literary transcript

 

XI

 

Education for Freedom

 

Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.

      In an earlier chapter I have discussed the Social Ethic, in terms of which the evil resulting from over-organization and overpopulation are justified and made to seem good.  Is such a system of values consonant with what we know about human physique and temperament?  The Social Ethic assumes that nurture is all-important in determining human behaviour and that nature - the psycho-physical equipment with which individuals are born - is a negligible factor.  But is this true?  Is it true that human beings are nothing but the products of their social environment?  And if it is not true, what justification can there be for maintaining that the individual is less important than the group of which he is a member?

      All the available evidence points to the conclusion that in the life of individuals and societies heredity is no less significant than culture.  Every individual is biologically unique and unlike all other individuals.  Freedom is therefore a great good, tolerance a great virtue and regimentation a great misfortune.  For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators, Organization Men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men's natures to some kind of manageable uniformity.  In the first flush of his Behaviouristic fervour, J.B. Watson roundly declared that he could find 'no support for hereditary patterns of behaviour, nor for special abilities (musical, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families'.  And even today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, 'as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself approach zero.  Man's vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice - none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait.'  In a word, Shakespeare's plays were not written by Shakespeare, nor even by Bacon or the Earl of Oxford; they were written by Elizabethan England.

      More than sixty years ago William James wrote an essay on 'Great Men and their Environment', in which he set out to defend the outstanding individual against the assaults of Herbert Spencer.  Spencer had proclaimed that 'Science' (that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a given date, of Professors X, Y and Z) had completely abolished the Great Man.  'The great man', he had written, 'must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth, as a product of its antecedents.'  The great man may be (or seem to be) 'the proximate initiator of changes ... But if there is to be anything like a real explanation of these changes, it must be sought in the aggregate of conditions out of which both he and they have arisen.'  This is one of those empty profundities to which no operational meaning can possibly be attached.  What our philosopher is saying is that we must know everything before we can fully understand anything.  No doubt.  But in fact we shall never know everything.  We must therefore be content with partial understanding and proximate causes - including the influence of great men.  'If anything is humanly certain', writes William James, 'it is that the great man's society, properly so called, does not make him before he can remake it.  Physiological forces with which the social, political, geographical and to a great extent anthropological conditions have just as much and just as little to do as the crater of Vesuvius has to do with the flickering of this gas by which I write, are what make him.  Can it be that Mr Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged upon Stratford-upon-Avon about the twenty-sixth of April 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental peculiarities, had to be born there? ... And does he mean to say that if the aforesaid W. Shakespeare had died of cholera infantium, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs have engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociological equilibrium.'

