action which are directly responsible for their present plight.  In other words, they can't be helped, because they are not prepared to collaborate with any helper who proposes a rational and realistic course of action.  In these circumstances, what ought the would-be helper to do?'

      'He's got to do something,' said Pete.

      'Even if he thereby accelerates the process of destruction?'  Mr Propter smiled sadly.  'Doing for doing's sake,' he went on.  'I prefer Oscar Wilde.  Bad art can't do so much harm as ill-considered political action.  Doing good on any but the tiniest scale requires more intelligence than most people possess.  They ought to be content with keeping out of mischief; it's easier and it doesn't have such frightful results as trying to do good in the wrong way.  Twiddling the thumbs and having good manners are much more helpful, in most cases, than rushing about with good intentions, doing things.'

      Floodlighted, Giambologna's nymph was still indefatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness.  Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her - predestined partners.  The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors!  The startling lights, the rich fantastic shadows!  The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like skyrockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls!  What fun!  What splendour!  What self-parodying emphasis!  What staggering beauty!  What enormous bad taste!  And what a shame that the man should have had to be content with mere daylight and tallow candles!

      'No,' Mr Propter was saying in answer to a protesting question from the young man, 'no, I certainly wouldn't advise their abandonment.  I'd advise the constant reiteration of the truths they've been told again and again during the past three thousand years.  And, in the intervals, I'd do active work on the technics of a better system, and active collaboration with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization.  Incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high.  Though, of course, much lower than the price demanded by the nature of things from those who persist in behaving in the standard human way.  Much lower than the price of war, for example - particularly war with contemporary weapons.  Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.'

      'And what happens,' Jeremy asked in a fluting voice, 'what happens when you've had your war?  Will the few be any better off than the many?'

      'Oddly enough,' Mr Propter answered, 'there's just a chance they may be.  For this reason.  If they've learnt the technique of self-sufficiency they'll find it easier to survive a time of anarchy than the people who depend for their livelihood on a highly centralized and specialized organization. You can't work for the good without incidentally preparing yourselves for the worst.'

      He stopped speaking, and they walked on through a silence broken only by the sound, from somewhere high overhead in the castle, of two radios tuned to different stations.  The baboons, on the contrary, were already asleep.