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
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
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.