      Professor Skinner is an experimental psychologist, and his treatise on 'Science and Human Behaviour' is solidly based upon facts.  But unfortunately the facts belong to so limited a class that when at last he ventures upon a generalization, his conclusions are as sweepingly unrealistic as those of the Victorian theorizer.  Inevitably so; for Professor Skinner's indifference to what James calls the 'physiological forces' is almost as complete as Herbert Spencer's.  The genetic factors determining human behaviour are dismissed by him in less than a page.  There is no reference in his book to the findings of constitutional medicine, nor any hint of that constitutional psychology in terms of which (and in terms of which alone, so far as I can judge) it might be possible to write a complete and realistic biography of an individual in relation to the relevant facts of his existence - his body, his temperament, his intellectual endowments, his immediate environment from moment to moment, his time, place and culture.  A science of human behaviour is like a science of motion in the abstract - necessary but, by itself, wholly inadequate to the facts.  Consider a dragonfly, a rocket and a breaking wave.  All three of them illustrate the same fundamental laws of motion; but they illustrate these laws in different ways, and the differences are at least as important as the identities.  By itself, a study of motion can tell us almost nothing about that which, in any given instance, is being moved.  Similarly a study of behaviour can, by itself, tell us almost nothing about the individual mind-body that, in any particular instance, is exhibiting the behaviour.  But to us who are mind-bodies, a knowledge of mind-bodies is of paramount importance.  Moreover, we know by observation and experience that the differences between individual mind-bodies can and do profoundly affect their social environment.  On this last point, Mr Bertrand Russell is in full agreement with William James - and with practically everyone, I would add, except the proponents of Spencerian or Behaviouristic scientism.  In Russell's view the causes of historical change are of three kinds - economic change, political theory and important individuals.  'I do not believe', says Mr Russell, 'that any of these can be ignored, or wholly explained away as the effect of causes of another kind.'  Thus, if Bismarck and Lenin had died in infancy, our world would be very different from what, thanks in part to Bismarck and Lenin, it now is.  'History is not yet a science, and can only be made to seem scientific by falsifications and omissions.  In real life, life as it is lived from day to day, the individual can never be explained away.  It is only in theory that his contributions appear to approach zero; in practice they are all-important.  When a piece of work gets done in the world, who actually does it?  Whose eyes and ears do the perceiving, whose cortex does the thinking, who has the feelings that motivate, the will that overcomes obstacles?  Certainly not the social environment; for a group is not an organism, but only a blind unconscious organization.  Everything that is done within a society is done by individuals.  These individuals are, of course, profoundly influenced by the local culture, the taboos and moralities, the information and misinformation handed down from the past and preserved in a body of spoken traditions or written literature; but whatever each individual takes from society (or, to be more accurate, whatever he takes from other individuals associated in groups, or from the symbolic records compiled by other individuals, living or dead) will be used by him in his own unique way - with his special senses, his biochemical make-up, his physique and temperament, and nobody else's.  No amount of scientific explanation, however comprehensive, can explain away these self-evident facts.  And let us remember that Professor Skinner's scientific portrait of man as the product of the social environment is not the only scientific portrait.  There are other, more realistic likenesses.  Consider, for example, Professor Roger William's portrait.  What he paints is not behaviour in the abstract, but mind-bodies behaving - mind-bodies that are the products partly of the environment they share with other mind-bodies, partly of their own private heredity.  In The Human Frontier and Free but Unequal Professor Williams has expatiated, with a wealth of detailed evidence, on those innate differences between individuals for which Dr Watson could find no support and whose importance, in Professor Skinner's eyes, approaches zero.  Among animals, biological variability within a given species becomes more and more conspicuous as we move up the evolutionary scale.  This biological variability is highest in man, and human beings display a greater degree of biochemical, structural and temperamental diversity than do the members of any other species.  This is a plain observable fact.  But what I have called the Will to Order, the desire to impose a comprehensible uniformity upon the bewildering manifoldness of things and events, has led many people to ignore this fact.  They have minimized biological uniqueness and have concentrated all their attention upon the simpler and, in the present state of knowledge, more understandable environmental factors involved in human behaviour.  'As a result of this environmentally centred thinking and investigation,' writes Professor Williams, 'the doctrine of the essential uniformity of human infants has been widely accepted and is held by a great body of social psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, and many others, including historians, economists, educationalists, legal scholars and men in public life.  This doctrine has been incorporated into the prevailing mode of thought of many who have had to do with shaping educational and governmental policies and is often accepted unquestioningly by those who do little critical thinking of their own.'

      An ethical system that is based upon a fairly realistic appraisal of the data of experience is likely to do more good than harm.  But many ethical systems have been based upon an appraisal of experience, a view of the nature of things, that is hopelessly unrealistic.  Such an ethic is likely to do more harm than good.  Thus, until quite recent times, it was universally believed that bad weather, diseases of cattle and sexual impotence could be, and in many cases actually were, caused by the malevolent operations of magicians.  To catch and kill magicians was therefore a duty - and this duty, moreover, had been divinely ordained in the second Book of Moses: 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'  The systems of ethics and law that were based upon this erroneous view of the nature of things were the cause (during the centuries when they were taken most seriously by men in authority) of the most appalling evils.  The orgy of spying, lynching and judicial murder, which these wrong views about magic made logical and mandatory, was not matched until our own days, when the Communist ethic, based upon erroneous views about race, commanded and justified atrocities on an even greater scale.  Consequences hardly less undesirable are likely to follow the general adoption of a Social Ethic, based upon the erroneous view that ours is a fully social species, that human infants are born uniform and that individuals are the product of conditioning by and within the collective environment.  If these views were correct, if human beings were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.  For the individual termite, service to the termitary is perfect freedom.  But human beings are not completely social; they are only moderately gregarious.  Their societies are not organisms, like the hive or the anthill; they are organizations, in other words ad hoc machines for collective living.  Moreover, the differences between individuals are so great that, in spite of the most intensive cultural ironing, an extreme endomorph (to use W.H. Sheldon's terminology) will retain his sociable viscerotonic characteristics, an extreme mesomorph will remain energetically somatotonic through thick and thin, and an extreme ectomorph will always be cerebrotonic, introverted and over-sensitive.  In the Brave New World of my fable socially desirable behaviour was ensured by a double process of genetic manipulation and post-natal conditioning.  Babies were cultivated in bottles and a high degree of uniformity in the human product was assured by using ova from a limited number of mothers and by treating each ovum in such a way that it would split and split again, producing identical twins in batches of a hundred or more.  In this way it was possible to produce standardized machine-minders for standardized machines.  And the standardization of the machine-minders was perfected, after birth, by infant conditioning, hypnopaedia and chemically induced euphoria as a substitute for the satisfaction of feeling oneself free and creative.  In the world we live in, as has been pointed out in earlier chapters, vast impersonal forces are making for the centralization of power and a regimented society.  The genetic standardization of individuals is still impossible; but Big Government and Big Business already possess, or will very soon possess, all the techniques for mind-manipulation described in Brave New World, along with others of which I was too unimaginative to dream.  Lacking the ability to impose genetic uniformity upon embryos, the rulers of tomorrow's overpopulated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children.  To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and threats of physical violence.  If this kind of tyranny is to be avoided, we must begin without delay to educate ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government.

      Such an education for freedom should be, as I have said, an education first of all in facts and in values - the facts of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity which are the ethical corollaries of these facts.  But unfortunately correct knowledge and sound principles are not enough.  An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.  A skilful appeal to passion is often too strong for the best of good resolutions.  The effects of false and pernicious propaganda cannot be neutralized except by a thorough training in the art of analysing its techniques and seeing through its sophistries.  Language has made possible man's progress from animality to civilization.  But language has also inspired that sustained folly and that systematic, that genuinely diabolic wickedness which are no less characteristic of human behaviour than are the language-inspired virtues of systematic forethought and sustained angelic benevolence.  Language permits its users to pay attention to things, persons and events, even when the things and persons are absent and the events are not taking place.  Language gives definition to our memories and, by translating experiences into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles of feeling and conduct.  In some way of which we are wholly unconscious, the reticular system of the brain selects from a countless host of stimuli those few experiences which are of practical importance to us.  From these unconsciously selected experiences we more or less consciously select and abstract a smaller number, which we label with words from our vocabulary and then classify within a system at once metaphysical, scientific and ethical, made up of other words on a higher level of abstraction.  In cases where the selecting and abstracting have been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal labels have been intelligently chosen and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our behaviour is apt to be realistic and tolerably decent.  But under the influence of badly chosen words, applied, without any understanding of their merely symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected and abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt to behave with a fiendishness and an organized stupidity, of which dumb animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are blessedly incapable.

      In their anti-rational propaganda the enemies of freedom systematically pervert the resources of language in order to wheedle or stampede their victims into thinking, feeling and acting as they, the mind-manipulators, want them to think, feel and act.  An education for freedom (and for the love and intelligence which are at once the conditions and the results of freedom) must be, among other things, an education in the proper uses of language.  For the last two or three generations philosophers have devoted a great deal of time and thought to the analysis of symbols and the meaning of meaning.  How are the words and sentences which we speak related to the things, persons and events, with which we have to deal in our day-to-day living?  To discuss this problem would take too long and lead us too far afield.  Suffice it to say that all the intellectual materials for a sound education in the proper use of language - an education on every level from the kindergarten to the post-graduate school - are now available.  Such an education in the art of distinguishing between the proper and the improper use of symbols could be inaugurated immediately.  Indeed it might have been inaugurated at any time during the last thirty or forty years.  And yet children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements.  Why is this so?  Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.  In this context the brief, sad history of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis is highly significant.  The Institute was founded in 1937, when Nazi propaganda was at its noisiest and most effective, by Mr Filene, the New England philanthropist.  Under its auspices analyses of non-rational propaganda were made and several texts for the instruction of high-school and university students were prepared.  Then came the war - a total war on all the fronts, the mental no less than the physical.  With all the Allied Governments engaging in 'Psychological Warfare' an insistence upon the desirability of analysing propaganda seemed a bit tactless.  The Institute was closed in 1941.  But even before the outbreak of hostilities, there were many persons to whom its activities seemed profoundly objectionable.  Certain educators, for example, disapproved of the teaching of propaganda analysis on the grounds that it would make adolescents unduly cynical.  Nor was it welcomed by the military authorities, who were afraid that recruits might start to analyse the utterances of drill sergeants.  And then there were the clergymen and the advertisers.  The clergymen were against propaganda analysis as tending to undermine belief and diminish church-going; the advertisers objected on the grounds that it might undermine brand loyalty and reduce sales.

      These fears and dislikes were not unfounded.  Too searching a scrutiny by too many of the common folk of what is said by their pastors and masters might prove to be profoundly subversive.  In its present form, the social order depends for its continued existence on the acceptance, without too many embarrassing questions, of the propaganda put forth by those in authority and the propaganda hallowed by the local traditions.  The problem, once more, is to find the happy mean.  Individuals must be suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work, but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of professional mind-manipulators.  Similarly, they should be taught enough about propaganda analysis to preserve them from an uncritical belief in sheer nonsense, but not so much as to make them reject outright the not always rational outpourings of the well-meaning guardians of tradition.  Probably the happy mean between gullibility and a total scepticism can never be discovered and maintained by analysis alone.  This rather negative approach to the problem will have to be supplemented by something more positive - the enunciation of a set of generally acceptable values based upon a solid foundation of facts.  The value, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry - the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.  This set of values will provide us with a criterion by which propaganda may be judged.  The propaganda that is found to be both nonsensical and immoral may be rejected out of hand.  That which is merely irrational, but compatible with love and freedom, and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be provisionally accepted for what it is worth.